CNN and ABC were given a guided propaganda tour by the Taliban. The bearded ones also made the claim that 70-100 Americans had been killed in Afghanistan, a claim refuted by the US.
The White House denied a claim by the Taliban that 70 to 100 Americans had been killed in the U.S. war on Afghanistan. ``Once again, the Taliban is just lying,'' said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. The Taliban consul in Karachi, Pakistan, Moulvi Rahamatullah Kakazada, made the claim to Qatar's al-Jazeera television. ``That report is completely false,'' Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman added. He said only three U.S. military deaths had occurred to date, all accidental, all outside of Afghanistan and all already reported. (Reauters) Their lips were moving; they musta been lying.
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11/02/2001 ||
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A US B-52 bomber on Friday pounded Taliban frontline positions north of the Afghan capital Kabul, but opposition officials here were skeptical over the impact of the raids. "Around 35 bombs were dropped this morning on the hills," said frontline commander Sayed Amruddin. "Four Taliban pick-ups were destroyed, but during these raids the Taliban leave the front. They can hear the plane coming, they leave and wait until the danger is over." (KHALEEJ TIMES)
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A group of 1,000 armed members of Tehrik Nifaz Shariah Mohammadi (TNSM), headed by Dr Mohammad Ismael, left Lagharai of Bajaur Agency village for the border Kunar province. They will join TNSM chief Maulana Soofi Mohammad. The 1,000 TNSM members were equipped with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers. Chanting slogans of "Allah-u-Akbar" (God is Great), "Taleban Zindabad" (long live Taleban) and "America Murdabad" (Death to America ), the TNSM boarded pick-ups for their journey towards the front. (KHALEEJ TIMES)
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Hamid Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun leader, said he survived a Taliban attack on a meeting of tribal elders he convened in Uruzgan province, and that his forces captured 12 Taliban soldiers in the skirmish. The Taleban says it has captured 25 supporters of Karzai. Execution orders had been issued for some members of the group and they are expected to be hanged on Friday. The rebels were seized after a clash in Uruzgan province. (BBC Online)
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Turkish soldiers are on their way to the Afghan theater, but some members of the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance are skeptical. "We don't really regard Turkey as a true Islamic country but rather as a lackeys of America and Israel," a senior Northern Alliance official tells the London Telegraph. (BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today)
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The Taliban claim to have shot down a US plane and the US admits that a helicopter went down. The crew was rescued and the craft destroyed.
The Taliban claimed to have shot down and destroyed an unidentified US aircraft west of the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. Several Taliban sources in Jalalabad said the plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire and crashed in Char Bolak district of Balkh province, near the border with Uzbekistan. (AFP)
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The Times of London ran a piece on 26-year-old Abu Mindar, from East London, who ran away to join the Taliban, was given a gun and told to fire "over thataway" and promptly jumped back to Pakistan as fast as his tubby little legs could carry him.
Abu Mindar, 26, from Londonâs East End, who deserted the Taliban, considers himself lucky to have survived with a crew of raw recruits of many nationalities, none of whom had ever fired a shot in anger. âMaybe I was naive but I was told there would be proper training and I would be joining an organised military unit and it was just chaos,â he said.
The impression being given by militant Muslim groups is that volunteers are shepherded by emissaries to Pakistan and on to training camps run by the Taleban. The reality, says Abu Mindar, is different. After days of delay, discomfort and lies he was driven into the desert with about 25 others, somewhere near Kabul, and handed a Kalishnikov by the âcommanderâ of his group who gestured for him to fire at an enemy he could not see through the swirling dust. "There were other Taleban around and suddenly everyone started firing,â Abu Mindar said on the telephone from Pakistan.
