Terrorist Attack _______________ Information Only


  1. rasputin
  2. JenL_2
  3. rasputin
  4. Rande
  5. JenL_2
  6. Steven_Russell
  7. Steven_Russell
  8. JenL_2
  9. greatgambino
  10. BPyles

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Top 344.   Nov 7, 2001 6:16 PM

» rasputin - Don't know it this will work

but if it does, this link (Steven Russell's favorite) will lead you to a whole bunch of middle east newpapers, many of which are fascinating

http://www.afghanradio.com/

when you get to this site, click on "global news" and then click on "middle east"

-- posted by rasputin



Top 345.   Nov 7, 2001 6:41 PM

» JenL_2 - Re: Terrorists' money

In response to message posted by BPyles:

Here's the story on the raid on Baraka Wire Transfer in Seattle including a video from King5.com:

Authorities raid Seattle address listed in terrorist probe

Hmmm - 'twill be interesting to see what if anything comes of this. The internet report doesn't mention it, but King5 TV news reported that the registered owner of the store has been an employee of the Seattle school district since mid '90s as a translator for Somali immigrants.

Interesting that they took away a truck-load of bags and boxes of food. Have been reading about Al Qaeda and terrorists smuggling weapons, drugs, etc in food - particularly in honey.

Also interesting is the impromptu protest demonstration generated by the raid....Jen

-- posted by JenL_2



Top 346.   Nov 7, 2001 6:44 PM

» rasputin - Chomsky published in Cairo paper

Our good buddy Noam has an article published in the Cairo paper Al-Ahram titled:

"Terrorism works"

To say that terrorism is the weapon of the weak is a farce. It is the weapon of the strong, says Noam Chomsky, and for the world's superpower, it works.

Starting with the common assumption that what happened on 11 September is a historic event -- one which will change history -- the question we should be asking is exactly why is this so? Another question has to do with the "War Against Terrorism". Exactly what is it? And there is a related question, namely, what is terrorism?

By far the most important question that we must ask ourselves after 11 September is what is happening right now? Implicit in this question is the question of what we can do about it. According to The New York Times there are seven to eight million people in Afghanistan on the verge of starvation. That was true actually before 11 September. They were surviving on international aid. On 16 September, the Times reported that "the US demanded from Pakistan the elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan's civilian population." As far as I could determine, there was no reaction in the US to the demand to impose massive starvation on millions of people. The threat of military strikes right after 11 September forced the removal of international aid workers that crippled the assistance programmes. "The country was on a lifeline and we just cut the line," the New York Times Magazine quoted an aid worker as saying.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP), which is the main aid programme by far, was able to resume food shipments in early October -- at a much lower level. They do not have international aid workers inside Afghanistan, so the distribution system is hampered. Even this, however, was suspended as soon as the bombing began. The WFP then resumed, but at a slower pace, while aid agencies levelled scathing condemnations of US airdrops of food packets as "propaganda tools which are probably doing more harm than good," the London Financial Times reported.

After the first week of bombing, The New York Times reported on a back page, inside a column on something else, that by the arithmetic of the United Nations, there will soon be 7.5 million Afghans in acute need of even a loaf of bread and there are only a few weeks left before the harsh winter will make deliveries to many areas totally impossible. But with bombs falling, the article said, the current delivery rate is down to half of what is needed. A casual comment, which tells us that Western civilisation is anticipating the slaughter of -- well, do the arithmetic -- between three or four million people.

Meanwhile, the leader of Western civilisation dismissed with contempt, once again, offers of negotiation for delivery of the alleged target, prime suspect Osama Bin Laden, and a request for some evidence to substantiate the US's demand for total capitulation. On the same day as this offer was categorically rejected, the special rapporteur of the UN in charge of food distribution pleaded with the US to stop the bombing to try to save millions of victims. As far as I am aware, that plea went unreported by the media. A few days later the major aid agencies like OXFAM and Christian Aid joined in the plea. This too went unreported.

It looks like what is happening is some sort of silent genocide. It also gives a good deal of insight into the elite culture, the culture that we are part of. It indicates that whatever will happen, we do not know, but plans are being made and programmes implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next couple of weeks. Very casually, with no comment, no particular thought about it. That is just kind of normal, here and in a good part of Europe. Not in the rest of the world, though. In fact, not even in much of Europe.

