Re:Globalisation for Greed
on
Globalization
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· Score: 1
thanks - interesting!
Re:Globalisation for Greed
on
Globalization
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· Score: 1
all this switching around can get complicated. one of my 'favourite' examples was from the angolan civil war (long ago, ask someone), in which you had oil refineries owned by western multinationals (such as gulf) being defended by cuban troops from attacks by apartheid south african (i.e. western backed) guerrilas.
NATO funding & Taliban ...
on
Globalization
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· Score: 1
There was a piece in the NY Times by a Tim Weiner a while back which is now archived and costs a fee, but which is also available here.
Here's an excerpt:
The Afghan resistance was backed by the intelligence services of the United States and Saudi Arabia with nearly $6 billion worth of weapons. And the territory targeted last week, a set of six encampments around Khost, where the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden has financed a kind of "terrorist university," in the words of a senior United States intelligence official, is well known to the Central Intelligence Agency.
The C.I.A.'s military and financial support for the Afghan rebels indirectly helped build the camps that the United States attacked. And some of the same warriors who fought the Soviets with the C.I.A.'s help are now fighting under Mr. bin Laden's banner.
From those same camps, the Afghan rebels, known as mujahedeen, or holy warriors, kept up a decadelong siege on the Soviet-supported garrison town of Khost.
This was written in 1998.
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it (as somebody once said...).
... we'll probably just have to leave it (cool phones) to Japan, like all the other ideas originally assumed to be dumb in the west (walkmans, robot dogs, etc).
'Sfunny, though, I would have thought that NN, with his cyberbooster past, would have been all over this. Maybe he's just getting to old to use a mobile phone. He probably can't cope with the buttons. The article says that he wears his reading glasses in restaurants so that he can see what he is eating.
According to this story on CNET, anyway. Here's a taster:
Slashdot sees revenue in ads, fees
By Gwendolyn Mariano
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
October 25, 2001, 12:30 p.m. PT
Slashdot.org, the "news for nerds" Web site popular among software developers and Linux fans, said this week that it plans to use larger ads and offer a subscription service.
When Slashdot increases ad sizes, it plans to introduce a subscription service for people who want to pay for an ad-free version. Jeff Bates, who runs the site, said Thursday that Slashdot will launch the new ads and subscription service early next year. The cost of the service has yet to be determined.
"The larger ad formats are coming about really because, as Bob Dylan put it, 'The times, they are a'changing,'" Bates wrote in an e-mail interview. "While we'll still be mostly featuring the 468-by-60 banner, we're trying to work with our advertisers and see how we can work together. Rest assured though, we'll still be only having one ad per page."
The Direction of the shadow for the IWalk doesen't match the direction of the shadow for the pack of cigerettes.
ok how about at least 2 lioght sources. one light source just right outside the bottom right hand corner of the frame, pointing towards the apple key on the keyboard would account for:
the highlight on the right hand edge of the iWalk
the highlights on the bottom right hand edge of the keyboard
the very narrow shadow along the edge of the marlboros
the highlights on the vertical edges of the keys on the right hand side of the keyboard (light getting reflected back towards the camera lens).
can also think of lots of reasons why its fake too tho. you're right - it should be bigger. dang - why do these things always happen when i have a deadline?
it's potential groupware. that is, it is not just for individual users with photographs of their significant other in front of the golden gate bridge and a list of links to nhl franchises, but a wysiwyg editor that a group of people can use for building pages between them.
packages of templates can be customised for different corporations.
who has access to the pages, and who controls uploading, can be set through passwords or whatever.
at least in part, it's kind of lotusnotes hting for putting up collaborative group sites and nets, with the ability to specify retrieval of non-html resources that are then presented in html.
also, in the case of e-commerce:
The customer may then be presented with specific information via the company's Web site. For example, a specific price of merchandise may be displayed to an appropriate customer (e.g., a large volume buyer) and another price may be displayed to a different customer (e.g., a first time buyer).
