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Niteshift

"She'll sort all this bullsh*t out. I mean it's hard to argue when you're not allowed to talk. "

Who is being denied the right to talk?


I agree with the majority of your post, but one point doesn't fly with me:

"i saw on the news channels that all of the news networks are no longer allowed to show footage of bin laden, at the request of the US government."

Either you got the info wrong or you presented it wrong. It says the networks are no longer allowed at the request of the govt. Was it a request or a requirement?

I haven't heard this before, but my guess is that there was no govt. REQUIREMENT, since it would be completely illegal. If you have something to the contrary, I'd be happy to look at it.

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A burning desire for social justice is never a substitute for knowing what you're talking about. -Thomas Sowell

Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is muzzle flash.

 

Mamabudz

A request was made publicly to the media not to show the Al-Queda footage repeatedly as is the manner of American news media (repeating the top news on the quarter hour) but to limit the showing of that footage.

I have found no specific reason given but I would surmise that as this was a taped repsonse made over a month ago it is no longer "news" and its value as a source of information is overshadowed by more recent information as well as it's untimeliness being out of context to the current state of events; therefore coverage should reflect its importance.

I agree that bin Laden sees his ideas as perfectly sane. That is standard the DSM-IV definition of psychosis. In this instance the man has the money, followers and plan to substantiate his full blown psychosis to the point where people are dying.

Yeah, nice watch...could feed a few hundred starving Afghans wheat for a week on that watch alone.

HappyMan

There is a belief that Bin Laden might try to communicate through the taped video's using hidden messages. Such as his watch, or the way he or a cronie is dressed.

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ButterflyDreams

And the Networks only agreed to careful screening and editing of the transmissions, not that they would not be broadcast.

The possible messages in a videotaped transmission are endless. A picture says a thousand words, How many pictures per second make up "live" footage?

Smiles,
BD

HappyMan

24 frame/second is normal broadcast standards.........but a message could be anything, from his already mentioned watch, to the way a rife is positioned, or the kind of clothes someone is wearing. It is not absurd to think that there are prepositioned cells in the U.S. with targets selected, weapons made who are waiting and watching CNN. They know that World Media will be convering this and they have planned for one way communication.....

 

tha_hashassin

October 13, 2001

DEATH ON THE GROUND
U.S. Raid Kills Unknown Number in an Afghan Village
By BARRY BEARAK



Tyler Hicks/Getty Images, for The New York Times
Soldiers of the Northern Alliance boarding a truck near the village of Khwaja Bahaouddin on their way to fight against the Taliban in northern Afghanistan.











ESHAWAR, Pakistan, Oct. 12 — Karam is a village in the hills of eastern Afghanistan, barely an hour from the border with Pakistan. Villagers say a training camp for Islamic guerrillas was once situated nearby, though it has been closed for several years.

Whether that camp was the intended target of the American bombers that swooped overhead on Wednesday, or whether there was somebody or something in the village that American military planners wanted to hit, may never be known.

What does seem clear is that Karam was bombed. One eyewitness account comes from a respected Pakistani journalist, working temporarily for The New York Times and exploiting connections at the border. He was able to get to Karam late on Thursday, returning today.

Villagers told him that 53 people had died, though only 22 bodies had yet been pulled from the wreckage. They said the radical Islamic Taliban government seemed inclined to inflate the toll.

The journalist, who could not be identified because his travel in Afghanistan was not authorized, had a close-up look at only three corpses in a hospital. They were all mutilated, he said. The face of one victim, a man named Shaqib, was torn away. A relative was patiently cleaning the body, preparing it for burial.

This relation, on seeing a Taliban official, began to shout. "I'm angry at the Americans and I'm angry at you," he said. "This is the result of your jihad."

Karam appeared thoroughly destroyed. Dead livestock lay about. Villagers, many in tears, were pulling away debris, looking for the missing. Throughout the area, Taliban soldiers sped by in pickups, reinforcing positions on the hilltops with antiaircraft guns.

The fog of war is always dense, with each side projecting its own claims and its own views of the conflict. In Afghanistan it is denser than usual because of the inaccessibility to Western journalists of the areas being bombed.

This morning Pakistani newspapers reported that the hamlet had been obliterated and that more than 100 people were believed to be dead. Late today the Afghan Islamic Press, a news service, quoted a Taliban official who said the body count had reached 160 and was likely to exceed 200.

