Bob Ballard posts a fine and eye-opening study of where the money comes from to maintain the Palestinians in the style to which they've become accustomed. Give ya a hint: It's not from Saudi telethons.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
04/25/2002 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
Afghanistan's interim government said Thursday it released 30 Pakistanis arrested last year while fighting alongside the deposed Taliban. Shazada Masood, adviser to the minister of tribal and border affairs who met with the prisoners Thursday morning before their release, said they did not appear to have any links to al-Qaeda. "They are old men who were fighting with the Taliban. They are not convicted of any exact crime," he said. "They were simply deceived by the Taliban. The Taliban persuaded them to fight." Yeah, well tell them to go home and tell their grandkiddies that jihad ain't all it's cracked up to be.
The 30 men were being held in a prison in Kabul. They were arrested in northern Afghanistan as the Taliban's rule collapsed, Masood said. The experience probably hasn't been, shall we say, pleasant?
Masood told the men Thursday morning that they would be released. "They were so happy," he said. Nope. Not pleasant at all. "I don't wanna see yew boys back wagin' jihad in these parts again, mind yew. I see yore skinny ol' butts, y'all in biiiig trouble."
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
04/25/2002 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
Four people were killed and three wounded when factional fighting erupted in Tombstone Khost on Wednesday after one local police commander arrested another and locked him in a shipping container for five days. What really cheezed him was the way he'd come by and bang on it with a claw hammer every few hours. When he dumped his chamber pot, that didn't make it any better...
The fighting broke out Wednesday afternoon in the main market. Hazrat Uddin, the provincial intelligence chief, said 150 fighters under Mujibur Earp Rahman attacked forces loyal to Sur Clanton Gul. Both men are provincial police officials. And neither seems real tightly wrapped.
Three of Gul's men were killed and two were injured, Uddin said by satellite telephone from Tombstone Khost. One of Rahman's men was wounded, and a shopkeeper was killed in the cross fire, he said. Uddin said the fighting broke out after Gul arrested Rahman, accused in an earlier killing, and kept him in the shipping container. Rahman staged his attack after being released, Uddin said. His kinfolk and Cole and Jesse were gonna spring him anyway, otherwise he'd have been lynched...
By Wednesday night, both sides had retreated to their positions, but appeared intent on continuing the battle, Uddin said. Keep in mind this is the cops we're talking about here.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
04/25/2002 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
Pashtun tribal elders from across southern Afghanistan gathered inside one of the country's holiest shrines on Wednesday to urge the return of deposed king Mohammad Zaher Shah to the throne. About 200 men with graying beards and swirling turbans sat cross-legged on the floor, fingering prayer beads and embracing old friends, as one speaker after another celebrated Zaher Shah's return to Afghanistan last week after 29 years in exile. "Baba was our king. Baba is our king, and Baba will remain our king in the future," said Ghulam Sakhi, an elder from Ghazni province. He used the Pashto word for "father" to refer to Zaher Shah, himself a Pashtun. That's probably an idea whose time has gone, which accounts for why the Pashtuns like it so much. With a king you can have vizirs and court intrigues, and when the old man's dead they can do interesting things with bowstrings or rope or axes to potential successors.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
04/25/2002 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
American advisers have been granted permission to accompany Pakistani troops into tribal areas of Pakistan during raids on suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda hideouts, senior officials were quoted as saying by the New York Times. Heard about this on Fox. They said our guys would be CIA, rather than Special Forces.
The agreement appears to clear the way for American help in Pakistani operations in a largely lawless region near the Afghan border where hundreds of Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters are believed to have taken refuge, the paper said. No more pretending to be Cambodia?
The report said that a Bush administration official acknowledged that "joint operations are being discussed." But American officials declined to talk about details. It was unclear whether the American advisers would include CIA agents, who have played a prominent role in operations inside Afghanistan. If they're smart, they'll never give details. If they're really smart, this'll be the last time we hear about this until they actually get something, if then.