... if you can afford the audiophile kit to make the difference in sound quality, you can afford to buy new cds...;) that way you get fun stuff, lyrics/history, artwork, etc. if this strikes you as being too much just chuck away the cases and inserts, paste blank labels with crummy clipart over the front of the cd, and keep 'em all in one of those case logic book.
seriously folks, most people listen to cds on equipment less than perfect, in conditions less than perfect (cars, diskmans, one of those refurbished flashing light disco tower things from circuit city). in this case the difference between burned and original cds is probably a lot less than the difference between the different things they get played on. i actually prefer lower sample rates for some things, in cars for instance it makes the music punchier over the white noise of road, engine, etc.
will? have! new age types in the u.k. believe that there is a huge diagram of the zodiac 10 miles across drawn around the town of glastonbury. glastonbury itself is a hub of various cosmic cultural activity, ufos, crystals, standing stomes, etc. the zodiac is supposed to be outlined by natural features, and lanes and hedges. it was 'discovered' in the 1930s by someone who claimed that it was originally king arthur's...
i thought that it was pretty interesting, but then again i used to live in some of the places they walked around (brighton -- a cool place). brighton's been settled for hundreds of years -- you can see the different parts of its growth in the different forms of street layouts.
now i live in colorado -- if you did it here, you'd just come up with graph paper, as all the streets are laid out in grids.
perhaps you can see people and streets and houses as information, and urban plans as the cultural algorithms (different in each place) that organise them?
right, in general. but a passport is no good for security purposes at the airport gate unless it (a) accurately identifies the person and then (b) accurately links that identification to a record of that person's activities. that's what ellison is after, some kind of universally identifiable 'boarding pass' to let people on planes. passports are neither, especially if the passport was obtained with false papers in the first place...
as the article notes, many of the recent hijackers were not u.s. citizens. they would not therefore have had i.d.s anyway.
this raises the possibility that all visitors to the u.s. will then also have to be issued with i.d.s. i guess they could be issued with along with visas before people come here, but many tourists do not need visas, and putting a bunch of lame bureacracy in the way will hit tourism. anyway anybody who's half together could just submit false papers to the consulate to get a false i.d. in the first place.
plus if the feds don't have anything on their database, an i.d. like this will not stop anybody getting on a plane.
ellison's missing the point. but plenty in washington will want to give his views an airing, i think.
a) forecasting weather will be thousands of times more accurate
b) they can run climate simulations for a thousand years in three days.
running climate models for 1000 years is not equivalent to predicting the weather for 1000 years.
where i live (colorado), we have climate (every day the same, hot and sunny in summer, cold and sunny in winter, with occasional precipitation). where i used to live, in u.k., we had weather (hot and sunny in the morning, arctic gales by 3 p.m.).
p.s. can we get rid of that flashing gif for planetharddrive.com please?
Re:FYI: Here's another one: NY Times, August 24 19
on
A New Kind of War
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· Score: 1
FYI: Here's another one: NY Times, August 24 1998
on
A New Kind of War
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· Score: 1
apologies if this has been posted eleswhere, but it's an interesting piece from three years ago - after clinton bombed sudan during the lewinski affair - that is still kind of relevant now.
Throughout the 1980's, the Soviet Union threw almost every weapon it had, short of nuclear bombs, at the Afghan camps attacked by the United States last week.
During their nine-year occupation of Afghanistan, the Soviets attacked the camps outside the town of Khost with Scud missiles, 500-pound bombs dropped from jets, barrages of artillery, flights of helicopter gunships and their crack special forces. The toughest Soviet commander in Afghanistan, Lieut. Gen. Boris Gromov, personally led the last assault.
But neither carpet bombing nor commandos drove the Afghan holy warriors from the mountains. Afghanistan has a long history of repelling superpowers. Its terrain favors defenders as well as any in the world, whether their opponents, like the Soviets, are trying to defeat them on the ground or whether, like the United States, they are trying to disperse, deter and disrupt them. It is uncertain that the United States, which fired dozens of million-dollar cruise missiles at those same camps on Thursday, can do better than the Soviets.
