Terrorist Attack _______________ Information Only

Top 385. Nov 12, 2001 12:06 PM

» Rande - It would be nice if they provided an excuse, but it's hard to i

It would be nice if they provided an excuse, but it's hard to imagine Iraq can be THAT stupid.

Kuwait claims Iraq fires cross-border mortar

November 12, 2001 Posted: 1:37 PM EST (1837 GMT)

KUWAIT CITY, Kuwait -- Iraqi forces are believed to have fired a mortar that landed near a U.N. patrol and observation post on the Kuwaiti side of the border, a spokesman for the international observers said.

The firing took place on Sunday and nobody was hurt, Daljeet Bagga told The Associated Press. He said the 82mm mortar made a "small crater" in the ground and a cloud of smoke billowing from the site attracted a Kuwaiti police patrol.

The angle of the trajectory "indicated it could have been fired from Safwan inside Iraq," the spokesman for the United Nations Iraq-Kuwait Observation Mission said on Monday.

The incident, the first of its kind in about three years, was a "very serious matter," and Iraq has been asked to investigate, Bagga said.

Bagga said Kuwaiti border police have also complained that 15 minutes before the mortar firing, two Iraqis "in khakis" were spotted firing several rounds from a Kalashnikov in the direction of the Kuwaiti border.

Nobody was hurt and observers were not able to find any bullets, he said. Baghdad has been asked to investigate that incident, too.

The desert frontier between the two countries has been closed since the 1991 Gulf War that liberated Kuwait from a seven-month Iraqi occupation.

U.N. observers have been patrolling a demilitarised zone along the border since the end of the war. The zone, which is barren and uninhabited, extends three miles into Kuwait and six miles into Iraq.

-- posted by Rande

Top 386. Nov 12, 2001 1:30 PM

» BPyles - Stupidity

Rande: Sure they can. Don't ever underestimate their stupidity or overestimate their intelligence.

How's this for stupidity? Think he will try anything on Saudi? Didn't even copy the entire article, just the bragging part.

Monday November 12 9:22 AM ET

Saudi Dissident Says Al Qaeda Planning More Attacks

By Ed Cropley

LONDON (Reuters) - Osama bin Laden 's network of supporters in
Saudi Arabia is planning a strike against government or U.S. military interests in the oil-rich desert kingdom, a leading Saudi dissident said Monday.

``There is credible information of an impending attack inside Saudi Arabia -- and one wonders whether inside America itself,'' Saad al-Fagih, head of the London-based Movement for Islamic Reform, told Reuters."

-- posted by BPyles

Top 387. Nov 12, 2001 1:36 PM

» BPyles - More stupidity

Here is stupid again...what goes up must come down....they sure need gun control

Radio report sparks wild melee in north-west Pakistan

At least fifteen people have been injured in a wild melee of shooting in Pakistan's northwest frontier province. It began when a local radio station incorrectly reported that the Taliban had recaptured the strategic Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

This report from Peter Cave in Islamabad.

In the tribal areas of Pakistan on the borders with Afghanistan support
for the TALIBAN is strong with thousands of armed tribesmen crossing
the border to fight alongside them. So when the local FM Radio Station
in BAJAUR broadcast an incorrect report that the TALIBAN had
retaken MAZAR I SHARIF and captured 1000 American special forces
troops they began celebrating in the traditional manner firing their
weapons including rocket launchers into the air…a wild celebration that
went on for more than three hours. But what goes up must come down .
Local hospitals says that 15 people were admitted with injuries from
falling ordinance including seven in a critical condition.

(12/11/01, 20:00:05 AEST)

-- posted by BPyles

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/s...

Top 388. Nov 13, 2001 10:26 AM

» Lawhawk - Ethnic cleansing suspected

Where have we heard this one before? The Taliban is likely to have engaged in ethnic cleansing in Bamiyan (home to the former landmark Buddha's that were destroyed this past summer).

And to think there are people who still think that the Taliban have done nothing wrong?

As an aside, you would think that the Taliban, which teaches their children to fire AK-74/47 machine guns, shoulder fired grenade launchers, and other assorted guns, would teach everyone about the physics of gravity? What goes up, must come down.

It shouldn't come as a surprise given that the Taliban curriculum is largely based on 16th Century texts - Islamic texts that have nothing to do with science, but everything to do with Jihad. When the Taliban and al Qaeda raised their voices against freedom and the right to practice religious beliefs other than strict Islam, they forgot that the rest of the world would come down on them with a strong fist to remind them that their view is best left in the 7th Century, not the 21st.