The agreement was struck after the seizure of documents and computer disks from a house inhabited by Abu Zubaydah, a senior leader of Al Qaeda arrested on March 27 during a raid in Faisalabad. The paper said "according to Pakistani officials, the information seized in the raid provided evidence of an effort by Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters to regroup in the mountains along the border, using the tribal areas as a haven to avoid attack by American forces." Got the goods on them so tight even Qureshi couldn't wiggle out of it, huh?
The information seized in the raid is not specific enough to guide individual operations, the Pakistani officials said. They said the information narrowed the area of Al Qaeda and Taliban activity to Nangarhar, Paktia and Paktika provinces in Afghanistan, and to the Pakistani tribal agencies of North Waziristan, South Waziristan, Mohmand and Bajaur. In other words, where we knew it was before we got the nail through it.
The prospect of joint Pakistani-American raids in the tribal areas suggests the possibility of a new two-pronged operation to squeeze remaining pockets of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters from both sides of the border, the Times said. But somehow I can't see that happening. The Paks'll have to wash their hair that day or something. Either that, or it'll involve a lot of troops poking through the bushes while the locals stand around snickering because all the Bad Guys left last week after the e-mail arrived.
The paper observed that Pakistani leaders are worried about provoking a backlash against the presence of Americans in the region, where tribes operate largely beyond the authority of the central government. I keep coming back to the same point: When's it going to be their turn to worry about our tetchy tempers?
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
04/25/2002 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[2 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
FoxNews reports US Special Forces are engaged in joint ops with the Paks right now. Wonder if they'll find anyone, or if they've skipped to somewhere else?
Posted by: Fred ||
04/25/2002 21:41 Comments ||
Top||
The chief of Jamaat-i-Islami, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, has said that if the Supreme Court upheld the referendum, his party would not accept the verdict and go to the people to create awareness for supremacy of the constitution and seek justice. He said: "If Presidential election through referendum is justified, it will be an act of subversion of the constitutional clause in which the procedure of how to elect the President has already been laid down. As such, it will also be contrary to its own decision in which the court has termed the constitution as the supreme law of the land. We expect from the Supreme Court that in these hours of trial and tribulations, it would uphold the supreme law of the land in judicating the issue." Qazi's suit was thrown out in a lower court, so it's now before the Supremes on appeal. It doesn't look like he expects to win, so he'll look for an "Islamic" solution.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
04/25/2002 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
A woman, sentenced to death by stoning in public by a trial court, has filed an appeal before the Federal Shariat Court on Tuesday. The appeal was filed on her behalf from Kohat, where she was sentenced by an additional district and sessions judge on April 17 for committing adultery. Barrister Masood Kausar will plead her case before the Shariat Court. The appellant is currently lodged in solitary confinement in a death cell at Kohat prison. The prison officials have not been allowing any individual, including members of different human rights bodies, to meet with her. The suckling female baby, born while she was in prison, is given in custody of some female prisoners.
In the appeal, the appellant has claimed that the trial judge had overlooked various important points while convicting her. It is added that there were two basic ingredients without whose fulfilment the punishment of stoning to death could not be awarded. The appellant claimed that she had neither confessed to any guilt nor had four truthful witnesses who abstained from major sins deposed against her. It is added that in the statement recorded under section 340 of the Criminal Procedure Code before the trial judge, the appellant had stated she was forcefully raped by her brother-in-law.
