Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [13]
But in July 2002, the truth came out and the General Accounting Office released the Justice Department’s actual legal opinion on the matter, dated October 1, 2001, a report that your attorney general had apparently suppressed. What did it say? That the Justice Department’s legal advisers had ruled that—get this—there was nothing wrong with using the gun background files to check if a suspected terrorist had purchased a gun. Did you read that, Mr. Bush? I’ll underline it and put it in bigger type so you can read it nice and slow and easy:
There’s nothing wrong with looking to see if a suspected terrorist bought a gun.
Nothing wrong! How shocking! Who else, other than you and John Ashcroft, would think that it’s a crime to find out if alleged terrorists were buying guns? (The GAO also reported that 97 percent of illegally purchased guns that were initially approved and then taken back once their mistake was realized would not have been detected if the gun check records had been destroyed in twenty-four hours rather than ninety days.)
Your administration talks of the “phantoms of lost liberty”? Tell that to the men and women who were thrown in jails, not because they were terrorists, but because they were Muslims. And tell me why you think you have the right to find out what books a suspected terrorist is reading, but not what guns he might be packing.
Who, Mr. Bush, is really aiding the terrorists here?55
Question #6: Were you aware that while you were governor of Texas, the Taliban traveled to Texas to meet with your oil and gas company friends?
Mr. Bush, I don’t know what compelled me to type in some key words one night on the BBC Web site, but there I was, punching in the words “Taliban” (the British spell it “Taleban”) and “Texas,” and lo and behold, look what popped up on my computer: a BBC story from December of 1997:
“Taleban to Texas for Pipeline Talks.”
The Taliban, as you know, were invited to come to Texas while you were governor of the state. According to the BBC, the Taliban went there to meet with Unocal, the huge oil and energy giant, to discuss Unocal’s desire to build a natural gas pipeline running from Turkmenistan through Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and into Pakistan.56
Mr. Bush, what was this all about?
According to London’s Telegraph Online, your oil company friends rolled out the red carpet for some of the world’s most notorious, murderous thugs and showed them a real good, down-home, Texas time.
First, the Taliban leaders spent a few days in Sugarland, Texas, enjoying the pleasures of Western extravagance. The oilmen put the brutal bastards up in a five-star hotel, took them to the zoo and, of course, to the NASA space center.57
“Houston, we have a problem” apparently never crossed your mind, even though the Taliban were perhaps the most repressive fundamentalist regime on the planet. If the reverse had happened and they were hosting you in Kabul, the entertainment would have been the hanging of women who didn’t keep themselves covered from head to toe. Now, that would have been some barbecue, huh?
After Texas, the Taliban dictators moseyed on over to Washington, D.C., where they met with Karl Inderfurth, assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs. Then they went to Omaha, where the University of Nebraska eventually created a special training program for Afghanis to teach them how to build pipelines—all paid for by your friends at Unocal. During one of their visits there, in May 1998, two Taliban members—this time in the U.S. sponsored by Clinton’s State Department—took in some more sites, including the Badlands National Park, the Crazy Horse Memorial, Gerald Ford’s birthplace, and Mount Rushmore.58
Yes, it was an amazing amount of hospitality, a fine example of American good will and our big, generous hearts. Or our love of money and cheap energy. Heck, if the price is right, we’ll give anyone a chance!
As you know, in the former Soviet republics east of the Caspian Sea, there’s hundreds of billions of