-- posted by Lawhawk

Top 389. Nov 13, 2001 11:26 AM

» rasputin - An upbeat discussion of torture

One Cheer for Torture
We have ways of making terrorists talk. Physical brutality isn't necessary.

BY COLLIN LEVEY
Tuesday, November 13, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST

HONG KONG--When you're this close to mainland China, discussion of the advantages of torture as an interrogation technique are not merely academic. But even here the question of no-pain-no-gain has taken on a new meaning as the Western world grapples with what to do with its clammed-up terrorism suspects.

With the causes of Flight 587's crash yesterday still unknown, the question looms: If it were another terrorist attack, could we have prevented it?

The thought was already percolating. Last week lefty Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter penned a piece admitting that "in this autumn of anger, even a liberal can find his thoughts turning to . . . torture." While "cattle prods and rubber hoses" aren't the way to go, he ventured, "how about tapes of dying rabbits or high-decibel rap?"

Mr. Alter isn't the only one chattering in earnest about torture. Fox News Channel ran a segment on the question under its formula tagline: "We report, you decide." Late last month, National Public Radio paired up a former Justice Department official with a Georgetown law professor to seriously debate the question. On Sunday the Baltimore Sun's Gregory Kane penned a column called "U.S. Can't Play Nice in the War on Terror," in which he imagines interrogating someone with foreknowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks:

If I'm the fed in charge of interrogating this guy, he gets a beating. He may get shocked with a cattle prod. He may lose fingers. By the time I was done, this guy would curse his mama's name if I told him to do it.
In dizzying speed the topic has gone from the province of the deranged and authoritarian to normal talk-show fodder in the land of the free.

America's justice system has earned its reputation as the best in the world for its commitment to treating accused criminals with fairness, dignity and rigid adherence to their rights. That system now finds itself at something of a loss in how to deal with suspects authorities would rather get information from than convict. Countless lives may be on the line in preventing the next attack. Here, if merely for reference purposes, Washington may want to ponder the experience of a part of the world were U.S.-style scruples don't apply. In 1995, Philippine police arrested terrorist mastermind Abdul Hakim Murad for his part in a plot to blow up 11 U.S. airplanes and kill the pope. After some quality time with Philippine authorities and their unconventional means, Mr. Murad crumbled, ultimately giving a five-hour confession to the FBI.

What unconventional means? Though nobody knows for sure, Mr. Murad claimed to have been beaten, spit on, burned with cigarettes and told he would face sexual abuse in the United States if he didn't talk on arrival. He blamed the ordeal for spilling his guts. He and co-conspirator Ramzi Yousef are both now serving life sentences.

Such expertise may not be entirely missing in the West. One of the Sept. 11-related suspects, Zacarias Moussaoui, was the subject of a dossier by French intelligence even before he was arrested in America after telling a Minnesota flight school that he wanted to learn to fly but wasn't interested in learning to take off or land. One idea floated by law enforcement officials in the pages of the Washington Post was to send Mr. Moussaoui back to France, where aggressive means to extract information are apparently not unheard of.

The CIA has its own history of investigating ways to extract confessions with an eye toward foreign intelligence as well. During the 1950s and '60s the agency explored various ways in which subjects could be made to confess, including hypnosis. In a 1963 counterintelligence interrogation manual, the agency explained that "the problem of overcoming the resistance of an uncooperative interrogatee is essentially a problem of inducing regression to a level at which the resistance can no longer be sustained."

One of the key models in this formulation is Israel, which has dealt with decades of suicide attacks everywhere from buses to pizza joints. Under Israeli law, "moderate pressure" can be applied to terrorism suspects thought to have knowledge of future attacks when the clock is ticking.

But far from our Hollywood images of state-sanctioned "torture," most of their techniques rely on psychological elements. Subjects might be made to sit like frogs, or have bags put over their heads and told creepy things. In 1970 Gen. Ariel Sharon managed to quell terrorism in Gaza by deporting the parents of terrorism suspects. It wasn't nice, but it worked.

The point of these routines to thwart future carnage is a kind of self defense foreign to a plain old murder case. But the psychological methods employed are also more trustworthy than infliction of physical pain. Even back in the days when torture was widely used, confessions given in duress were understandably considered dubious. That's why torture devices like one called "the Pear" were developed--specifically designed to inflict internal wounds so confessions would seem to have been freely given.
This highlights the fundamental problem of torture--the information it elicits can often be aimed more at satisfying the needs of the interrogators than in satisfying the truth. In Stalinist Russia or Cambodia under the Khmer rouge, torture experts managed to produce large numbers of small children and old people who confessed to being CIA agents.