A fact-finding team was sent to Kohat, which came to know that the woman was in fact trapped by her in-laws. She said her husband was serving a prison term, when she complained to her mother-in-law about her rape by her brother-in-law. However, her father-in-law took her to the police station and charged his rival, Akmal, with the offence. Someone called the present conflict a "clash of civilizations." I thought it took two to clash? It may not be multiculturalist or postmodern or whatever the hell they call it of me, but that's not a civilization on the other side. And furthermore, for being so much holier than us depraved westerners, those people sure spend a lot of time raping each other. Maybe there should be a shariah law that says you should keep your doinker to yourself.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
04/25/2002 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
Worshippers were hastily evacuated from a Moscow synagogue after a telephoned bomb threat, police here said. An unidentified man made the call and said there would be an explosion at the synagogue twenty minutes later. Around 300 worshippers who were in the building at the time were evacuated. However, police failed to find any bomb or explosives in the synagogue during a subsequent search. My guess in this case would be skinheads. When Putin cracks down on them, it will probably cause Mary Robinson to wet herself. But he's trying not to be old-style Russian about it.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
04/25/2002 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
More than half of Venezuelans want President Hugo Chavez to resign, according to a recent poll, two weeks after he was deposed in a failed two-day coup. More than 52 percent of people surveyed by the influential daily El Universal, a leader in the opposition to the populist president, said Chavez should resign, while 55 percent thought he should be removed from office by a constitutional recall vote. Seventeen percent of those polled supported a successful repeat of the April 11 coup, when Chavez was removed from power by a joint business and military effort. Thirty-four percent of survey respondents would rather remove Chavez by legal means. Those favoring a military coup d'etat were 13.5 percent. Just 15 percent saw no need to change the current situation. He's probably calling Fidel every day to ask for advice. I don't think Venezuelans want to go back to having coups every few years, but I don't think they want to be a little Cuba, either. There should be lots of raw money from oil exports, and it should be trickling into the pocketbooks of the citizenry, as in Kuwait or the UAE. If Hugo can't accomplish that, maybe they should borrow a few al-Sabahs to make it happen. Kuwait gets more than half its annual income from investments it's made over the years with its oil money. (Wonder what the proportion is for the Arabians? Anybody ever see any figures on it?)
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
04/25/2002 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
A makeshift court inside Yasser Arafat's compound convicted four Palestinians on Thursday for last year's assassination of Israel's tourism minister, Rehavam Zeevi. The men's trial was held Monday, with security officers acting as judges and a policeman assigned as defense attorney. Arafat approved the sentences, Arafat aide Nabil Abu Rdeneh said from inside the shell-shattered headquarters. This was a cynical exercise in drumhead court martial. The convictions are meaningless if the sentences aren't served, and the PA has a history of springing the Bad Guys at the least excuse.
Hamdi Quran was sentenced to 18 years in prison for allegedly shooting Zeevi in a Jerusalem hotel on Oct. 17. Quran's alleged lookout, Basel Al-Asmar, received 12 years; getaway driver Majdi Rimawi, eight years; and Ahmad Gholmy was jailed for one year for knowing of the plot but failing to inform authorities. Gholmy's the one who took it in the shorts. He could have told everyone he knew, and the plan still would have gone ahead as planned.
Palestinian human rights activist Bassem Eid denounced the conviction, saying the security court violated "international standards for fair trial." And this is unusual because...?
The move appeared unlikely to end Israel's siege of Arafat's compound. Israel says it won't lift its encirclement of Arafat's offices until the men are handed over. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dismissed the convictions announced Thursday and said the demands still stand. That's pretty good evidence that Sharon hasn't been dropped on his head...
Israel also demands the surrender of Fouad Shubaki, who Israel says was behind a ship caught smuggling 50 tons of weapons from Iran to the Palestinians. Shoubaki, as everyone knows, has been under arrest since January. That's probably why Yasser's keeping him close by.
Sharon told The New York Times he would consider letting Arafat leave his compound and move to the Gaza Strip. Arafat would not be allowed, however, to take any of the wanted men with him, Sharon said in an interview published Thursday. Well, it ain't a nuthouse in Morocco, but it's better than having him underfoot in Ramallah...
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat dismissed the idea, telling the Times that Sharon "wants to renew his occupation of the West Bank, and he wants to exile Arafat to Gaza." If I was Sharon, I'd be trying to talk Jordan into taking the West Bank. Failing that, I'd try to give it to Norway, or Botswana, or Peru...
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
04/25/2002 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[1 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Weren't the judge and prosecutor for this trial effectively collaborating with the Israelis? Shouldn't they therefore recieve the typical punishment for such?
Nine Palestinian youths emerged from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, along with two monks carrying two bodies - fulfilling a deal struck the day before between negotiators. That only leaves about 191 thugs to go, less the one ventilated, one killed, and two surrenders yesterday. That makes, ummm... 187 or thereabouts.
