Karen DeYoung Washington Post Staff Writer October 4, 2001; Page A01
As it assembles a massive diplomatic, financial and military arsenal against terrorist kingpin Osama bin Laden and his Taliban hosts in Afghanistan, the White House is weighing a proposal to deploy a much more basic weapon, targeted at the long-suffering Afghan people. Under a plan drawn up by U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Andrew Natsios, bags of American wheat would be air-dropped into the Afghan snow. Local merchants would be supplied with tons of U.S. commodities to take into the country by road from Pakistan, Iran and Central Asia to flood markets and drive down food prices in every major town and city.
This article starring:
Andrew Natsios
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10/04/2001 ||
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Christian Science Monitor
On our shortwave radios, we heard Mullah Mohammad Omar, the leader of the radical Islamic Taliban militia, throwing down the gauntlet on Monday during an interview on Taliban-run Radio Kabul: "Americans don't have the courage to come here," he said. The reclusive Taliban chief, whose troops control 90 percent of the country and consider Osama bin Laden one of their "guests," urged Americans to "think again and again" about attacking Afghanistan.
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10/04/2001 ||
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ABC News
The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies have been forced to double their estimates of what is needed to cope with the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, with up to 500,000 Afghan refugees being targeted. Red Cross officials in Pakistan say the focus will be on getting tents, blankets and health care equipment into Afghanistan as soon as possible ahead of the start of winter next month. As well, aid workers say there will be an effort to provide water and sanitation facilities in some of the dozens of new refugee camps being built in western Pakistan in readiness for the estimated one million people expected to cross the border in the event of a war in Afghanistan.
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10/04/2001 ||
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ABC News
Severe dust storms in northern Afghanistan have halted the advance of the Afghan Opposition, and allowed the Taliban time to muster troops for a counter-offensive. A Taliban attack is expected in the north of the country in the next day or two. The Taliban continues to have superior numbers and fire power, and the Opposition's forces believe they are unlikely to prevail without foreign intervention.
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10/04/2001 ||
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JAN GOODWIN NY DAILY NEWS
One Friday afternoon, 30,000 men and boys poured into a dilapidated Olympic sports stadium in Kabul, capital of Afghanistan. Hawkers peddled nuts, biscuits and tea to the crowd. The scheduled entertainment? A young woman named Sohaila was going to be flogged. Her crime? She was walking with a man who wasn't a relative. Under Taliban law, she was guilty of sex out of wedlock. She was sentenced to 100 lashes, a punishment that has killed grown men. But Sohaila was considered lucky, her sentence "light," because she was single. Had she been married, she would have been stoned to death.
These circuses are weekly outings for the entertainment-starved males of Kabul. For women, however, life under the Taliban is like being "buried alive," says Spoghmai, a 27-year-old resident of Kabul. This former elementary schoolteacher lost her right arm and leg in a shelling attack in 1996. Since then, Spoghmai has not been able to leave her home: She cannot walk with crutches while wearing a burqa, and the Taliban forbid women to be uncovered in public. The despised burqa is like wearing a tent, it envelopes women from head to toe and so impedes vision that some have been hit by cars; one woman was run over by a tank.
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10/04/2001 ||
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FoxNews.com
Desperate Taliban troops are taking thousands of boys and men from their families and forcing them into the military in an attempt to bolster their thinning ranks, according to recently arriving refugees in Pakistan. "Eight members of my family have disappeared and been taken away to fight," said Said Anwar, a 40-year-old Kabul resident who staggered into a refugee shanty town here just three days ago. "They were young people, 12 or 13. The older ones, the teenaged boys, are being taken away, too." Anwar and dozens of other refugees have arrived here in the last week telling disturbingly similar stories of how Taliban forces, faced with hundreds of defections, have abandoned the towns, looted the markets and are turning on their own people.
This article starring:
Said Anwar
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10/04/2001 ||
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Dawn
An envoy of Taliban said in remarks published today, the movement would not hand over Osama bin Laden even if there was evidence to implicate him in attacks on the United States. Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, told the United Arab Emirates' Al-Khaleej newspaper the movement would thoroughly check U.S. documents linking Osama bin Laden to the devastating attacks on New York and Washington before putting him on trial in an Islamic sharia court.