The camps, hidden in the steep mountains and mile-deep valleys of Paktia province, were the place where all seven ranking Afghan resistance leaders maintained underground headquarters, mountain redoubts and clandestine weapons stocks during their bitter and ultimately successful war against Soviet troops from December 1979 to February 1989, according to American intelligence veterans.
The Afghan resistance was backed by the intelligence services of the United States and Saudi Arabia with nearly $6 billion worth of weapons. And the territory targeted last week, a set of six encampments around Khost, where the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden has financed a kind of "terrorist university," in the words of a senior United States intelligence official, is well known to the Central Intelligence Agency.
The C.I.A.'s military and financial support for the Afghan rebels indirectly helped build the camps that the United States attacked. And some of the same warriors who fought the Soviets with the C.I.A.'s help are now fighting under Mr. bin Laden's banner.
From those same camps, the Afghan rebels, known as mujahedeen, or holy warriors, kept up a decadelong siege on the Soviet-supported garrison town of Khost.
Thousands of mujahedeen were dug into the mountains around Khost. Soviet accounts of the siege of Khost during 1988 referred to the rebel camps as "the last word in NATO engineering techniques." After a decade of fighting during which each side claimed to have killed thousands of the enemy, the Afghan rebels poured out of their encampments and took Khost.
"This was the most fiercely contested piece of real estate in the 10-year Afghan war," said Milt Bearden, who ran the C.I.A.'s side of the war from 1986 to 1989.
United States officials said their attack was intended to deter Mr. bin Laden, whom they call the financier and intellectual author of this month's bombings of two American embassies in Africa, which killed 263 people, including 12 Americans. They said the damage inflicted on the Khost camps was moderate to heavy.
But the communications infrastructure used by Mr. bin Laden is based on portable satellite telephones, not a centralized command-and-control system that can be destroyed with a missile, intelligence officials said. The strongest power that binds his loose-knit network of confederates is his money, which is hidden inside a thus-far impenetrable global maze.
And history does not favor superpowers trying to subdue men dug into the mountains of Afghanistan.
Mr. bin Laden has said he spent the 1980's supporting the mujahedeen from their political base in Peshawar, Pakistan, near the foot of the Khyber Pass. He was most strongly allied with the most fundamentalist leaders of the Afghan resistance, particularly Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the head of the group called the Islamic Party. After the fall of the Soviet-backed Government, Mr. Hekmatyar spent most of his brief tenure as Prime Minister hurling missiles and mortars at Kabul, trying to dislodge more moderate rebel leaders from power.
The more militant Afghan rebels, like Mr. Hekmatyar, denounced the United States and backed Iraq during the Persian Gulf war in 1991, as did Mr. bin Laden. A year after the Persian Gulf war, posters throughout eastern Afghanistan displayed heroic, if imaginary, portraits of Saddam Hussein and Mr. Hekmatyar standing side by side.
No amount of money or moral support could keep the veterans of the Afghan resistance from killing one another after the fall of Kabul. The chaos that their infighting created led to the rise of the Taliban, the militant armed religious party that now controls most of Afghanistan and harbors Mr. bin Laden.
In the nine years since the Soviet withdrawal, Afghan resistance veterans have hoarded the remaining weapons sent by the C.I.A. and set up military training centers at resistance camps like the one near Khost, according to United States officials. In those years, thousands of Islamic outcasts, radicals and visionaries from around the world came to the borderlands of Afghanistan to learn the lessons of war from the mujahedeen. Mr. bin Laden sponsored many of those foreigners.
In a 1994 interview, a commander loyal to Mr. Hekmatyar, Noor Amin, said that "the whole country is a university for jihad," or holy war.
"There are many formal training centers," Mr. Amin said. "We have had Egyptians, Sudanese, Arabs and other foreigners trained here as assassins." United States officials said the former mujahedeen camps it attacked on Thursday were precisely that kind of "university for jihad."
Mr. bin Laden, stripped of his Saudi citizenship and formally stateless, returned to the anarchy of Afghanistan in 1996 from the Sudan, where United States intelligence analysts believe he built at least three training camps for veterans of the Afghan war.
