Justice Minister Hatoyama's friend's friends

are very happy this holiday season:

...when Afghan Ambassador to Japan Haron Amin learned Japan was withdrawing its Maritime Self-Defense Force vessels from the Indian Ocean on Nov. 1 and heard rebels supporting the Taliban praising it, he was shocked. (The article indicates that these "rebels" are al Qaeda.)

"To whom was the withdrawal of (Japan's) ships a positive signal? Not to the international coalition against terror and not to the Afghan people. It was encouraging news to al-Qaida and the Taliban," Amin said in an interview with The Japan Times Thursday.

Hatoyama, as many remember, said that he had a friend whose friend was in al Qaeda and this friend warned him away from a terrorist attack in Bali. Kunio, being the Justice Minister of Japan, took this seriously and was able to save his own buttocks. He apparently did a good job of keeping the information secret too as he warned nobody else of the plot until his new conference years after it occurred. No problem as he was not yet the Justice Minister at the time.

(Hatoyama later used the traditional Nakasone /Abe/LDP defense of claiming to have been misquoted and misunderstood. It appears that even Japanese reporters cannot understand Japanese.)