This article starring:
MULLAH ABDUL SALAM ZAIF
Taliban
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10/04/2001 ||
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Dawn
The United Nations revealed today that the Taliban had closed off several of its offices in Jalalabad. "Some UN offices in Jalalabad are being guarded by the Taliban and are not available to UN staff," UN spokesman Stephanie Bunker told reporters.
This article starring:
Stephanie Bunker
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10/04/2001 ||
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Frontier Post
ROME (Online): Taliban would be part of the proposed transitional set up to be put in place in Afghanistan, according to General Abdul Wali, brother-in-law of Afghanistan's exiled former ruler Zahir Shah. Spelling out details of an agreement reached between Shah and a delegation of the Northern Alliance in an interview with The Hindu, he told the agreement proposes ways to establish a broad-based, popular government in Afghanistan by convening a Loya Jirga - council of ethnic and tribal chiefs - to set up a new transitional government.
This article starring:
General Abdul Wali
Zahir Shah
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AFP
The Taliban's hold on power in Afghanistan appeared to be slipping Thursday, amid growing signs of internal rebellion and stepped-up external military and diplomatic pressure. Top opposition commander Ismail Khan told AFP that Afghans in the western provinces of Ghor and Bagdhis were rising up against their hardline Taliban rulers and predicted both provinces would fall within a week. "The most important fact is that civilians in these two provinces are rising against the Taliban. They do not want to be under Taliban rule," said Khan, one of the most powerful commanders fighting the Taliban. Any opposition advances in Ghor and Badghis threaten the western city and province of Herat, close to the Iranian border.
Khan said residents in Herat were ready to rise up, and had begun writing "Death to the Taliban" on walls around the town in a major show of defiance. Khan estimated that as many as 10,000 civilians in Ghor and Herat had access to weapons left over from the 1979-89 Afghan war against Soviet occupation,and said men were enlisting in his militia army in unprecedented numbers, swelling his force from 3,000 to just 5,000. Since capturing Herat in 1995, the ethnic Pashtun dominated Taliban have never been at ease in the mainly ethnic Tajik and traditionally moderate city.
This article starring:
Ismail Khan
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Reuters
Russia is planning to supply Afghan anti-Taliban forces with tanks, armoured vehicles and other arms worth up to $45 million in the coming weeks, a leading Russian newspaper reported on Thursday. But Russia's ambassador to ex-Soviet Tajikistan, through which the paper said Moscow would funnel weapons to Northern Alliance forces, said no Russian arms had arrived so far. "Up to now there has been only humanitarian aid," the envoy, Maxim Peshkov, told a news conference in the Tajik capital Dushanbe, referring to planeloads of food, blankets and medical supplies which Moscow has begun sending to northern Afghanistan. "There have been no guns or machineguns," he added.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper, giving the first such comprehensive list of Russian hardware likely to be channelled to the U.N.-recognised Northern Alliance government, quoted defence sources as saying supplies would include 40-50 tanks, 60-80 armoured personnel carriers and ammunition for them. Russia would also supply Grad missile systems, artillery, mortars, anti-tank weapons and sniper rifles as well as Mi-24 attack helicopters and Mi-8 troop-carriers. "The total volume of military-technical assistance to the Northern Alliance up to the end of 2001 will be of the order of $30-45 million," the newspaper said.
President Vladimir Putin has set increased arms supplies to the Northern Alliance as one of the main ways in which Moscow will support Washington's planned operations against "terrorist" bases in Afghanistan.
This article starring:
Maxim Peshkov
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''It is an isolated case and it is not contagious,'' U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson said at a White House briefing. ''There is no terrorism.''
Robert Stevens, a 63-year-old Palm Beach County man has been hospitalized in critical condition in Lantana with anthrax, state health officials confirmed. State of Florida and federal investigators from the Centers for Disease Control are at the Columbia JFK Medical Center are investigating, federal sources said. ''It is an isolated case and it is not contagious,'' U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson said at a White House briefing. ''There is no terrorism.'' Thompson said he was aware of two reported cases of anthrax -- one in Florida in 1974, the other within the last year in Texas -- in the United States, but admitted it was ''entirely possible'' there have been undocumented cases.
