While we were holed up in a hotel waiting to deal with our troubled van, I happened to catch CNN's 360 with Anderson Cooper. He was interviewing Republican Rick Lazio, famous for losing to Hillary Clinton in the NY senate race, and currently running for governor of NY. The topic was the Cordoba Mosque that is planned to be built a couple blocks from the World Trade Center site.
Rick Lazio, like Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Joe Lieberman, and many other idiots, is pretending to outraged for political gain. Lazio says the group's imam, Feisel Abdul Rauf, should be investigated to determine who is funding the project. Of course, investigating private citizens who aren't breaking any laws isn't something we normally do without probable cause. However, Lazio thinks we should make an exception because Rauf once said that America was an accessory to the crime of 9-11, a victim of foreign policy blowback.
Cooper weakly pushed back on Lazio, but I was yelling at him through the TV on the other side of the planet to bring up that Osama bin Laden was funded by the CIA to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden was on the CIA payroll and later attacked the USA. That is a textbook example of blowback. Is Anderson Cooper ignorant about this? Is Rick Lazio, or does he just think that speaking a verifiable inconvenient truth is grounds for investigation?
The next day, we had our van towed to the mechanic. Guess where our tow truck driver was from...Kabul! His entire family fled to New Zealand 20 years ago in the aftermath of the war with the Soviet Union. As we were discussing the current state of affairs in Afghanistan, without prompting, he lamented all the trouble bin Laden brought to Afghanistan and mentioned that bin Laden was on the CIA payroll. Hey CNN, maybe you should get in touch with this guy. He's at Discount Towing in Auckland. Be warned though--he only takes cash.
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