Tag Archives: Taliban

The unluckiest person in the world

If you’ve ever wondered who the unluckiest person in the world is, I think I’ve found him. His name is Abdul Rahim.

In January 2000, he was arrested in Afghanistan by the Taliban. They tortured him. They burned him with cigarettes, smashed his hand, deprived him of sleep, submitted him to water torture, and hanged him from the ceiling. Eventually he “confessed” to being a spy for the United States.

The prison Rahim was being tortured in was captured by US forces in January 2002. Given the circumstances, he probably thought it was his lucky day. He was wrong. The US promptly accused him of being an al-Qaida terrorist—and tortured him. Again.

He’s currently in Guantanamo Bay, one of the many people kept imprisoned without any actual criminal charges being filed against them.

Since Dick Cheney and friends are happy with holding people’s heads under water in order to extract information—they just argue that it shouldn’t be called torture—I imagine Abdul Rahim is pretty used to water torture by now.

First casualty of war

The US-led coalition in Afghanistan has distributed leaflets calling on people to provide information on al-Qaida and the Taliban or face losing humanitarian aid.

The move has outraged aid organisations who said their work is independent of the military and it was despicable to pretend otherwise.

- Guardian 2004-05-06

Attacked by Saudis? Invade Iraq!

I’m sure there are some people who still doubt that Bush decided to attack Iraq immediately after 9/11, in spite of the fact that the 9/11 attackers were Saudi Arabian and Iraq had nothing to do with it at all. So:

PRESIDENT George Bush first asked Tony Blair to support the removal of Saddam Hussein from power at a private White House dinner nine days after the terror attacks of 11 September, 2001.

According to Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to Washington, who was at the dinner when Blair became the first foreign leader to visit America after the strikes using hijacked jets, Blair told Bush he should not get distracted from the war on terror’s initial goal—dealing with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Meyer claims Bush replied: ‘I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.’ Regime change was already US policy.

It was clear, Meyer says, ‘that when we did come back to Iraq it wouldn’t be to discuss smarter sanctions’. Elsewhere in his interview, Meyer says Blair always believed it was unlikely that Saddam would be removed from power or give up his weapons of mass destruction without a war.

Faced with this prospect of a further war, he adds, Blair ‘said nothing to demur’.

Details of this extraordinary conversation will be published this week in a 25,000-word article on the path to war with Iraq in the May issue of the American magazine Vanity Fair. It provides new corroboration of the claims made last month in a book by Bush’s former counter-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke, that Bush was ‘obsessed’ with Iraq as his principal target after 9/11.

—Observer

In Case You Missed It

Time for another boring little news summary, culled from diverse mainstream media outlets, with links to sources…

Dick Cheney is being sued for possible involvement in accounting fraud while running Halliburton. The company is also being investigated by the SEC. Meanwhile, Halliburton has just won the contract to provide the support services for the US military in Afghanistan.

Halliburton took part in Energy Task Force discussions about building an oil pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to Dabhol in India, to allow the tapping of the Central Asian oil reserves. The pipeline construction was to be handled by a company called UNOCAL, also a member of the Energy Task Force. A third company in the task force was Enron, who just happened to have a power plant in Dabhol. [PDF]

UNOCAL began negotiating the pipeline construction. Pakistan was no problem, but Afghanistan wouldn’t play ball. When the Taliban made the mistake of supporting Osama bin Laden’s attack on the WTC, it became clear that there was a much easier way of getting the pipeline built: bomb Afghanistan, and install some friendly warlords as the new government. It seems to have worked—the new regime wants UNOCAL to start building the pipeline this year. Naturally it’s pure coincidence that Bush’s special envoy to Afghanistan is Zalmay Khalilzad, who was special advisor to UNOCAL in 1997 and carried out the risk assessments for the Afghanistan pipeline project—along with colleague Hamid Karzai, who is now interim president of Afghanistan.

We still don’t know exactly what Enron, UNOCAL and Halliburton discussed with Dick Cheney. Initially Cheney refused to hand over the meeting notes. After a subpoena, it was agreed to release some documents—but only if guarantees were given that their contents would not be made public. Why is it so important to protect the confidentiality of advice given by a bankrupt company that no longer exists? We might have found out from Enron Vice Chairman and whistleblower J. Clifford Baxter—but sadly, he was found in his car, dead from a gunshot wound. A suicide note was found near his body. Also, he’d made sure to still have his defunct Enron corporate ID in his wallet, even though he’d resigned five months previously, perhaps in case the people finding him might fail to realize who he was. Police have concluded that he went out for a drive to shoot himself. It’s a little curious that a suicidal man had talked about needing a bodyguard just two days earlier, but no doubt he was feeling confused. An autopsy uncovered chemical traces on Baxter’s left hand consistent with his having fired the gun, and concluded that he died from the bullet wound to his right temple. Toxicology results revealed residual traces of a cocktail of sedatives, antidepressants and and painkillers in his body. So, nothing suspicious there.

A second oil executive committed suicide last month. Charles Dana Rice was senior vice president at El Paso Corp. El Paso has worked with UNOCAL on pipeline projects. Probably just another coincidence.

Statshot

  • Amount of money raised by Red Cross for NYC terrorism victims: $530m
  • Amount disbursed to terrorism victims: $40m
  • Amount spent on “long term goals and administrative costs”: $225m

[Source: Toronto Star]

  • Percentage of Pakistanis who say they sympathize with the Taliban: 83%
  • Percentage who sympathize with the USA: 3%
  • Percentage of Pakistanis who see Osama bin Laden as a “holy warrior”: 82%
  • Percentage who believe he is responsible for the 9/11 attacks: 12%

[Source: Newsweek, via The Week]