He said in an interview with CNN last year that one of his main missions during the war, which he helped finance with millions of dollars of his own money, was to transport bulldozers, front-end loaders and other heavy equipment to Pakistan to help build tunnels, military depots and roads inside Afghanistan for the mujahedeen.
It is unclear whether Mr. bin Laden, who inherited about $250 million from a fortune his father made building mosques, palaces and public works for the Saudi royal family, personally helped build the Khost camps during the war against the Soviets, or has substantially upgraded them since returning to the mountains of Afghanistan.
[(c) 'N.Y.Times', 1998, Reprinted for Fair Use Only]
imho, people being protected (by authorities who claim to know better than them) from any form of information that might cause them to pause and think about the current situation, is partly what got us into this mess in the first place.
i was replying to an earlier post, who said that the number of people who died in the sudan bombing was far less than the number who died in the wtc (and therefore the bombing of sudan was not as bad?).
i was replying by giving an an example of someone who also massacred thousands of civilians. in this case, though, the perpetrator, being supported by the u.s., was not subject to sanction.
sure, i condemn the legacy of colonialism left behind by the europeans. i also condemn the colonialism now being practiced by the u.s. do you?
i also condemn vicious governments and armies, worldwide, anywhere. this includes the taliban, syria, the russian federation. and also israel. do you?
ok so these are uncomfortable facts for the u.s. but running around with your eyes shut and hands over your ears is not a way to resolve the situation. bush's rhetoric of a christian holy war might seem attractive in the short run, but the shit he's flinging will come back and hit the fan at some point.
to try and understand the situation and deal with it, you have to understand history. for instance, you do know of course that many of the weapons floating around afghanistan were originally provided by the cia? and what happened to them? are you sure, for instance, that all the stinger anti-aircraft missiles have been accounted for and that none have made their way to the u.s. to be used after a bombing attack on kabul?
in 1982 up to 4000 civilian refugees were massacred by lebanese militia at the sabra and chatila refugee camps in lebanon. they died just as horrible deaths as the people at wtc, pentagon, etc. basically, the israeli army sealed off the camps and then let the militia in to kill everybody.
according to an israeli government commission of inquiry (the kahan commission):
The Commission determined that the massacre at Sabra and Shatilla was carried out by a Phalangist unit, acting on its own but its entry was known to Israel... the Commission asserted that... Mr. Sharon was found responsible for ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge when he approved the entry of the Phalangists into the camps as well as not taking appropriate measures to prevent bloodshed.
On another note, i'm curious as to whether anyone knows if there is a significant difference in the quality of living between people living under Taliban rule and those living in northern Afghanistan.
there's been a significance difference in the quality of life of all people in afghanistan since the ussr and usa decided to fight out the cold war there.
narrowly, as far as i know (from watching bbc streams), pakistan has agreed only to the terms of a u.n. security council resolution. although i don't know what this says it is unlikely to be a complete rubber stamp of u.s. wishes. thus overflies and/or use of pakistan air basese are probably allowed. launching a ground invasion, like desert storm is probably not, (yet).
but i think the more general point of the piece -- that obl wants to provoke massive retaliation as a prequel to more moves on his part -- is worth considering.
taking into account the highly complex and sophisticated nature of the plot so far -- one that has been years in the planning, apparently -- it would be foolish to not at least entertain the notion that provoking retaliation isn't part of the wider game plan.
An Afghan-American speaks
You can't bomb us back into the Stone Age. We're already there. But you can start a new world war, and that's exactly what Osama bin Laden wants.
here's a concrete example altho i do not know if it was discussed here.
in the fall of 2000, toysmart, an online toy retailer partly owned by the walt disney corporation, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, and announced that it was including its customer data base as one of the assets to be liquidated. disney had injected $45 million into toysmart but finally pulled the plug in may 2000, and shortly after toysmart filed for bankruptcy.
it then emerged that toysmart considered its database of customer information to be a liquidisable asset, that it would sell, in effect, to the highest 'trustworthy' bidder.
the federal trade commission disagreed with toysmart, and for a while considered blocking the sale, before finally allowing it to proceed under restricted conditions. notably, these conditions did not include any obligation on the part of toysmart's creditors to either inform or obtain permission from toysmart's customers. in the end, the data did not provoke a bidding frenzy: the highest offer had come from disney itself ($50,000), with the next highest offer being $15,000 from a market research firm in maine.
for more info search google, cnet, etc., with relevant terms.
considering that the internet can be seen as a complex system (in the sense of complexity theory) it would not be surprising if maps of it did not also exhibit some fractal structure.
