By Kathryn Jean Lopez, NRO Executive Editor
James S. Robbins: On October 24 a Chinese internet news site, Zhongxin Wang, ran a piece describing in detail the purported assassination of Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar by members of their retinue at an underground base near Kandahar on October 16. They were both shot twice in the back. One of bin Laden's sons and two of Omar's were also killed. The story was picked up today by the Tokyo-based Yomiuru Shimbun, the largest daily newspaper in Japan. Of course rumors and war go hand in hand, and without proof one way or another what is one to think?
Robbins: Well, there were some strange things going on in Afghanistan last week. The Pakistani press reported that Mullah Omar had convened a Shura (council meeting) in Kandahar on the 16th of more than 100 Taliban commanders. This alone strikes one as unusual. How could they get to Kandahar safely? And, once there, wouldn't they present a perfect target for the allied forces? Maybe they were â the meeting lasted until the 19th, which was the day of the U.S. Ranger raid on Kandahar. When the Shura ended the Taliban issued some odd comments. For example, they "advised" Mullah Omar to "control the command of the Taliban army by remaining underground," and also "directed Usama bin Ladin and his associates to remain underground." They also set up a line of succession should Omar be "martyred," and "expressed their determination to remain united until the end, even after their leader is martyred." It might sound like prudent planning to establish a line of succession â the United States has one for example â but in an authoritarian regime it is rare. Usually it amounts to a death sentence for the person tapped as the successor. In this case four Taliban commanders were named as possible successors â which could mean that the Shura could not decide on a single successor, and a power struggle is underway. The AP report of the arrest of 100 people in Kandahar also fits the puzzle.
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10/25/2001 ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
"Who asked Mr Bush to 'save civilisation'?" sneers an editorial in London's America-hating Guardian newspaper. "Which bits of the planet does Mr Bush term uncivilised? Some would say Afghanistan; others might nominate west Texas."
Meanwhile, the Pentagon says the Taliban are planning to poison food supplies dropped from U.S. airplanes and trucked in by humanitarian organizations, apparently in order to score propaganda points against America and the international community. Can the Guardian point to anything similar that West Texans have ever done?
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10/25/2001 11:13 am ||
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Pakistani border officials on Wednesday fired tear gas to disperse stone-throwing demonstrators in Karachi after 35 Harkatul Mujahideen militants were killed by US bombing in Kabul, witnesses said. Border officials at Torkham crossing in North West Frontier Province had prevented the entry of eight bodies from among at least 20 members of the Pakistani-based militant group which is active in the Kashmir Valley.
A crowd of more than 5,000 people had gathered in Karachi for funeral prayers for the militants. They grew angry after being told the authorities had refused to let eight of the bodies back into Pakistan. An official at Torkham said the bodies had arrived but been refused entry. âWe had instructions from higher authorities not to receive the bodies,â said the official, Bakhtiar Khan.
The demonstrators, who stripped one policeman naked, vowed they would not leave the public square where the protest was staged until the government agreed the bodies could be returned to Pakistan. The Pakistan based Afghan Islamic Press said the eight bodies were sent back to the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad. Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokesman Riaz Mohammad Khan said the government had no information about the deaths in Kabul or whether bodies had been refused. But he said: âFor quite some time the Pakistan government has impressed on the Afghanistan government that they should not allow any Pakistanis to be part of any of their forces.â
The group was staying in a house in a military compound area called Daraluman in the Afghan capital Kabul. A Harkat spokesperson told Reuters in Muzaffarabad, state capital of Pakistani occupied Kashmir: âWe have unconfirmed reports that 35 fighters have been martyred. We have the names of 20 people who died in the attack.â The list of dead included six commanders of the group, including one Ustad Farooq from Lahore. The spokesman also named one Chacha Lahori, sometimes called Baba Lahori as a casualty of the bombing.
This is the second time Harakatul Mujahindeen has lost men in US attacks on Afghanistan. Nine fighters were killed and several wounded in cruise missile attacks by the United States on a training camp in the eastern Khost area of Afghanistan in August 1998. That attack was launched after the, bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. The group's main leader, Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, has not been spotted since Washington put the group's name on the list of 27 individuals and groups whose assets were frozen.
