BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
The Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, is accusing America of "genocide." Yes, genocide. The specific claim is that U.S. bombs hit a hospital in Herat, killing 100. There's no reason to think the report is true; it hasn't been independently verified. But even if Zaeef were telling the truth, it would be ludicrous to call this "genocide." Yes, by Gawd! Wiped out the entire gene pool of left-handed red-haired Afghans with buck teeth at one strike!
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10/22/2001 ||
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"The Northern Alliance is on the march in the north toward Mazar-i- Sharif, and I think they're gathering their strength to at least invest Kabul, or start moving on Kabul more aggressively," Secretary Powell said. As a retired general, he used the word "invest" in its military sense, meaning to surround and lay siege to an objective. The bombing raids and Secretary Powell's virtual invitation to the rebels to surround Kabul suggest a growing sense of urgency in Washington about the military operation.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
10/22/2001 ||
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Ever since it reluctantly agreed to support American military operations against Afghanistan, Pakistan has been insisting that the Taliban government not be toppled before Pakistan has had time to construct a "broad-based government" capable of taking over. In Afghanistan's turbulent history, whoever controls Kabul usually controls the country, so it has been in Pakistan's interest to see that the Northern Alliance not get the chance to overrun the capital. In deference to Pakistan, American bombing since Oct. 7 has been carefully calibrated to exclude the Taliban's lines north of Kabul. American officials were also dispatched to tell alliance commanders that they should not mount a full-scale offensive on Kabul until Pakistan's maneuvering produced a viable formula for a new government.
One result has been to put the United States in the contradictory position of striking the Taliban in four other Afghan cities â Jalalabad, Kandahar, Herat and Mazar-i- Sharif â while in effect sparing them from defeat in Kabul. But American officials in Pakistan have grown impatient. According to Pakistani and American officials, Pakistan has been prodding an array of Afghan groups to come up with a formula for a new government with the Northern Alliance, which represents Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara minorities in Afghanistan. The groups have included allegedly moderate elements of the Taliban, representatives of the exiled former Afghan king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, and Pashtun tribal chiefs from southern and eastern Afghanistan.
But talks between those groups in Islamabad have bogged down, and some American officials suspect that Pakistan's powerful military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, of manipulating the talks to ensure that Taliban elements retain a decisive hand. A case in point has been Maulvi Jalaluddin Haqqani, the Taliban's top army commander, who spent several days last week in Islamabad. While Pakistan has represented Maulvi Haqqani as a moderate, American intelligence officials who have known him since his days as a guerrilla commander against occupying Soviet forces say he is an anti- American Islamic hard-liner who joined the Taliban out of conviction, not expediency. "Haqqani had a reputation as a commander who was brutal even by the standards that characterized that conflict," one senior American intelligence official said. "Haqqani is no moderate."
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
10/22/2001 ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
A lot of people have said stupid and tasteless things since Sept. 11, but it'll be hard to beat this quote from author Alice Walker, speaking at a rally in support of Rep. Barbara Lee of California, the only pro-surrender member of Congress. InstaPundit.com noticed the story in Berkeley's Daily Californian:
Walker compared the U.S. government to her recent 10-day fast in Hawaii. "Just as we need to examine the contents of our own colons, we need to examine the contents of our government," she said. Be wary of the "stuff" the government is made of, the acclaimed author cautioned those in the crowd. "If you swallow just one lie from the government, it will ruin your day," she said.
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10/22/2001 ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
The despicable Louis Farrakhan delivered a Saturday speech at a "gathering of religious leaders" sponsored by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. Farrakhan blasted America for waging war on terrorism, saying Washington should have shared intelligence information about Osama bin Laden with his backers in the Taliban before bombing them. In addition, "Mr. Farrakhan said, without citing his evidence, that 1.5 million Iraqis had died under sanctions imposed by the United Nations after the 1991 Persian Gulf war 'while we are crying over 5,000,' " according to a report in the Washington Times, which is owned by the Unification Church.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
10/22/2001 ||
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The Nation Naomi Klein
Many political opponents of anticorporate activism are using the symbolism of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks to argue that young activists, playing at guerrilla war, have now been caught out by a real war. The obituaries are already appearing in newspapers around the world: "Anti-Globalization Is So Yesterday," reads a typical headline. It is, according to the Boston Globe, "in tatters." Is it true? Our activism has been declared dead before. Indeed, it is declared dead with ritualistic regularity before and after every mass demonstration: our strategies apparently discredited, our coalitions divided, our arguments misguided. And yet those demonstrations have kept growing larger, from 50,000 in Seattle to 300,000, by some estimates, in Genoa. Perhaps the children should think real hard about what they're really doing. Playing at "intifada" against all grown-ups everywhere could easily land them in the same soup as the real intifada crowd. A terrorist is a terrorist, regardless of his aims. A riot is a riot, regardless of motive.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
10/22/2001 ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Berkeley may pay a price for its City Council's anti-American views: "Berkeley officials and some merchants were rattled yesterday by the threat of an economic boycott of the city over a City Council resolution opposing the U.S.-led bombing of Afghanistan. Some local businesses lost large contracts, and several individuals said they would avoid Berkeley shops and restaurants, but observers said it is too early to know what the effect will be."