This article starring:
Robert Stevens
Tommy Thompson
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The Weekly Standard
Meanwhile, in the category of moral obtuseness, an honorable mention goes to Judith Rizzo, a deputy chancellor of New York's school system, who told the Washington Post: "Those people who said we don't need multiculturalism, that it's too touchy-feely, . . . I think they've learned their lesson. We have to do more to teach habits of tolerance, knowledge, and awareness of other cultures."
This article starring:
Judith Rizzo
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The Weekly Standard Susan Sontag set a standard difficult to match. Still, for sheer outrageousness, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen topped her, calling the destruction of the World Trade Center "the greatest work of art imaginable. . . . Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn't even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for ten years, preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying, just imagine what happened there. You have people who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 people are dispatched into the afterlife, in a single moment. I couldn't do that. By comparison, we composers are nothing." When the uproar in Germany caused the cancellation of a major program of his music, Stockhausen apologized, saying he meant that the terrorists had created a work of "the devil's art."
This article starring:
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Susan Sontag
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WSJ Kim Strassel
But perhaps the groups that have done themselves the most harm are the antiglobalization protestors. After the International Monetary Fund and World Bank called off meetings planned to be held in Washington in late September--an event the protestors spent months gearing up for--the antiglobal groups decided they would change their message. A much-smaller group of protestors, led by the virulently anti-American International Action Center, showed up in Washington, this time to promote "world peace." Talk about irony. Here was a group that hates anything global--except, it seems, world peace. Moreover, here were people who have a track record of violent "protest," now lecturing our government on the need for pacifism.
This article starring:
International Action Center
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Andrew Sullivan, WSJ Editorial
Of course the initial response of left-wing intellectuals to Sept. 11 was one jerking of the collective knee. This was America's fault. From Susan Sontag to Michael Moore, from Noam Chomsky to Edward Said, there was no question that, however awful the attack on the World Trade Center, it was vital to keep attention fixed on the real culprit: the United States. Of the massacre, a Rutgers professor summed up the consensus by informing her students that "we should be aware that, whatever its proximate cause, its ultimate cause is the fascism of U.S. foreign policy over the past many decades." Or as a poster at the demonstrations in Washington last weekend put it, "Amerika, Get a Clue."
Less noticed was the reasoned stance of liberal groups like the National Organization for Women. President Kim Candy stated that "The Taliban government of Afghanistan, believed to be harboring suspect Osama bin Laden, subjugates women and girls, and deprives them of the most basic human rights--including education, medicine and jobs. The smoldering remains of the World Trade Center are a stark reminder that when such extremism is allowed to flourish anywhere in the world, none of us is safe." The NAACP issued an equally forceful "message of resolve," declaring, "These tragedies and these acts of evil must not go unpunished. Justice must be served."
"To excuse such an atrocity by blaming U.S. government policies is to deny the basic idea of all morality: that individuals are responsible for their actions."
Left-wing dissident Christopher Hitchens, meanwhile, assailed his comrades as "soft on crime and soft on fascism." After an initial spasm of equivocation, The American Prospect magazine ran a column this week accusing the pre-emptive peace movement of "a truly vile form of moral equivalency" in equating President Bush with terrorists. Not a hard call, but daring for a magazine that rarely has even a civil word for the right.
Most moving was Salman Rushdie's early call in the New York Times to "be clear about why this bien-pensant anti-American onslaught is such appalling rubbish. Terrorism is the murder of the innocent; this time, it was mass murder. To excuse such an atrocity by blaming U.S. government policies is to deny the basic idea of all morality: that individuals are responsible for their actions."