Let us turn to a slightly more abstract question, forgetting for the moment that we are in the midst of apparently trying to murder between three or four million people. Not the Taliban, of course, but their victims.

Let us turn to the question of the historic event that took place on 11 September. I think it was a historic event -- not, unfortunately, because of its scale. Though unpleasant to think about, in terms of the scale, it's not that unusual. It is, however, probably the worst instant human toll of any crime.

Unfortunately, there are terrorist crimes with effects a bit more drawn out that are more extreme. Nevertheless, 11 September was a historic event because there was a change. The change was the direction in which the guns were pointed. That is new. Radically new.

The last time the national territory of the US was under attack, or for that matter, even threatened was when the British burned down Washington in 1814. In press reports following the attacks, it was common to bring up Pearl Harbour, but that is not a good analogy. Whatever you think about it, the Japanese bombed military bases in two US colonies -- not the national territory, which was never threatened. These colonies had been taken from their inhabitants in not a very pretty way. The US preferred to call Hawaii and the Philippines a "territory", but they were in effect colonies.

This time it is the national territory that's been attacked on a large scale, so you can find a few fringe examples, but this is unique.

During these close to 200 years, we, the United States, have expelled or mostly exterminated the country's indigenous population -- that's many millions of people. We have conquered half of Mexico, carried out depredations all over the region, Caribbean and Central America, and sometimes beyond. We conquered Hawaii and the Philippines, killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos in the process. Since the Second World War, the US has extended its reach around the world in ways I don't have to describe. But it was always killing someone else, the fighting was somewhere else -- it was others who were getting slaughtered.

In the case of Europe, the change is even more dramatic because its history is even more horrendous than that of the US. The US is an offshoot of Europe, basically. For hundreds of years, Europe has been casually slaughtering people all over the world. That's how they conquered the world -- not by handing out candy to babies. During this period, Europe did suffer murderous wars, but that was European killers murdering one another.

The main sport of Europe for hundreds of years was slaughtering one another. The only reason that it came to an end in 1945 had nothing to do with democracy or not making war with each other and other fashionable notions. It had to do with the fact that everyone understood that the next time they play the game it was going to be the end for the world. Because the Europeans, and the US as well, had developed such massive weapons of destruction that game just had to be over.

But during this whole bloody, murderous period, it was Europeans slaughtering each other, and Europeans slaughtering people elsewhere. There are again small exceptions, but pretty small in scale, certainly invisible in the scale of what Europe and the US were doing to the rest of the world. This is the first change. The first time that the guns have been pointed the other way.

The world looks very different depending on whether you are holding the lash, or whether you are being whipped by it for hundreds of years -- very different. So I think the shock and surprise is very understandable. That is the reason why most of the rest of the world looks at it quite differently. Not lacking sympathy for the victims of the atrocity or being horrified by them, that is almost uniform -- but viewing it from a different perspective. It is something we might want to understand.

Well, let us go to the question of terrorism. What is the "war against terrorism"? The war against terrorism has been described in high places as a struggle against a plague, a cancer which is spread by barbarians, by "depraved opponents of civilisation itself." That is a feeling that I share. The words I am quoting, however, happen to date back 20 years. I am quoting President Reagan and his secretary of state. The Reagan administration came into office 20 years ago declaring that the war against international terrorism would be the core of US foreign policy and describing it in terms of the kind I just mentioned.

And it was the core of US foreign policy. The Reagan administration responded to this "plague spread by depraved opponents of civilisation itself" by creating an extraordinary international terrorist network, totally unprecedented in scale, which carried out massive atrocities all over the world. I will not run through the whole gamut of it, but just mention one case which is totally uncontroversial: the Reagan-US War Against Nicaragua. It is uncontroversial because of the judgments of the highest international authorities: the International Court of Justice, the World Court and the UN Security Council. So this one is uncontroversial, at least among people who have some minimal concern for international law, human rights, justice and other things like that.

The case of Nicaragua is a particularly relevant one, not only because it is uncontroversial, but because it does offer a precedent as to how a law- abiding state would respond -- did in fact respond -- to a case of international terrorism, which is uncontroversial. A case of terrorism that was even more extreme than the events of 11 September. The Reagan-US war against Nicaragua left tens of thousands of people dead, the country ruined, perhaps beyond recovery.