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10/25/2001 11:12 am ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
Omar Saleem is the new imam of New York's Islamic Cultural Center, the Big Apple's biggest mosque. The Forward asks him about his predecessor's endorsement of a Jewish conspiracy theory to explain Sept. 11:
Q: Imam Al-Gamei'a said that he thought the Jews were behind the attack and the Zionist media was trying to cover it up. What do you think of those views?
A: His argument was that that kind of attack required technology beyond the capability of Osama Bin Laden and Afghanistan. As a matter of fact, in the absence of definitive pieces of evidence, nobody can say for sure. I would not, for example, accuse any party. To be fair, I'd not accuse the Jews or the Muslims. Because no definitive proof has been given that any specific quarter or quarter or authority or organization did that. . . .
Q: Would you rule out that Jews did it?
A: (laughs) That is, as a matter of fact, a question that I cannot say, that it was committed by Jews or non-Jews, because I don't have any evidence.
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10/25/2001 ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
The Democratic chairman, Delaware's Joe Biden, weighed in earlier this week with the observation that if the U.S. keeps bombing Afghanistan, it will look like a "high-tech bully." InstaPundit.com has a great answer to this nonsense: Funny, but although it's always the right that's accused of thinking of warfare in terms of the schoolyard, it's always the left that uses metaphors like this one. War, of course, isn't a schoolyard. We aren't bombing Afghanistan to show off, or to get the attention of girls. We're doing it because it has been an integral part of the operation that killed thousands of Americans. "Fighting fair" means nothing in this context. Only winning.
The Washington Times reports Biden also suggested to President Bush that he appoint Bill Clinton as a special envoy to the Mideast. "The suggestion reportedly drew an incredulous response from others at the meeting."
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
Not all American Muslim leaders think this is a good time to stir up resentments against America. James Zogby, head of the Arab American Institute, tells the Times: "The terrorism was the result of a suicide death cult that was hellbent on killing a lot of people. It simply wasn't edifying in the face of the horror and the shock to discuss any of these grievances. There's not a connection." Adds Aly Abuzaakouk of the American Muslim Council: "The country is in crisis, and we need to show our loyalty to it by standing by the administration. We need to build bridges, not break them."
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10/25/2001 ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
The Muslim Public Affairs Council "started running advertisements on a Los Angeles radio station last week, saying United States intervention in the Middle East had inflamed anti-American sentiment in the region." The station, KNX, got so many angry calls that the council decided to withdraw the ads and tone them down.
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10/25/2001 ||
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Virginia Postrel
CONDI RICE, FAKE FEMALE: Glenn Reynolds, who is big on the idea of bellicose women, points to this contrary article by Philip Weiss, which relies heavily on a few high-profile intellectuals to prove that women are still peaceniks. Weiss obviously hasn't talked with my facialist, who doesn't understand why we don't level Afghanistan, never mind the civilians and the difficulty of bombing caves. More important, Weiss is a sexist pig, who declares women who don't fit his model a) not really women b) not really serious. Arundhati Roy, Susan Sontag, and Katha Pollitt are important and female. Condoleezza Rice, on the other hand, is merely playing "the trouser role in light opera, the woman wearing a mustache to everyone's amusement." This is a typical move, demonstrating how far American women remain from full public equality. I thought it was bad when that other sexist pig, Paulina Borsook, called me a "token girl" in her book, Cyberselfish. But at least I was just a magazine editor, not the closest foreign policy adviser to the president of the United States. Just another tiring example of the difference between intellects and intellectuals; Rice and Postrel are both real minds; Sontag, Pollitt, et al., are gasbags in skirts.
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10/25/2001 ||
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Stupidity Watch BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
Reporter Shanay Cadette of the Macon (Ga.) Telegraph begins a dispatch on a United Nations Day panel with the following stunning display of illogic:
FORT VALLEY--What leads a person to terrorism?
As it turns out, there's no easy answer to that question. Poverty, frustration and political repression are all reasons that may drive a person to incite fear with a violent attack as the world witnessed Sept. 11. But what is clear is that Islam doesn't automatically equate to terrorism, according to a panel of professors and community members who spoke about Islam, terrorism and globalization at an international forum held Wednesday at Fort Valley State University.
So let's see if we follow this. Islam doesn't automatically "equate to" terrorism, but poverty, frustration and political repression do? Just how poor does Cadette suppose Osama bin Laden is? How repressed were his hijackers, who were living in America and Germany? As for frustration, that's what we feel when we read nonsense like this, but it's not about to "drive" us to terrorism.
