BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
Here's another example of Taliban military prowess: A Pakistani named Mahabub, who came to Afghanistan two weeks ago to join the Taliban's jihad, was captured by Northern Alliance fighters after he left his post to buy some cigarettes. "Mahabub's tale of woe is a familiar one to the opposition Northern Alliance officers, who grabbed the lost fighter after he took some wrong turns," Reuters reports.
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10/23/2001 ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
Britain's Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon says joint U.S.-British air strikes have destroyed all nine active al Qaeda terrorist camps in Afghanistan. In addition, Hoon says, nine airfields and 24 Taliban barracks have suffered severe damage.
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10/23/2001 ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
The Taliban military looks even less fearsome than it did yesterday. No, seriously. Remember that helicopter the Taliban claimed to have shot down? They produced the wheels but refused to take a CNN camera crew to the actual site of the purported shootdown, saying it was too dangerous because of land mines. Now the Pentagon says the wheels did come from an American helicopter--which hit a barrier as it arrived at the attack site, ripping off its front landing gear. The chopper returned to Pakistan, where it was able to land safely on the rear gear.
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10/23/2001 ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
Last week we noted that Sheik Muhammad Gemeaha, an imam at New York's Islamic Cultural Center, had been quoted as putting forth the conspiracy that the Jews were behind Sept. 11. Now the New York Times has a fascinating account of the backstory. It seems that on Sept. 14 Gemeaha "delivered a sermon in English to an interfaith audience calling for peace, healing and love among people of all religions. Two weeks later, he suddenly moved his family back to Cairo, telling an Arabic-language newspaper that he left because his family had been threatened at their home on the Upper West Side."
But Mohammad Abdullah Abulhasan, the United Nations ambassador from Kuwait--which donated two-thirds of the money to build the Islamic Cultural Center--says Gemeaha was never seriously threatened, though Egypt's ambassador says there were telephone threats. Abdulhasan adds that what Gemeaha said about a Jewish conspiracy "does not represent at all the policy and the beliefs of the Islamic Cultural Center, nor what Imam Gemeaha was teaching the Islamic community during his three and a half years here."
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10/23/2001 ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
Ted Rall, the cartoonist and columnist who is probably the most bitterly anti-American commentator in America, weighs in with the following wisdom: "Finally the Bushies have the perfect excuse to do what the U.S. has wanted all along-invade and/or install an old-school puppet regime in Kabul. Realpolitik no more cares about the 6,000 dead than it concerns itself with oppressed women in Afghanistan; this ersatz war by a phony president is solely about getting the Unocal deal done without interference from annoying local middlemen."
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10/23/2001 ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
Harley Sorensen of SFGate puts forth the conspiracy theory that the U.S. military shot down Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, and is now lying about it: "Flight 93's 'black box,' the flight recorder, has been recovered, but so far the government hasn't seen fit to allow the press or the public to hear what was on it. The government also refuses to give out the names of the fighter pilots known to be flying in the vicinity of Flight 93. Because we don't know who they are, they can't be interviewed."
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10/23/2001 ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
Patricia Thomas, a physics teacher at Dixie Hollins High School in St. Petersburg, Fla., had an idea to inject some fun into a project studying (we guess) gravity: She spent $500 on a custom-made, plastic-coated 9-by-9-foot poster of Osama bin Laden with a bull's eye over his face. She was going to put the poster on the football field, then climb into a cherry-picker, which would hoist her 35 feet aloft, whereupon she would drop eggs on the terrorist mastermind. The St. Petersburg Times reports:
District officials are cautioning that the egg drop project--dubbed "The Yolk's on Osama"--could be construed as culturally insensitive. Now, plans for the poster have been scrapped. . . . Ultimately, the decision to cancel or go forward with the idea is up to the high school, said Pinellas County school spokesman Ron Stone. He said Dixie Hollins contacted the district and asked for its opinion. "I reviewed it with a couple of people and I thought perhaps, especially with our emphasis on multicultural issues . . . that it would not be a good thing to do," Stone said. "Perhaps we could do something less controversial . . . maybe a poster that said terrorism."
We have a better idea. How about a poster of a "culturally sensitive" school administrator? "Culturally insensitive:" How do they make two words that long into a single four-letter word?
Posted by: Fred Pruitt ||
10/23/2001 ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
"A crop duster sprayed a white substance on the U.S. Coast Guard post just north of the Natchez-Adams County Port in the lower Mississippi River," the Associated Press reports. No word on what the substance was. On Friday a crop duster sprayed a towboat and a pleasure boat on the lower Mississippi. Reports of Mohamad Atta's interest in crop dusters--presumably as a way of delivering biological or chemical weapons--make the Mississippi incidents unsettling.
Meanwhile, Mayor Anthony Williams of Washington confirms it was anthrax that killed two postal workers in his city.
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10/23/2001 ||
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AndrewSullivan.com
THE UNASKABLE QUESTION: This following awful scenario keeps occurring to me. If we shortly prove that biological warfare has indeed been launched upon the United States from a foreign source, what will our response be? In the past, we have had a doctrine that a biological attack upon American citizens would open the possibility of nuclear response. But against whom? How? Where? This is the bluff that the terrorists have just successfully called. By starting the biological war piece-meal, they have been very smart. Because the casualties are as yet minuscule, and the horror diffuse, the terrorists have managed to both break a previously unthinkable barrier in warfare and yet also avoid anything like a commensurate response. I think the response used to be a counterattack with another weapon of mass destruction - and not measles.
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10/23/2001 ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
Two American helicopters were fired on yesterday--in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. The choppers were trying to recover the wreckage of a Blackhawk helicopter that crashed accidentally last week. That mission was aborted when the shooting started. The Boston Globe reports that "the identity of the attackers is unknown, but officials suspect Islamic radicals aligned with the Taliban and opposed to the US presence in Pakistan." Washington has asked Islamabad to remove hostile forces from the region.
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10/23/2001 ||
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AndrewSullivan.com
CHRISTIANITY AS A CANCER: "Like a cancerous growth, we are seeing Christians gain a foothold in the lands of the believers. The first time these crusading forces came with swords and suits of armor, this time they arrive with credit cards and million-dollar aid cheques. Employing Faustian machinations, these human shayateen are converting many Muslims to their false religion and serving to inject a virulent poison into the stream of the Ummah. The Muslim world is under attack." - Nida'Ul Islam, a magazine published by the Islamic Youth Movement in Australia.
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10/23/2001 ||
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BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today
Attorney General John Ashcroft says Hamburg, Germany, was "a central base of operations" for at least three of the Sept. 11 hijackers, including apparent ringleader Mohamad Atta, along with three alleged accomplices now being sought by American and German officials. At a joint press conference, Germany's Interior Minister Otto Schily issues a mea culpa for his country's failure to catch the suspects before Sept. 11: "We altogether failed. . . . We have to re-examine our security system."
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10/23/2001 ||
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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.