Nicaragua did respond. They did not respond by setting off bombs in Washington. They responded by taking the US to the World Court, presenting a case for which they had no problem putting together evidence. The World Court ruled in Nicaragua's favour, and condemned what they called the "unlawful use of force", which is another term for international terrorism. They ordered the US to terminate the crime and to pay massive reparations. The US, of course, dismissed the court judgment with total contempt and announced that it would not accept the jurisdiction of the court henceforth. Nicaragua then went to the UN Security Council, which considered a resolution calling on all states to observe international law. No one was mentioned but everyone understood. The US vetoed the resolution. It now stands as the only state on record which has been condemned both by the World Court for international terrorism and has vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on states to observe international law.

Nicaragua then went to the UN General Assembly, where there is technically no veto, but a negative US vote amounts to a veto. The General Assembly passed a similar resolution -- with only the US, Israel, and El Salvador opposed. The following year Nicaragua took its case again to the General Assembly. This time the US could only rally Israel to the cause, so two votes opposed observing international law. At that point, Nicaragua had exhausted all available legal measures, concluding that they do not work in a world that is ruled by force.

Terrorism, on the other hand does work, and is the weapon of the strong. It is a very serious analytic error to say, as is commonly done, that terrorism is the weapon of the weak. Like other means of violence, it is primarily a weapon of the strong -- overwhelmingly, in fact. It is held to be a weapon of the weak because the strong also control the doctrinal systems and their terror does not count as terror.

Excerpts taken from a lecture given by professor Chomsky on 18 October sponsored by the Technology and Culture Forum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

-- posted by rasputin



Top 347.   Nov 7, 2001 7:05 PM

» Rande - Re: Chomsky published in Cairo paper

In response to message posted by rasputin:

What a shock that Chomsky somehow managed to turn current events into an opportunity to rail against Ronald Reagan (not). Have kids between 18 and 22? This is what they hear from Chomsky clones all day long, day in and day out all around the country on college campuses everywhere. These 60s rejects still go to sleep every night hating Ronald Reagan, they have bad dreams about Ronald Reagan every night, and they wake up every morning to a new day of hating Ronald Reagan. After all these years, why? Because they will never be able to forgive him for putting the stake through the heart of their precious Communism and Socialism once and for all, for proving forever the unquestionable superiority of Capitalism. Because they hate America.

-- posted by Rande



Top 348.   Nov 7, 2001 7:13 PM

» JenL_2 - Afghanistan Poem

In response to message posted by rasputin:

This poem is from the Literature/Poetry section at Afghanradio.com:


"SILENCE"

BY ZIEBA SHORISH-SHAMLEY
DEDICATED TO MY AFGHAN SISTERS AND THE VICTIMS OF YAKAOLANG

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY
MARCH 8, 2001

Why does the world deny invasion of my land?
Why is justice silent? Does not make a stand?
I have told the world, my suffering and pain
I have asked for help, time after time again
Why is the world silent?

I tell you once again, my horrifying tale
You must listen to me, for I am very ill
Invaders are ruling, my own beloved land
Ruin is all around, nothing left but sand
Why is the world silent?

The Talib is a plague, befallen on my nation
Denies us all knowledge, no rights of education
Erases ancient history, they burn all the books
Ruining oldest artifacts, Talibs are crooks
Why is the world silent?

Terrorists run rampant, selling drugs and guns
They rape our daughters, make soldier our sons
They made our land the center of crime
The Mullah calls them "Guests!" for penny or a dime
Why is the world silent?

My village is burned. My people are killed
My sisters are stolen, my mother's blood spilled
My sons are all murdered, and buried in the sand
I am forced to leave my ancestors land
Why is the world silent?

The Talib in frenzy does massacre all men
Killing young and old, no one stops their sin
Shooting helpless people, time after time again
Why can't you help stop, the torture and the pain?
Why is the world silent?

My nation is dying, hunger disease and cold
We have become homeless; we have nothing to hold
Seeking food and shelter, we walk night and day
Countries shut the doors; they force us back, away
Why is the world silent?

Do not shut your eyes, you must see my world
We have become a pawn; we are bought and sold
Every crime you know, committed in my land
When you stay silent, you also lend a hand
Why is the world silent?

I have lost all hope; I must face my fate
I am awaiting death; the help will be late
Don't listen to invaders, they all cheat and lie
Do help Afghan nation; do not let them die
DO NOT STAY SILENT!