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10/25/2001 ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
A reporter has been hospitalized with a suspected case of inhalation anthrax. The unnamed patient "is a journalist who works on Capitol Hill and was one of many who rushed to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's office in the Hart Senate Office Building last Monday when news broke that a letter containing an anthrax-contaminated powder was opened by the senator's staff. Now doctors fear she may have been infected as a result." Roll Call reports that "military and Congressional officials are considering the use of a powerful disinfecting gas--chlorine dioxide--in a novel attempt to rid Hill offices of dangerous anthrax spores that may be lurking on hard-to-clean surfaces."
A second NBC News employee in New York, meanwhile, has been diagnosed with cutaneous anthrax. And USA Today reports Carole Simpson, who anchors ABC's "World News Tonight" on Sundays, "has been suspended for two weeks after speaking inaccurately at a luncheon about ABC's recent anthrax scare." Simpson falsely claimed that ABC's Cokie Roberts had received a mysterious letter postmarked Trenton, N.J. And this just in: A State Department mailman based in Sterling, Va., has tested positive for anthrax exposure.
Good news from Mississippi: That crop-duster scare was a false alarm. "The white powder released by a crop-dusting plane over a Coast Guard post on the Mississippi River was fertilizer," the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reports. "The Monday flyover at Natchez is being called 'accidental' by authorities."
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10/25/2001 ||
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TRB FROM WASHINGTON by Peter Beinart
Last month the Nobel Committee did something completely useless: It awarded its Peace Prize to Kofi Annan and the United Nations. Was it the UN's anti-racism conference--with its agenda formulated largely in Tehran--that won over the committee? Or perhaps Annan's personal accomplishments--for instance his role, as head of UN peacekeeping in 1995, in pulling blue helmets out of Srebrenica so the Serbs could rape and murder the city's residents without international interference?
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
"Pakistani officials detained a pro-Taliban scientist who played a key role in helping Pakistan become a nuclear power," the Washington Times reports. "The government said Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood had been placed in protective custody. . . . Mr. Mahmood's links with Islamic groups and his pro-Taliban sentiments had drawn scrutiny from Pakistani security agencies in recent months, sources at the energy commission said."
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
Italian police made a bizarre discovery last week: an Egyptian man carrying a Canadian passport stowed away in a ship container furnished with its own bed and toilet. Rizik Amid Farid "was carrying airport maps and airside security passes for Canada, Thailand and Egypt," the Times of London reports. He also had "a laptop computer, two mobile phones, cameras, . . . other identity documents and a certificate saying he is an aircraft mechanic." Police suspect Farid was planning to hijack a plane, but his lawyer denies it.
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10/25/2001 ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
The Times reports that a key suspect in the attack on America, Moroccan student Said Bahaji, apparently fled to Afghanistan the week before Sept. 11. "Mr Bahaji, who has German nationality, flew on Turkish Airlines from Hamburg to Karachi on September 4 with two other Arab men. The three checked into one room in an hotel, where he is thought to have made final plans to escape across the border." The Times adds that Bahaji, who Attorney General John Ashcroft says is a member of a Hamburg-based al Qaeda cell, "used a public telephone booth near the Embassy Hotel in Karachi three times to make calls to a house in Hamburg used by Mohammed Atta, the hijack ringleader." There's no word on what happened to the two men who flew to Karachi with Bahaji; the FBI now wants to question them.
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10/25/2001 ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
The disclosure that 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia "is likely to complicate an already tangled and difficult relationship between Washington and Riyadh," reports the New York Times. That's for sure. The Times notes that the Saudis were "deeply offended" that the Bush administration didn't notify them in advance of the terrorist-linked organizations whose assets it was freezing. But the Saudis have not yet joined the effort to block those assets, suggesting that the administration's wariness of Riyadh was justified.
Here's a bit of good news out of the oil-rich kingdom: The BBC reports that Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Shaikh, Saudi Arabia's grand mufti--the country's top Islamic cleric, has issued a fatwa (a religious decree) banning the killing of non-Muslims in Muslim countries. British-based Saudi dissident Saad al-Faqih, however, says that, in the BBC's words, "government-appointed clerics like the Grand Mufti have lost almost all credibility in the eyes of the people."
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10/25/2001 ||
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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.
