Dear Sen. McCain: No, the Taliban Prisoners Didn’t Carry Out 9/11; But You Supported Muslim Radicals

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment

09 June 14

 

en. John McCain on Sunday maintained that President Obama, in releasing the five officials who had served in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in the 1990s and until 2001, had released people who were “hard core al-Qaeda who were responsible for 9/11.”

I am shocked and dismayed that the knowledgeable Sen. McCain should confuse the Taliban and al-Qaeda and should blame Afghans for 9/11. The Taliban regime did host al-Qaeda and they were allies within Afghanistan against the Northern Alliance. The Taliban did also allow al-Qaeda to train fighters at training camps, who were known to have an interest in carrying out attacks in Indian Kashmir, Uzbekistan, etc.

However, I know of no documentary evidence that the officials of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan helped plan, or even knew about, the 9/11 attacks on the US until they occurred. No Afghans were directly involved in those attacks or in the money trail for funding them. Taliban officials maintain that they were already disturbed by Bin Laden’s actions before 9/11 and made contacts with the US to find a way of surrendering him. That allegation may go too far, but that there were tensions between the Afghans and the Arabs in Afghanistan is well known, and that a country with a return address would not want to be involved in a direct attack on the US is perfectly plausible.

Not only is McCain making assertions of a serious sort for which there is no evidence, he is covering up his own past as a supporter of Muslim radicals in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1980s, radicals allied with al-Qaeda.

I wrote some time ago of McCain’s record in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1980s:

“McCain appears never to have met a rightwing dictator he didn’t like. McCain defends the dictator. Here is what McCain said about Musharraf late last December:

“Prior to Musharraf, Pakistan was a failed state,” McCain said. “They had corrupt governments and they would rotate back and forth and there was corruption, and Musharraf basically restored order. So you’re going to hear a lot of criticism about Musharraf that he hasn’t done everything we wanted him to do, but he did agree to step down as head of the military and he did get the elections.”

So in the building confrontation between democratic parties and the military dictator who trashed the rule of law, which would McCain support? What kind of relations will a president McCain have with the new prime minister of Pakistan if McCain is on record supporting the dictatorship that preceded?

The potted history McCain offers is wrong, and it points to the deep problems of authoritarianism and admiration for dictatorship in McCain’s political philosophy. Pakistan was not a failed state before 1999, and in fact most of its political problems derived from repeated military coups such as the one spearheaded by Musharraf, as well as from the US government giving the Pakistani military gobs of money and enormous stockpiles of weapons, and winking at its nuclear program. In fact by “US government” above, we really could just substitute “Senator John McCain.”

Pakistan’s constitution prescribes a parliamentary government. When the military has allowed Pakistanis to go to the polls, they have elected moderate, centrist political parties such as the Pakistan People’s Party and the Muslim League. Those parties have longstanding grass roots, cadres, canvassers, and loyal constituencies.

Bhutto was elected in 1971 as head of the PPP.

The PPP was overthrown in 1977 by Gen. Zia ul-Haq, a fundamentalist general who had his boss, PM Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto hanged on trumped-up charges in 1979 and who kept promising new elections that never came. Gen. Zia sponsored the Muslim fundamentalist Mujahidin that Ronald Reagan called “freedom fighters,” and which included the early al-Qaeda. He also put enormous resources into making an atomic bomb. Nowadays a leader of that description would be part of Bush’s axis of evil. But Reagan cozied up to Zia like a cat to catnip.

And McCain went out to cozy up to the military dictator himself, in February of 1984. McCain supported the Reagan jihad, cynically deploying radical Muslim extremists like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar against leftist secularists in Afghanistan.

Here is what McCain was up to when the radical Muslim extremist Gen. Zia was in power in Pakistan, according to UPI, Feb. 17, 1984:

‘Senator John Tower, R-Texas, and Rep. John McCain, R-Ariz., arrived in the Pakistani capital Friday evening for the start of a three-day visit.

During their stay, the legislators will meet Pakistan’s military president, General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, and other top officials. . .

While in Pakistan, they will also visit an Afghan refugee tent village on the outskirts of Peshawar, near the border with Soviet-occupied Afghanistan.

On arrival at Islamabad airport, they were received by U.S. Ambassador Deane Hinton and Pakistani Defense Secretary Aftab Ahmad Khan.’

Now McCain is the big expert on problem solving in Pakistan. McCain is the Pied Piper of Hamelin; he’ll be glad to get rid of your rat problem, but at the price of making your children disappear.

So lest we take any holidays from history, I have some questions for John McCain. Did you or did you not know about Gen. Zia’s nuclear weapons program? Did you wink at it? If so doesn’t that make you a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction to a radical Muslim extremist regime?

And what about this AP article from 1985:

So how much support did John McCain give to the precursors of the Taliban in Afghanistan? To the budding al-Qaeda?