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10/22/2001 ||
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Andrey Slivka NY PRESS
It does occur to me, however, that this current cultural momentâthis moment during which the best, coolest thing you can be in New York is a burly firemen, or else one of the prole cops whom, as recently as early September in some of the more ideologically refined neighborhoods, it was customary to despiseâisnât going to last much longer. Todayâs New York Post reports: âWild applause shook Madison Square Garden when Michael Moran, 38, delivered his in-your-face patriotic message to the terror chief: âKiss my royal Irish ass!ââ (Moran, the Post explains, lost his brother, also a firemen, on Sept. 11.) The Post subsequently asked Moran what heâd do if he encountered bin Laden in an alley. âIâd put my hands around his throat and bite off his nose,â the fireman replied.
Itâs going to be interesting to see how long the New York City ruling class puts up with this sort of thing: firemen running around using salty dialect in public and threatening men of color with violence from the Madison Square Garden stage; Irish proletarian behemoths acting all uppity about themselves, swaggering from their traditional reservations in Staten Island and the Yankee Stadium bleachers to impose themselves on the genteel consciousness; working-class cops getting photographed for Vanity Fair and laid every time they walk into a bar. Had Moran threatened to corporally punish bin Laden on Sept. 10, Hillary Clinton would have denounced him, in her Midwestern drone, as a genocidal racist, Mark Green would have suggested prosecuting him in accordance with federal hate-crimes statutes and a deputation of the more freethinking bourgeoisie would have picketed his firehouse and screamed insults at him every time he rolled out of the station on his truck. He might have been forced to attend a course in sensitivity training.
How long can this inversion of the New York social orderâthe cops are more beloved than Hillary Clinton, and get to swear at her; the firemen are onstage with Michael J. Foxâlast in New York?
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10/22/2001 ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
The New York Times reports that President Bush "has won over some unlikely supporters, prominent Democrats who campaigned for Al Gore in last year's presidential campaign." Many of them refused to be quoted by name, including a "former senator who was a staunch Gore backer," who "said he was relieved that Mr. Bush was president because he feared that the former vice president would think he had all the answers." An earlier article by Newsweek's Howard Fineman made the same point, and erstwhile Gore partisan Gerald Posner contributed a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece titled "I Was Wrong About Bush."
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10/22/2001 ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
Matt Drudge reports Hillary Clinton was jeered at Saturday's "Concert for New York": Hillary Clinton was jeered and booed by thousands gathered at Madison Square Garden as she took to the stage--unannounced--to introduce a movie clip. VH1 cameras captured firemen and police heroes wildly booing Clinton, who attempted to raise her voice above the shouting crowd. "Get off the stage! We don't want you here!" yelled one New York City police officer just feet from the senator. Anti-Clinton slurs spread and intensified throughout the Garden, with many standing near the stage lobbing profanities. Event-planner and close Clinton friend Harvey Weinstein was visibly shaken as he heard the crowd erupt with boos and jeers, according to an eyewitness.
The Boston Globe reports that actor and Dalai Lama groupie Richard Gere was also booed, when he asked for "compassion" for the enemy.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
10/22/2001 ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
Here's one reason we love New York: New York Post editorial assistant Johanna Huden, recovering from a cutaneous anthrax infection of her middle finger, pens a defiant first-person account of her illness. It's full of Big Apple attitude:
I'm on Cipro. My finger is healing. I'll be OK. Am I quitting my job? Am I leaving town? Absolutely not. I've been kicking butt in this town for 7 years--trying to make it as a journalist in the biggest and best city in the world. And I will.
Too bad, Osama. You loser.
The front page of Saturday's Post is a tabloid-lover's delight: It depicts Huden holding up her infected middle finger, alongside a headline that screams ANTHRAX THIS.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
10/22/2001 ||
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A worker at the Washington post office that handles all mail delivered in the capital was infected with a dangerous form of anthrax, health officials said today. The diagnosis comes a day after anthrax bacteria was also detected in a building that processes mail for the House of Representatives. The worker sought treatment for respiratory difficulties and flulike symptoms at the emergency room of Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Va., near his home, on Friday afternoon, said Steven Brown, the hospital's administrator. This morning, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention diagnosed his condition as inhalation anthrax, saying anthrax spores had lodged in his lungs.
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10/22/2001 ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
"Saddam Hussein has relocated his chemical weapons factories after the first case of anthrax poisoning in America, in apparent anticipation of an imminent bombardment by the US-led coalition," London's Sunday Telegraph reports. "A senior Western intelligence official said that since the death of the British-born picture editor Bob Stevens in Florida on October 5, there has been a 'mass movement of weapons' to protected 'no-go' areas in the north, north-west and west of the country."
There are disagreements among former United Nations weapons inspectors over Iraq's involvement in the anthrax attacks. Scott Ritter says he doesn't think Saddam is behind them. While Baghdad "had not fully complied with its disarmament obligation, particularly in the field of biological weapons," Ritter tells the Telegraph, that failure did not "equate to a retained biological weapons capability." But the New York Post quotes Richard Spertzel, who headed the U.N. team that exposed Rihab Taha, a 45-year-old Iraqi scientist known as "Dr. Germ," as saying: "There is no question in my mind these anthrax attacks in Florida, New York and Washington involve international terrorists. And Iraq is the prime suspect as the supplier."
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10/22/2001 ||
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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.
