Mari, I absolutely agree with you! I'd rather evacuate from 1,000 tsunami warnings than be drowned by one which was not issued to spare us the trauma. This goes for what we face now. Be safe and keep on doing what you were meant to do. Live your lives as best you can. Attend games and parties. If we don't we will die inside and they will have provided the means for this death. I am not willing to give up so easily! My son was just married. I am looking forward to the possibility of another little generation of people to inhabit a most wonderous world.

Interesting piece from the New York Times: October 26, 2001 We Are All Alone By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Let me see if I've got this all straight now: Pakistan will allow us to use its bases Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; provided we bomb only Taliban whose names begin with Omar and who don't have cousins in the Pakistani secret service. India is with us on Tuesdays and Fridays, provided it can shell Pakistani forces around Kashmir all other days. Egypt is with us on Sundays, provided we don't tell anyone and provided we never mention that we give the Egyptians $2 billion a year in aid. Yasir Arafat is with us only after 10 p.m. on weekdays, when Palestinians who have been dancing in the streets over the World Trade Center attack have gone to bed. The Northern Alliance is with us, provided we buy all its troops new sandals and give U.S. passports to the first 1,000 to reach Kabul. Israel is with us provided we never question the lunacy of 7,000 Israeli colonial settlers living in the middle of a million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Kuwait would like to be with us, it really would, since we saved Kuwait from Iraq, but two Islamists in the Kuwaiti Parliament spoke out against the war, so the emir just doesn't want to take any chances. You understand. The Saudis, of course, want to be with us, but Saudis are not into war-fighting. That's for the household help. Don't worry. Prince Alwaleed has promised to rent us some Bangladeshi soldiers through a Saudi temp agency — at only a small markup. The Saudi ruling family would love to cooperate by handing over its police files on the 15 Saudis involved in the hijackings, but that would be a violation of its sovereignty, and, well, you know how much the Saudis respect sovereignty; like when the Saudi Embassy in Washington rushed all of Osama bin Laden's relatives out of America after Sept. 11 on a private Saudi jet, before they could be properly questioned by the F.B.I. And then there's my personal favorite: All our Arab-Muslim allies would love us to get bin Laden quickly, but the Muslim holy month of Ramadan is coming soon and the Muslim "street" will not tolerate fighting during Ramadan. Say, do you remember the 1973 Middle East war, launched by Egypt and Syria against Israel? Remember what that war was called in the Arab world? "The Ramadan war"; because that's when it was started. Oh, well. I guess the Arab world can launch wars on Ramadan, but not receive them. My fellow Americans, I hate to say this, but except for the good old Brits, we're all alone. And at the end of the day, it's U.S. and British troops who will have to go in, on the ground, and eliminate bin Laden. Ah, you ask, but why did we have so many allies in the gulf war against Iraq? Because the Saudis and Kuwaitis bought that alliance. They bought the Syrian Army with billions of dollars for Damascus. They bought us and the Europeans with promises of huge reconstruction contracts and by covering all our costs. Indeed, with the money Japan paid, we actually made a profit on the gulf war; Coalitions "R" Us. This time we'll have to pay our own way, and for others. Unfortunately, killing 5,000 innocent Americans in New York just doesn't get the rest of the world that exercised. In part we're to blame. The unilateralist message the Bush team sent from its first day in office: get rid of the Kyoto climate treaty, forget the biological treaty, forget arms control, and if the world doesn't like it that's tough; has now come back to haunt us. And who can blame other countries for wanting to shake down U.S. taxpayers when Dick Armey and his greedy band of House Republicans are doing the same thing; pushing a stimulus bill with more tax breaks for the rich, lobbyists and corporations, and virtually nothing for the working Americans who will fight this war? My advice: Try not to focus on any of this. Focus instead on the firemen who rushed into the trade center towers without asking, "How much?" Focus on the thousands of U.S. reservists who have left their jobs and families to go fight in Afghanistan without asking, "What's in it for me?" Unlike the free-riders in our coalition, these young Americans know that Sept. 11 is our holy day; the first day in a just war to preserve our free, multi-religious, democratic society. And I don't really care if that war coincides with Ramadan, Christmas, Hanukkah or the Buddha's birthday; the most respectful and spiritual thing we can do now is fight it until justice is done.

The Italians have also committed to send troups. It was reported on Italian Rai TV news that 10 American soldiers have been captured in A. Has it been reported here? Also in Italy, a Muslim has been found living in a metal container with computer and maps of all Italian airports and Canadian airports. He is in custody and the FBI is on its way.

Nothing on the capture on ABC or CNN's websites. And nothing about the Muslim living in the dumpster.

White House says capture story is completely false.

And more comments from David Kline: Wow, today's NY Times also has an excellent piece on "Afghan Art Dispersed by the Winds of War." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/01/arts/design/01PILL.html I may have mentioned before how wonderful and unique Afghan art is, and how proud Afghans have always been of it (a further indication that the Taliban are completely alien to traditional Afghan culture and tradition). Anyway, my movie script -- a love story set against the Afghan war -- also centers around a plot to steal precious Afghan art. I sold the script 10 years ago (to Tom Selleck of all people), but when the Gulf War broke out he decided not to make the movie. So the rights reverted back to me. I'm thinking about resurrecting this script and trying again -- one thing's for sure, I'd be the first up to the plate with an Afghan script. Anyone know any agents or producers to steer me to?

The atrocities inflicted on the antiquites of Afghanistan were reported in Geo - archeologist world-wide are outraged. Little did they know that these people are willing to kill of the whole specied to their eternal glory.

Twenty-six-year-old Palestinian-American poet and political activist Suheir Hammad has published a book of poems, BORN PALESTINIAN, BORN BLACK, and a memoir, DROPS OF THIS STORY, and is prominently featured in LISTEN UP! AN ANTHOLOGY OF SPOKEN WORK POETRY. Recipient of the Audre Lourde Writing Award from Hunter College, the Morris Center for Healing Poetry Award, and a New York Mills Artist Residency in Minnesota, Hammad is a frequent reader at New York reading venues, including numerous radio appearances, and has performed with The All That Band and Rhythms of Aqua. She has produced a documentary film, HALF A LIFETIME, and is writing a film entitled FROM BEIRUT TO BROOKLYN, based on her memoir. Naomi Shihab Nye has called Hammad's work "a brave flag over the dispossessed." First Writing Since 1. there have been no words. i have not written one word. no poetry in the ashes south of canal street. no prose in the refrigerated trucks driving debris and dna. not one word. today is a week, and seven is of heavens, gods, science. evident out my kitchen window is an abstract reality. sky where once was steel. smoke where once was flesh. fire in the city air and i feared for my sister's life in a way never before. and then, and now, i fear for the rest of us. first, please god, let it be a mistake, the pilot's heart failed, the plane's engine died. then please god, let it be a nightmare, wake me now. please god, after the second plane, please, don't let it be anyone who looks like my brothers. i do not know how bad a life has to break in order to kill. i have never been so hungry that i willed hunger i have never been so angry as to want to control a gun over a pen. not really. even as a woman, as a palestinian, as a broken human being. never this broken. more than ever, i believe there is no difference. the most privileged nation, most americans do not know the difference between indians, afghanis, syrians, muslims, sikhs, hindus. more than ever, there is no difference. 2. thank you korea for kimchi and bibim bob, and corn tea and the genteel smiles of the wait staff at wonjo the smiles never revealing the heat of the food or how tired they must be working long midtown shifts. thank you korea, for the belly craving that brought me into the city late the night before and diverted my daily train ride into the world trade center. there are plenty of thank yous in ny right now. thank you for my lazy procrastinating late ass. thank you to the germs that had me call in sick. thank you, my attitude, you had me fired the week before. thank you for the train that never came, the rude nyer who stole my cab going downtown. thank you for the sense my mama gave me to run. thank you for my legs, my eyes, my life. 3. the dead are called lost and their families hold up shaky printouts in front of us through screens smoked up. we are looking for iris, mother of three. please call with any information. we are searching for priti, last seen on the 103rd floor. she was talking to her husband on the phone and the line went. please help us find george, also known as adel. his family is waiting for him with his favorite meal. i am looking for my son, who was delivering coffee. i am looking for my sister girl, she started her job on monday. i am looking for peace. i am looking for mercy. i am looking for evidence of compassion. any evidence of life. i am looking for life. 4. ricardo on the radio said in his accent thick as yuca, "i will feel so much better when the first bombs drop over there. and my friends feel the same way." on my block, a woman was crying in a car parked and stranded in hurt. i offered comfort, extended a hand she did not see before she said, "we're gonna burn them so bad, i swear, so bad." my hand went to my head and my head went to the numbers within it of the dead iraqi children, the dead in nicaragua. the dead in rwanda who had to vie with fake sport wrestling for america's attention. yet when people sent emails saying, this was bound to happen, lets not forget u.s. transgressions, for half a second i felt resentful. hold up with that, cause i live here, these are my friends and fam, and it could have been me in those buildings, and we're not bad people, do not support america's bullying. can i just have a half second to feel bad? if i can find through this exhaust people who were left behind to mourn and to resist mass murder, i might be alright. thank you to the woman who saw me brinking my cool and blinking back tears. she opened her arms before she asked "do you want a hug?" a big white woman, and her embrace was the kind only people with the warmth of flesh can offer. i wasn't about to say no to any comfort. "my brother's in the navy," i said. "and we"re arabs.""wow, you got double trouble." word. 5. one more person ask me if i knew the hijackers. one more motherfucker ask me what navy my brother is in. one more person assume no arabs or muslims were killed. one more person assume they know me, or that i represent a people. or that a people represent an evil. or that evil is as simple as a flag and words on a page. we did not vilify all white men when mcveigh bombed oklahoma. america did not give out his family's addresses or where he went to church. or blame the bible or pat robertson. and when the networks air footage of palestinians dancing in the street, there is no apology that hungry children are bribed with sweets that turn their teeth brown. that correspondents edit images. that archives are there to facilitate lazy and inaccurate journalism. and when we talk about holy books and hooded men and death, why do we never mention the kkk? if there are any people on earth who understand how new york is feeling right now, they are in the west bank and the gaza strip. 6. today it is ten days. last night bush waged war on a man once openly funded by the cia. i do not know who is responsible. read too many books, know too many people to believe what i am told. i don't give a fuck about bin laden. his vision of the world does not include me or those i love. and petitions have been going around for years trying to get the u.s. sponsored taliban out of power. shit is complicated, and i don't know what to think. but i know for sure who will pay. in the world, it will be women, mostly colored and poor. women will have to bury children, and support themselves through grief. "either you are with us, or with the terrorists" - meaning keep your people under control and your resistance censored. meaning we got the loot and the nukes. in america, it will be those amongst us who refuse blanket attacks on the shivering. those of us who work toward social justice, in support of civil liberties, in opposition to hateful foreign policies. i have never felt less american and more new yorker, particularly brooklyn, than these past days. the stars and stripes on all these cars and apartment windows represent the dead as citizens first, not family members, not lovers. i feel like my skin is real thin, and that my eyes are only going to get darker. the future holds little light. my baby brother is a man now, and on alert, and praying five times a day that the orders he will take in a few days time are righteous and will not weigh his soul down from the afterlife he deserves. both my brothers - my heart stops when i try to pray - not a beat to disturb my fear. one a rock god, the other a sergeant, and both palestinian, practicing muslim, gentle men. both born in brooklyn and their faces are of the archetypal arab man, all eyelashes and nose and beautiful color and stubborn hair. what will their lives be like now? over there is over here. 7. all day, across the river, the smell of burning rubber and limbs floats through. the sirens have stopped now. the advertisers are back on the air. the rescue workers are traumatized. the skyline is brought back to human size. no longer taunting the gods with its height. i have not cried at all while writing this. i cried when i saw those buildings collapse on themselves like a broken heart. i have never owned pain that needs to spread like that. and i cry daily that my brothers return to our mother safe and whole. there is no poetry in this. there are causes and effects. there are symbols and ideologies. mad conspiracy here, and information we will never know. there is death here, and there are promises of more. there is life here. anyone reading this is breathing, maybe hurting, but breathing for sure. and if there is any light to come, it will shine from the eyes of those who look for peace and justice after the rubble and rhetoric are cleared and the phoenix has risen. affirm life. affirm life. we got to carry each other now. you are either with life, or against it. affirm life. �suheir hammad http://www.smith.edu/poetrycenter/poems_all.php http://www.turath.org/Articles/Suheir.htm

I have known a young geology student in Islamabad for several years. My heart aches for him now. He worries about me. I am far from harm's way, and he is just starting out on life and the study of how precious and special this planet really is. This is incredibly sad, especially when it beomes highly personal.