Whatever else is going on, the liberal-left alliance has taken as big a hit as the conservative-fundamentalist alliance after the blame-America remarks of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
This article starring:
Christopher Hitchens
Edward Said
Jerry Falwell
Kim Candy
Michael Moore
National Organization for Women
Noam Chomsky
Pat Robertson
Salman Rushdie
Susan Sontag
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
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James Lileks
The International Action Center coordinated the rally -- and who are they, you ask? According to their Web site, they're dedicated to "resistance to U.S. militarism, war and corporate greed." Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark is one of their luminaries, and the site reflects his U.S.-Out-of-North-America worldview.
These people would take Lex Luthor's side against Superman.
Judging from the position papers and articles on the site, they live in that Bizarro world of American politics where Fidel Castro is a champion of freedom, Saddam Hussein is a victim, and North Korea is an innocent victim of American imperialism. These people would take Lex Luthor's side against Superman.
True to the belief that evil can best be combated with ponderous acronyms, they've assembled a new antiwar group, the International ANSWER. (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism). The list of signatories condemning Bush had all the usual suspects -- labor organizers from AFSCME, a Mumia Abu-Jamal advocate, Greens, dovish Jews, and other sorts who'd be shot on day one should the terrorists win.
This article starring:
Act Now to Stop War
Fidel Castro
International Action Center
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Ramsey Clark
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It takes a special breed of moral imbecile to believe their hearts will be softened by the entreaties of pacifistic spam.
A progressive group called ActForChange has announced that it will send your disapproving e-mail to the Taliban. Direct from your warm, comfy dorm to diplomats in Pakistan. We can stop the Bush Death Juggernaut, friends -- just start typing for peace! One small problem: the Taliban itself. This is a government that beats people to death for playing cards. It takes a special breed of moral imbecile to believe their hearts will be softened by the entreaties of pacifistic spam.
But in the protesters' world, the actual effect of one's actions is immaterial. What counts is holding forth a standard that ensures your civilization dies in a state of moral purity. Every response to aggression should have the same effect as the Polish cavalry's assault on Nazi tanks -- gallant, doomed, and above all symbolic. Hence the march on D.C. last Saturday.
This article starring:
ActForChange
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NR Kumbaya Watch
The Village Voice stays true to form, serving up a cornucopia of anti-American inanities. Here, for instance, is Richard Goldstein, complaining about what we've lost in our "rush to unity": "Suddenly it seems like an act of impiety to point out that, in the phalanx of police and firefighters surrounding Giuliani on Saturday Night Live, there was hardly a black face to be seen. Or that, in the spectrum of opinion following this awful event, women were barely heard from, and so we were deprived of their perspective on the crisis ... If women were fully included in the national dialogue, it wouldn't be such a monologue. We might be able to process our feelings without sedating the culture." Guess his house isn't on fire if he's got the time to look.
This article starring:
Richard Goldstein
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#1
why is it anti american for someone to wonder if black people or women were not included enough? i dont see the connection - please explain. It was a great thing for american people to come together following the tragedy, but surely that doesnt mean that dissenting voices should shut up?
Mark Steyn National Post
What have we learned since September 11th? We've learned that poverty breeds despair, despair breeds instability, instability breeds resentment and resentment breeds extremism.
Yes, folks, these are what we in the trade call "root causes." Which cause do you root for? "Poverty breeds instability" (The Detroit News)? Or "poverty breeds fanaticism" (Carolyn Lochhead in The San Francisco Chronicle)? Bear in mind that "instability breeds zealots" (John Ibbitson in The Globe And Mail), but that "fanaticism breeds hatred" (Mauve MacCormack of New South Wales) and "hatred breeds extremism" (Mircea Geoana, Romanian Foreign Minister)...
Faced with the enormity of September 11th the pacifist left has done what it always does -- smother the issues in generalities and abstractions.
And so faced with the enormity of September 11th the pacifist left has done what it always does -- smother the issues in generalities and abstractions -- though never on such an epic scale. On that sunny Tuesday morning, at least 7,000 people died -- real, living men and women and children with families and street addresses and telephone numbers. But the language of the pacifists -- for all its ostensible compassion -- dehumanizes these individuals. They're no longer flight attendants and firemen and waitresses and bond dealers, but only an abstract blur in some theoretical equation -- if not mere "collateral damage," certainly collateral. Of course, real live folks die in the Middle East, too, and their stories are worth telling. But in between the bonehead refrains of this breeding that and that breeding the other you'll search in vain for a name or a face, a street or a city or sometimes even a country. Just the confident assertion that one abstract noun breeds another.
