Welcome to side six

Last Saturday, in talking about the baleful gaze of the warhawks now being aimed at Iran, I noted that one of things that was being pointed to was the finding of the 9/11 Commission that as many as 10 of the attackers had passed through Iran without having their passports stamped.

Now comes columnist/cartoonist Ted Rall (link via Information Clearinghouse), who noted on Tuesday that for a country to not stamp certain passports is not an uncommon practice, one usually done to enable travelers to avoid undue hassles at a later stop or on returning home. (If the column is not on the home page, click on July 27 on the calendar.)

When U.S. citizens arrive at Havana, the Cubans don't stamp their passports. When tens of thousands of Americans come back home to the U.S., they tell immigration that they were in Mexico or Canada instead. Which they were - to change planes.

Israel offers a similar courtesy. "Do you plan to visit any Muslim countries?" customs clerks ask travelers at Tel Aviv. If the answer is positive, they affix the visa stamp to a separate piece of paper. ...

For reasons ranging from economic dependence upon migrant labor (hello Rio Grande!) to religion and politics, numerous nations fail to document the movement of foreign nationals through their territory. Sometimes, for reasons no one asks and nobody tells, border guards don't bother to stamp a passport upon entry from abroad. It's happened several times to me at JFK in New York. ...

Iran doesn't stamp Saudi passports for good reason: the Saudi government, dominated by Wahhabi Sunni extremists, despises Shia Iran. Viewing Shiites as pseudo-Islamic heretics more contemptible than infidels, the Saudi regime takes a dim view of those who travel to Iran - a fact that Iranian customs takes into account when welcoming Saudi visitors so they don't get into trouble back home.

It also bears repeating, as I noted on Saturday, that the finding was based on a single memo and the CIA says it has no evidence that Iran was involved in 9/11. (Pointing to findings of CIA incompetence doesn't change anything; there is still no evidence. And if "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," even less is it evidence of presence.) One additional thing to point out is that the dates involved in the alleged incidents were 1990 and 1991, 10 years before the attacks.