With the terrorists we are now looking for and hoping to detain, a very different set of rules and values will apply. It is clear that at least the ringleaders in the Sept 11 attacks were prepared to die for their cause. (Although the FBI speculates that many of the hijackers were not informed they were on was a suicide mission.)

What such hardened terrorists may fear most is disgrace or dishonor, a fact which would make them both more difficult to break under physical pressure, and perhaps easier given the right psychological formula. One joke flying around the Internet suggested that the perfect punishment for bin Laden might be to send him to Bangkok for a sex change and then return him to Afghanistan to live as a woman.

The logic is not far off: Those who live for fantasies of martyrdom might most easily be turned by its opposite.

Crude torture is both inefficient and degrading to both parties. Yet there are ways of getting to the truth. Americans, with all their ingenuity and a disproportionate share of the world's clinical psychologists, ought to be able to crack this nut without lowering ourselves to bin Laden's level.

Ms. Levey is an editorial page writer at The Wall Street Journal. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.

-- posted by rasputin

http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/people/s...

Top 390. Nov 13, 2001 2:19 PM

» Rande - American Christians still held

Taliban take arrested aid workers

November 13, 2001 Posted: 11:14 AM EST (1614 GMT)

Picture:

http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/ce...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- All eight Western aid workers held by Afghanistan's Taliban have been taken to the southern stronghold of Kandahar, according to the father of one of the workers.

The aid workers -- four Germans, two Americans and two Australians -- have been detained by the Taliban for more than three months. They were on trial in Kabul on charges of trying to convert Muslims to Christianity.

John Mercer -- in Islamabad to secure the release one of the two Americans, his daughter, Heather, 24 -- said a reporter in Kabul told him that the detained workers were taken to Kandahar, which is the Taliban's spiritual headquarters.

"She visited the prison this morning and was told by the guard that between 6:30 last night and midnight, they were taken away with little notice, put in a van, and they said they were taking them to Kandahar," Mercer told CNN Tuesday. "I visited the Taliban embassy this morning and, while they did not come out and say 'yes they're in Kandahar,' they led me to believe that's where they were."

Mercer is in Pakistan with Heather's mother, Deborah Oddy, and Nancy Cassell, mother of the other American aid worker, Dayna Curry. The three parents and Western officials have not seen the detained aid workers since September 1, on a visit approved by the Taliban.

The eight aid workers are members of the German-based Shelter Now International, a Christian charity that provided food and homes to the poor of Afghanistan. There has been no word on the fate of 16 Afghan Muslims who worked for the aid agency and were arrested at the same time.

Mercer said it is possible the Taliban were holding the workers for "some sort of leverage" against the United States, which is leading airstrikes on Taliban targets because the regime has been harboring Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist organization. But he said he hopes that is not the case.

"Possibly the Taliban want to show they have a viable government in Kandahar and that they can continue their trial there," he said. "That may be a little bit far out there, but it's still a possibility."

A senior Western diplomat said last week the eight were being constantly moved between different locations in Kabul, possibly to prevent a commando raid to rescue them, and were now clearly hostages.

'It's very distressing'
A visibly worried Mercer said he was angry and disappointed the Taliban had moved his daughter to Kandahar. He told CNN he didn't know whether they had been moved for their own safety or to prove a point by the Taliban.

"It's very distressing. If I sit back and try to analyze it, you know, it is quite possible that the Taliban consider that they still have an effective government and they can still have a trial in Kandahar," Mercer said. "That's one way to look at it.

"The other is that maybe they are going to be pawns for some leverage in political negotiations. I still have hope that the Taliban have kept them safe for over 100 days now and they will continue to do so," Mercer said.

The last letter Mercer received from his daughter said she expressed "disappointment and dismay" that they had not heard from their Pakistani-based lawyer, Atif Ali Khan, in three weeks.

Despite the absence of their lawyer, Mercer said the letter, which was dated November 4, indicated the workers were being treated well.

"They were preparing a nice meal for Dayna Curry, whose birthday was on the 4th (of November)," Mercer said. "Over the past few days it had been relatively quiet in Kabul proper and I think emotionally they had all come to develop a sense of resignation that they were in for the long haul, that they were doing OK emotionally but they certainly did want to get out of there as soon as they could."

The trial of the eight aid workers had just begun when the U.S.-led military campaign was launched against the Taliban for sheltering Osama bin Laden, blamed for the suicide-hijacking attacks in the United States that killed more than 4,000 people.

The Taliban had rejected earlier appeals by family and governments to release the aid workers, who have denied trying to convert Afghans from Islam.