A friend, Koti, sent me this today. From MAILER-DAEMON Tue Nov 6 21:26:30 2001 Date: 06 Nov 2001 21:26:30 -0600 From: Mail System Internal Data Subject: DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE -- FOLDER INTERNAL DATA X-IMAP: 1005103590 0000000000 Status: RO This text is part of the internal format of your mail folder, and is not a real message. It is created automatically by the mail system software. If deleted, important folder data will be lost, and it will be re-created with the data reset to initial values. From terry@www.spring.net Tue Nov 6 17:12:54 2001 -0600 Status: R X-Status: X-Keywords: Return-Path: Received: from localhost (koti@localhost) by www.spring.net (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id fA6NCpA52010; Tue, 6 Nov 2001 17:12:51 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from koti@spring.net) Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2001 17:12:50 -0600 (CST) From: Koti Nandipati To: gdegamo@lucent.com cc: wayne.branagh@motorola.com, terry@spring.net Subject: Hijackers' Meticulous Strategy of Brains, Muscle and Practice (fwd) Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII NY Times article detailing the sept 11th event execution...--koti Hijackers' Meticulous Strategy of Brains, Muscle and Practice November 4, 2001 By DON VAN NATTA Jr. and KATE ZERNIKE American Airlines Flight 11 was in line for takeoff from Logan International Airport, the passengers already reminded to turn off personal electronic devices, when Mohamed Atta, in seat 8D in business class, dialed his cellphone for the last time. The call rang aboard another sparsely occupied jetliner a bit farther back on the same tarmac, on a cellphone belonging to Marwan al- Shehhi, in seat 6C on United Airlines Flight 175. The conversation between the two men, so close that they called each other cousin, lasted less than one minute - just long enough, investigators say, to signal that the plot was on. That simple communication was the culmination of months of meticulous planning and coordination that by 10 o'clock on the morning of Sept. 11 would become the worst terrorist attack in history. With all the suspects dead and no conclusive evidence, as yet, of any accomplices, investigators have been left to recreate the architecture and orchestration of the plot largely from the recorded minutiae of the hijackers' brief American lives: their cellphone calls, credit card charges, Internet communications and automated teller machine withdrawals. What has emerged, nearly two months into the investigation, is a picture in which the roles of the 19 hijackers are so well defined as to be almost corporate in their organization and coordination. Investigators now divide the 19 into three distinct groups: Mr. Atta, considered the mastermind, and three other leaders who chose the dates for the attack and flew the planes; a support staff of three who helped with the logistics of renting apartments, securing driver's licenses and distributing cash to the teams that would take the four planes; and beneath them, 12 soldiers, or "muscle," whose main responsibility seems to have been restraining the flight attendants and passengers while the leaders took over the jets' controls. The leaders had researched their plans so well that they knew just when each of the four cross-country flights would reach its cruising altitude - the moment, investigators say, when the hijackers stormed the cockpits to confront the pilots with box cutters. The coordination was so thorough that each of the four hijacking teams had its own bank account, and each team's A.T.M. cards used a single PIN. The slightest misstep could trigger intense frustration: more than once last summer in Florida, when money transfers from abroad had not arrived on the expected dates, security cameras captured several hijackers glaring impatiently into A.T.M. screens. The hijackers made a true technophile's use of the Internet, online chat rooms and e-mail. But when it came to their most crucial communications, they did what Al Qaeda's manual on terrorist operations instructs: they met in person. They chose as their meeting place the same locale where generations of American conventioneers have met to exchange information about their crafts: Las Vegas, where investigators say the most crucial planning in the United States occurred. But unlike traditional conventioneers who cluster in casino hotels that replicate the Pyramids or the New York City skyline, the leaders and their logistics men stayed at the seediest end of the famous Las Vegas Strip, next to the "Home of the $5 Lap Dance," at a cheap motel guaranteed not to have surveillance cameras. They stayed briefly, only as long as it took to exchange important information, and apparently did not visit the casinos or any of the other purveyors of easy vice in America's City of Sin. Most of the 19 hijackers, perhaps all of them, spent time in Osama bin Laden's Afghan training camps, investigators now say. Some of the Sept. 11 soldiers appear to have met there. And like Mr. Atta and the other pilots, the muscle did not seem to fit the profile of suicide bombers as desperate and impoverished young men. With the exception of one, they were all Saudis, relatively well off and well educated. While the leaders seemed to be Islamic zealots, the muscle did not, indulging often in pornography and liquor. There is still much that investigators do not know. While they contend, for instance, that the plot cost nearly $500,000, they have been able to trace only half of it back to a suspected Al Qaeda source. They know where the leaders met, but not what information they exchanged - among hundreds of e-mail messages seized from computers in Florida and Las Vegas, there is no "smoking gun" or reference to the Sept. 11 attacks, a senior investigator said. The investigators say they are unsure how the soldiers were recruited. And they do not know how those men thought the story was going to end - if they were aware that they had signed on to die. "This went totally by the book," one senior government official said. "It has all the earmarks of Al Qaeda. It was well organized, far from a half-baked operation. They had good coordination, excellent communication that is hard to track, and a good, simple plan. Somebody did their homework." Following the Manual Investigators say their best theory is that Sept. 11 was a franchise operation, and that the leaders hewed closely to the dictates of Al Qaeda's terror manual. The plot was first pieced together, they say, at least two years ago, in Hamburg, Germany, where three of the men who would later be leaders and pilots - Mr. Atta, Mr. Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah - were part of a terrorist cell. Three other suspected members of that cell fled in early September and are being sought as accomplices. Senior law enforcement officials say the Hamburg plotters received the blessing - and, crucially, cash - from Al Qaeda, although investigators say they do not know who in Osama bin Laden's organization approved the operation. Several officials say they suspect it was Mr. bin Laden himself, and investigators have also said his top three associates were involved in the planning. "They met with somebody else who was calling the shots" in Germany, one official said. "But we don't know who that person is.'` Mr. Shehhi and Mr. Atta received visas to enter the United States in January 2000, and Mr. Jarrah arrived in June of that year. Another pilot, Hani Hanjour, had been living in Southern California since 1996, and two of the logistics men, Nawaq Alhazmi and Khalid al-Midhar, had moved to San Diego in 1999. Investigators are not certain how the Hamburg and California groups came together, but evidence suggests it was through Al Qaeda channels. Investigators say they have linked Mr. Midhar to the attack on the American destroyer Cole and perhaps to the 1998 bombings of American Embassies in East Africa. The money for the operation began arriving at branches of the SunTrust Bank and Century Bank in Florida, in the summer of 2000. Mr. Atta received slightly more than $100,000, Mr. Shehhi just less than that amount. About half of the $500,000 used to pay for the operation, senior Federal Bureau of Investigation officials say, was wired by an important bin Laden operative, Mustafa Ahmad, from the United Arab Emirates, and much of the rest from Germany. However, one official said the authorities suspected the money trail began in Pakistan. Travel records show each of the men making several trips in and out of the United States in 2000 and early 2001 - to Spain, Prague, Bangkok and Saudi Arabia. Mr. Atta took seven international trips; Mr. Shehhi took five. In this country, they all had begun taking flying lessons, in Phoenix, San Diego and South Florida. By spring 2001, the 12 men whom investigators call the muscle had begun to arrive from Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government, stung by reports that most of the hijackers had visas from their country, initially said that the hijackers used fake identities stolen from innocent citizens. But the F.B.I. says that it has confirmed the identities of all 19 of the hijackers, and that 15 were Saudis. While the Saudi government has restricted the F.B.I. and reporters from interviewing the families of the men, the families of some of the foot soldiers have told Arab newspapers that their sons left within the last 18 months, variously saying they were going to seek religious counseling, on pilgrimage or on jihad in Chechnya. An investigator said there was evidence that these men spent at least a year in Al Qaeda training camps. The family of one, Mohand Alshehri, said he had studied at Imam Muhammed Ibn Saud Islamic University in Abha, Saudi Arabia, for one semester. The father of two others, Wail and Waleed Alshehri, said they had studied to become teachers. Another, Ahmed Alnami, had studied law in Abha. The man the F.B.I. identifies as the third logistics man, Majed Moqed, studied at King Saud University in Riyadh, in the faculty of administration and economics, according to Arab newspapers. Most hailed from poor villages where fundamentalism thrives. But their families appeared to be on the upper rungs; their fathers were religious leaders, school principals, shopkeepers and businessmen. None had visited the United States before, and several appeared to speak little or no English. Once they arrived, the logistics men helped them fade into American life. Hani Hanjour helped some rent an apartment in Paterson, N.J. Others cycled through one apartment in Delray Beach, Fla. Mr. Midhar helped some obtain illegal driver's licenses and photo ID's in Virginia. The leaders and logistics men seemed to "buddy up" with their junior partners. When Ahmed Alhaznawi had an ulcerated leg, Mr. Jarrah took him to Holy Cross Hospital in Palm Beach County, Fla. At first, Mr. Atta and Mr. Shehhi lived together in Florida; Mr. Shehhi then moved in with Fayez Ahmed , and Mr. Atta with Abdulaziz Alomari, the last hijacker to arrive. Most of the 19 obtained Social Security numbers, which allowed them to open bank accounts and obtain credit cards. They seemed, the F.B.I. says, to remain self-contained, with little or no help from a support network in the United States. Investigators suspect the help came from money men in the United Arab Emirates and several important lieutenants in Germany and Afghanistan. Research and Planning Al Qaeda's manual, which prosecutors say was used in the embassy bombings, outlines three stages of any operation: research, planning and execution. "In order to discover any unexpected element detrimental to the operation," it says, "it is necessary, prior to execution of the operation, to rehearse it in a place similar to that of the real operation." So beginning in May, the leaders and logistics men began taking trial flights on cross-country routes, though they never took the exact flights that they would later hijack. After each flight to the West Coast, they flew to Las Vegas. And each time, they flew first class - as most of the 19 would on Sept. 11. Although they traveled first class, their accommodations were distinctly low- rent, at an Econo Lodge on the faded end of the Strip. Although several of the hijackers are believed to have had numerous meetings in South Florida and Paterson, senior investigators say they are convinced that the most important American planning occurred in that dingy hotel room. Investigators say they can confirm only one overlapping visit to Las Vegas, on Aug. 13 and 14, although they say the picture may not be complete. An Algerian who is believed to have helped train the pilots, Lotfi Raissi, drove from Phoenix to Las Vegas at least once last summer, and hijackers may have done the same. Mr. Alhazmi and Mr. Hanjour arrived together and appear to have spent most of their time together; Mr. Atta spent most of his time alone, disappearing into the dark cavern of Cyberzone, an Internet cafe where young men slouch in front of a half-dozen brightly lighted computer terminals, surfing the Web. Investigators are not sure why the plotters chose Las Vegas. "Perhaps they figured it would be easy to blend in," one senior official said. The men were most likely following the manual's protocol: meet at a place that offers good cover. It is not unusual for criminals to launder money in Las Vegas casinos, but surveillance tapes show no trace of the hijackers. Based on that and on interviews, the F.B.I. says it believes the hijackers did not gamble. Nor have investigators found any local terrorist cells there. There was one curious disruption in their pattern, on the last trip east from Las Vegas. For the flights in May, June and July, the hijackers booked nonstop, round-trip tickets. But on that final flight, they bought one-way tickets to different destinations, with layovers, and they flew coach, not first class. Investigators speculate that with their test flights completed, the hijackers now wanted to save money. They may also have wanted to see if they could buy one-way tickets without attracting attention - which is what they did over the next two weeks as they purchased tickets for Sept. 11. Carrying Out the Mission Those return flights put the men in position to execute the plot. Mr. Hanjour and Mr. Alhazmi flew to Baltimore, where they would soon join their soldiers in nearby Laurel, Md. From there, on the morning of Sept. 11, they would leave for Dulles International Airport and American Airlines Flight 77. Mr. Atta flew from Las Vegas to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., near where much of the muscle was living. Investigators see a spike in the number of cellphone calls between the 19 in those final weeks. The hijackers bought plane tickets, each team choosing almost exactly the same seats on the planes. The Florida group moved north to Boston; the New Jersey group moved out of the Paterson apartment. Three hijackers wired money back to Mr. Ahmad in the United Arab Emirates. On Sept. 10, Mr. Atta and his charge, Mr. Alomari, drove from Boston to Portland, Me. Why Portland? Again, it may have been protocol: the manual warns against traveling in large groups and suggests boarding "at a secondary station" to deflect notice. The next morning, they almost missed their connecting flight at Logan Airport in Boston, making it with minutes to spare. As the hijackers may have anticipated from test runs, the planes hit cruising altitude after about 40 minutes. The hijackers, who had cared so little about learning to take off and land a plane, began their work. Four of the five men on American Flight 77, the jet that plowed into the Pentagon, had helped with the logistics or are considered by investigators to have been leaders. It is assumed that several of the logistics people, including Mr. Midhar, also carried box cutters and served as muscle. That plane, apparently flown by Mr. Hanjour, began to jerk wildly in the air. There may have been a struggle with the pilots, but investigators say it was more likely a result of Mr. Hanjour's poor skills - his flying school teachers would later say he had been a sorry student. Based on one cellphone call from one of the planes, the F.B.I. now contends that the muscle began to herd passengers into the back of the planes, and forced the pilots from the cockpit by telling them it was a traditional hijacking, one where, if demands were met, the passengers and crew would be released without harm. As the planes accelerated toward their targets, the muscle men, too, may have believed the same thing. This question remains the subject of debate within the F.B.I. Some investigators note that in surveillance photographs taken at a Portland A.T.M. the previous night, Mr. Alomari appears to be grinning, an expression more befitting a petty thief about to go on a stealing spree. One F.B.I. official said the prayers found at the crash sites seemed to exhort the foot soldiers to be strong in prison - unlike the four-page set of instructions and prayers found in Mr. Atta's luggage, which made it clear he believed he was going to his eternal paradise. Investigators in this country and abroad note that this would be in keeping with terrorist patterns. As Al Qaeda's manual instructs, "The operation members should not all be told about the operation until shortly before executing it, in order to avoid leaking of its news."

Al Qaeda Takes Cues From Asimov? The Ansible (http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/SF-Archives/Ansible/a172.html) and Locus Online (http://www.locusmag.com/2001/News/News11Log.html) Web sites both reported on the rumor of a possible connection between Al Qaeda, the Islamic terrorist network purportedly masterminded by Osama bin Laden, and, of all things, Isaac Asimov's classic SF novel Foundation, the first in his well-known series of the same name. Ansible quoted SF writer China Mi�ville--author of King Rat, Perdido Street Station and Macmillan's upcoming The Scar--as saying, "My supervisor, an expert in the Middle East, told me about a rumor circulating about the name of bin Laden's network. The term al qaeda seems to have no political precedent in Arabic, and has therefore been something of a conundrum to the experts, until someone pointed out that a very popular book in the Arab world--Arabs apparently being big readers of translated SF--is Asimov's Foundation, the title of which is translated as Al Qaeda. Unlikely as it sounds, this is the only theory anyone can come up with." At least one post on a Russian message board (http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/5491-4.cfm) speculated that bin Laden might be taking cues from Asimov's book, about an uprising against a Galactic Empire led by a single-minded revolutionary and his band of fighters against overwhelming military odds, Locus reported. For the record, the PBS Frontline Web site reported that al qaeda is "an Arabic word meaning 'the base.'

...and asimov was jewish bin laden's form of fundamentalism is remarkably malleable, when he wants it to be

FBI: Sender of anthrax letters a guy, a loner Saturday Nov. 10 By Chris Mondics and James Kuhnhenn Knight Ridder Newspapers WASHINGTON -- FBI officials said Friday that they believe the person who mailed several anthrax-filled letters is probably a U.S.-based male loner with a scientific bent, possibly like Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, whose letter bombs mystified law enforcement for nearly two decades. Federal officials have been speculating for weeks that the anthrax attacks were not connected to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but the FBI's announcement Friday was the strongest endorsement yet of that theory. Even so, FBI officials said they had not ruled out the possibility that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network is behind the anthrax attacks. But they said the wording of the three known anthrax-laced letters suggests a domestic source. "We are not ruling anything out, but we are certainly looking in that direction," said one FBI official, who spoke to reporters on condition that he not be identified. The officials hope the public will help identify the culprit. In related developments, traces of anthrax spores were found in four more central New Jersey post offices, President Bush boosted the National Guard presence at the nation's airports, and top administration officials offered assurances that security measures taken since Sept. 11 have made the nation safer. Whoever sent the letters "did not select his victims randomly," the FBI source said. Based on analysis of the handwriting on the letters, they said the anthrax attacker likely was nursing a grudge and probably had a high degree of technical training. The officials believe, too, that he decided to increase the potency of the anthrax he put into the letters as one attack led to another. So far, four people have died after inhaling anthrax spores, and 13 more got sick from anthrax exposure. The officials said that they could detect no political agenda from the letters and their sender's known actions. Each of the three known letters were photocopies, not originals, likely used to help him evade pursuers. The FBI profile of the likely anthrax attacker suggests that he probably avoids public situations. If he has a job, they said, it likely does not involve contact with many people. They suspect he underwent a significant behavioral change as the letters went out, becoming focused on his mission to spread terror, and might have struck acquaintances as increasingly remote. FBI officials said they doubt the letters were sent by Middle Eastern terrorists because they do not resemble other such letters sent in the past. One official said that such letters typically include some Arabic text, but these do not. The FBI's new profile of the likely anthrax-attacker doesn't bring them any closer to solving the case. Law enforcement authorities spent nearly two decades trying to capture the Unabomber and did not succeed until Ted Kaczynski's brother turned him in. The FBI appealed openly to the public to help them identify possible suspects, knowing they probably will have to rely on an informant to finger the person responsible. In a potential break in the hunt for the suspect, anthrax tests detected traces of the bacteria in four more post offices in central New Jersey, authorities said Friday. The small satellite offices all feed a regional processing center that handled three tainted letters sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's office in Washington and to the New York offices of NBC and the New York Post. The new evidence could help narrow down possible sites from where the letters were sent. Meanwhile, the Bush administration sought to reassure an anxious public that it was safeguarding the nation's airports, mail system and water supplies against new terrorist attacks. President Bush announced a 25 percent increase in the number of National Guard troops assigned to protect airports during the busy holiday season. The increase, effective immediately, will boost by 2,000 the 6,000 guard troops that already have been stationed at airports since the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings. "These are temporary measures and we believe they will help a lot," Bush said. With no new reports of anthrax infections, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge expressed hope that the threat of anthrax was subsiding. His optimism came as two postal workers who had been treated for the often fatal inhalation form of the disease were released from their hospital beds and sent home. "We're prayerful, we're hopeful, we hope that this is the last we ever see and have to deal with it," Ridge said. Meanwhile, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christie Todd Whitman said her agency was working closely with water companies and other federal agencies to protect drinking water from contamination. "The good news here, if there is good news, is that it takes more than a teaspoon or a cupful of a biological or chemical agent to disrupt a water supply and to jeopardize or threaten the health of a municipality or a city," she said. "In fact . . . it would take a truckload to do it." The assurances came a week after the administration issued a nationwide alert warning that a terrorist strike might be imminent somewhere, but without further details. Many criticized that warning, the second since Sept. 11, as too vague to be useful and pointlessly alarmist. (Mondics is a Washington correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Tony Pugh and Sumana Chatterjee in Washington, and Jake Wagman and Tom Avril of the Philadelphia Inquirer contributed to this article.) Could this be a gov. conspiracy in order to enable them to not declare war on other Muslim counties which might be responsble, such as Iraq or even Saudi Arabia? How does the anthrax found in Pakistan fit in? Why would "a U.S.-based male loner" do that? I have my doubts.

