BUSH’S SHIP OF FOOLS GETS HIJACKED BY THE TALIBAN

For a Presidency that makes it hard to keep up with its dizzying pace of lies and hypocrisy, the Bush administration grant of $43 million dollars to the barbaric Taliban regime deserves a special spot on the White House wall of infamy.

As Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times indignantly writes:

“Enslave your girls and women, harbor anti-U.S. terrorists and destroy every vestige of civilization in your homeland, and the Bush administration will embrace you. All that matters is that you line up as an ally in the drug war, the only international cause that this nation still takes seriously.

That's the message sent with the recent gift of $43 million to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, the most virulent anti-American violators of human rights in the world today. The gift, announced last Thursday by Secretary of State Colin Powell, in addition to other recent aid, makes the United States the main sponsor of the Taliban and rewards that "rogue regime" for declaring that opium growing is against the will of God. So, too, by the Taliban's estimation, are most human activities, but it's the ban on drugs that catches this administration's attention.”

See (http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/iprs/20010523/cm/bush_s_faustian_deal_with_the_taliban_1.html)

One could argue the immorality of subsidizing a government that treats women like cattle, tortures dissenters, and forces non-Muslims to wear identity badges, among other crimes against humanity. That would be bad enough, but the U.N. just condemned the Taliban for allowing the cultivation of an opium crop and benefiting from its sale! So not only is the Bush Incorporated "grant" to the Taliban an inexcusable subsidization of a stone age band of faith-based zealots, it is a horrifying example of gross incompetence at taxpayer expense.

The U.N. Report lucidly and cogently argues that the Taliban are actually storing up Opium, waiting for a rise in the market price, before selling the crop to the highest bidder. Cutting down on distribution in order to raise prices is something that Cheney and Bush know well from the activities of their oil baron backers. But even though Cheney and Bush are accomplices to this very strategy being implemented now in order to inflate gasoline and energy prices, they fell for the Taliban version of the Enron/Exxon “who hid the energy/oil” Texas two-step:

“In a report to the Security Council, the five-member panel questioned the sincerity of the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, when he banned the cultivation last July of poppy, the raw material used to make heroin and opium. The report said the Taliban was stockpiling the drugs, suggesting it only halted production in order to keep opium and heroin prices from plummeting.

According to the U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, Afghanistan's opium production was about 2,500 tons in 1998, 4,600 tons in 1999, and 3,100 tons in 2000. ``If Taliban officials were sincere in stopping the production of opium and heroin, then one would expect them to order the destruction of all stocks existing in areas under their control,'' the report said. The panel, established to make recommendations on how best to monitor a U.N. arms embargo and the closure of terrorist training camps, said it was essential to look into the illicit drug trade because drug money was being used to buy weapons and ``finance the training of terrorists and support the operations of extremists in neighboring countries and beyond.''

See Associated Press story at (http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010525/wl/un_afghanistan_1.html)

That's our $43 million that Bush is turning over to the Taliban extremist hoods. If they can pull the wool over Bush's eyes, God knows that the lunkheads in the White House will be easy pickings for our more powerful adversaries.

The American government should be supporting the brave Afghani women who are fighting for their lives and a free future for the women of Afghanistan. You can read about their work at http://my.rawa.org/ Browse through this website and see the victims of the Taliban reign of terror. View the photographs of their atrocities if you have the stomach for it. Meanwhile the Bush wrecking crew continues to defile America’s foreign policy.

And then there’s the matter of Osama bin Laden. Four of his henchmen were just convicted of killing 224 Americans in terrorist attacks. Afghanistan is harboring the mastermind terrorist and has no plans of extraditing him for trial to the U.S. After the New York verdict that found his terrorist proteges guilty of a Timothy McVeigh-style mass terrorist attack, a spokesman for the Taliban said of bin Laden:

``He is a great holy warrior of Islam and a great benefactor of the Afghan people,'' Abdul Anan Himat, a senior official at the Taliban information ministry, said of bin Laden, who remains in hiding in Afghanistan.

``We won't hand him over to America under any circumstances. It is our stated policy,'' Himat told The Associated Press in the Afghan capital of Kabul.

See (http://www.guardian.co.uk/breakingnews/International/0,3561,943845,00.html)

That we are outraged by Bush Incorporated giving our money to this barbaric regime is one thing. But the fact that the Bush Boys are being snookered by the Taliban, as they store their opium until the market price goes higher, isn’t just an outrage; it’s intolerable incompetence.

This “installed” administration isn’t running “smoothly” as the pro-Bush press would have us think.

These ideological zealots, sucked at the breast of the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute, are playing an amateur game of cards in a dangerous world of street smart knaves.

And we’re paying the price for the Bush team’s ignorance and arrogance.

On behalf of the women and oppressed minorities of Afghanistan, we should bow our heads in shame. And then we should cross our fingers and hope that God will guide the Bush ship of fools to a shore of sanity and morality.

-- Infamy and Shame (GOP@terror.com), May 31, 2001

Answers

Imcompetence? You assume that Bush et. al. don't know what they're doing. Surely you want to tell us about the drug-dealing ways of the Bush family going back for decades. So it would be a natural for them to slip a little money to the Taliban for access to some of that opium market once it goes back on sale, eh?

-- Bush Snorts (dumbya@smokes.hookah), May 31, 2001.

Hey Lars -- you've written a lot about the Taliban. What's your take on this?

-- just curious (today@com.com), May 31, 2001.