The U.S. government has listed the release of the eight as one of its demands of the Taliban, along with handing over bin Laden and his senior lieutenants in the al Qaeda network.

The Taliban chief justice had promised a fair trial but any punishment would ultimately be decided by Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. The punishment could range up to death sentences.

Profiles of Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer:

-- posted by Rande

Top 391. Nov 13, 2001 4:36 PM

» BPyles - No civilian courts for terrorists

Will this mean the ACLU will no longer be able to "monitor" the terrorists? Would not think the military code of justice would give them much of a say, if any.

Tuesday November 13 6:51 PM ET

Bush Seeks Military Courts to Try Terror Suspects

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush signed an order on Tuesday that would allow the U.S. military to set up special courts to try foreigners accused in the Sept. 11 attack and similar assaults, a White House official said.

The military order gives Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld the authority to establish the tribunals, White House counsel Al Gonzales told Reuters. The order does not name anybody who would be subject to prosecution in the military courts and does
not apply to Americans, he said.

``The president would make a separate independent finding that someone was a member of a terrorist organization like al Qaeda and that it was in the interests of the United States that the person be prosecuted,'' Gonzales said. ``That person would then be delivered to the secretary of defense who would take control of the individual.''

Gonzales said the order gave the president an option and an additional tool other than civilian courts for bringing to justice those directly responsible for attacks like the Sept. 11 assaults on the New York and Washington.

``The president thinks it can be a helpful option now in bringing al Qaeda suspects to justice,'' White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters.

The United States has blamed Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network for the suicide plane assaults that killed more than 4,500 people.

Gonzales, a former Texas Supreme Court judge who is the president's top lawyer, said a military commission could have advantages over a civilian court. He said it was easier to protect sources and methods of investigation in military proceedings. Also, a military trial could be held overseas.

There was precedent for the military tribunals, Gonzales said, citing the trial of eight German saboteurs during World War Two. He said the system also had been used in the 19th century in the U.S. Civil War and the Mexican War.

Bush signed the order before leaving Washington for his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

-- posted by BPyles

http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/ce...

Top 392. Nov 14, 2001 6:52 AM

» Rande - Freedom!

Freedom! Nothing can ever fully assuage the civilian mass murder on 9/11, but there are worse legacies than to think the events of that day have led directly to the liberation of millions formerly living under a strict ultra-fundamental Muslim tyranny they despised. And it's not just the lifting of veils and shaving of beards -- widows may now be able to feed themselves and their children, proper education and healthcare may finally come, and no more fear of imprisonment or summary execution for violating "the rules." Lots of work ahead to keep moving in the right direction, but this is a good start:

Kabul residents relish new freedoms

November 14, 2001 Posted: 7:54 AM EST (1254 GMT)

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Women are unveiling their faces and men are shaving their beards one day after Taliban forces fled the Afghan capital of Kabul.

Once-prohibited music and radio stations are now competing with bicycle bells following five years of harsh Taliban rule.

In Karte Nau, a largely Pashtun neighborhood, children flew kites and teenagers listened to music as Northern Alliance troops entered the city.

"We haven't heard any music for six years, we are crazy about music!," Omar, a 20-year-old Pashtun mechanic told Reuters news agency.

The Taliban, which espoused a purist form of Islam, banned Western dress and demanded that all men wear turbans. Women had to be completely veiled and were not allowed to be educated nor work.

Television, photographs, lipstick, neckties, playing cards and music -- except for religious songs and capella chants - were also banned as part of the Taliban's campaign to create the purest Muslim state on earth.

But on Wednesday a few bold women shrugged off their head-to-toe veils, or burqas, after the Taliban's religious police, the Ministry of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, fled the city.

In Foruj-Ga market, one woman worked in a shop wearing a black headscarf that revealed her face, Reuters news agency reported.

Barbers too were doing brisk business as young men with trimmed beards and bare faces walked the streets listening to music from roadside stalls, no longer fearing imprisonment.

-- posted by Rande

Top 393. Nov 14, 2001 12:17 PM

» BPyles - Lebanon

I wonder if it will ever dawn on Lebanon that the world is really not listening to them?

Dawn, 11-14-01

Lebanon's PM says US terrorism list illegitimate:
BEIRUT, Nov 14: Lebanese
Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri has criticised Washington for drawing up a list of terrorist organisations and said such classification should only be made by the United Nations.
"The United Nations is at the front line to sort out this problem. No state can unilaterally draw and impose any sort of list," Hariri said late on Tuesday. "There are more fundamental problems than terrorism that must be resolved, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, which is far more important," Hariri said. (Reuters) (Posted @ 14:50 PST)

-- posted by BPyles