Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [8]
Not us.
Here’s what I don’t get: Why have you and your father chosen to align yourselves with a country that is considered by most human rights groups to be among the worst and most brutal dictatorships in the world?
Amnesty International had this to say in its 2003 report on Saudi Arabia:
Gross human rights violations continued and were exacerbated by the government policy of “combating terrorism” in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks in the USA. The violations were perpetuated by the strictly secretive criminal justice system and the prohibition of political parties, trade unions and independent human rights organizations. Hundreds of suspected religious activists and critics of the state were arrested, and the legal status of most of those held from previous years remained shrouded in secrecy. Women continued to suffer severe discrimination. Torture and ill-treatment remained rife.42
In 2000, 125 people were publicly beheaded, many of them in the city of Riyadh at a place popularly known as “Chop-Chop Square.”43
After meeting with the Saudi crown prince in April 2002, you happily told us that the two of you had “established a strong personal bond” and that you “spent a lot of time alone.”44 Were you trying to reassure us? Or just flaunt your friendship with a group of rulers who rival the Taliban in their suppression of human rights? Why the double standard?
Question #3: Who attacked the United States on September 11—a guy on dialysis from a cave in Afghanistan, or your friends, Saudi Arabia?
I’m sorry, Mr. Bush, but something doesn’t make sense.
You got us all repeating by rote that it was Osama bin Laden who was responsible for the attack on the United States on September 11. Even I was doing it. But then I started hearing strange stories about Osama’s kidneys.
It turns out that there have been reports on Osama’s health problems for years. For example, in 2000 The Associated Press reported, “. . . a Western intelligence official said [Osama] is suffering from kidney and liver disease. Bin Laden has kidney failure and ‘his liver is going,’ the official said. . . . He said bin Laden’s followers were trying to find a kidney dialysis machine for their ailing leader.”45
After September 11, these reports escalated. I was watching Hardball with Chris Matthews one night on MSNBC, and one of the guests—a Taliban expert—said, “. . . Osama bin Laden appears to need dialysis treatment for his kidney problem, so he’s got to be close to some dialysis. He really can’t travel far.”46
Did he just say “dialysis”? The world’s biggest monster, the most sinister, evil man on all of planet Earth—and he can’t even piss in a pot without help? I don’t know about you, but if I’m told to be seriously frightened by an evildoer, especially the top evildoer, I want that evildoer to have all his bodily functions working at 110 percent! I want him strong, scary, and omnipresent—and the possessor of two working kidneys. How am I supposed to be supporting all these Homeland Security measures when the lead bad guy is flat out on a table somewhere hooked up to a kidney machine?
Suddenly, I don’t know who or what to trust. I started to ask other questions. How could a guy sitting in a cave in Afghanistan, hooked up to dialysis, have directed and overseen the actions of nineteen terrorists for two years in the United States and then plotted so perfectly the hijacking of four planes and then guaranteed that three of them would end up precisely on their targets? How did Osama do this? I mean, I can’t get this computer to stop crashing every time I type the word “gingivitis.” I can’t get a cell signal from here to Queens! And he’s supposed to have pulled off all of September 11 from his little cave, 10,000 miles away? What was he doing, then, when we started the bombing over there? Was he running from cave to cave in Afghanistan with his tubes and dialysis machine trailing behind him? Or, um, maybe there was a dialysis machine in every third