This article starring:
Carolyn Lochhead
John Ibbitson
Mauve MacCormack
Mircea Geoana
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Kevin Johnson and Alan Levin, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON Cockpit voice recordings from United Airlines Flight 93 indicate that the hijacked jet's passengers attacked their captors and fought their way into the cockpit before the jet went down, according to data obtained Wednesday. The account is based on an ongoing analysis of the cockpit voice recorder. It provides confirmation of the passengers' heroic efforts as they fought against four terrorists who had commandeered the jet on an apparent suicide mission toward a target in Washington.
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WSJ Best of the Web Today
Remember that hoax photo of the guy supposedly standing atop one of the World Trade Center towers seconds before the airplane hit? Someone's been having fun with Photoshop. A gallery of photos of the same guy shows him near the Hindenburg, in a Titanic lifeboat and in the front seat of the car carrying JFK on Nov. 22, 1963.
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NY Post
City University trustees are horrified by a forum in which professors blamed America for the attack on the World Trade Center - and they're drafting a resolution condemning faculty hate speech. "These people should be ashamed of themselves," CUNY trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld told me yesterday.
"While recognizing the professors' right to be stupid, their opinions render ill repute to the university."
"While recognizing [the professors'] right to be stupid, their opinions render ill repute to the university. They're fortunate it's not up to me. I would consider that behavior seditious at this time."
As you read here yesterday, City College's radical professors union - the Professional Staff Congress Forum - sponsored an event on Tuesday titled "Threats of War, Challenges to Peace." It was a two-hour, hard-core America-bashing festival. The terrorist attack on the trade center was referred to by faculty as "the incident." Terrorists were described as freedom fighters. One anthropology professor, M.A. Samad-Matias, framed the atrocity as an understandable Islamic response to Western imperialism.
Wiesenfeld said he will introduce a resolution condemning the event at a meeting of CUNY trustees this month. "We would expect the board will vote unanimously in favor" of the resolution, said trustee John Calandra. Such resolutions - the last one condemned the anti-Semitic ravings of Prof. Leonard Jeffries - allow trustees to send a message to taxpayers who pay the ranting professors' salaries.
This article starring:
Jeffrey Wiesenfeld
John Calandra
Leonard Jeffries
M.A. Samad-Matias
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James Lileks
One hates to bring up something as inconvenient as history, but war was a jack-dandy solution to that nation's Final Solution. By the protesters' logic, D-Day was just a big karmic disaster -- if we'd just waited, the Nazis would have collapsed of their weight, just like the U.S.S.R. Granted, it wouldn't have happened until 1977, and by then Europe would have been blond and blue-eyed from Gibraltar to the Urals. But at least we wouldn't have stooped to their level.
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NY Daily News
The man in charge of security at Logan Airport when terrorists hijacked two planes was fired yesterday but put in charge of security at Boston's harbor instead. Acting Gov. Jane Swift unveiled new security for Logan Airport yesterday, including replacing Chief of Security John Lawless with State Superintendent Col. John DiFava. "That two of those planes took off from Logan Airport is particularly painful for us," Swift said.
Lawless is a former police officer who was appointed to the $130,000 a year job by then-Gov. William Weld. He had been Weld's chauffeur.
Lawless, who was appointed in 1993 as the Massachusetts Port Authority's head of public safety, came under increasing scrutiny after the hijackings of American Flight 11 and United Flight 175. The two planes smashed into the World Trade Center.Lawless defended his credentials in the days after the attack. He said preliminary findings suggested the hijackers had boarded the flights without violating security measures. "We are being blamed for things over which we have no control," he said then.
Lawless is a former police officer who was appointed to the $130,000 a year job by then-Gov. William Weld. He had been Weld's chauffeur.