Slashdot Mirror
thanks - interesting!
all this switching around can get complicated. one of my 'favourite' examples was from the angolan civil war (long ago, ask someone), in which you had oil refineries owned by western multinationals (such as gulf) being defended by cuban troops from attacks by apartheid south african (i.e. western backed) guerrilas.
Here's an excerpt:
The Afghan resistance was backed by the intelligence services of the United States and Saudi Arabia with nearly $6 billion worth of weapons. And the territory targeted last week, a set of six encampments around Khost, where the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden has financed a kind of "terrorist university," in the words of a senior United States intelligence official, is well known to the Central Intelligence Agency.
The C.I.A.'s military and financial support for the Afghan rebels indirectly helped build the camps that the United States attacked. And some of the same warriors who fought the Soviets with the C.I.A.'s help are now fighting under Mr. bin Laden's banner.
From those same camps, the Afghan rebels, known as mujahedeen, or holy warriors, kept up a decadelong siege on the Soviet-supported garrison town of Khost.
This was written in 1998.
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it (as somebody once said ...).
'Sfunny, though, I would have thought that NN, with his cyberbooster past, would have been all over this. Maybe he's just getting to old to use a mobile phone. He probably can't cope with the buttons. The article says that he wears his reading glasses in restaurants so that he can see what he is eating.
Slashdot sees revenue in ads, fees
By Gwendolyn Mariano
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
October 25, 2001, 12:30 p.m. PT
Slashdot.org, the "news for nerds" Web site popular among software developers and Linux fans, said this week that it plans to use larger ads and offer a subscription service.
When Slashdot increases ad sizes, it plans to introduce a subscription service for people who want to pay for an ad-free version. Jeff Bates, who runs the site, said Thursday that Slashdot will launch the new ads and subscription service early next year. The cost of the service has yet to be determined.
"The larger ad formats are coming about really because, as Bob Dylan put it, 'The times, they are a'changing,'" Bates wrote in an e-mail interview. "While we'll still be mostly featuring the 468-by-60 banner, we're trying to work with our advertisers and see how we can work together. Rest assured though, we'll still be only having one ad per page."
ok how about at least 2 lioght sources. one light source just right outside the bottom right hand corner of the frame, pointing towards the apple key on the keyboard would account for:
can also think of lots of reasons why its fake too tho. you're right - it should be bigger. dang - why do these things always happen when i have a deadline?
packages of templates can be customised for different corporations.
who has access to the pages, and who controls uploading, can be set through passwords or whatever.
at least in part, it's kind of lotusnotes hting for putting up collaborative group sites and nets, with the ability to specify retrieval of non-html resources that are then presented in html.
also, in the case of e-commerce:
The customer may then be presented with specific information via the company's Web site. For example, a specific price of merchandise may be displayed to an appropriate customer (e.g., a large volume buyer) and another price may be displayed to a different customer (e.g., a first time buyer).
maybe jeff bezos read this, no?
search google images for steganography will point you towards some more demo'd stegos.
seriously folks, most people listen to cds on equipment less than perfect, in conditions less than perfect (cars, diskmans, one of those refurbished flashing light disco tower things from circuit city). in this case the difference between burned and original cds is probably a lot less than the difference between the different things they get played on. i actually prefer lower sample rates for some things, in cars for instance it makes the music punchier over the white noise of road, engine, etc.
search google for glastonbury zodiac.
now i live in colorado -- if you did it here, you'd just come up with graph paper, as all the streets are laid out in grids.
perhaps you can see people and streets and houses as information, and urban plans as the cultural algorithms (different in each place) that organise them?
