Josh's (TPM) 's "fill in" Ackerman shoots down Tinfoilhat Theories/Johnson [View All]

Reading Josh's "fill in" for his TPM while he's on vacation about Johnson's beheading and the US relationship with Saudi Arabia, pretty much shoots down my :tinfoilhat" and others theories that Johnson story smells to high heaven of Rove/Bush intervention for political purposes.

Ackerman's interview with "Anonymous" a high "Official in Intelligence" seems to say that Saudi Arabia is on the brink of destabilization because of radical Ilamists amongst it's population. I get the feeling he discounts what some of us feel about the Johnson assassination.

Frankly, because I'm :tinfoilhat: I got very annoyed with Ackerman's interview with "Anonymous." I thought "Anonymous" would expose more about Bush connections and cooperation with Saudi's, but instead I find that "Anonymous" seems to be saying it's true that beheadings are all legit....

Here's a snip...but one needs to read the whole thing to get what I'm talking about. I hope I read this blog thing wrong..but I don't think so..:-( Seems like more "terra alert" to me. And verification for more troops to stabilize SA and the ME.

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TPM: So what has that led to in terms of cooperation with the United States?

ANONYMOUS: From what I can tell, including what I see in the media, it's much better than it used to be, but I'm not sure what that means in terms of progress because we're faced by a community that is by and large sympathetic and familiar with the arguments bin Laden makes about the responsibilities of religion. I would say there has been improvement but I think the Saudis really are in a Catch-22 situation, and that will have a limiting effect on their cooperation not only with us but with any other country.

TPM: What should we be asking them to do?

ANONYMOUS: I think we're focused on what we want them to do. We want to control al-Qaeda within the kingdom. We want them to continue to produce oil. We want them to do any number of police-type, and intelligence-type cooperation, and I'm sure they'll be willing to do that. But what we want them to do, as I wrote in the book, I don't think is going to happen: people argue that we should force them or pressure them to change their curriculum and their education system, and that is very unlikely to happen. The al-Sauds, when they came to power, made a deal with the Islamic establishment: the al-Sauds would take care of the economy and foreign policy, and the religious establishment would take care of education. I'm not sure they're terribly eager to adopt a curriculum of Islamic education as it’s proposed by the United States. …
It's a system that's not prone to reform at a pace that would satisfy us. A pace that would satisfy us would completely destabilize the country. We're going to watch them do as much as they can, and they'll do as much as they can that's

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