For more information, contact:
Women's Alliance for Peace and Human Rights in Afghanistan (WAPHA)
P. O. Box 77057 Washington, DC 20013-7057.
Tel: 202-882-1432, Fax: 202-882-8125
E-mail: zieba@aol.com
Website: http://www.wapha.org


....Jen

-- posted by JenL_2



Top 349.   Nov 7, 2001 8:35 PM

» Steven_Russell - fighting Talib propaganda in Pakistan

http://www.afghanradio.com/news/2001/nov...

Pakistan asks Taliban to stop press briefings

By Richard McGregor and Farhan Bokhari in Islamabad
Financial Times November 6 2001

The Pakistan government has asked the Taliban embassy in Islamabad to halt its regular daily press conferences, which have become one of the most effective platforms for the hardline regime to attack the US-led military campaign against Afghanistan.

The Pakistani move, confirmed on Tuesday night by the Pakistan foreign ministry, will please Washington, which is planning to establish its own briefing centre in Islamabad, partly to counter what it says is the misinformation produced by the Taliban.

The Pakistani foreign ministry said last night the request to halt the briefings was based on the so-called "third country rule", under which a diplomatic mission cannot use its embassy to publicly criticise another nation. "I think [the Taliban] will be sensitive to our concerns to keep diplomatic regulations intact," the spokesman said.

Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban envoy who hosted the daily gathering for western journalists in the front yard of the Islamabad embassy, visited the foreign ministry to discuss the issue yesterday. Mullah Zaeef has focused his criticisms on the US military action and, for the most part, has tried to avoid commenting on Pakistan in the briefings.

But Pakistan, a former sponsor of the Taliban before throwing its support behind America's war against terror, has become increasingly irritated by the press conferences.

The government of Pakistani leader General Pervez Musharraf is also believed to be moving to tighten restrictions on foreign journalists, reviewing its policy of allowing unlimited access to the country for hundreds of foreign reporters since September 11.

Already, a quota on the number of foreign journalists working for each news organisation has been quietly enforced. New visas are issued to fresh applicants only when they are replacing a correspondent from the same organisation who is leaving the country, senior officials say.

Communications equipment, such as satellite phones and dishes, will also be more tightly regulated, requiring a permit from government regulators, officials said.

Access to Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal area bordering Afghanistan, where support for the Taliban runs high, was off-limits to foreigners even before the attacks in the US. Officials say those violating the rules may find themselves expelled from Pakistan.

-- posted by Steven_Russell



Top 350.   Nov 7, 2001 8:46 PM

» Steven_Russell - Osama's Nuclear Quest

http://www.afghanradio.com/news/2001/nov...

Osama's Nuclear Quest

November 12, 2001 Vol. 158 No. 21
Time Magazine

How long will it take before al-Qaeda gets hold of the most dangerous of weapons?

BY JEFFREY KLUGER
Nobody is certain what Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood has been up to in Afghanistan in the past three years--but nobody in the West much likes it either. Mahmood is one of Pakistan's leading nuclear engineers, a key part of the team that developed the country's small arsenal of atom bombs. According to a lot of people, he also may be a little flaky. The fact that since 1998, so loose a nuclear cannon has been traveling in and out of the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, where he has helped the Afghans construct a complex of buildings he describes as flour mills, has a lot of people worried.

It was for this and other reasons that Pakistan detained Mahmood and two of his colleagues to determine if the three scientists may have been passing nuclear expertise, raw materials or--worse--functioning weaponry on to the Taliban. So far, nothing Islamabad has learned has proved that the men have indeed been trafficking in secrets, and they have been released. But nothing has put all doubts to rest either.

The detention of the three scientists was just the latest in the so-far offstage effort to battle the most dreadful of the terror weapons Osama bin Laden would like to have in his arsenal: nuclear arms. Airborne anthrax and hijacked planes are little more than a murderous tease compared with the prospect of rogue nukes. Just what bin Laden has in his stockpiles, what he plans to do with it and what can be done to stop him are rapidly becoming the most pressing questions in the anti-terror wars. "The goal of terrorism is to spread panic," says Dr. Jerrold Post, a physician and professor at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, who believes that al-Qaeda would try a nuclear or radiological attack if it had the capacity. "Psychologically, there are no constraints."