Two monks carried the bodies, which had been decomposing inside the church for days, on stretchers and set them in the middle of Manger Square, where they were collected by Palestinian ambulances. That probably improved the smell inside the church. It also removed an ever-present reminder from the sight and scent of the other 187.
It was the largest group to leave the church since more than 200 Palestinians - mostly armed - fled into the compound and were surrounded by Israeli troops who invaded Bethlehem on April 2. Israeli authorities detained the nine youths, a Palestinian official said. They want to make sure they're "youths" and not gunnies.
Negotiators agreed Wednesday on the departure of the youths and the removal of the bodies, and talks were to resume Thursday. Probably late Thursday. Mmmm... Sure is a good sandwich I'm eatin'. Bet those 187 snuffies wish they had one.
"There is very cautious optimism that the affair is closer to an end today than it was yesterday," Israeli military spokesman Brig. Ron Kitrey told army radio. The Palestinians have proposed the gunmen be escorted to Gaza. Israel demands they surrender or accept deportation. I suspect they're going to wait until they get all wrapped up eating each other, then rush the church. ("Donner! Party of 187!")
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
04/25/2002 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[3 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
What exactly is the meat ingredient in a Donner kabob ??
Posted by: Mark ||
04/25/2002 11:22 Comments ||
Top||
Wednesday night, a large force including tanks and troop carriers entered the northwest part of Hebron, according to eyewitnesses. They said the tanks advanced a kilometer into the city. One Palestinian Authority security official was killed in an exchange of fire, and others were wounded. Several Palestinians were arrested, including a Fatah activist who was an accomplice of Marwan Zalum, the head of Fatah's al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade in Hebron. Zalum was killed on Tuesday when missiles fired by an Apache helicopter slammed into his car.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
04/25/2002 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
Wednesday night, a Border Police undercover unit arrested two Palestinian Intelligence Service officers in the village of Kusra, south of Nablus and northeast of Shilo in Samaria. They are suspected of involvement in the attack on an IDF roadblock in Ein Arik, west of Ramallah on February 19, in which three Palestinian gunmen disguised as laborers killed six soldiers and wounded two.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
04/25/2002 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
Reserve soldiers apprehended a wanted terrorist who was hiding in an ambulance that was stopped during a routine check near Kalkilya. The fugitive was handed over to security forces. Those boys just don't learn. They don't think the IDF does, either.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
04/25/2002 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
Israeli security forces have apprehended a five-member terrorist cell that was responsible for the murder of seven Israelis in shooting attacks in and around Jerusalem over the past year. The members of the Tanzim cell were arrested over the past several weeks. They are in their early 20s from various Arab villages in the Jerusalem area. During their interrogation they confessed to carrying out a wave of attacks in and around the capital, Judea and Samaria.
Among the attacks attributed to the cell were five different drive-by shootings from January 2001 until February 2002 in which seven Israelis were killed. The cell also drove the terrorist who carried out the January 22 shooting attack on Jerusalem's Jaffa Road, in which two people were killed. The investigators also uncovered that Ahmed Barghouti, a senior advisor to imprisoned West Bank Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti, provided the members of the cell with the ammunition and stolen cars to be used in the attacks, supplies that would be returned at the conclusion of every operation. Marwan Barghouti, who was arrested by Israel earlier this month and is awaiting trial, would be updated about every attack. Ahmed was nabbed the same time as Marwan. Looks like they're rounding up the boys. I wonder if it's Marwan who's fingering them or Ahmed, or both?
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
04/25/2002 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
A police spokesman said four gunnies were waxed while crossing the line of control in Jammu yesterday. The identity of the deceased was not available. Not enough left of 'em?
Three snuffies and three civilians were killed in Doda where suspected militants shot dead an SPO and his mother at Jawalpur. Police has taken cognizance. They shot his Mom? Cheeze. There's a place in hell for people like them.
Two soldiers were killed in a gunbattle with the hard boys in Rajouri yesterday.
Security forces claimed recovery of 700 rounds of AK at Mulurian in Kalakote Rajouri yesterday. One suspect has been arrested.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
04/25/2002 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
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.