The Taliban are almost certainly inflating casualties and, with Taliban-controlled territory closed to foreigners and the movement of even Afghan journalists limited, it is difficult to know how much about Karam there is to regret.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, asked about the Taliban assertions, repeated assurances that United States strikes were not aimed at innocents.

"There is no question but that when one is engaged militarily that there are going to be unintended loss of life," Mr. Rumsfeld said on a day when the bombardment had slowed. "And there's no question but that I and anyone involved regrets the unintended loss of life."

People in Karam said they had felt in no particular danger of an American attack. "We were eating our late meal when the planes came, dropping their bombs," said Shah Mehmood, a farmer. "I was knocked out completely, and I still have shrapnel in my neck. My 8-year-old son, Najib, he was knocked out, too, but I think he will be O.K. now."

Maulvi Abdullah Haijazi, an elder from a nearby village, had come to assist. "These people don't support the Taliban," he said. "They always say the Taliban are doing this or that and they don't like it. But now they will all fight the Americans. We pray to Allah that we have American soldiers to kill. These bombs from the sky we cannot fight."

Today's papers, whether in Urdu, Pashto or Punjabi, were filled with horrors: a civilian death toll placed at anywhere from 200 to 500; 10 members of a family killed in Kabul; a mosque leveled in the Surkh Rud district of Nangarhar Province; 11 unexploded missiles lying in the area around Jalalabad. All of the dead were referred to as "martyred."

None of those reports could be independently confirmed today, including a story that said the 10-year- old son of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader, had been killed in the air raids on Kandahar. That item, based on a single unnamed source, was published on the front page of several newspapers, including Pakistan's largest, The Daily Jang.

The Jang, an Urdu paper, also ran a front-page cartoon portraying Uncle Sam as a munitions dealer boasting that his latest products were being field-tested in Afghanistan.

The reports reveal the gulf in perceptions between Pakistan and the United States about the war. Although Pakistan is nominally allied with the United States in its quest to eliminate the terrorist cells in Afghanistan responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, sympathy for the plight of Afghans is strong here.

Items published here often seem eerie twists on items appearing in the United States. Ausaf, the second largest daily, ran what purported to be an announcement from Al Qaeda offering $50,000 for the capture of an American soldier and $3,000 for the uniform of a dead one.

At a protest rally here today, 1,000 people marched from one of Peshawar's famous mosques to one of its famous bazaars, chanting anti- American slogans all the way.

"Death to Bush!" they yelled. In the United States, the "war against terrorism" is described as a duel between good and evil. But most of the protesters are working from a much different set of premises. To them Al Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden — from a remote perch in Afghanistan — is an unlikely suspect in the terrorism of Sept. 11.

Rafatullah, a well-groomed wholesaler of medical supplies, said, "I think the Americans are anti-Islam, and their assault on Osama without proof is a tragedy."

By then another protester, this one with an unkempt beard and a raging tone in his voice, declared that the Muslims of the world had decided to wage jihad against the Americans.

Yet another man intervened. "We will have our vengeance," he said, unfolding a newspaper he had placed in his pocket. He pointed to the news about the village of Karam.

Niteshift

Considering the amount of bombing done, I have no problem with 53 deaths.

suede

Were these identified.????
Were they civilians????
How does anyone know who they are fighting....???
They all look alikeb.d.

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Niteshift

Looks to me like they claim 53 dead, 22 of which have been identified.

In any case, I don't have a problem with the 53. Nobody is going to run a war without collateral damage, nobody. As long as the US does it's best to minimize it, I'm satisfied.

Slim

I'm w/ you, Happyman; The gov. is obviously being over-cautious with Captain Caveman's videotaped speech. Not playing the entire tape: what a security measure!
I still am not convinced that bin Laden's support is purely a religious force; he is said to be a hero to poor Arabs, this is important to note. The Taliban only recently began to obey their own religious edicts against the drug crops, as the drug trade supported their terrorist camps for years.
Niteshift, Hitler was supposedly part Jewish, but that didn't stop him from rallying anti-semitism. Bin Laden has a Timex, but he still talks of defending the poverty-stricken as well as Muslims. It's always about money, you can't separate that from the equation. If you have nothing to lose, you can afford to be an extremist. It's about the whole watermelon: money, culture, religion, nationalism, sexism, and rasicsm. Their society is as complex as our own.
...We've got a margin of error of 6,000 civilian casualties, 53 is well within my tolerances.
Whether or not we go into other countries I think will hinge on how quickly and successfully we get Bin Laden and the Taliban ousted. I believe that if Afghanistan forms a better government, it will serve the Coalition's support as well.

Slim