Despite what McCain says about military rule bringing stability, the opposite is the case. Never mind the dirty war in Afghanistan that led to the displacement abroad of 5 million Afghans, 3 million of them to Pakistan, and which helped destabilize Pakistan. Never mind the filling of Pakistan with machine guns and drug smuggling to support McCain’s al-Qaeda “freedom fighters,” which created a million heroin addicts in Pakistan. Karachi spiralled into virtual civil war in the mid to late 1980s under Zia. There were massive Shiite demonstrations against unfair Sunni fundamentalist policies of Zia. A Movement for the Restoration of Democracy began mobilizing political parties. Zia put Benazir Bhutto of the Pakistan People’s Party under arbitrary house arrest.

Gen. Zia finally exited the scene in a summer, 1988, airplane crash. But he left behind 16 martial law amendments, among them a provision for the president, who is not popularly elected, to arbitrarily dismiss parliament and the prime minister. . . “

House of Cards-Style Corruption in Virginia

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

09 June 14

 

n the Netflix show “House of Cards,” Kevin Spacey plays Frank Underwood – a shrewd and cunning politician who methodically manipulates his way into higher levels of power like a chess game, often through blackmail, bribery, and other forms of skullduggery. Phil Puckett, a Virginia state senator, is truly embodying the worst of Frank Underwood, throwing his constituents under the bus to secure benefits for himself and his family.

State Senator Phil Puckett, a Democrat, announced his resignation today after 16 years in the Senate. Puckett is from Southwest Virginia, which is largely poor and rural. His resignation will trigger a special election which Republicans are likely to win, giving the GOP a majority in the Senate. If a Republican replaces Puckett, his daughter gets a judgeship and he gets a position as Deputy Director of the state tobacco commission.

Should the Republicans win the Senate, they’re likely to take Medicaid expansion out of the state budget, making access to health care impossible for 400,000 Virginians – particularly poor and rural Virginians in Russell County, where Puckett used to serve. Unless McAuliffe is willing to veto the Republican budget and trigger a state government shutdown on July 1, nearly half a million Virginians won’t get access to the health care they need.

Puckett’s daughter, Martha P. Ketron, has had her judicial appointment up in the air since the start of this year’s legislative session. Last year’s elections, in which former DNC chair Terry McAuliffe won the governor’s race, also saw the 40-seat State Senate switch hands from GOP control to Democratic control. State Senator Ralph Northam won the Lieutenant Governor’s race and a Democrat narrowly won his old Senate seat in a special election this January. Republicans have been blocking Ketron’s confirmation for a judgeship in Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court, on the grounds of an informal policy that doesn’t allow for relatives of legislators to serve as judges. Ketron was named as an interim judge in July of 2013 and requires confirmation from the legislature to serve a 6-year term. Puckett’s resignation from the Senate means the anti-nepotism policy will no longer apply.

The sweetheart deal for Puckett and his family will likely come at a lethal cost to Virginians who depend on Medicaid expansion. A Harvard study recently found that as many as 17,000 Americans may die due to lack of Medicaid expansion in states where Republican governors have opted out of expanding the program under Obamacare.

Out of the 8 million Americans who lost the ability to get health insurance under expanded Medicaid programs, 432,000 diabetics won’t be able to have access to medication, 659,000 women won’t have access to mammograms, and 3.1 million women in need of regular pap smears won’t have health insurance to make those exams and treatments available. Former Florida governor Charlie Crist claims 6 Floridians die each day due to current governor Rick Scott’s decision to not expand Medicaid, which Politifact rated “half-true,” only on the grounds that the number is actually closer to 3 a day.

Blocking Medicaid expansion isn’t only a loss for people who need Medicaid – it’s also political suicide. According to Public Policy Polling results collected this past April, five Republican governors who chose not to expand Medicaid are trailing in their bids for re-election. Maine governor Paul LePage and Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett are both losing popularity among their blue-state constituents. Red state constituents are losing confidence for Kansas governor Sam Brownback and Georgia governor Nathan Deal. And in Florida, Rick Scott’s opposition to Medicaid expansion is widely opposed by a 58 to 33 margin.

At the federal level, Mitch McConnell may lose his re-election bid in Kentucky, as his constituents are supportive of Kynect – Governor Steve Beshear’s expansion of health insurance for Kentuckians. McConnell has been put in such a precarious position over Obamacare’s popularity among Kentuckians that he’s taken the position of wanting to repeal Obamacare but keep Kynect, which a Washington Post fact-checker called “not credible.” 413,000 Kentuckians have signed up for Kynect, the state-based exchange funded by Obamacare, and most qualified for the federal subsidy that lowers premium costs.

The fact that Senator Puckett is letting the GOP buy him out with a cushy job and a prestigious position for his daughter so they can successfully block Medicaid expansion isn’t just nakedly corrupt, it’s also lethal. Puckett deserves to be investigated and the Democratic leadership needs to hold fast to either having a budget that expands access to healthcare, or having no budget at all.

Senator Puckett's office did not return calls for interview requests.

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Carl Gibson, 27, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nonviolent grassroots movement that mobilized thousands to protest corporate tax dodging and budget cuts in the months leading up to Occupy Wall Street. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary We're Not Broke, which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Carl is also the author of How to Oust a Congressman, an instructional manual on getting rid of corrupt members of Congress and state legislatures based on his experience in the 2012 elections in New Hampshire. He lives in Sacramento, California.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.