Another plane crash today. Anyone heard any news on this?

Kabul. Northern Alliance troops have taken control of Kabul amid scenes of chaos and jubilation. In a dramatic overnight advance, Northern Alliance units entered the Afghan capital after Taleban fighters fled towards their southern stronghold, Kandahar. Troops were backed by rockets and US bombing There was a vacuum of authority in the city after the Taleban withdrew, with reports of looting, but the BBC's William Reeve says the atmosphere is now less tense. Taleban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar is reported to have urged his troops to regroup and fight. He is quoted by the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press as telling his men to obey their commanders and not to desert. Some Arab volunteers serving with the Taleban were summarily shot and a BBC camera crew was attacked as opposition troops entered Kabul. from the BBC.co.uk website.

Yup, watched the sorry structural failure that caused the small community of Rockaway even more pain. I they buried 12 members of their community with the WTC disaster. This is truly tragic. Yup, an American is sick enough to have created an atmosphere scary enough to cause 32,000 of his fellow citizens to take antibioitcs and kill a few others. There is really not a punishment which fits this crime. I'd make it as slow and as painful as possible. I am throroughly disgusted with apologists and terorists making excuses for why WE deserve to die. Time for payback !

On NPR this morning they were discussing the formation of a "tribunal for terrrorists, something usually reserved for overseas cases, but now being positioned for domestic used. The Bush administration is faced with the scary thought of a Court system that might result in, say, a hung jury for a Bin Laden. I'll look for details on the web today, it's early and I haven't been to the news web sites yet. Meanwhile, there is music in the streets of Afghanistan. I had a fantasy about a bunch of rock musicians going there and throwing a big, free Woodstock sytle concert for the Afghan people. I fantasized this while I was cleaning the garage.

David Kline's thoughts on the Taliban and freeing of Kabul. And no laughter in public. Until yesterday, if the religious police (who all carry plastic foot-long whips) caught you on a street in Kabul laughing at a friend's joke, you would be whipped. They also patrolled the soccer stadium during games -- yes the same stadium where public executions were held -- and if they saw fans applauding or rooting too hard for their team, they would be whipped. No public display of humanity was allowed. These people are so much worse than backward, I can't find the proper words to describe them. Their leaders and top cadre must all be killed. Period. . . . let's not get too excited about a few executions and a certain amount of disorder. This isn't the new Mayor of New York being sworn in here -- these are tribal people who've lived with nothing but savage war for 25 years. A few reprisals is to be expected. But I'll bet anything that it will be limited, and that order and a broad-based transition regime will be put in place soon. There's too much at stake. And this time the world is watching, acting as a stabilizing influence. Since my first post here on 9/12 or so, I have argued that the only way to oust the Taliban is to help and assist the Northern Alliance and other forces take the initiative. This is now what's happening. Seven days ago when some here wondered whether NA forces were too timid to fight -- "We don't like to train in the rain," said one commander -- I urged people not to underestimate them. They may not be the smartest fighters around, but they're surely the toughest. And it's true, they've taken a good number of casualties and plunged ahead with American help. I now worry a little about the Taliban's sudden withdrawal from Kabul. It is such an Afghan move -- Massoud invented and used it 7 times to butcher Soviet armored columns trying to move into his Pansjir Valley redoubt. Could they be laying a suck 'em in and then envelope 'em scheme? We'll soon see. But now with the Herat-Kabul line established and the Taliban apparently retreating to their last-stand defense perimeter, my guess (today) is that two things are going to happen: 1) Pashtun (not Arab) Taliban commanders in the south will begin putting out defection feelers. Leaders to replace Abdul Haq will emerge. 2) The fighting is going to get a lot more bloody because these fucking Arabs really can't wait to die and we can't wait to help them die. Unless, miracle of miracles, the Taliban simply collapses and they head for the border. We better have a brigade and every Pashtun speaking agent we have standing at that Quetta border. They should look for a "woman" in burqa sitting atop a horse-drawn wagon (to conceal "her" true height) trying to mosey on through the border.

Kline: . . . it's a very smart move to leave some open leeway for fleeing Taliban forces. Because the point is to encourage defections -- which are now going to begin en masse, you can be sure -- and thereby separate the Arab from the Pashtun Taliban. That could bring a swift collapse of the regime. Or, if the Arab legions head for the hills to try and wage guerrilla warfare against a post Taliban authority, then the most effective way to root them out will be to send people after them who are a) even tougher than the Arabs; and b) know the mountains even better than the Arabs. IOTW, the Pashtun Afghans who grew up in those damn mountains. Watch for defections increasing by the day. Because the tide has turned. (Unless the retreat from Kabul really is some sort of suck-em-in trap.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24744-2001Nov13.html "Bush said the tribunals are needed because "mass deaths, mass injuries and massive destruction of property" from future terrorism could "place at risk the continuity of the operations of the United States government." It is "not practicable," he said, to require the tribunals to abide by the "principles of law and the rules of evidence" that govern U.S. criminal prosecutions. .... Bush's order promises "a full and fair trial" and access to lawyers, but there is no provision for an appeal to U.S. civil courts or international tribunals. Only Bush or the secretary of defense, if the president so chooses, will have the authority to overturn a decision. .... The order says defendants could include past or present members of al Qaeda or anyone involved in acts of international terrorism intended to have "adverse effects on the United States, its citizens, national security or economy." It also targets anyone who has "knowingly harbored" such terrorists."

my guess (today) is that two things are going to happen: 2) The fighting is going to get a lot more bloody because these fucking Arabs really can't wait to die and we can't wait to help them die. All I can say is bring it on... #2 is a great line.

I find that statement frightening. How does one deal with people who WANT to die?? I was most delighted last night to watch the enforced beards being shaved off men. I had hoped to see a liberated woman or two, but that did not happe. We are far from done with this war. Rob mentioned to me that geologists had studied OBL's most recent movies and determined that he was not in Afghanistan. The rock forming his cave were not the kind found in Afghanistan. That had not occurred to me!

New York Times November 14, 2001 Bush to Subject Terrorism Suspects to Military Trials By ELISABETH BUMILLER and DAVID JOHNSTON ASHINGTON, Nov. 13 � President Bush signed an order today allowing special military tribunals to try foreigners charged with terrorism. A senior administration official said that any such trials would "not necessarily" be public and that the American tribunals might operate in Pakistan and Afghanistan. At the same time, the Justice Department has asked law enforcement authorities across the country to pick up and question 5,000 men, most from Middle Eastern countries, who entered the country legally in the last two years. Both actions are part of a sweeping government effort to expand the investigation into Al Qaeda's network and clear the way for the more aggressive prosecution of anyone charged with terrorism. Mr. Bush signed the order allowing for the military tribunals shortly before leaving this afternoon for his ranch in Crawford, Tex. White House officials said the order did not create a military tribunal or a list of terrorists to be tried. Instead, they said, it was an "option" that the president would have should Osama bin Laden or his associates in Al Qaeda be captured. If the tribunals were created, it would be the first time since World War II that such an approach was used, officials said. Under the order, the president himself is to determine who is an accused terrorist and therefore subject to trial by the tribunal. The order states that the president may "determine from time to time in writing that there is reason to believe" that an individual is a member of Al Qaeda, has engaged in acts of international terrorism or has "knowingly harbored" a terrorist. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/14/national/14DETA.html ================================================================================ Wednesday November 14 01:13 PM EST Some Warn of Too Much Police Power By Oliver Libaw ABCNEWS.com After Sept. 11, are police getting too much power? Secret property searches, detaining individuals without charges, jailing people on secret evidence, even military tribunals - such powers may seem far-fetched, but law enforcement agencies have them, and are using them to press their campaign against terror. The Patriot Act, as the sweeping anti-terrorism legislation recently signed into law is officially known, is part of an unprecedented effort to catch those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks � the worst acts of terrorism ever � and prevent future assaults. President Bush added to those powers Tuesday, signing an executive order that allows suspected high-level terrorists to be tried in greater secrecy by the military. The enforcement measures have provoked a wide-ranging debate about how to safeguard civil liberties without overly constraining investigators, but many civil liberties advocates say the government has gone too far. Secret Evidence Some point to what they say are problems with earlier anti-terror laws as proof the system may be abused, especially by holding people on secret evidence. This week, the federal government appealed a lower court ruling concerning the power to hold immigrants for long periods based only on such evidence. The case involves Mazen Al-Najjar, a Palestinian professor at the University of South Florida, who was held by the Immigration and Naturalization Service for more than three years based on evidence that was never shown to him or his attorney. A federal judge in Miami had found that Al-Najjar's rights were violated. Al-Najjar had lived in the United States for 20 years and headed a charity that officials suspected was a front for a Palestinian terrorist group, but the exact allegations and evidence against him have not been revealed. Al-Najjar, who was never charged with a crime, was released in December 2000. His case is one of some two dozen in which immigrants have been held for months or years based entirely on secret evidence, but were never prosecuted. "If these folks were such serious threats, why weren't they prosecuted criminally?" asks Susan Akram, a Boston University law professor who represents another secret evidence detainee, Anwar Haddam. The Dangers of Expanded Power Expanding government agencies' surveillance powers is also dangerous, says David Kairys, a constitutional rights lawyer and professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. "It's easily open to abuse," he says, pointing to problems in the past, such as the so-called Palmer Raids carried out by President Woodrow Wilson's attorney general in the early 1900s. Between 1918 and 1921, A. Mitchell Palmer pursued and smashed union offices and Communist and Socialist Party headquarters, spurred on by growing fears of radical foreign agents. In 1919, he seized more than 200 resident aliens believed to have radical political views and put them on a ship bound for the Soviet Union. The FBI also famously pursued Martin Luther King Jr. as a national security threat in the '50s and '60s. Efforts to loosen restrictions and expand powers of law enforcement could well lead to similar problems, Kairys says. Law enforcement's expanded powers could "be used not against terrorists but against people who have viewpoints against the government," he says. Investigators could use recently relaxed restrictions on roving wiretaps to monitor groups and organizations, he says. By obtaining a wiretap on one member of a group, law enforcement officials can now track incoming and outgoing calls on any phone the suspect uses. If the individual uses a phone belonging to the organization, Kairys fears agents would be able to look at all the phone records for the group. Some argue that such fears are overblown, however. "I think that's a little far-fetched," says Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, the former general counsel of the CIA and National Security Agency. "Getting [court permission for] a wiretap is not an easy thing." Rindskopf Parker advocates close oversight of the domestic anti-terror campaign, but says it's unreasonable to assume there will be widespread abuse. "I think law enforcement has learned from earlier privacy mistakes," she says. Detainees The FBI has detained more than a thousand individuals since Sept. 11 � most, the agency says, picked up on unrelated charges. Officials' refusal to release the names of the detainees or to say how long they were held has troubled civil liberties advocates. Many of them are still being held, Justice officials said. Some detainees have publicly complained of mistreatment, but only one had filed a complaint as of last week. Feds Listening In The Bush administration has also made it easier to listen in on people's conversations with their lawyers, allowing investigators to break the seal of attorney-client privilege when it comes to jailed terror suspects. The administration on Friday defended the decision to tap such conversations. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the monitoring applies to a "very narrow number of people, people who the intelligence community will formally certify that conversations are a potential threat to the national security of the nation." Critics have complained loudly, however, that such action violates attorney-client privilege. Rindskopf Parker, who spent her early career on civil rights issues, sums up the difficulty civil liberties advocates and the government face. "We all sign on to the notion that absolute power invites abuse," she says. But she also notes that Americans may have to deal with intelligence lapses when the government law enforcers are restrained from peering wherever they want. "We don't have domestic intelligence because we don't want a government that spies on us," she says. http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/abc/20011114/ts/civilliberties011114_1.html ================================================================================ WASHINGTON, Nov. 14 (UPI) -- House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member John Conyers,D-Mich., said Wednesday a decision by President George W. Bush that terrorist suspects might face a military tribunal adds to questions about civil liberties. In a Nov. 14 letter to Committee Chairman Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., Conyerscalled for hearings on civil liberties, including an administration plan to monitor some defendants' communication with their lawyers, and the status of suspects detained in the government's investigations of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Conyers said Bush's Tuesday decision to establish military tribunals run by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld only adds to his concern. "Indeed, the very purpose of the directive appears to be to skirt the usual constitutional and criminal justice rules that are the hallmark of our democratic form of government." While Sensenbrenner did not return calls seeking comment, Conyers' request comes one day after United Press International reported that Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., might soon hold hearings on the new government policy on monitoring communication between defense attorneys and their clients, and the status of what lawmakers said could be 1,000 people detained by the government.Some of those detainees have reportedly been released. Leahy twice sent letters to Attorney General John Ashcroft on the issues on Oct. 31 and Nov. 9. "We also have received no cooperation from the Justice Department in our effort to obtain information regarding the 1,000 plus immigrants who have been detained in connection with the terrorism investigation, as reflected in a letter that several Democratic Members transmitted to the attorney general on Oct. 31, 2001," Conyers wrote to Sensenbrenner Wednesday. "We would be remiss in our duties, however, if we did not also oversee the extent to which the Department may be abusing its authority and wrongfully targeting innocent Americans." http://www.unitedstates.com/news/farticle/640127?20011114142500 =============================================================================== Bush Order on Military Tribunals is Further Evidence That Government is Abandoning Democracy's Checks and Balances Statement of Laura W. Murphy, Director ACLU Washington National Office FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Wednesday, November 14, 2001 WASHINGTON -- The American Civil Liberties Union is deeply disturbed by President Bush's executive order allowing special military tribunals to try non-citizens charged with terrorism. The tribunals would even reach non-citizens in the United States, including lawful permanent residents. To our knowledge, the move to establish a military tribunal when Congress has not declared war is unprecedented. We do not believe that the Administration has shown that the constitutional jury trial system does not allow for the prosecution of those accused of terrorist activities. Absent such a compelling justification, the President's decision is further evidence that the Administration is totally unwilling to abide by the checks and balances that are so central to our democracy. The use of military tribunals would apparently authorize secret trials without a jury and without the requirement of a unanimous verdict and would limit a defendant's opportunities to confront the evidence against him and choose his own lawyer. What's worse, these important legal protections would be removed in a situation where defendants may very well be facing the death penalty. It is difficult to understand how the Administration can justify the use of a tribunal when the United States has successfully tried in our courts non-citizens accused of terrorist acts, organized crime, and others in situations where the safety of jurors and the disclosure of government intelligence methods were at issue. As the prosecutions of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh demonstrate, the government has managed to protect the safety and identity of jurors while achieving convictions in terrorism cases. And there is already a system established to handle classified information in the course of a trial; it is called the Classified Information Procedures Act. For decades, CIPA has adequately balanced national security and due process concerns. The government has made no showing that CIPA procedures would not be adequate in these circumstances as well. Further, it would be hypocritical of the United States to impose such a tribunal when we have repeatedly protested the use of such courts against U.S. citizens abroad. Congress has already given the Administration and the Justice Department virtually everything they asked for to fight terrorism. This latest move, combined with the Justice Department's announced intentions to eavesdrop on attorney conversations with inmates and to begin interviewing foreign visitors to the United States, demonstrates the government's increasing willingness to circumvent the requirements of the Bill of Rights. We call on Congress to exercise its oversight powers before the Bill of Rights in America is distorted beyond recognition. http://www.aclu.org/news/2001/n111401b.html

