Text 14340, 37 rader
Skriven 2011-02-22 06:25:30 av Bob Ackley (1:300/3)
  Kommentar till text 14278 av Ward Dossche (2:292/854)
Ärende: Defector admits to WMD lies that triggered Iraq war
===========================================================
Replying to a message of Ward Dossche to Robert Bashe:

 B>>> WD> Do you still remember the story of Khaled-al-Bassam, ex-RC54?

 RB>> No. Please tell the story.

 WD> R54 Saudi-Arabia wasn't doing all too bad. But the Al-Saud royal
 WD> family had appointed one of their 3.200 princes as "Prince of
 WD> communication" and it was decided that Fidonet was communication
 WD> therefore a several thousand dollar tax was levied to operate his
 WD> Fidonode. When he argued against it at the Ministry of
 WD> Telecommunication he wast told to either comply or lose his medical
 WD> benefits (all Saudi-Arab citizens have free medical care paid for by
 WD> oil-dollars) and because he was disabled after a car accident he had
 WD> little choice.

 WD> So he went to the United Arab Emirates to call me voice from there
 WD> because his house-phone was tapped and requested to drop R54 from the
 WD> nodelisted to avoid further trouble.

Back before the powers-that-be ran Dale Ross (Net 379) out of Fidonet he had a
node
in Saudi Arabia.  I don't recall seeing any posts from that node but there was
quite a
squabble about Dale accepting nodes in Net 379 that were out of his area and
region.
My node (379/103 at the time) was outside of Dale's region and, looking at
today's NODEDLIST there are a number of US nodes that are not in their proper
geographic
region; for a short time several years ago RC14 was located outside of region
14.
Rather than get involved in the squabble I just pulled the plug on Fidonet for
about a
year (2004-5), when I set my system back up Dale was gone.

--- FleetStreet 1.19+
 * Origin: Bob's Boneyard, Emerson, Iowa (1:300/3)