March 05, 2005

Daniel Pipes Busts the Saudi Government in an Apparent Deception re: the Abu Ali Case

Daniel Pipes points out that the parents of Abu Ali, who is charged with attempted assassination of the President, say extremely critical things about the Saudi government.

...the parents are utterly venomous on the subject of Saudi Arabia: His father, Omar, said, “The Saudi government are slaves of the Americans.” His mother, Faten, stated outside a federal courtroom that her son “was tortured on orders of the USA; they are monsters.”

Pipes observes that there’s something very fishy about this. Namely… Abu Ali’s father, Omar, works for the Saudi government. Pipes quotes Newsweek:

Abu Ali’s Virginia-based parentshis father works as a computer analyst for the Saudi Embassysay their son was tortured [while kept in a Saudi jail] into confessing to lies, and sued the federal government last year [to have him brought back to the United States].

There appears to be no possible way Omar Ali could say such things about his own employer and escape serious punishment, unless he was doing so under orders from that employer… the government of Saudi Arabia.

Even in the U.S. you would lose your job for saying such things about your employer. Working for the Saudi government, the expected repercussions would most likely be far worse.

“Does the Express Line Here Take Cell Phone Cash?”

Cell phones of the future—available now in Japan:

One even has a biometric fingerprint sensor to ensure that no one can use the phone but its owner, and three of the five models come with a nifty function called FeliCa, which enables the 901i to serve as a digital wallet. You download cash into the phone’s guts, then simply swipe it over a FeliCa reader at the local mini-mart.

Almost anything else you might place in your wallet—a gym membership ID, video-store card or tickets to a concert—can be digitized on a FeliCa-enabled handset. Some apartment buildings in Tokyo are even making their locks compatible. Now that’s convergence.