Word: saudi
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Bush travels to Israel for the country's 60th anniversary May 14, and Israel has threatened to reinvade Hamas' Gaza stronghold if it launches new attacks. A Hamas-provoked Israeli incursion would undermine pro-peace players on both sides and enrage Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which are key to negotiations. And it would cast Carter's latest peacemaking mission into the loss column...
...preached after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks: that this was a case of America's "chickens coming home to roost." He tried to say he was merely quoting U.S. Ambassador Edward Peck-but Wright chose to interpret those "chickens" not as the decision to place U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, which was Osama bin Laden's casus belli, but as the ancient sins of slavery, the eradication of Native Americans, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It would have been nice if Moyers had asked Wright, "Do you really believe that God was punishing us for our sins...
...Laden? (henceforth acronymed as WITWIOBL), Spurlock resolves to comb the Islamic world in an attempt to locate al-Qaeda's CEO. Taking a cue from Hollywood action movies - that in impossible missions, where armies and statecraft fail, one lone hero can succeed - he travels to Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, speaking to and occasionally learning from street vendors, pundits, schoolkids, government officials and U.S. soldiers. To most of them he poses the simple question that is the movie's title. Will anyone tell him? Hey, ya never know. (Except...
...everyone is so forthcoming. In Saudi Arabia - where he drives past the "bin Laden Aviation Company" - Spurlock visits a school and is allowed to question two 18-year-old boys. What does he get? Terse answers, then "No answer." And before long, from their hovering teachers, "Interview over." His only threat of physical violence comes in Israel, from the Orthodox Jews who see his camera and shout, "Get the hell out of here!" (You get the full versions of these confrontations in the new Random House book Spurlock has written about his trip...
...When both the Attorney General and the SFO's Wardle resisted BAE's request for lenience, the Saudis turned up the heat. In 2006, the judgment states, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi Ambassador to Washington, warned Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's then-chief of staff, to shelve the investigation. Failure to do so, the Prince threatened, would weaken intelligence cooperation and wreck a $40 billion deal for BAE to supply Eurofighter Typhoon jets to the Saudis. Soon after government ministers made Wardle aware of the threat, the SFO's boss agreed to drop the case. "The Director...