Tracking bin Laden: Still a lot of caves to hide in Nov. 14, 2001, 4:58PM By SALLY BUZBEE Associated Press WASHINGTON -- The United States is pursuing Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, believed to be on the move in the shrinking but still difficult parts of Afghanistan that their forces control. Sharpening the focus on the war's primary targets, American special operations troops are questioning Taliban defectors and prisoners, dangling millions in reward money and hoping for a communications slip-up. Warplanes focus more bombing on mountain hide-outs and caves where Omar or bin Laden might try to disappear. The two men, both expert in guerrilla warfare, have plenty of those remote caves and mountain tunnels -- and enough friends and supplies along the Pakistani border -- to make the chase difficult. "We still have a ways to go" in tracking them, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cautioned today. U.S. intelligence officials believe bin Laden and Omar are still in the region of Afghanistan not under northern alliance control, said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity. Each is moving around, but they aren't believed to be together. It isn't thought likely that bin Laden will try to leave the country, because such movements could expose him to capture. A Taliban official said today that Omar and his "guest" bin Laden were "safe and well." Omar claimed in a radio address Tuesday that he was in the Taliban's southern stronghold of Kandahar, the site Wednesday of sporadic fighting between Taliban and rebel Pashtun leaders. The United States is bombing areas in the south and in the east, especially around Jalalabad, where bin Laden is known to have hide-outs. "Bunker-buster" bombs can dig under the surface and explode in a tunnel. Fuel-air explosives can produce tremendous heat and suck out a cave or tunnel's oxygen. Defectors and prisoners are probably the best hope for information on where bin Laden is now, said a former senior U.S. intelligence official with experience in South Asia. Even rumors or hints -- about something such as a recent supply run to a cave, for example -- could prove a breakthrough. In addition, "It may very well be that money will talk at some point," Rumsfeld said, referring to the millions in reward money the United States has offered. Or, Taliban troops and commanders on the run might take fewer precautions with radios and phones, allowing U.S. eavesdropping aircraft to pick up communications and thus get hints to bin Laden's location. U.S. special forces also have been watching roads in southern Afghanistan to see who passes by, Rumsfeld said, and "to stop people that they think ought to be stopped." Bin Laden is believed to move from cave to cave -- some a three days' walk into the mountains -- with only a group of highly trusted aides. The amount of support he can still muster among thousands of past supporters is key. The Taliban may fracture, with some commanders deciding to become guerrilla fighters in mountainous southern Afghanistan, and others making peace with the Pashtun leaders now taking power, said another U.S. official. Afghan fighters have a history of retreating from cities but then waging effective guerrilla warfare in mountains for years afterward, essentially thwarting an enemy's larger goals, said Charles Fairbanks, a central Asia expert at Johns Hopkins University. "Particularly if they fled to the east, that's a very difficult situation," Fairbanks said. "They have so many sympathizers in Pakistan, and Pakistan really has no control of the situation there." Such supporters could keep bin Laden and Omar supplied with food, guns and hiding places, said Andrew Hess, an expert on Pakistan and Afghanistan at Tufts University. In addition, the former guerrilla leader who took control of Jalalabad from the Taliban, Mullah Yunus Khalis, has long-standing ties with bin Laden's Arab followers. Bin Laden is believed to have camps in the mountains near there. Most U.S. officials and outside experts do not think Omar would ever give bin Laden up, despite what Rumsfeld called signs of strain between the two. In his most recent interview, bin Laden said he was "ready to die." Chillingly, he predicted the war against America would continue even if he were gone. http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/special/terror/front/1133127

NPR talked about music in the streets of Kabul today, and the women are liberated, yet they still completely shroud themselves in clothing.

David Kline (dkline) Wed Nov 14 '01 (09:54) 43 lines The number of reprisals is unbelievably limited by historic Afghan standards. I am convinced the Northern Alliance intends to do things right this time, and to unite democratically with the southern Pashtun tribes. Pashtun tribes, by the way, who at this moment are rising up spontaneously to fight the Taliban with no leadership other than village elders to guide them. These unorganized Pashtun farmers have already seized the Kandahar airport to prepare the way for U.S. and Northern Alliance activity. And now a more personal note: We have all of us discussed and learned a lot in the past two months, especially in the last month since the war in Afghanistan began. Just two weeks ago many were thinking these Northern Alliance warlords are too timid to fight, that no one supported them, and that surely the Taliban had to have mass public support else they wouldn't be in power, right? I am so grateful to have been able to have these discussions with you because it brought up a deep and long-buried sympatico I feel for the only people I met in my round-the-world travels whom I ever completely loved and admired (despite all their screwy fractiousness). Most anyone who has ever been to Afghanistan feels the same way. Remember how I said from Day 1 that the Taliban are NOT the Afghans? In Kabul today, the NY Times reports a man standing atop a building waving in the air one of those foot-long plastic whips used to beat women -- and crowds cheering him in joy. Burqas are being tossed. Kites are flying. And music -- remember I described how the mujahadeen once outfitted a captured Soviet tank with tape deck and speakers? -- music is playing again! Anyway, I want to say thank you all so much for bearing with my sometimes arrogant certainty of victory for the Afghans. And for sympathizing with me in such a gentle and compassionate way the loss of my friend Abdul Haq. And especially for being not only deeply interested in a little-known people half a world away but also for being absolutely the smartest and most insightful group of people that I have ever "spoken" with. The battle is finally being won. Afghanistan will be liberated at last! I can't even describe how happy I am, and how much it meant to me to be able to share all this with you. Thank you all.

An awesome statement by one of the most insightful commentators on Afghan Life, thanks David Klein.

David Klein: To me, the next big challenge is how to slowly win the trust of the broad masses of Muslims worldwide and isolate the extremists who serve as recruiting ground for the Bin Ladens of this world. We've got to: 1) Apologize for Mossadegh and the Shah of Iran 2) Pledge henceforth our support of democratic reform in Muslim nations ruled by elites 3) Break legs if we have to in order to cool down or even hopefully solve the Palestinian question 4) Offer massive economic aid to Pakistan and other key Muslim states facing fundamentalist threats 5) And finally, in a televised address to the whole world, announce that we want to work with Muslims of good faith everywhere to solve our mutual problems That's how you end the scourge of Islamic terrorism, and not simply snuff Al-Queda. I don't imagine the US will take all the above steps immediately, but we humans are pretty adaptive -- we'll learn eventually that if we want to end terrorism that's what we'll need to do.

Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) November 13, 2001 Appeal to the UN and World community The people of Afghanistan do not accept domination of the Northern Alliance! Now it is confirmed that the Taliban have left Kabul and the Northern Alliance has entered the city. The world should understand that the Northern Alliance is composed of some bands who did show their real criminal and inhuman nature when they were ruling Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996. The retreat of the terrorist Taliban from Kabul is a positive development, but entering of the rapist and looter NA in the city is nothing but a dreadful and shocking news for about 2 million residents of Kabul whose wounds of the years 1992-96 have not healed yet. Thousands of people who fled Kabul during the past two months were saying that they feared coming to power of the NA in Kabul much more than being scared by the US bombing. The Taliban and Al-Qaeda will be eliminated, but the existence of the NA as a military force would shatter the joyful dream of the majority for an Afghanistan free from the odious chains of barbaric Taliban. The NA will horribly intensify the ethnic and religious conflicts and will never refrain to fan the fire of another brutal and endless civil war in order to retain in power. The terrible news of looting and inhuman massacre of the captured Taliban or their foreign accomplices in Mazar-e-Sharif in past few days speaks for itself. Though the NA has learned how to pose sometimes before the West as "democratic" and even supporter of women's rights, but in fact they have not at all changed, as a leopard cannot change its spots. RAWA has already documented heinous crimes of the NA. Time is running out. RAWA on its own part appeals to the UN and world community as a whole to pay urgent and considerable heed to the recent developments in our ill-fated Afghanistan before it is too late. We would like to emphatically ask the UN to send its effective peace-keeping force into the country before the NA can repeat the unforgettable crimes they committed in the said years. The UN should withdraw its recognition to the so-called Islamic government headed by Rabbani and help the establishment of a broad-based government based on the democratic values. RAWA's call stems from the aspirations of the vast majority of the people of Afghanistan. http://rawa.fancymarketing.net/na-appeal.htm RAWA Main Page: http://rawa.fancymarketing.net/index.html RAWA documents and statements: http://rawa.fancymarketing.net/documents.htm

I was just musing, in my early waking hours this morning, about how great it would be if there were on outpouring of love for Afghanis from America and the world, the country can grow and prosper now that the evil regime is on the run. The job is far from finished, but the pieces have started to fall in place.

The story of how the eight religious aid workers were released by the Taliban, plucked from a field near Ghazni by a local Pashtun commander and the Red Cross, and flown by US helicopter to a Pakistani air base is going to be quite the blockbuster. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/15/international/asia/15WORK.html

By Molly Moore Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, November 15, 2001; 1:08 PM Excerpt: The German workers today provided dramatic details of their escape, while the two American women, Heather Mercer, who grew up in Vienna, Va., and Dayna Curry, of Thompson's Station, Tenn., and two Australians spent the day in seclusion.................... Georg Taubmann, who headed the Kabul office of the German-based Shelter International Now, provided dramatic details of an escape he called "horrifying." While many details of the past two days remain murky, this is the story as he told it. On Monday night, as the Taliban began fleeing Kabul, soldiers forced the eight detainees from their Kabul jail cells, loaded them in cars and joined the convoy of tanks, pickups and other vehicles streaming southward toward Kandahar. When the convoy reached the neighboring province of Wardak, soldiers led the eight out of the car and locked them in a large steel container. "It was terribly cold," Taubmann said. "They wanted to lock the container and leave us in there until the morning. We had no blankets. We were freezing the whole night through." The next morning they pushed on and were deposited in a prison in the southeastern city of Ghazni. Taubmann described it as the worst of the five prisons in which the group had been housed during the past 3� months. Shortly after arriving the walls rattled as U.S. aircraft dropped bombs nearby. The detainees then heard heaving gunfire and loud shouting outside the prison. Some time later they heard the doors of the prison cells clanging open. When their cell door burst open, a soldier stood in the doorway gripping a gun. The detainees believed he was a Taliban soldier who might kill them. Instead the soldier stared at them wide-eyed, apparently stunned to find foreigners in the prison. He then shouted, "Azad! Azad!" Free! Free! "We walked into the city and the people came out of the houses and they hugged us and they greeted us," said Taubmann. "They were all clapping. They didn't know there were foreigners in the prison." "It was like a big celebration for all those people," he said. A local commander who was among town citizens who rose up against the Taliban then found shelter for the eight at the local offices of an aid organization. With the International Committee of the Red Cross acting as an intermediary, messages were dispatched to the U.S., German and Australian embassies in Islamabad. Because of the difficulty in relaying messages and answers, it took nearly 24 hours to organize the rescue efforts by U.S. special forces based in Pakistan, according to the aid workers and diplomats. Meanwhile, in Ghazni, some local villagers expressed opposition to freeing the aid workers, believing they could be ransomed to their governments for large sums of money, rescuers apparently told the aid workers. On Wednesday night, with the city under a curfew and with some villagers agitating to hold on to the detainees, the eight were led to a field where U.S. special forces helicopters were supposed to pick them up. The aid workers said, however, that the helicopters could not locate them. With the helicopters thumping in the distance, angry villagers who allegedly wanted to hold the workers for ransom running toward them, and fearful that hostile Taliban troops were still in the area, the increasingly desperate aid workers began building a signal fire, first burning the women's headscarves, then sweaters and jackets. "We burned everything we had � clothes, everything � to make a big fire," said Taubmann. Special forces teams led the eight into helicopters and flew them to Pakistan, according to diplomats here. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34986-2001Nov15.html

Terry, you're right about love and accepting warmth for those still struggling to regain some sense of security in Afghanistan. They will make mistakes. All new forms of government do. We just need to let them explore what is best for them and keep the crazies from killing them all while they do so. It is a long tedious process. We're still in the process! *Hugs* I wish it were this easy!