This article starring:
Jane Swift
John DiFava
John Lawless
William Weld
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Andrew Coyne National Post
But the rediscovery of truth -- the daunting awareness, not merely that I might be wrong, but that I might be right -- is more than the final death blow to relativism. It is implicitly universalist.
To smash an airliner into a building is not wrong in some cultures, but not in others; it is not wrong for you, but not for me; it is simply wrong.
To smash an airliner into a building is not wrong in some cultures, but not in others; it is not wrong for you, but not for me; it is simply wrong. Who's to say? All of us. Humanity. Civilization. And if it is wrong to kill, if every person has the right to life, if each one's life is the equal of every other's, then all else follows: freedom, equality, democracy, and the rest of the apparatus of humanism. Or as they are not afraid to say in some parts of the world, of "universal human values."
To say that this is a revolution would hardly do it justice. The moral code that was slowly working its way through our societies stressed not right and wrong, but authenticity: To thine own self be true. An action was to be judged, not by appeal to universal values, but by whether it was consistent with the actor's (self-chosen) identity. Hence the undergraduate's obsession with what to him seems the worst, if not the only crime: hypocrisy. Actions are not, indeed, to be judged at all, but rather persons, and by extension nations, are to be scored against their previous record. To the point that his only reaction, on hearing of the murder of 6,000 Americans, is to bring up other crimes other Americans are alleged to have committed.
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BBC
On his second visit to New York since the 11 September attacks, President Bush found his strong line on terrorism is winning him support in a city once hostile to his views, writes BBC News Online's Ryan Dilley in New York. George Bush may feel more at home in Midland, Texas, than on the streets of the Big Apple - perhaps concluding that his Southern charm plays better to those in what he calls "America's heartland" than to the urban sophisticates of New York.
However, the 11 September terror attack has changed New York's political landscape, just as it wrought such horrible change on the city's skyline. In his second visit here since the World Trade Center tragedy, President Bush is being heartily welcomed by some New Yorkers once inclined to despair of their leader.
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FoxNews.com
A passenger was arrested when an airport security guard searched his bag and found a disassembled shotgun -- but only after it had gone through X-ray screening unnoticed. Bradley Cooper, 20, told investigators the gun and duffel bag belonged to his roommate and he had forgotten the gun was inside. Investigators said an X-ray machine operator didn't recognize the shapes of the shotgun and ammunition on Cooper's first trip through security Tuesday at Colorado Springs Airport.
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(CNN)
Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who was drug czar during President Clinton's second term, said in an online exchange last month that those against the United States in its war on terrorism would "be killed suddenly, in significant numbers and without warning." McCaffrey, who commanded the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division in the Persian Gulf War, offered his blunt assessment on the mission and the strategy confronting the United States and its allies in an e-mail exchange with a cadet at West Point, where McCaffrey teaches.
The exchange took place September 19 -- a little more than a week after the deadliest terror attacks on U.S. soil. McCaffrey and others have since distributed the e-mail widely to friends and associates in the national security community. McCaffrey told CNN he is not displeased the exchange became public, because he is eager to articulate the likely multi-faceted course of action. McCaffrey identified multiple objectives -- to increase domestic security, build a strong coalition and finally "take the gloves off and use integrated military power to find, fix and destroy" terrorist organizations.
This article starring:
Barry McCaffrey
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John Caniglia
Plain Dealer Reporter
Hundreds of worshippers at Northeast Ohio's largest mosque yesterday forgave Imam Fawaz Damra for demeaning statements toward Jews, but its leaders are undecided about whether he should continue as their leader. Officials of the Islamic Center of Cleveland were to discuss comments Damra made 10 years ago that referred to Jews as animals. The comments, which surfaced last week, troubled Christians, Jews and Muslims in Greater Cleveland. Damra apologized in a written statement. But the gathering of leaders never began because more than 400 people turned it into a town meeting to support him.
"All people make mistakes," said Dr. Azzam Ahmed, an elder and the man who helped hire Damra. "When they realize their mistakes, they apologize. He did, and that's as far as he can go. If other faiths don't accept it, then the ball is in their court."
