With allies like these …

7 thoughts on “With allies like these …”

1. Hmmm.

   Turn the story around.
   What if it were an American husband held on foreign soil, and the wife and kids came home?

   Are you still outraged?

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2. If we were claiming that we were stout friends of the hypothetical foreign country, and were assisting fully with anti-terrorism investigations there (and here), and if the wife were under subpoena there, and if we were talking about a country with a reasonable jurisprudential tradition — yeah, I’d be, if not outraged, then wondering what the heck our own State Dept. was up to.

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3. I’m sorry, reversing the argument that way won’t work, not without a lot of twisting and manipulating of reality, like this: if the United States was an autocratic theocracy, and Saudi Arabia was a secular democratic republic, and we (the US) traded our one valuable product to Saudi Arabia (this would entail the US being a poor, desert environment with a mostly tribal culture and Saudi Arabia being a rich, prosperous nation that nevertheless depended upon that one valuable product to keep going — which valuable product was mostly obtained from less recalcitrant nations) on the one hand while paying off American terrorist groups to attack Saudi Arabia instead of America on the other hand, and that it was one of these American terrorist groups that had flown a couple of jet liners into, say, a crowd of worshippers in Mecca during Ramadan and killed thousands of people….

   No, you see, it really doesn’t work to simply reverse the arguments. An American being held on Saudi soil would be in the power of a government that, to put it mildly, is not too interested in treating prisoners according to strict laws. A prisoner here in America is at least guaranteed that there are certain laws protecting him, and that he has recourse to defense — yes, even prisoners of war, and people being held as that woman’s husband is.

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4. I meant Saudi Arabia is not interested in treating prisoners fairly according to strict laws — I was not clear. What Dave said, basically.

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5. Typical of this Administration’s handling of the Saudis. After all, how many 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi? How many were Saudi?

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6. The Saudis also have a history of providing visas to ex-husbands trying to flee the US with their non-custodial children. And they pay $500,000 to the US PR firm that represents them to subcomittee meetings of the US Congress.

   “Well yes, senator, we know this problem has been going on for 15 years, but were looking into it, I assure you.” The CSPAN converage of the hearings would have been funny if they weren’t so tragic.

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7. Yeah, well, that’s just being a bunch of selfish scumbags. This particular case is their benig a bunch of backstabbnig selfish scumbags. Or something like that.

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