Lethal Mouth Fresh from his ground war against New York taxi drivers, Lethal Weapon lead Danny Glover once again establishes why it's bad for actors to run their mouth without a script: As guest speaker at an anti-death penalty forum at Princeton University, Glover said America was the one to blame for bombing and terror around the world. "Yes -- Yes!" Glover said when asked if American forces should spare the Saudi terrorist's life. "When I say the death penalty is inhumane. I mean [it's inhumane] whether that person is in a bird cage [jail] or it's bin Laden." Lethal Pap at http://www.zwire.com/site/Danny_Glover.html Life in the Cave: Intercepted email As the hunt for bin Laden narrowed as of Wednesday, November 21, the following email appeared in our inbox: ----- Original Message ----- From: Bin Laden, Osama Sent: Monday, November 19, 2001 8:17 AM To: Cavemates Subject: The Cave Hi guys. We've all been putting in long hours but we've really come together as a group and I love that. Big thanks to Omar for putting up the poster that says "There is no I in team" as well as the one that says "Hang In There, Baby." That cat is hilarious. However, while we are fighting a jihad, we can't forget to take care of the cave. And frankly I have a few concerns. First of all, while it's good to be concerned about cruise missiles, we should be even more concerned about the scorpions in our cave. Hey, you don't want to be stung and neither do I, so we need to sweep the cave daily. I've posted a sign-up sheet near the main cave opening. Second, it's not often I make a video address but when I do, I'm trying to scare the most powerful country on earth, okay? That means that while we're taping, please do not ride your razor scooter in the background. Just while we're taping. Thanks. Third point, and this is a touchy one. As you know, by edict, we're not supposed to shave our beards. But I need everyone to just think hygiene, especially after mealtime. We're all in this together. Fourth: food. I bought a box of Cheez-Its recently, clearly wrote "Osama" on the front, and put it on the top shelf. Today, my Cheez-Its were gone. Consideration. That's all I'm saying. Finally, we've heard that there may be American soldiers in disguise trying to infiltrate our ranks. I want to set up patrols to look for them. First patrol will be Omar, Muhammed, Abdul, Akbar, and Richard. Love you lots. Osama

Name that President "He walked into history an obscure, flat footed, bantamy little fellow in a light gray suit, the inhabitant of an eloquence-free zone who gave boring speeches in a flat voice. He was not compelling. This was more obvious because he followed a charismatic leader who did big things and filled the screen. He was quickly defined and dismissed by the opinion elite as "a first-rate second-rate man." And maybe at the beginning he feared the appraisal was correct, for when he became president he said very frankly that he felt the moon and the stars had fallen upon him." Okay, who is this guy? Answers at http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/ One More Reason to Give Thanks Out: Yellow Ribbons. In: Flags Surveying the reaction to September 11, Father Richard John Neuhaus asks, where have the yellow ribbons gone? Where did the flags suddenly come from? "Nobody decreed that it should be so," he writes in the December issue of First Things; "it just happened, and its happening is likely to be of great significance." First appearing in the Iranian hostage crisis two decades ago, the ribbons were "too often a symbol of self-pity and maudlin sentimentality." But they've been replaced by "a buoyant patriotism unprecedented in living memory." http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/rbartley/?id=95001487 "I Have A Dream" The hallucinations brought on by living with shrapnel inside your skull continue among the Taliban "leadership:" "Recent reports suggested that Mullah Omar, facing almost certain defeat, had agreed to surrender Kandahar. But yesterday Ahmad Karzai, whose brother Hamid has been negotiating with the Taliban for the surrender of the city, said Mullah Omar had changed his mind because he had had a prophetic dream in which he remained in power. "I have had a dream in which I am in charge for as long as I live," Mr. Karzai quoted Mullah Omar as saying." For as long as you live, Omar? Okay. Start the countdown clock at mission control! http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia_china/story.jsp?story=105801 Duh as in 'Diplomat' The editors of The New Republic on why Colin Powell and his elves should back off and give victory a chance. "Just how brilliant do the diplomats of the United States think they are? They seem to believe that they can calibrate a place that is infamous for its lack of calibration. Their thinking about the political conditions for a military victory in Afghanistan has become rigid and dogmatic: they foolishly attempted to delay the fall of Kabul until their own plans for it could be met, once again giving Osama bin Laden the impression that we are reluctant warriors and hesitant victors. What happened in the North this week was not the United States unleashing the Northern Alliance; it was the Northern Alliance surprising the United States. And the United States could not bring itself to concede that this was a pleasant surprise." http://www.tnr.com/112601/editorial112601.html This Week's Conventional Media Wizdum THIS war is in trouble. We're bogged down, getting nowhere and staring at a Vietnam-style quagmire. The Taliban's grip on the country remains total. These famously tough warriors of iron resolve are unlikely to be. . . Whoops, sorry, that was last week. Just let me punch up this week's Conventional Media Wisdom. Ah, here we go. Things are moving too fast. There's a dangerous power vacuum. The Taliban, being famously tough, etc, have pulled off a brilliant double-bluff by abandoning every major city and lever of government. Their grip on selected southern and western caves remains total. The Northern Alliance are too vicious, unfairly targeting enemy soldiers instead of just killing unarmed women and homosexuals. The collapse of the burqa market will devastate the Afghan fashion industry. .,

http://www.dailytelegraph.co.uk/dt?ac=006605705660173&rtmo=V1PPjumx&atmo=rrrrrrrq&pg=/01/11/17/do02.html Can't We All Just Get Along? The New York Times reports that the "spiritual ' leader of the Taliban is appealing to the world to just forgive and forget: Syed Tayyab Agha, spokesman for Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, also told a news conference that it is time to ``forget'' about the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United States, as they have been superseded by the U.S.-led war on Afghanistan. ``You should forget the Sept. 11 attacks because now there is a new fighting against Muslims and Islam, and the international and global terrorists like America and Britain, they are killing daily our innocent people,'' he told journalists in the Afghan border town of Spinboldak. All in favor of inviting this guy to Thanksgiving dinner, send email to caveguys@screweinstan .com And Next on the USA's Christmas List Is.... An end to Saddam's regime would be a major defeat for terrorism and would give us great leverage in getting others-Iran and Syria, Saudis and Palestinians-to shut down terrorist movements. Winter, some say, is a bad time for war in Afghanistan. Everyone agrees that winter is a good time for war in Iraq. The time may come soon for George W. Bush to say again, "Let's roll." Michael Barone at U.S. News http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/011126/politics/26pol.htm

This is really great stuff on a day full of stuffing. Thanks! Harry Trumanm is my guess for Prez in the first part, but I am still hungry and preparing sacrifices for Mme Pele for later in the day.

"For the time being, the reasons behind the advance on Kunduz remain unclear." ... "Even as the advance began some northern commanders continued to insist that a surrender was still possible." "The BBC's Jon Sopel outside Kunduz said the military advance may indicate a battle for control of the town between different factions of the Northern Alliance." http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1669000/1669567.stm

I heard a blockbuster rumor today. Basically, there is a French book being published which recounts the FBI's investigation of Osama Bin Laden and his cohorts. which says that they were hot on the trail of all of the terorists and were then pulled off the case by the State Department just before 9/11. Reportedly, the chief of the FBI investigation quit over the interference from the State Department. I'll try and substantiate this with some facts and sources.

Interesting! I'll check too...

They may fave found Bin Laden's hideout. See topic 49 in the news conference. There's a picture of this mountain fortress.

I didn't know where else to put this. My Daughter-in-law sent it to me. I think it sums up my feelings as well as hers and my son's. Giving Thanks for What We're Not http://www.ncpa.org/edo/pd/2001/pd111901.html

dkline Mon Dec 10 '01 (09:49) Meanwhile, today's NY Times has a very encouraging front page article on the demoralizing effect the Afghan Jihad has had on the Swat Valley region of Pakistan (home to Shangri-La, believe it or not). 15,000 men were "volunteered" by their local mullahs to go fight -- "the militant leaders mostly stayed home, or crossed the frontier only long enough to declare themselves holy warriors before hastening back," notes the article -- and as many as 3,000 have never returned. The reason I say it's encouraging is that the great losses suffered by these poor uneducated people are surely weakening the hold over them that the fundamentalists have until now enjoyed. As one disillusioned local put it: "So a lot of innocent people have died, and Sufi Muhammad (the local religious boss) and other religious leaders are responsible for this. They sent people who had no training whatsoever to war, and then they stayed back in Pakistan. They are still alive, while so many others have died." One day we're going to be shocked to discover just how much control -- top to bottom -- the fundamentalists really had in Pakistan, a country with several ready-to-use nuclear weapons. The war, thank God, will hopefully allow us (and Mushareff) to break the grip these fanatics have on such a strategic country. There's a book here, for anyone brave enough to do it. Read the full article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/10/international/asia/10JIHA.html?searchpv=nytToday

I was driving down the highway to work this morning and most of the radio stations did a memorial national anthem at the same time the Sept 11 attacks took place just 3 months ago. It's hard to believe that 3 months have gone by. As Bush spoke on the radio at a service, I was passing by the exact spot where I first heard the news as he was saying "we will all remember where we were on that day." Where were you? How did you hear the news? How has your life changed since then? How has it affected your world?

Has anyone else heard this? I got it in an email from a friend, yesterday: *The extended bin Laden family is building a trade center in Lebanon that's an image of one of the twin towers.* If this is the case, what a horrific way to memorialize it.

The WTC was attacked at 2AM Hawaiian time. I was awakened the next morning (about 5 hours later) with the news and turned on the television. I still can't (or don't want to) believe the devastation it unleashed. I still look at the images on TV. My mind recoils from watching, but I know I must not forget, so I watch. I can see the buildings falling down even with my eyes open.

It has affected my world by making a routine inter-island commute into a 4 hours ordeal. Two hours on each end to have all things gone through carefully, walking around in a seemingly armed camp surrounded by rifles at the ready National Guard Troops. We also are forbidden fishing from the breakwaters, and the piers are sealed off by customs inspectors. Hawaii is considered a war zone, so we are also partolled by gunships - both US Navy and Coast Guard. When we went to the summit of Kilauea for Thanksgiving dinner, we noted that the Kilauea Military Rest Camp there hand armed guards where none had existed before, and a heavy metal gate had been installed across each entrance. I think we will never be the same again. Our childhood has been taken away from us, and we must be adults like all the rest of the world has had to be for so long. My delight is the determined comradship I find in my friends who were not all that friendly before. The "we take care of our own" attitude has been replaced by "you AR our own." I hope that part lasts.

This is very strange. I wish I knew what factory was at the bottom of the picture. No, I don't believe it.... http://www2.justnet.ne.jp/~kiti/Ufo/wtc/wtc.htm

Tom Clancy on why the CIA didn't catch the 9-11 terrorists O'REILLY: Was there a reason that Turner and Carter -- was their a reason why Turner and Carter wanted a weaker [CIA]? CLANCY: It's politically correct. O'REILLY: Simple as that? CLANCY: I think so. The political left is, you know, they deal in symbols rather than reality. The general difference between conservatives and liberals is liberals like pretty pictures and conservatives like to build bridges that people can drive across. And conservatives are indeed conservative because if the bridge falls down, people die. Where as the liberals figure, oh, we can always build a nice memorial to them and make people forget it happened and it was our fault. They're very good at making people forget it was their fault, all right. The CIA was gutted by people on the political left who don't like intelligence operations, and as a result of that, as an indirect result of that, we've lost 5,000 citizens last week.

The Tape http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/12/13/ret.bin.laden.videotape/ CNN has posted a transcript in pdf format http://i.cnn.net/cnn/2001/US/12/13/transcript/binladentape.pdf David Kline (dkline) Thu Dec 13 '01 (09:20) 32 lines Yep, I just saw the Bin Laden tape and it is unbelievable. The man is toast. No doubt he did it (although there will always be 250 people in the world who think the tape is doctored or whatever). And no doubt his callous admissions and disregard for others will hurt his image greatly. Especially his laughter. People hate smug assholes, and OBL is one. Not a lot of things are truly "chilling" to me. This tape was. I was also interested to notice the same sort of ass-kissing by OBL subordinates that I remember from my old political days. Only in this case, it was OBL's henchment vying with each other for the most vivid or predictive or praiseworthy (of OBL) dreams that they were pretending to have had. These schmucks were all claiming had these vivid dreams which were all just a bit too pat and synchronous to real-world events for my taste. And they were competing with each other to tell comrade Bin Laden about the praiseworthy meaning of their dreams. What pathetic fucks. I'll tell you what, though. It confirms my sense that OBL was laughing at us during the bombing-only phase of our campaign. Bombing was what they expected us to do. They did not expect us to get on the ground and help the Northern Alliance. And they certainly did not expect that cooperation would lead to the total military collapse of the Taliban in 4 weeks. So who's laughing now, Bin Laudenam? I'll tell you, though, I feel sorry for anyone watching this tape who lost family or loved ones in 9/11. It must be so hurtful to see a low-life like OBL laughing at the murder of innocents. God. The transcript in html http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/12/13/tape.transcript/ and it is in real video at http://video.c-span.org:8080/ramgen/fdrive/ter121301_osama.rm?mode=compact Sulayman ((Abu Guaith)): ... So I went back to the Shaykh (meaning UBL) who was sitting in a room with 50 to 60 people. I tried to tell him about what I saw, but he made gesture with his hands, meaning: "I know, I know�" UBL: He did not know about the operation. What an amazing tape excerpt -- seen at the CNN site. Questions: CNN said it was not taped in chronological order, rather than saying the tape had been edited/dubbed. Strange. Is that just spin? It would have had to have been edited by someone to be out of order, right? Odd. I think the stakes are too high to fake a tape like this. I think it is real, and chilling. I wonder what made them delay releasing it. The propaganda value for those in the Western world who were uneasy about proof is unmistakable. I am very curious how this will play in the Pakistani press and on al-Jezeera tv. I wish we had an arabic speaker who could translate/paraphrase what the commentary and lead-ins are like there. Or a good arabic media critique site (in english) for the same purpose. David Kline (dkline) Thu Dec 13 '01 (11:27) 66 lines > One thing that struck me was the way the visiting "Saudi cleric" kept > > saying "thanks be to Allah...by the grace of Allah" in practically every > other sentence, while UBL smiled in a way that made me think he finds > other people's devotion to Allah amusing and useful, but that it's not > something he particularly shares. Thank you, Jake. That's a very good point -- and very typical behavior for the top leader of a movement that also functions like a personality cult. The henchmen kiss ass. The leader starts believing the worshipful. And he starts looking down at his henchmen who then worship him even more. Anyway, a few points: 1) WHEN THE TAPE WAS MADE? The Tape was made probably the same day that US chopper lost a wheel and was abandoned (or shot down). Anyone remember what day that was? It was right around the mid-October time of the special forces PR raid. Anyway, this was also the time when US fortunes in Afghanistan looked their bleakest. It seemed all we were doing was bombing Red Cross hospitals and everyone talked about how we'd under-estimated the strength of the Taliban. Even I was a bit demoralized by our lack of progress, and kept wishing we'd just put some SF guys on the ground with the NA and stop all this futile if not counter-productive bombing. The point being, the tape was shot when it appeared to Bin Laden that the US was doing exactly as he expected -- i.e., come in and bomb from a safe height, but not get our boots dirty with on-the-grouned fighting. So he was feeling supremely confident in his ultimate and total success, probably more confident than at any time before or since. 2) WHY THE TAPE WAS MADE? We look for savvy thinking, for conspiratorial 3-steps-ahead planning, in the behavior of Osama bin Laden. But the fact is he was simply suffering from great hubris at the time (see my point #1 above), and allowed the local hosts of that dinner party (which was probably a small victory dinner for the loss of America's first helicopter in the war) to shoot a little home video souvenir. I'm telling you: Osama Bin Laden was convinced at that time that he had won -- he had killed Massoud, destroyed the WTC, frustrated the bombing-only American war effort, sparked mass protests in a dozen Muslim capitals, won the hearts of Al-Jazeera viewers, and made even some in Washington think he could never be defeated. As a result, OBL simply no longer was as concerned with security. He was sure no enemy would ever even set foot in that house to find the tape in the fist place. 3) IMPACT OF THE TAPE There will always be those few who think the tape was faked, or who don't care and support Bin Laden anyway. But based on my knowledge of how Afghans think first of all, and to a lesser extent how Pakistanis and other Muslims think, I am absolutely convinced that this tape will seal the political doom of OPsama Bin Laden and his Jihadist movement. Not that there won't be other terrorists, not that even remnants of Al Queda will survive and cause trouble down the road. But Osama bin Laden no longer looks like Robin Hood. He has publicly admitted his guilt to any reasonable person -- and 90% of Muslims are reasonable people. But by itself, that would not be enough to detroy his mystique and the allure of his movement. When combined with two added factors, though -- 1) his total rejection by and defeat at the hands of Muslim Afghans; and 2) his smug complacency and disdain for others (people DESPISE hubris like that) -- Bin Laden's admitted guilt on this tape will definitely seal his doom. This tape will be believed. It will be talked about. And heads will nod throughout as the lessons of arrogance and hubris and fanaticism are debated throughout the Muslim world. I think one reason Washington was hesitant to release the tape at first was OBL's reading of his (bad) poetry. They may have feared that a poem calling on the Muslim masses to "storm the forts" would hurt us. Thankfully, those worries were put aside. http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/10/22/ret.retaliation.facts/index.html WBUR prints synopses of A-J, but a day later, so we should see it tomorrow. http://www.wbur.org/special/specialcoverage/feature_aljaz.asp

This is Aljazeera's account today from the above url cited by David Kline.