It's been an open secret in the intelligence community that bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization have long lusted after nukes. The consensus in Washington is that the group does not have a true nuclear-fission device, though it may well have what is known as a radiological weapon or "dirty bomb"--a conventional explosive packed with radioactive debris. Whatever bin Laden's got, he has made any number of attempts to get more. As early as the mid-1990s, intelligence sources tell TIME, bin Laden's agents began cruising the black markets of Europe and Asia looking for pirated Russian warheads. Al-Qaeda also made it known that loose components such as enriched uranium would do too. Relatively new to the free-for-all thieving of the post-Soviet republics, bin Laden was fleeced at least twice, getting fooled by black marketeers who tried to sell him low-grade, radioactive rubbish--in one instance claiming it was "red mercury," a fictional Russian weapon.

But bin Laden has been a patient shopper, and if he hasn't made a good buy yet, he has come awfully close. Earlier this year, at the trial of the four men now convicted of planning the U.S. embassy bombings, al-Qaeda turncoat Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl described his role in helping to broker a 1993 deal in which bin Laden attempted to pay $1.5 million for a cylinder of South African uranium. Al-Fadl saw the cylinder, but he wasn't present to see when--or if--money and material changed hands. Last April a Bulgarian working as a middleman in a Dubai company providing Asian laborers to Middle East construction firms was briefly introduced to bin Laden in a safe house at an unknown location during a trip to Pakistan. The next day he was approached by a scientist who seemed to be part of bin Laden's organization, offering him a different kind of business proposition: a scheme to bring nuclear waste from Bulgaria through Moldova and Ukraine. The names al-Qaeda and bin Laden never came up during that meeting, but the wary Bulgarian backed out of the deal. "They pressured me," he told TIME. "They said, 'We're ready to give you this business.'"

That kind of al-Qaeda tenacity is part of what sparked the recent arrests in Pakistan. Mahmood, the best known of the detained engineers, has been a vocal supporter of the Taliban, calling its members "upholders of a...movement of renaissance of Islam." He has compared the journey of the soul from life through death and after to an electrical current passing through a wire, and has said the energy of the spirits known as jinns could be harnessed to solve the energy crisis. Such seemingly loose-screw ideas coming from a man with so much knowledge of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal always troubled Islamabad and Washington. In 1999, when Mahmood retired from the government and began traveling in and out of Afghanistan to establish what he said was a relief organization, antennae went up.

Once American military actions began, the commanders of the air campaign decided to direct a few bombs at Mahmood's flour mills. At about the same time, Pakistani officials brought Mahmood and the others in for questioning. President Pervez Musharraf's spokesman Major General Rashid Quereshi stresses that the U.S. did not request the arrests--something Washington confirms--dismissing as "absolutely baseless" rumors that the men were simply handed over to the FBI or the CIA. Secretary of State Colin Powell, however, has readily admitted that the Pakistani scientists are high on Washington's worry list. "I discussed this issue with President Musharraf," he said, "and I'm confident that he understands the importance of ensuring that elements of his nuclear program are safe."

For now, they appear to be. As long as Musharraf remains in charge, the weapons are well nailed down. If he should be toppled, however, and if power should fall into the hands of extremist factions, the situation could change fast. In hopes of preventing that, the U.S. has offered to help Pakistan improve its already tight bomb security.

But even if Islamabad's bombs stay buttoned up, the nuke risk remains high. That's because Russia and the former Soviet states are leaking like a sieve. The Soviet Union produced more than 140 tons of weapons-grade plutonium and a whopping 1,000 tons of highly enriched uranium during its nuclear peak. Russia's internal-security agencies admit that on hundreds of occasions they have had to seize fissionable materials or technical documents that had fallen into the wrong hands. The United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency reports 175 cases of trafficking in nuclear material since 1993. In the late 1990s, Afghan and Pakistani smugglers were sneaking so much nuclear material out of the former Soviet Union that they had to stockpile it in at least one warehouse in Peshawar, Pakistan. Robert Puffer, an American antiquities dealer familiar with Pakistan's black markets, claims to have been in the warehouse, where dozens of canisters of nuclear contraband were stored under the floor. "These Afghans didn't know anything about radioactivity," he told TIME. "They were walking around with stuff they said was 'yellow cake,' which they kept in a matchbox in their pocket." U.S. officials in the region at the time were less impressed by whatever the smugglers were selling, saying most of it was radioactive waste material scavenged from hospitals--certainly not weapons-grade stuff.