This article starring:
Azzam Ahmed
Fawaz Damra
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STEVE WARMBIR STAFF REPORTER Chicago Sun Times
Three men are suing United Airlines for allegedly being kicked off a Phoenix-to-Chicago flight, four days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, because a passenger erroneously believed they were Arabs and posed a danger--even after the men were cleared by the FBI and security. Younadam Youkhana, 52, and his son, Ninos, 20, who are in the parking lot business in Chicago and who are American citizens, were on the flight along with two Iraqi friends, one of whom is also a plaintiff in the suit.
The men are not Muslims but Assyrian Christians who are involved in fund-raising for a group in Iraq that opposes Saddam Hussein, said their attorney Terence J. Moran. All four men were asked to leave the 2:40 p.m. United Flight 722 on Sept. 25 after a female passenger apparently became worried, solely based on her wrong perception that they were Arabs, Moran said.
This article starring:
Terence J. Moran
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Dawn
At least six people were killed and eight injured today when unidentified gunmen opened fire on a Shiite mosque in Karachi, police said. Five people died on the spot and another critically injured in the firing died later in hospital, police said. "It was sectarian violence," local police chief Majid Dasti told AFP.
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Washington Post
In a region braced for an American war in Afghanistan, all that's missing are visible signs of the Americans. Thousands of U.S. troops and warplanes are reportedly on their way here, to staging areas in former Soviet republics along Afghanistan's northern border. But from dusty airfields in southern Uzbekistan to a strategically located base near the Afghan border in Tajikistan, there is no evidence of a significant U.S. military presence. And inside Afghanistan, the opposition forces that hope to join U.S. troops to oust the ruling Taliban militia say they have not seen a single U.S. soldier. More than three weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington prompted the expectation of U.S. retaliatory strikes against Osama bin Laden and his hosts in Afghanistan, it has become clear that this is a different kind of war. Instead of organizing massive troop buildups and very public preparations such as those undertaken a decade ago during the Persian Gulf War, the Pentagon has mobilized more than 30,000 soldiers to the region without saying where they're going.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
10/04/2001 ||
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Dawn
A Japanese newspaper said today that Pervez Musharraf had said Islamabad plans to sever ties with Taliban. The Mainichi Shimbun newspaper said Musharraf had told National Security Council that Pakistan would reverse its policy on Kabul and cut ties. The report was not specific about what ties would be cut.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
10/04/2001 ||
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Dawn
Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) on Wednesday expressed deep concern over the reports that the military regime has been discussing with the United States possible American assistance for the security of Pakistan's nuclear installations. In a statement issued here, the PML spokesman said that the move amounted to compromising Pakistan's most vital security interests. The spokesman said it was expected that the reports, emanating from Washington, would be contradicted or at least a plausible clarification would be issued from Islamabad. "However, continued silence of the official spokesman has strengthened the suspicion that the military rulers have completely surrendered the national interests before the global hegemonic interests of the US," he alleged.
The spokesman said that the reports, carried by the national press, clearly stated that the top-level US military team visiting Islamabad last week "discussed possible US help to Pakistan to provide equipment and other assistance for improving security and installing new safeguards on Pakistan's nuclear weapons and at its nuclear power plants."
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
10/04/2001 ||
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Julian Borger, Richard Norton-Taylor and Patrick Wintour The Guardian
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and Tony Blair embarked yesterday on emergency missions to repair holes in a shaky anti-terrorist coalition, after nervousness among key regional allies pushed back the launch of air strikes on Afghanistan. American officials yesterday confirmed that the governments of Saudi Arabia, Oman and Uzbekistan had had last-minute doubts about allowing their territory to serve as a base for military operations aimed at Osama bin Laden, his al-Qaida terrorist group and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The three governments, together with Pakistan, have "serious problems" about allowing the US to establish bases for special forces and military hardware on their territory, according to American officials. The apparent deadlock in negotiations about the bases has prompted a flurry of diplomatic activity. Mr Rumsfeld arrived in Saudi Arabia yesterday for talks with King Fahd, Crown Prince Abdullah and the defence minister, Prince Sultan. Earlier this year, the US completed a state-of-the-art command centre at the Prince Sultan air base near Riyadh, which could be vital in a sustained aerial campaign.