Bin Laden: Attackers Knew About The Operation Just Before They Boarded The Planes The Pentagon released Thursday a video that it says implicates Osama Bin Laden in the 11 September attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The 40-minute recording is of very poor audio and visual quality. The tape was recorded on November 9 in Kandahar, Afghanistan. US officials disclosed they found the videotape in a private residence in Jalalabad. According to the CNN, Bin Laden and the other three men seated with him make numerous references to various al Qaeda members having dreams of planes hitting tall buildings at least a year before the attacks. Speaking of the hijackers, bin Laden states, "They were trained and we did not reveal the operation to them until they are there and just before they boarded the planes." Additionally, he had turned on his radio in advance to listen to coverage of the attacks and that he had underestimated the damage that would be inflicted on the World Trade Center. Bin Laden is quoted as saying: "We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower." This comment referred to hijacked airliners, which hit and destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. "We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all," he added. http://www.wbur.org/special/specialcoverage/feature_aljaz.asp

I LIKE DAVID KLINE. He says things I would not dare but think, anyway! I refuse to offend my eyes by looking at that man. I watched to be informed but that is all. Is there doubt? Not even for the criminally insane person that he is!

Mutual. David Kline hits home with his poignant observations, based on years in Afghanistan.

Indeed. I can feel the intensity of David Kline's anguish and love for Afghanistan in his eloquence. Thanks, Terry, for your continuing posts of his comments. I still worry about that idiot who called Art Bell last night suggesting OBL be set free because we do not punish the criminally insane. Art cut him off, and the following phone calls with creative ways to deal with a captured live OBL gave me much comfort. We have developed a wry sense of the ridiculous when dealing with the actuality of the current war, but are we angry? committed? determined? You'd better believe it!

Hi all I am wondering if it might be better to set a trap for bin Laden with bait of some sort to lure him out. I am not sure how you would do this but it is obvious to me that bin Laden will not be caught in a specific place if he does not to be. Because everyone is climbing a tree called Afghanistan, he may have quietly climbed a tree called Pakistan or Kazakhstan or something like that. I also wonder if assuming Bush decides to move into Somalia and North Korea, if the world coalition will fragment. Even your staunchest ally Britain is rumbling in world media about setting limits as to how far they are prepared to go. I think you need the UN's permission before you set foot on the soil of any other country. Many think America can gain those countries co-operation by offering aid. I urge extreme caution in any decision to expand the war for several reasons: 1)Prove their connections to terrorism 2)Accept that there are more peaceful alternatives to sanctions or military movements in countries like North Korea and Somalia. Humanitarian aid to the former may encourage the former to be more open and possibly allow a thawing of international relations with the North. 3)Another round of diplomacy to reassure key players like the Russians, your European allies and Britain. 4)Don't send the CIA to play the role of the agitator in countries that are preoccupied with internal problems unless the Federal government is prepared to accept some responsibility for wrong doings. 5)Arabs and Muslims have the jitters at the moment over the Palestinian question. Which suggests to me that some "unthinkable" things will have to be done to calm them down and stop an escalation of the war. Rob

We've captured Tora Bora but no Osama. David Kline (dkline) Tue Dec 18 '01 (13:55) 23 lines Wait a minute ... you mean there are people here who really believe that the Pakistani border could be sealed tight if only we really wanted to -- and that maybe we don't really want to? Un . . . believable! Not all the world is as secure as a Safeway parking lot, you know. I have spent a good deal of time in those Tora Bora mountains, and crossed that border several times whilst on the run from Russian special forces units and the Pakistani military and intelligence services. Plus I covered the heroin traffic in that region, and I recall how once when the Pakistani government wanted to meet with tribal leaders, they only way they could get them to sit down and talk was to bring in artillery. What's rally happening here, I suspect, is that naive conspiracy-mongering at work here again. You know, the notion of the United States as all-knowing and all-powerful and able to control all events in the world as it chooses. Makes for real good Chomsky, to be sure. But it hardly conforms to the way the real world works. Just ask the Vietnamese. Or Osama bin Laden.

From today's New York Times report on the swearing in of Hamid Karzai: "Adding to the optimism and calm that pervaded the capital today was the show of unity by two Afghan military commanders who had been expected to snub the ceremony: General Rashid Dostrum ... and Gen. Ismail Khan." The most moving part of the ceremony, said the Times, was when the Belgian foreign minister Louis Michel made areference to slain Alliance leader Massoud Ahmed Shah that "captured the combination of grief, exhaustion and aching hope" that Afghans are feeling today. "I am sure," Michel said, "that Mr. Massoud is proud of his nation today." According to the Times, "That single sentence sent tears rolling down scores of weathered, wrinkled and scarred cheeks in the audience." Really wonderful. And for me as an interested outside observer, especially so. I've literally waited 22 years for this day - David Kline

And Kline adds this: There's certainly cause for hope and optimism re: Afghanistan, but it's also important to be aware of the dangers ahead as well. I can think of many mistakes that the new government could make that would jeopardize Afghan peace and unity: 1) Karzai must not get involved in another muddle with the US (such as the one over amnesty for Mullah Omar) thaty makes him look like a US puppet. 2) Karzai must firmly suppress by armed force if necessary any warlordism or lawlessness or resistance to the government -- at least from middle- or lower-level military, political, religious or tribal figures. 3) But Karzai must never use suppressive methods (an Afghan tendency) against high-level military, political, religious or tribal dissenters. Always compromise should be sought; negotiations conducted. The above are just three things to worry about. I can think of many more potential roadblocks ahead that Karzai will need to skillfully negotiate. Hopefully he can do it. But it's not at all certain he can.

David Kline: I have waited (I kid you not) 22 years for this day! -- but even apart from my personal attachment to that country I do believe that something of great import for the world is now taking place in Afghanistan. You cannot push a people through much more suffering and disaster than that which the the Afghans have experienced in recent years, yet now we are witness to a rebirth of hope that many though impossible. Will it succeed? We'll soon know. But the subtext for this inauguration ceremony, as Barb suggests, is really the question of whether hope and rebirth is possible for the larger world as a whole. If the Afghans can save themselves, after all, then maybe we can, too.

Poor Afghanistan. I truly hope those people can live in peace and not become a global battlefield. There is so much to hope for, now...!

Mr. John Reid the shoe bomber really is part Jamaican apparently a small time criminal who converted to Islam while in prison. Details here: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2001570016-2001595137,00.html That article links him to Zacarias Moussaoui, the "20th hijacker". What next? Body cavity bombs?

It does not take much plastique as far as I know. Scary, indeed! When will the dental record become necessary, too?!

Swiss-led campaign to rebuild the destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas: http://www.msnbc.com/news/661589.asp http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011121/sc/attack_afghan_statues_dc_1.html http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/11/18/wbud18.xml&sSheet=/news/2001/11/18/ixhomer.html More on what's been lost/missing in Afghanistan: http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2001%2F11%2F23%2Fwkab223.xml http://www.dallasnews.com/science/STORY.ea3e5c965f.b0.af.0.a4.6e84a.html http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20011112/taliban.html

A number of artifacts are being recovered from the WTC site: http://www.nydailynews.com/2001-11-15/News_and_Views/City_Beat/a-132149.asp

http://www.timesofindia.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=380255744 Indo-Pak war raging in cyberspace SIDDHARTH SRIVASTAVA TIMES NEWS NETWORK NEW DELHI: Pakistani hackers have made several attempts to hack into Indian sites--especially those containing data on sensitive information relating to nuclear test management--to access sensitive information related to the country's security, said sources in the Intelligence Bureau. The sites targetted include those of Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR), the Nuclear Science Centre (NSC) and the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC). Although these three sites have been repeatedly hacked in the past, according to IB officials, the recent attempts were aimed at accessing crucial data secured under severely firewalled servers. "It is quite apparent that the new breed of hackers are much more equipped and trained," say sources in the IB. Officials also say that there could have been at least a couple of successful attempts to break the codes of the sites. "There have been as many as seven attempts to hack into the BARC data since the attack on Indian Parliament on December 13. We are also on the lookout for spy programs that might have been installed," says an official. The IB has already written to the defence and the home ministry about the issue. The two ministries have, in turn, sought the help of cyber security firms to shore up the sites. The hackers, according to officials, may be on the payroll of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence. There has been a history of infiltration into Indian sites with sensitive information by Pakistani hackers. The first infiltration into BARC was in 1998, when it was hacked by three members of Milworm, a Pakistan-based hacker group. Ever since, BARC servers have been favourite targets of Pakistani hackers. "This year alone, at least one spy program has been detected in a BARC mail server," says an official. The first intrusion into IGCAR was reported in January last year when G-Force, a Pakistani hacker group, defaced its main server. Subsequently, other servers in IGCAR have been repeatedly hacked by G-Force. Indian intelligence officials have identified one hacker as Rsnake, who is said to have copied the master database from IGCAR and provided some data to Pakistani intelligence as proof of his access. The ISI, in turn, has realised the importance of hackers after BARC was hacked in 1998. The first Pakistani hacker group-Pakistani Hackers Club-was formed by two 'hacktivists' who used the pseudonyms DoctorNuker and Mr Sweet. DoctorNuker took to hacking when he was a computer science student at Karachi University. Along with fellow hacker Dizasta (real name: Fahad Shamshek Khan), he started hacking into critical Indian and US servers. DoctorNuker, say IB officials, was the first hacker whose skills were recognised by the ISI and under the latter's directives, focused on critical Indian government servers (especially those relating to nuclear and atomic establishments). But sources say the most active Pakistani hacker in the recent past has been a person impersonating as Rsnake, who started hacking from the Netherlands where he was working with a group of portals. Inspired by DoctorNuker, he started the hacker group G-Force from Holland. The ISI has now got him to Pakistan to coordinate other hackers targeting Indian websites, claim IB officials.

Its all The Same,War, not good for any one

There never HAS been a "good" war. However, if our ancestors had not fought for your right to say what you said, perhaps you would not have the right to do so. Soem causes have to be bought more preciously than others. Or would you rather be speaking German or Japanese, now? Alas, war is not a simple case of right or wrong when there are two sides.

