Limousine liberals have been posing with, and propagandizing for, shadowy rebel groups for decades. But the Kennedys were chumming around with a group credibly linked to terrorists who are at war with the United States, and consorting with drug smugglers who are essentially at war with all civilized peoples.
Morocco is a frontline state in America’s war against “Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb” (AQIM), a branch of the late Osama bin Laden’s terror network. This is the group that plotted to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Bamako, Mali. It schemed to kidnap drivers on the Paris-Dakar road race. It has held for ransom more than a score of Europeans.
AQIM also plots to kidnap or kill American diplomats all across North Africa. Morocco is a constitutional monarchy with an elected government, so undermining it hurts a vital U.S. ally in both the war on terror and the war on drugs.
Both the terrorists and the drug lords have been repeatedly linked to the Polisario Front — the same anti-Moroccan rebel group that hosted the Kennedy women.
Polisario Front elements have provided weapons, training and safe haven to AQIM, according to Moroccan and international reports. Polisario fighters have also joined an AQIM splinter group in raiding a large swath of Northeastern Mali.
The Polisario camps are a textbook case of human rights abuses. I know: I visited those same camps near Tindouf, Algeria in December 2010.
I met with an artist who said he was tortured — repeatedly sodomized with a glass bottle — in the Polisario’s Rabumi Prison.
I met with the relatives of Sidi Mouloud, who was charged with treason for telling a Moroccan news outlet that he favored the amnesty and autonomy plans offered by that nation’s king. He, too, disappeared into the Polisario prison system.
I met with Muhammad bin Abdelaziz, the president of the Polisario Front. He wins election very easily because no one ever runs against him. In a wide-ranging conversation, he said he admired the authoritarian policies of the Algerian government, the second-most repressive regime in the Arab world — after Syria.
If the Kennedys want to worry about human rights, they should start with their hosts.
Richard Miniter is the author of Leading From Behind and other books.