He laughed nervously as he described how, as he was not used to handling a gun, the ricochet nearly tore the AK47 from his grasp. âIt arced up in the air, took off the top of a tree and nearly decapitated some of the others in our group. Before I knew it the other side â whoever they were â started firing back and there was nowhere much to take cover. Everyone was shouting, some got shot, I didnât know what to do.â Abu Mindar is not sure how many casualties his group suffered in the 20-minute gunfight but he was taken back to their makeshift barracks sharing a four-wheel-drive truck with three wounded. âSome of the others were shouting victory slogans but we hadnât done anything except get ourselves shot,â he said. âIt wasnât the danger I minded because I expected shooting. It was the recklessness of the Taleban and their complete disregard for the lives of those fighting for them.â (DANIEL MCGRORY The Times of London) Well, y'know, those Taliban are tough. Us Americans should be really scared. Nobody's ever won a war in Afghanistan except for Alexander the Great. Yep.
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11/02/2001 ||
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U.S. Special Forces had a plan to kill Osama bin Laden, his top lieutenant and the ruler of the Taliban in one stroke, but the plot was foiled by a suspected intelligence betrayal by Pakistan's spy agency, reports DEBKA-Net-Weekly. The ambush by Rangers and Delta Force was set for Oct. 16, according to DEBKA's military and intelligence sources. (WorldNetDaily.com) Debka is not the most reliable source in the world.
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Hamid Karzai has begun the first known armed uprising against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan since the U.S.-led airstrike campaign began, fighting off a Taliban attack and claiming to control part of a southern province. Karzai, an influential Pashtun figure, said he survived a Taliban attack on a meeting of tribal elders he convened in Uruzgan province, and that his forces captured 12 Taliban soldiers in the skirmish. (By Marc Kaufman Washington Post)
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State prison officials have put a Muslim chaplain at the Albion Correctional Facility on paid administrative leave after she told inmates that Osama bin Laden "is a hero to all Muslims." She also is said to have told a gathering of inmates that the United States was making a scapegoat of bin Laden, and that the Taliban government in Afghanistan is right in not turning him over to the United States. Corrections authorities say Sister Aminah Akbar of Rochester was locked out of the women's prison. She was put on leave while prison authorities investigate more than a half-dozen complaints about the speech, made before corrections officers as well as inmates. (The Buffalo News, by MICHAEL BEEBE)
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Dr. Ron Walters, in an article carried by Black Press USA, complained that Bill Clinton had 'boos from the same beer-drinking crowd of blue-collar New York City fire and police department ''heroes'' being honored, many of them White men who Black communities know as some of the country's most demonstrated racists.'
It was downright painful to see Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) being booed loudly as she came out on stage at the Oct. 21 New York City gala benefit for the victims of the Twin Towers disaster. Bill also received his taste of boos from the same beer-drinking crowd of blue-collar New York City fire and police department ''heroes'' being honored, many of them White men who Black communities know as some of the country's most demonstrated racists. (Dr. Ron Walters NNPA Columnist on Black Press USA)
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Marcellee Gralapp, art director of the Boulder, Colo., public library, refuses to hang an American flag from the entrance of the library's main branch. "It could compromise our objectivity," she sniffs. "We have people of every faith and culture walking into this building, and we want everybody to feel welcome." (BY JAMES TARANTO WSJ Opinion On-Line Best of the Web Today) Uh... Most places hang the flag and put out a mat that says "Welcome." You can get them in any hardware store. Really does the trick, too.
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Malik Zulu Shabazz, of the New Black Panther Party, hosted a venomous anti-American, anti-Semitic pep rally at the National Press Club October 31st, which won him an appearance on Fox News' Hannity & Colmes. Shabazz' incoherent vitriol probably turned as many viewers against any kind of acceptance of Islam as had the sight of the WTC attack.
There was a venomous hatefest in the nation's capitol on Halloween night. It was hosted by Malik Zulu Shabazz of the militant New Black Panther Party. Deadly rhetorical spores of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism permeated the air for more than four hours... Shabazz defended Osama bin Laden, blamed President Bush for the 9-11 attacks, called our founding fathers "snakes" and likened them to terrorists, lambasted Catholicism, Christians and Jews, and repeated his avaricious call for societal reparations to blacks. (Michelle Malkin) At some point the national patience with this sort of 5th Column activity is going to snap. At that point, so also will the necks of those like Shabazz. We'll feel very bad about it afterwards, and our grandchildren will probably give some sort of compensation to his grandchildren for the trauma we caused; but he'll be dead, and at the time we'll all feel a lot better, won't we?