(739 - Paul Terry Walhus (terry)I heard a blockbuster rumor today. Basically, there is a French book being published which recounts the FBI's investigation of Osama Bin Laden and his cohorts. which says that they were hot on the trail of all of the terorists and were then pulled off the case by the State Department just before 9/11. Reportedly, the chief of the FBI investigation quit over the interference from the State Department. *************************** CNN AMERICAN MORNING WITH PAULA ZAHN Explosive New Book Published in France Alleges that U.S. Was in Negotiations to Do a Deal with Taliban Aired January 8, 2002 - 07:34 ET - CNN January 8, 2002 - 07:34 ET THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Time to check in with ambassador-in- residence, Richard Butler, this morning. An explosive new book published in France al leges that the United States was in negotiations to do a deal with the Taliban for an oil pipeline in Afghanistan. Joining us right now is Richard Butler to shed some light on this new book. He is the former chief U.N. weapons inspector. He is now on the Council on Foreign Relations and our own ambassador-in- residence -- good morning. RICHARD BUTLER, FMR. U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR: Good morning, Paula. ZAHN: Boy, if any of these charges are true... BUTLER: If... ZAHN: ... this... BUTLER: Yes. ZAHN: ... is really big news. BUTLER: I agree. ZAHN: Start off with what your understanding is of what is in this book -- the most explosive charge. BUTLER: The most explosive charge, Paula, is that the Bush administration -- the present one, just shortly after assuming office slowed down FBI investigations of al Qaeda and terrorism in Afghanistan in order to do a deal with the Taliban on oil -- an oil pipeline across Afghanistan. ZAHN: And this book points out that the FBI's deputy director, John O'Neill, actually resigned because he felt the U.S. administration was obstructing... BUTLER: A proper... ZAHN: ... the prosecution of terrorism. BUTLER: Yes, yes, a proper intelligence investigation of terrorism. Now, you said if, and I affirmed that in responding to you. We have to be careful here. These are allegations. They're worth airing and talking about, because of their gravity. We don't know if they are correct. But I believe they should be investigated, because Central Asian oil, as we were discussing yesterday, is potentially so important. And all prior attempts to have a pipeline had to be done through Russia. It had to be negotiated with Russia. Now, if there is to be a pipeline through Afghanistan, obviating the need to deal with Russia, it would also cost less than half of what a pipeline through Russia would cost. So financially and politically, there's a big prize to be had. A pipeline through Afghanistan down to the Pakistan coast would bring out that Central Asian oil easier and more cheaply. ZAHN: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) as you spoke about this yesterday, we almost immediately got a call from "The New York Times." BUTLER: Right. ZAHN: They want you to write an op-ed piece on this over the weekend. BUTLER: Right, and which I will do. ZAHN: But let's come back to this whole issue of what John O'Neill, this FBI agent... BUTLER: Right. ZAHN: ... apparently told the authors of this book. He is alleging that -- what -- the U.S. government was trying to protect U.S. oil interests? And at the same time, shut off the investigation of terrorism to allow for that to happen? BUTLER: That's the allegation that instead of prosecuting properly an investigation of terrorism, which has its home in Afghanistan as we now know, or one of its main homes, that was shut down or slowed down in order to pursue oil interests with the Taliban. The people who we have now bombed out of existence, and this not many months ago. The book says that the negotiators said to the Taliban, you have a choice. You have a carpet of gold, meaning an oil deal, or a carpet of bombs. That's what the book alleges. ZAHN: Well, I know you're going to be doing your own independent homework on this... BUTLER: Yes. ZAHN: ... to see if you can confirm any of this. Let's move on to the whole issue of Iraq. The deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, at one time was considered one of those voices within the administration... For the complete transcript, go to the following URL: http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0201/08/ltm.05.html ************************ U.S. Taliban Policy influenced by Oil by Julio Godoy Inter Press Service English News Wire, 16 November 2001 Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG), globalresearch.ca 17 November 2001 A new book by two French intelligence analysts claims that at the behest of U.S. oil companies, the Bush administration initially blocked FBI investigations into terrorism, while it bargained with the Taliban for the delivery of Osama bin Laden in exchange for political recognition and economic aid. In the book "Bin Laden, la verite interdite" ("Bin Laden, the forbidden truth"), which hit bookshelves in Paris yesterday, the authors, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, claim that FBI deputy director John O'Neill resigned in July to protest the policy. Brisard claims O'Neill told him that "the main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were U.S. oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia." The authors say the U.S. government's main objective in Afghanistan was to consolidate the position of the Taliban regime and thereby obtain access to the oil and gas reserves in Central Asia. They say that until August, the U.S. government saw the Taliban regime "as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia," from the rich oilfields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. Until now, says the book, "the oil and gas reserves of Central Asia have been controlled by Russia. The Bush government wanted to change all that." But confronted with the Taliban's refusal to accept U.S. conditions, "this rationale of energy security changed into a military one," the authors claim. "At one moment during the negotiations, the U.S. representatives told the Taliban, either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs," Brisard said in an interview in Paris. According to the book, the Bush administration began to negotiate with the Taliban shortly after taking power in January. U.S. and Taliban diplomatic representatives met several times in February in Washington, Berlin and Islamabad. To burnish their image in the United States, the Taliban even hired a PR representative in Washington, Laila Helms. The authors say that Helms was well-versed in the arcana of U.S. intelligence agencies because her uncle, Richard Helms, is a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The last meeting between U.S. and Taliban representatives took place in August, five weeks before the attacks on New York and Washington, the analysts maintain. On that occasion, Christina Rocca, at the time head of Central Asian affairs for the State Department, met the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan in Islamabad. Brisard and Dasquie have long experience in intelligence analysis. Brisard was until the late 1990s director of economic analysis and strategy for Vivendi, a French company. He also worked for French intelligence, and wrote a report in 1997 on the now notorious al Qaeda network headed by bin Laden. Dasquie is an investigative journalist and publisher of Intelligence Online, a respected newsletter on diplomacy, economic analysis and strategy, available on the Internet. Brisard and Dasquie also note that Bush and his closest aides have strong ties to the oil industry. Bush's family made their money from Texas oil. Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and the Secretaries of Commerce and Energy, Donald Evans and Stanley Abraham, have all worked for U.S. oil companies. Until the end of last year, Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton, a company that provides services to the oil industry. From 1991 to 2000, Rice was a manager for Chevron. Evans and Abraham worked for Tom Brown, Inc., another oil company. Besides the secret negotiations held between Washington and Kabul, the book examines the role played by Saudi Arabia in fostering Islamic fundamentalism, the personality of bin Laden, and the networks that the Saudi dissident built to finance his activities. Brisard and Dasquie contest the U.S. government's claim that it had been seeking to try bin Laden since the attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. "Actually," Dasquie says, "the first state to officially prosecute bin Laden was Libya, on the charges of terrorism." "Bin Laden wanted to settle in Libya in the early 1990s, but was hindered by the government of Muammar Qaddafi," Dasquie claims. "Enraged by Libya's refusal, bin Laden organized attacks inside Libya, including assassination attempts against Qaddafi." Dasquie also discusses the role of the Islamic Fighting Group (IFG), reputedly the most powerful Libyan dissident organization, based in London, and directly linked with bin Laden. "Qaddafi even asked that Western police institutions, such as Interpol, pursue the IFG and bin Laden, but never obtained cooperation," Dasquie says. "Until today, members of IFG openly live in London." The book confirms earlier reports that the U.S. government worked closely with the United Nations during the negotiat ons with the Taliban. "Several meetings took place this year, under the arbitration of Francesc Vendrell, personal representative of U.N. Secretary- General Kofi Annan, to discuss the situation in Afghanistan," say the authors. "Representatives of the U.S. government and Russia, and the six countries that border with Afghanistan, were present at these meetings," it says. "Sometimes, representatives of the Taliban also sat around the table." These meetings, also called "6+2" because of the number of states (six neighbors plus U.S. and Russia) involved, have been confirmed by Naif Naik, former Pakistani Minister for Foreign Affairs. In a French television interview two weeks ago, Naik said during a "6+2" meeting in Berlin in July, the discussions focused on "the formation of a government of national unity. If the Taliban had accepted this coalition, they would have immediately received international economic aid." "And the pipelines from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan would have come," he added. Naik also claimed that Tom Simons, the U.S. representative at these meetings, openly threatened the Taliban and Pakistan. "Simons said, 'either the Taliban behave as they ought to, or Pakistan convinces them to do so, or we will use another option'. The words Simons used were 'a military operation'," Naik claimed. Copyright IPS, 2001. For fair use only The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/GOD111A ************************************ The Irish Times Monday, November 19, 2001 US efforts to make peace summed up by 'oil' A new book alleges years of attempts to arrest Osama bin Laden being blocked by the US , one of the authors tells Lara Marlowe ANALYSIS: The fate of John O'Neill, the Irish-American FBI agent who for years led US investigations into Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, is the most chilling revelation in the book Bin Laden: The Hidden Truth, published in Paris this week. O'Neill investigated the bombings of the World Trade Centre in 1993, a US base in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-Es-Salaam in 1998, and the USS Cole last year. Jean-Charles Brisard, who wrote a report on bin Laden's finances for the French intelligence agency DST and is co-author of Hidden Truth, met O'Neill several times last summer. He complained bitterly that the US State Department - and behind it the oil lobby who make up President Bush's entourage - blocked attempts to prove bin Laden's guilt. The US ambassador to Yemen, Ms Barbara Bodine, forbade O'Neill and his team of so- called Rambos (as the Yemeni authorities called them) from entering Yemen. In August 2001, O'Neill resigned in frustration and took up a new job as head of security at the World Trade Centre. He died in the September 11th attack. Brisard and his co-author Guillaume Dasqui�, the editor of Intelligence Online, say their book is a tribute to O'Neill. The FBI agent had told Brisard: "All the answers, everything needed to dismantle Osama bin Laden's organisation, can be found in Saudi Arabia." But US diplomats shrank from offending the Saudi royal family. O'Neill went to Saudi Arabia after 19 US servicemen died in the bombing of a military installation in Dhahran in June 1996. Saudi officials interrogated the suspects, declared them guilty and executed them - without letting the FBI talk to them. "They were reduced to the role of forensic scientists, collecting material evidence on the bomb site," Brisard says. O'Neill said there was clear evidence in Yemen of bin Laden's guilt in the bombing of the USS Cole \in which 17 US servicemen died\, but that the State Department prevented him from getting it." Brisard and Dasqui� discovered that the first country to issue an international arrest warrant against bin Laden was not the US, but Moamar Gadafy's Libya, in March 1998. The confidential notice, published for the first time in their book, was sent by the Libyan interior ministry to Interpol on March 16th, 1998, and accuses bin Laden of murdering two German intelligence agents, Silvan Becker and his wife, in Libya in 1994. Bin Laden supported a fundamentalist group called al-Muqatila, made up of Libyans who had fought with him against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Al-Muqatila wanted to assassinate Gadafy, whom it considered an infidel. According to the former MI5 agent David Shayler, British intelligence - also in league with al-Muqatila - tried to assassinate Gadafy in November 1996. It was because of British collaboration with al-Muqatila that the Interpol warrant was ignored, Brisard says. Since September 11th, al-Muqatila has been placed on President Bush's list of "terrorist groups". The central thesis of Brisard and Dasqui�'s book is sure to join the annals of 21st century conspiracy theories. The writers document negotiations between the Bush administration and the Taliban between February and August of this year. Less convincingly, they conjecture that the September 11th suicide attacks were the result of the failure of those negotiations. The chief motivation behind US attempts to make peace with the Taliban can be summed up in one word: oil. The former Soviet republics of Central Asia - Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and especially "the new Kuwait", Kazakhstan - have vast oil and gas reserves. But Russia has refused to allow the US to extract it through Russian pipelines and Iran is considered a dangerous route. That left Afghanistan. The US oil company Chevron - where Mr Bush's National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice was a director throughout the 1990s - is deeply involved in Kazakhstan. In 1995, another US company, Unocal (formerly Union Oil Company of California) signed a contract to export $8 billion worth of natural gas through a $3 billion pipeline which would go from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan. The authors recall how the State Department applauded the Taliban takeover in September 1996, five months after a US assistant secretary of state warned "economic opportunities will be missed" if political stability was not restored in Afghanistan. Laila Helms, the part Afghan niece of the former CIA director and former US ambassador to Tehran Richard Helms, is described as the Mata-Hari of US-Taliban negotiations. Ms Helms brought Sayed Rahmatullah Hashimi, an adviser to Mullah Omar, to Washington for five days in March 2001 - after the Taliban had destroyed the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan. Hashimi met the directorate of Central Intelligence at the CIA and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department. In negotiations which continued until July, the US then took a more discreet position, letting the UN envoy Francesc Vendrell do most of the work and appointing a former US ambassador to Pakistan, Thomas Simons, to represent the US at informal meetings in Berlin. The last direct US contact with the Taliban was on August 2nd, 2001, when Christina Rocca, the director of Asian affairs at the State Department, met the Taliban ambassador in Islamabad. Ms Rocca was previously in charge of contacts with Islamist guerrilla groups at the CIA, where in the 1980s, she oversaw the delivery of Stinger missiles to Afghan mujaheddin. Last February, the Taliban had indicated it might be willing to hand over bin Laden, but by June, according to Brisard and Dasqui�, the US began considering military action. "The US thought they could 'decouple' Osama bin Laden from the Taliban," Brisard says. "What they did not understand was that without bin Laden, the Taliban regime wouldn't have existed." By dispatching Francesc Vendrell to see the exiled King Zaher Shah in Rome and raising the threat of military action, Washington "backed the Taliban into a corner", the authors say. For the Taliban - assuming its leadership had advance knowledge of the suicide attacks - September 11th was a sort of pre-emptive strike. Brisard and Dasqui� claim a significant part of the Saudi royal family supports bin Laden. "Saudi Arabia has always protected bin Laden - or protected itself from him," says Brisard. He points out that attacks inside the kingdom targeted US interests, never the Saudis. Khalid bin Mahfouz is the former chairman of the kingdom's biggest bank, the National Commercial Bank, who, with 10 family members received Irish citizenship in December 1990. Brisard and Dasqui� call him "the banker of terror". The 73-year-old Mahfouz is now under house arrest in the Saudi resort of Taif, accused by the FBI and CIA of having diverted $2 billion to Islamic charities that helped bin Laden. http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2001/1119/wor8.htm ************************** Reviews of "Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth": http://serendipity.magnet.ch/wot/bl_tft.htm The Australian: Bin Laden book banned in Switzerland at the request of one of bin Laden's half brothers: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,3514962^1702,00.html Daily Mail&Guardian: The war in Afghanistan is a means to another end: http://www.mg.co.za/mg/za/archive/2001dec/features/04dec-war.html

Wow, that was like a big spoiler alert after the text bomb. I'm glad Mahfouz is under arrest We need to know the truth of the events leading up to September 11 so is this a piece of the puzzle, the whole puzzle, or is it a distortion. Obviously Paula Zahn thinks it's worthy of probing, let's see where this story goes.

The war will end in 2008, now we know. Pentagon warns of war lasting six years By David Wastell in Washington (Filed: 13/01/2002) AMERICAN military chiefs believe that the global war against terrorism will last at least six years. Pentagon officials are being advised to draw up budgets and plans to buy new equipment on the assumption that the struggle against al-Qa'eda and other international terrorist groups will endure until 2008, and perhaps even longer. " continued at http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$MO5SHXQAAECK5QFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2002/01/13/wtal213.xml&sSheet=/news/2002/01/13/ixnewstop.html

Happy Us. We KNOW when the war will end. How very peculiar!

More from the same article: Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, has won President Bush's backing for a sharp increase in military spending. Extra money will be allocated for more of the weapons that have proved useful in Afghanistan, such as unmanned surveillance and attack aircraft. The increased spending will continue whether or not Osama bin Laden is found soon. It follows signs that the Pentagon is wearying of the intense public interest in the hunt for the al-Qa'eda leader, and Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. John McCain, a senator and former chairman of the armed services committee, said on his return from a trip to the Afghan region that he felt frustrated that bin Laden was still at large. He added, however: "He's on the run now. I think he's a threat so long as he's alive, but it's a far different scenario than the one where he had sanctuary and was able to operate with a financial network and a network of terrorists throughout the world." After four weeks in which the Pentagon and the media were constantly on tenterhooks for the imminent capture of bin Laden, a change of tack ordered by Mr Rumsfeld has become evident. Officials say that they will no longer even hint at where they think he might be. There have also been reports of clashes between the Pentagon and the CIA over the quality of intelligence emanating from Afghanistan. Some military officials feared there was a "missed opportunity" when the Pentagon ordered US Central Command to rely on local Afghan forces rather than US troops to try to intercept and capture bin Laden after the assault on al-Qa'eda's Tora Bora mountain hideouts. Not only did bin Laden apparently escape, but so have a series of Taliban leaders over the past two weeks, almost certainly including Mullah Omar, raising questions about the competence or possible corruption of the Afghan forces. Although no politician is yet prepared to risk publicly differing with Mr Bush over the administration's handling of the war, some advisers fear that public patience over the failure to catch bin Laden will evaporate if the hunt drags on too long - or if there is a fresh terrorist attack on the US.

Osama bin Laden may be on the verge of winning a round, the Saudis are said to be on the verge of asking the Americans to leave Saudi Arabia: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64536-2002Jan17.html This was Bin Laden and Al Quaeda's aim, and it will vindicate Bin Laden to the Islamic world. I hate to see it take this turn. More later as I learn more.

US Envoy Plays Down Reports of Strains with Saudi January 18, 2002 09:34 AM ET Email this article Printer friendly version RIYADH (Reuters) - A senior U.S. envoy played down U.S. media reports of tensions with Saudi Arabia over the presence of American troops in the kingdom, an Arabic newspaper reported on Friday. "I did not come to the kingdom with any demand, instead I came as an ally and a friend," U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Lincoln Bloomfield told the London-based daily Al-Hayat. "Our cooperation is very important and is not only about (fighting) the terrorist al Qaeda organization but also for the sake of long-term regional security," he said. The New York Times reported this week that senior officials in Congress and at the Pentagon had called for the pullout of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia because of what they see as its tepid support for the U.S. war on terrorism and restrictions on U.S. military operations. Bloomfield said he had not discussed with Saudi officials the presence of U.S. troops at a Saudi air base, which an influential U.S. senator has said may have to end because of restrictions imposed on them by Saudi Arabia.