This article starring:
Crown Prince Abdullah
Donald Rumsfeld
King Fahd
Prince Sultan
Tony Blair
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
10/04/2001 ||
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Agence Press France
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said Thursday that his country will not take part in any US-led military action against international terrorism. Egypt "supports the fight against terrorism but will not take part with troops," he said. The president said US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was due in Egypt later the same day, was not seeking Egypt's military participation in the war on terrorism. "He is not coming to ask for troops. He is coming for an exchange of points of view on events in the region," Mubarak said in a meeting with Egyptian army officers, in comments broadcast on television.
This article starring:
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
Hosni Mubarak
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
10/04/2001 ||
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Frontier Post
Pakistan Thursday immediately closed its airspace except one approach. Incoming flights from abroad are being diverted to the route from Karachi to Islamabad via Nawabshah, Rahimyar Khan and Lahore. Any other plane which reaches Pakistans airspace has been ordered to shot down.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
10/04/2001 ||
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Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, October 4, 2001; Page A01 Richard L. Armitage flew through the night from Washington, landing in Moscow just after sunrise. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's deputy and dearest friend headed for a government mansion, where he was closeted with his Russian counterpart, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, a senior deputy foreign minister and former head of the Kremlin's Foreign Intelligence Service. Just a week after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Armitage had been dispatched on a hastily arranged mission to ask for Russia's help in tracking down Saudi exile Osama bin Laden and his militant cadres and in mounting a military reprisal against them.
But beyond the specific requests made during a full day of discussions that included midday talks over a buffet of traditional Russian meats and potato dishes, Armitage was posing a far more fundamental question: Were the two former Cold War adversaries prepared -- 12 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall -- to transform their still antagonistic relations? What the two men discussed that day, according to accounts by U.S. and Russian officials, led to one of the most intensive series of meetings, telephone conversations and back-channel communications between the two governments in many years. Emboldened by their united front against terrorism, the Bush and Putin administrations embarked on a course that could fundamentally recast U.S.-Russia relations.
This article starring:
Richard L. Armitage
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
Vyacheslav Trubnikov
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
10/04/2001 ||
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David Jackson and Laurie Cohen Chicago Tribune staff reporters
Outside the Bridgeview charity, a bright sign reads: "Compassion in Action Throughout the World." But federal investigators are examining whether the $5 million-a-year Global Relief Foundation belongs on a list of charities suspected of supporting global terrorism. About 18 months ago, FBI and Jordanian intelligence agents tried to question the charity's co-founder and former treasurer about his fundraising and associates, but he refused to answer questions and soon left the U.S., according to his attorney.
Earlier this week, Treasury Department officials said they are considering whether to freeze Global Relief's assets as part of the U.S. effort to choke off the finances of Osama bin Laden, who is suspected of orchestrating the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. Global Relief attorney Ashraf Nubani said the group has no ties to terrorism or bin Laden. The investigation into Global Relief and other Islamic charities is part of a "smear campaign" to discourage Muslims from donating to legitimate groups, Nubani said.
In a Bridgeview industrial park, Global Relief continues to operate from a low-slung brick building with a U.S. flag on the front lawn. Inside, a small staff raises money through mosque appeals and direct mail campaigns. One fundraising video depicts maimed and bloody corpses as it describes atrocities by Indian soldiers against Muslims in Kashmir, and it features a young refugee boy who declares he will "become a freedom fighter and fight for Kashmir's independence."
This article starring:
Ashraf Nubani
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
10/04/2001 ||
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MSNBC
Among the evidence U.S. officials have been showing other countries to bolster their conclusion that Osama bin Laden was involved in planning Septembers terrorist attacks are records showing that individuals linked to the suspected hijackers called phone numbers that also were used by participants in the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in Africa, NBC News has learned.
INVESTIGATORS SAY that in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, overseas associates of the hijackers placed calls to phone numbers in Yemen that also appear in the phone records of bin Laden recruits who were involved in bombing the U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, sources familiar with the investigation told NBC News.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
10/04/2001 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