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Fresh from his recent jaunt to Israel, the Rev. Al Sharpton is moving ahead with plans to fly into Afghanistan to visit the eight jailed Western charity workers charged by the Taliban with attempting to convert Muslims to Christianity. (NY POST, by FRANKIE EDOZIEN)
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The restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal, its depoliticization, is the nettle that all Muslim societies must grasp in order to become modern. The only aspect of modernity interesting to the terrorists is technology, which they see as a weapon that can be turned on its makers. If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which Muslim countries' freedom will remain a distant dream. (By SALMAN RUSHDIE NY TIMES) Islam had better get on the stick and start its reformation. Step one: learn the joys of secularism. There is no step two.
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A graduate who watched television coverage on the September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in New York telephoned police and warned of plans to "bombard" Britain as well, was jailed for three years. Mossadek Jouini, 38, said he was a member of the banned Palestinian Hamas organisation, insisted it was responsible for the outrages in America, then claimed one of London's tallest tower blocks was to be targeted. Whether that happened and "innocent people" in the former NatWest Tower at Canary Wharf were killed as a result depended on Tony Blair, he told a telephone operator at Scotland Yard, who was busy tracing the call. The attack would go ahead if the Prime Minister's statements in the coming weeks showed he was backing the United States, Jouini told the operator. (ThisIsLondon.com)
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Al-Qaeda has reaped millions of dollars in the past three years from the illicit sale of diamonds mined by rebels in Sierra Leone, according to U.S. and European intelligence. Investigators in the United States and Europe are still trying to determine how much money al Qaeda derived from its dealings with the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), but they estimated the amount to be in the millions. (Washington Post, by Douglas Farah)
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An employee of Pakistan's top-selling newspaper and a worker at a computer factory are being treated for anthrax infection. Both the head office of the Daily Jang and the computer factory are in Karachi. Tests by the Aga Khan University Hospital on a powder confirmed the presence of anthrax spores. (Bloomberg, by Peter McGill)
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"We saw the television pictures of Tony Blair in Syria and we think he looks like a pimp and acts like one," said Khaled Zakoud, 17, a Palestinian student. "He is a liar who will say anything to try to please the Arab world. We don't trust him." Khaled's friends, gathered on a corner of the graffiti-scarred street in the dilapidated neighbourhood where 70,000 refugees live cheek by jowl, nodded in approval. (UK Telegraph, by Inigo Gilmore and Ohad Gozani)
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French Muslims expressed regret no aircraft had smashed into the Eifel Tower.
The only thing 19-year-old Mounir blames Osama bin Laden for is not slamming a plane into the Eiffel Tower, too. His friend Najib, 18, agrees that bin Laden, named by the U.S. as the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, is a hero. ``Bin Laden has already won this war: He struck at America's heart and exposed its weakness,'' said Najib. ``The U.S. deserved it. It always acted in an arrogant manner, and now it reaped what it sowed.'' They were speaking 6 miles from the Eiffel Tower that Mounir wants to see destroyed. And they're French. The high school students of Moroccan and Algerian origin live in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, home to many young, low- income "beurs,'' as those of North African origin are known.(Bloomberg, by Jad Mouawad)
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Twenty-four Afghans involved in riots that rocked Quetta after the US started bombing Afghanistan were thrown out of the country. At least five people were killed and another 29 injured here in the immediate aftermath of the US bombing blitz that started on October 7. Banks were looted and police stations, United Nations offices, cinemas and shopping malls were torched. The Afghans were part of a wider sweep that netted dozens of refugees with no identification papers who joined the mobs. More than 50 people arrested after the rioting remain in prison. (AFP)
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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.