If nuclear material of whatever quality is trickling out of the former Soviet Union, nuclear engineers are too. In the early 1990s--well before Mahmood and his Pakistani colleagues may have got the itch to help out al-Qaeda--Russia intercepted a planeload of its missile scientists leaving the country to go work for North Korea. In the years since, out-of-work engineers have grown no less desperate, and Russian borders have grown no less porous--meaning that the brain drain may only grow worse.

But detonating a bomb won't take any technical assistance if bin Laden can get his hands on a few fully built--and widely feared--suitcase nukes. During the cold war, the Soviets built an unknown number of portable nuclear explosives, small enough to be carried in a case 8 in. by 16 in. by 24 in. After the East-West thaw, Russia claimed to have secured all the weapons, but plenty of people have doubts. In 1996, Russian General Alexander Lebed claimed that his government had lost track of 134 mini-nukes, and stories have circulated that bin Laden himself bought 20 of them from the Chechens for $30 million and two tons of opium.

Given the nature of post-Soviet record keeping--which often means no record keeping at all--the truth of the claims is impossible to determine. Colonel-General Igor Valynkin, a top official of the Russian Defense Ministry, dismisses the talk as "ravings," and even if there is more to the stories than that, there is reason to believe the danger is not as great as it seems. Though suitcase bombs may be out there, they may also be duds, since the tritium triggers needed to ignite them have probably decayed. "You need to recharge the tritium every six years," says Paul Leventhal of the Nuclear Control Institute. Of course, even partial detonation of a weapon could cause a lot of damage--and release a lot of radioactivity.

Simpler still is the so-called dirty bomb. Detonated in a crowded city, a dirty bomb would pack an explosive punch no greater than ordinary ordnance, but the radioactive debris it would scatter could sicken and kill unknown numbers of people and contaminate an unknown stretch of real estate. Because the bomb would require no special skill to build, it's perhaps the most feared of the terrorists' nuclear choices. "They don't kill as many people," says Morton Bremer Maerli, a nuclear-terror expert at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, "but as a weapon of terror, they may be just as effective."

If there's reason for anxious Americans to feel hopeful, it's that pulling off a nuclear attack, even a low-grade one, is an enormously complicated business, and anything at all--from technical problems to supply problems to the simple dangers of fooling with radioactive material--could trip it up. For bin Laden, everything would have to go exactly right, or a nuclear strike wouldn't work. For the American military and the global law-enforcement forces arrayed against him, the job is to see to it that at least one of those things goes wrong.

-- posted by Steven_Russell



Top 351.   Nov 7, 2001 9:16 PM

» JenL_2 - Re: Osama's Nuclear Quest

In response to message posted by Steven_Russell:

Does Afghanistan has the capacity to launch a nuclear missile?

<img src="/files/mysites/jen7/camel.gif" width=397 height=246>

Thanks to Betty for that one!.......Jen

-- posted by JenL_2




Top 353.   Nov 8, 2001 5:39 AM

» BPyles - Taleban's dream world

Still living in their dream world!

‘Taliban won’t hand over Osama’ from MSNIndia 11-8-01

Islamabad, Nov 8: Despite nearly five weeks of US air strikes, a Taliban official reportedly said that his government will never hand over terrorist suspect Osama bin Laden and will fight America if necessary for 100 years.

Abdul Salam Zaeef, Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, made the comments during a dinner for Pakistani editors at his residence here yesterday. One of those who attended provided details on condition that his name was not published.

“We will never hand over Osama to America,” Zaeef said. He also denied allegations that Bin Laden’s Al-Qaida network maintain terrorist camps in the country.

“Arabs live in Afghanistan, but they have no such camps which can be used against any other country,” Zaeef said. “If necessary, Afghans will fight for 100 years, but they won’t abandon Islam. Jihad (holy war) is now mandatory.”

He also said the Taliban would not stop Pakistanis or other Muslims from going to Afghanistan to join in the war against the US-led coalition.

Pakistan has repeatedly asked the Taliban not to recruit Pakistanis in their ranks.
(Agency)
Published: Thursday, November 08, 2001

-- posted by BPyles



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