That is just bullshit. The Taliban was the de facto government in Afghanistan, they harbored and aided Al Qaeda. It is much more ridiculous to try and hold Saudi Arabia accountable because of the citizenship of the 9/11 hijackers rather than the people aiding the actual organization that carried out the attacks.They could have picked a lot of places, they didn't, they picked Afghanistan.
The actual attackers as well as most of the organizers were Saudi, the money they used to train and execute the plan was from Saudi Arabia. 'harboring & aiding' by THE Taliban, no such entity exists. Anyone can fly The Taliban flag or even call themselves Al Qaeda. I know this sounds like semantics, but it is relevant these are amorphous titles and organizations, more an idea than an actual organization.
Taliban was the government.
Governments and interconnected powers are like ducks who need the water to swim but only when it's sunny so they can be free.
Yeah they totally DID ask for evidence when we demanded extradition and we totally DID bomb the shit out of them for it.
I'd love to read a good breakdown (with citations) of this chain of events. Though it seems like the kind of thing where you either trust what the maybe-guilty party (the US govt) says or you don't have much to go on.
There was plenty of reporting on it (though not so much from our press):http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001...stan.terrorism
Thanks for the link. I wonder if that was a legit compromise for a govt that was pressured from within and outside, and I wonder if the US was more compliable if we could've gotten Bin Laden without bloodshed.
Contrary to what Mikhail tries to imply, that was widely reported at the time. I remember cnn and msnbc talking about it at length, the Taliban's offer to try him. Pretty much everyone was of the opinion it was a total bullshit delaying tactic and an attempt to get the US to release information on their sources. How fucking gullible do you have to be to think the Taliban would put him on trial if the US gave them evidence?
There were actually more developments (including an offer to extradite him to Pakistan to have him tried there). As for how real they were or whatever that's debatable but the fact of the matter is it's not legal or reasonable to demand extradition without providing evidence. Let's flip positions and imagine that someone living in the U.S. had committed an act of terrorism in Afghanistan and they came to us demanding that we extradite him without giving a shred of evidence that he was involved, we'd laugh in their face. The only reason anyone has to take such demands from us seriously is that we have bombs and bullets, and that doesn't make us right, it just makes us dangerous.
I would hope that we would have our own investigation and wouldn't need another government to provide evidence in order to make that determination.
You would hope that we would have our own investigation into a crime that occurred in another country? Think about what that would mean without the flip. You're saying that the Taliban should have come to the U.S. to do an investigation to see whether or not there was merit to our demand to turn over Bin Laden. While that's certainly a very interesting proposition, I'm not sure that's something you'd actually endorse.