David Kline (dkline) Thu Jan 24 '02 (10:44) 63 lines I had lunch yesterday with the nephew of the legendary Afghan hero Abdul Haq, and it was rather interesting to hear his views on issues that have something to do with this discussion. First, a bit of background. Khushal Arsala is the son of Abdul Haq's brother. During the anti-Soviet war, the two brothers fought side by side and promised each other that if either died, the other would raise the deceassed's children as if they were his own. And that's what happenned -- Abdul Haq raised Arsala and his siblings as if they were his own kids. So as you might imagine, Arsala has enormous love and hero worship of Abdul Haq, who as you might recall was captured and executed by the Taliban only a few weeks before a sufficient critical mass of popular revolt started the Taliban crumbling. A sad irony, indeed. Anyway, Arsala spoke to two issues that have been very controversial here in the USA: the treatment of Guantanamo prisoners, and the bombing campaign in Afghanistan. On the first issue -- treatment of prisoners -- he said he could understand America's dilemma vis. a vis. the Geneva conventions and other legal issues. He had no real suggestions to offer. But he did want to stress, "in case you Americans forget," that by and large the people detained in Guantanamo are "beyond the pale" of anything "Americans are used to facing." They are relentless, he said, and "they will kill you at the first chance. You Americans are not used to people like this, people with no standard of decency and humanity such as you try to have." I guess his point was to be sympathetic to our dilemma, but to also remind us that we are afflicted with akind of naivete and "sense of fair play" that while important for us to maintain, may blind us to the utter and implacable hatred of our enemies. Point No. 2 concerned the bombing. Like his uncle Abdul Haq, Arsala opposed the US bombing campaign in Afghanistan. He totally supported our special forces teams working with the Northern Alliance and other opposition forces to oust the Taliban, but he felt much of the bombing, at least, did not serve to aid that effort but merely alienated some of the population owing to the civilian casualties that resulted. What about the continued bombing of suspected Al Queda positions in Paktia province? He said that we definitely had to go in there and kill those people, but by employing bombing, we ended up killing too many innocent civilians when ground action would accomplish the job without such civilian losses. Overall, though, he said that Afghans today overwhelmingly welcome the US presence in the country, but that this could change overnight if a) too many more civilians are killed; or b) we do not deliver immediate aid to help the country get back on its feet. "How much does it cost for one or two bombing missions?" he asked. "That money could provide salaries to thousands of civilservice employees." He also said: "I do not feel that by asking for American economic aid we are asking for charity. Thousands and thousands of our people died to battle first your enemy the Russians and now your enemy Al Queda. And we warned you year after year after year -- Abdul Haq warned you -- that the Taliban and Al Queda would attack America from their bases in Afghanistan. We asked you to help us defeat them, but you refused." The above is close to an exact quote. His views are pretty interesting, I think. . Great observations from Abdul Haq's son and David Kline.

This is some not good news. In fact, horrible news *if true*. Al Qaida moving into Gaza, may join fight against Israel ANKARA � Western diplomatic sources said Al Qaida insurgents have infiltrated the West Bank and Gaza Strip in an effort to determine whether the movement should make the Palestinian areas into their new home. The sources said Al Qaida appears to prefer the Gaza Strip over more distant locations such as Somalia. http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/breaking_7.html

The 'War on Terrorism', 'War on Terror' or 'Long War' can refer to several distinct conflicts, but it is most recently the name given by the United States of America and its allies[1] to an ongoing campaign with the stated goal of "ending international terrorism," launched in direct response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S., for which al-Qaeda claimed responsibility.[2][3][4] The campaign's stated goals include preventing those groups identified as "terrorist" by the United States[5] (largely focused on militant Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda and its affiliates) from carrying out attacks and posing a threat to America and its allies; "spreading freedom"[6] and liberal democracy; and putting an end to state sponsorship of terrorism in so-called rogue[7] and failed states,[8] beginning with Operation Active Endeavor, NATO's anti-terrorism response to the trafficking of weapons. It was followed with the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, which had sheltered elements of al Qaeda including its leader, Osama Bin Laden. The War on Terrorism was launched by U.S. President George W. Bush,[9] with support from NATO and other allies. The "War on Terror" has taken many forms, such as diplomacy, going after "terrorist financing",[10] domestic provisions aiming to prevent future attacks, and joint training and peacekeeping operations with a wide variety of nations. The phrase Global War on Terrorism (or GWOT)[11] [12] is the official name used by the U.S. military for operations designated as part of the campaign. Thus, the "War on Terror" as defined by this article is largely a military effort, and has been compared in both its unspecified, continuing duration and its multiple theaters of operation, to the Cold War.[13] The war is also characterized as an ideological struggle, "involving both a battle of arms and a battle of ideas,"[14] and some have characterized it as a "clash of civilizations".[15] Although the U.S.-led coalition that invaded Iraq in 2003 and toppled President Saddam Hussein was made up of allies in the "War on Terror",[16] the current Iraq war and its alleged links to the larger campaign against terrorism have been highly controversial. The Bush Administration has been accused of acting in violation of international law, human rights,[17] and the U.S. Constitution[18] in its execution of the campaign, particularly with regard to the internment of prisoners of war (or "illegal combatants") in its military prison at Guant�namo Bay, Cuba.[19] The U.S. government's articulation of military doctrines such as pre-emptive war and "regime change" as part of the War on Terror, as well as Bush and Blair's justifications for the war, have also been controversial. Both the larger concept of a "War on Terrorism", and the specific tactics used, have been subject to widespread criticism outside of the United States, and world opinion polls[20] have shown limited support even in some nations whose governments and militaries are supportive.[21] In addition, according to the U.S. government's own measures, international terrorist incidents have been on the rise[22] since the campaign began. However, the U.S. and allies have claimed victories, such as democratic elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the capture of alleged 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.[23] The War on Terrorism has resulted in high military casualties on both sides, as well as high civilian casualties, although very few United States civilians have been killed other than those who died on 9/11[24][25], and is a "long war" whose planners expect it to continue for the foreseeable future.[26] In December 2006, the British Foreign Office advised the government to stop using the phrase "War on Terror". A spokesperson for the department said the government wanted to "avoid reinforcing and giving succour to the terrorists' narrative by using language that, taken out of context, could be counter-productive".[27] Also, in December 2006, U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, as he prepared to end his tenure, expressed regret over the Bush Administration's use of the phrase "War on Terror", saying the phrase had created unattainable expectations and that "it's not a war on terror. Terror is a weapon of choice for extremists who are trying to destabilize regimes and impose their -- in the hands of a small group of clerics -- their dark vision on all the people that they can control."[28]

To explain the unanticipated free-fall collapses of the twin towers at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, mainstream experts (also see The American Professional Constructor, October 2004, pp. 12�18) offer a three-stage argument: 1) an airplane impact weakened each structure, 2) an intense fire thermally weakened structural components that may have suffered damage to fireproofing materials, causing buckling failures, which, in turn, 3) allowed the upper floors to pancake onto the floors below. Many will nod their head, OK, that does it and go back to watching the NBA finals or whatever, but I find this theory just about as satisfying as the fantastic conspiracy theory that "19 young Arabs acting at the behest of Islamist extremists headquartered in distant Afghanistan" caused 9/11. The government�s collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms, but its blinkered narrowness and lack of breadth is the paramount defect unshared by its principal scientific rival � controlled demolition. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapses of WTC 1 (North Tower), WTC 2 (South Tower), and the much-overlooked collapse of the 47-story WTC building 7 at 5:21 pm on that fateful day. The scientific controversy over the initial structural weakening has two parts: what caused the original tower damage and did that damage "severely" weaken the structures? Photos show a stable, motionless North Tower (WTC 1) after the damage suffered at 8:46 am and the South Tower after its 9:03 am impact. If we focus on the North Tower, close examination of photos reveals arguably "minor" rather than "severe" damage in the North Tower and its perimeter columns. As many as 45 exterior columns between floors 94 and 98 on the northeast (impact) side of the North Tower were fractured � separated from each other � yet there is no direct evidence of "severe" structural weakening. None of the upper sections of the broken perimeter columns visibly sags or buckles toward its counterpart column below. We can infer this because of the aluminum covers on the columns: each seam uniformly aligns properly across the Tower, forming a horizontal "dashed line" in the fa�ade from beveled end to end. Despite an impact hole, gaps in perimeter columns, and missing parts of floors 95�98 at the opening, the aluminum fa�ade shows no evidence of vertical displacement in the columns, suggestive of little or no wider floor buckling at the perimeter. The aluminum covers attached to the columns also aligned vertically after impact, that is, separated columns continued to visually remain "plumb" (true vertical), lining up top to bottom around the aperture, implying no perceptible horizontal displacement of the columns. Photographic evidence for the northeast side of the North Tower showed no wider secondary structural impact beyond the opening itself. Of course, there was smoke pouring out of the upper floors. The fact that perimeter columns were not displaced suggests that the floors did not buckle or sag. Despite missing parts of floors 95�98, photos show no buckling or sag on other floors. If so, that boosts the likelihood that there was little damage to the core. Photos do not document what happened within the interior/core and no one was allowed to inspect and preserve relevant rubble before government authorities � primarily FEMA � had it quickly removed. Eyewitness testimony by those who escaped from inside the North Tower concerning core damage probably is unavailable. Photos do not allow us to peer far into the interior of the building; in fact the hole is black, with no flames visible. We know that the structural core and its steel was incredibly strong (claimed 600% redundancy) making it unlikely that the core was "severely" damaged at impact. There were 47 core columns connected to each other by steel beams within an overall rectangular core floor area of approximately 87 feet x 137 feet (26.5 m x 41.8 m). Each column had a rectangular cross section of approximately 36" x 14" at the base (90 cm x 36 cm) with steel 4" thick all around (100 mm), tapering to �" (6 mm) thickness at the top. Each floor was also extremely strong (p. 26), a grid of steel, contrary to claims of a lightweight "truss" system. Those who support the official account like Thomas Eagar (p. 14), professor of materials engineering and engineering systems at MIT, usually argue that the collapse must be explained by the heat from the fires because the loss of loading-bearing capacity from the holes in the Towers was too small. The transfer of load would have been within the capacity of the towers. Since steel used in buildings must be able to bear five times its normal load, Eagar points out, the steel in the towers could have collapsed only if heated to the point where it "lost 80 percent of its strength, " around 1,300oF. Eagar believes that this is what happened, though the fires did not appear to be extensive and intense enough, quickly billowing black smoke and relatively few flames. While some experts claim that airliner impact severely weakened the entire structural system, evidence is lacking. The perimeters of floors 94�98 did not appear severely weakened, much less the entire structural system. The criminal code requires that crime scene evidence be saved for forensic analysis but FEMA had it destroyed before anyone could seriously investigate it. FEMA was in position to take command because it had arrived the day before the attacks at New York�s Pier 29 to conduct a war game exercise, "Tripod II," quite a coincidence. The authorities apparently considered the rubble quite valuable: New York City officials had every debris truck tracked on GPS and had one truck driver who took an unauthorized 1 � hour lunch fired. The preliminary NIST Response claims that "the wall section above the impact zone moved downward" (pdf, p. 36) on WTC 1 but offers no evidence. It offers photographic evidence, however, for a "hanging floor slab" on the 82d floor of the South Tower at 9:55 a.m. This looks minor though because there is no sag on adjacent floors and the integrity of the structure looks very much intact. The fire looks weak too, yet the South Tower collapsed only four minutes later. This would be quite a puzzle without a demolition theory. About a dozen of the fragmented ends of exterior columns in the North Tower hole were bent but the bends faced the "wrong way" because they pointed toward the outside of the Tower. This fact is troublesome for the official theory that a plane crash created the hole and subsequent explosion between floors 94 and 98. The laws of physics imply that a high-speed airplane with fuel-filled wings breaking through thin perimeter columns would deflect the shattered ends of the columns inward, if deflected in any direction, certainly not bend them outward toward the exterior. A possible response would be that, well, yes, an airliner crash would bend a column inward rather than outward, if bent at all, but the subsequent force of a jet fuel blast would act in the opposite direction: any inward bends caused by plane impact would straighten toward vertical or even reverse the bent steel columns toward the exterior under blast pressure. However, such a proposed steel "reversal theory" (first bend inward by collision, then bend outward by explosion) suffers two major handicaps: 1. No "inward-bending columns" were observed and it would be unlikely that each and every one would be reversed by subsequent explosion, and 2. the hypothesis is ad hoc and lacks simplicity, both scientific negatives. Occam�s razor would suggest that the outward bends in the perimeter columns were caused by explosions from inside the tower rather than bends caused by airliner impact from outside. Also supporting this theory is the fact that the uniformly neat ends of the blown perimeter columns are consistent with the linear shaped charges demolition experts use to slice steel as thick as 10 inches. The hypothesis of linear shaped charges also explains the perfectly formed crosses found in the rubble (crucifix-shaped fragments of core column structures), as well as the rather-neatly shorn steel everywhere. The engineering establishment�s theory has further difficulties. It is well-known that the hole in the west wing of the Pentagon, less than 18-foot diameter, was too small to accommodate a Boeing 757, but the North Tower�s hole wasn�t big enough for a Boeing 767 either, the alleged widebody airliner used on AA Flight 11 (officially tail number N334AA, FAA-listed as "destroyed"). A Boeing 767 has a wingspan of 155� 1" (47.6 m) yet the maximum distance across the hole in the North Tower was about 115 feet (35 m), a hole undersized by some 40 feet or 26 percent. "The last few feet at the tips of the wings did not even break through the exterior columns," comments Hufschmid (p. 27). But 20 feet on each wing? I�d call that a substantial difference, not "the last few feet," especially since aircraft impact holes tend to be three times the size of the aircraft, reflecting the fact that fuel-laden airliners flying into buildings send things smashing about in a big way. The small size of the holes in both towers cas s doubt on the airliner-impact hypothesis and favors professional demolition again. There were no reports of plane parts, especially wings, shorn off in the collision and bounced to the ground on the northeast side of the tower, to my knowledge, though FEMA reported a few small pieces to the south at Church street (pp. 68�9) and atop WTC-5 to the east of WTC-1. more at http://www.lewrockwell.com/reynolds/reynolds12.html

from http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Sep/16-241966.html The US State Department The Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers Allegation: 9/11 Revealed suggests that the collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) towers occurred because not the terrorists flew airliners filled with jet fuel into them, but because the towers were �pre-rigged with explosives.� Facts: The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) conducted an extremely thorough, three-year investigation into what caused the WTC twin towers to collapse, as explained on NIST�s WTC Web site. Some 200 staff reviewed tens of thousands of documents, interviewed more than one thousand people, reviewed 7,000 segments of video footage and 7,000 photographs, analyzed 236 pieces of steel from the wreckage, performed laboratory tests and sophisticated computer simulations of the sequence of events that occurred from the moment the aircraft struck the towers until they collapsed. Its conclusion is that the twin towers collapsed because the impact of the planes severed and damaged support columns and dislodged fireproofing insulation coating the steel floor trusses and steel columns, which meant that the subsequent fire, which reached 1000 degrees Celsius, weakened the floors and columns to the point where they bowed and buckled, causing the towers to collapse. NIST�s Draft Summary Report stated (pp. 171-172):

A documentary is being released about Phillipe Petit, who walked between the World Trade Centers on a high wire on August 7, 1974. "Man on Wire" it's called.

Saw it at the Tribeca Film Festival and hope to see it again this week, with Phillipe and the director, James Marsh, being interviewed by Dick Cavett after the film.