oh ess eks dot eye?
can't wait (for example) for oh ess eks dot eye vee
right, in general. but a passport is no good for security purposes at the airport gate unless it (a) accurately identifies the person and then (b) accurately links that identification to a record of that person's activities. that's what ellison is after, some kind of universally identifiable 'boarding pass' to let people on planes. passports are neither, especially if the passport was obtained with false papers in the first place ...
this raises the possibility that all visitors to the u.s. will then also have to be issued with i.d.s. i guess they could be issued with along with visas before people come here, but many tourists do not need visas, and putting a bunch of lame bureacracy in the way will hit tourism. anyway anybody who's half together could just submit false papers to the consulate to get a false i.d. in the first place.
plus if the feds don't have anything on their database, an i.d. like this will not stop anybody getting on a plane.
ellison's missing the point. but plenty in washington will want to give his views an airing, i think.
a) forecasting weather will be thousands of times more accurate
b) they can run climate simulations for a thousand years in three days.
running climate models for 1000 years is not equivalent to predicting the weather for 1000 years.
where i live (colorado), we have climate (every day the same, hot and sunny in summer, cold and sunny in winter, with occasional precipitation). where i used to live, in u.k., we had weather (hot and sunny in the morning, arctic gales by 3 p.m.).
p.s. can we get rid of that flashing gif for planetharddrive.com please?
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/docs/camps.htm
it's also posted at http://emperors-clothes.com/docs/camps1.htm
btw note the use of "mr. bin laden" ;)
--+
Afghan Taliban Camps Were Built by NATO
The New York Times August 24, 1998
By TIM WEINER
- WASHINGTON, Aug. 23
Throughout the 1980's, the Soviet Union threw almost every weapon it had, short of nuclear bombs, at the Afghan camps attacked by the United States last week.
During their nine-year occupation of Afghanistan, the Soviets attacked the camps outside the town of Khost with Scud missiles, 500-pound bombs dropped from jets, barrages of artillery, flights of helicopter gunships and their crack special forces. The toughest Soviet commander in Afghanistan, Lieut. Gen. Boris Gromov, personally led the last assault.
But neither carpet bombing nor commandos drove the Afghan holy warriors from the mountains. Afghanistan has a long history of repelling superpowers. Its terrain favors defenders as well as any in the world, whether their opponents, like the Soviets, are trying to defeat them on the ground or whether, like the United States, they are trying to disperse, deter and disrupt them. It is uncertain that the United States, which fired dozens of million-dollar cruise missiles at those same camps on Thursday, can do better than the Soviets.
The camps, hidden in the steep mountains and mile-deep valleys of Paktia province, were the place where all seven ranking Afghan resistance leaders maintained underground headquarters, mountain redoubts and clandestine weapons stocks during their bitter and ultimately successful war against Soviet troops from December 1979 to February 1989, according to American intelligence veterans.
The Afghan resistance was backed by the intelligence services of the United States and Saudi Arabia with nearly $6 billion worth of weapons. And the territory targeted last week, a set of six encampments around Khost, where the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden has financed a kind of "terrorist university," in the words of a senior United States intelligence official, is well known to the Central Intelligence Agency.
The C.I.A.'s military and financial support for the Afghan rebels indirectly helped build the camps that the United States attacked. And some of the same warriors who fought the Soviets with the C.I.A.'s help are now fighting under Mr. bin Laden's banner.
From those same camps, the Afghan rebels, known as mujahedeen, or holy warriors, kept up a decadelong siege on the Soviet-supported garrison town of Khost.
Thousands of mujahedeen were dug into the mountains around Khost. Soviet accounts of the siege of Khost during 1988 referred to the rebel camps as "the last word in NATO engineering techniques." After a decade of fighting during which each side claimed to have killed thousands of the enemy, the Afghan rebels poured out of their encampments and took Khost.
"This was the most fiercely contested piece of real estate in the 10-year Afghan war," said Milt Bearden, who ran the C.I.A.'s side of the war from 1986 to 1989.
United States officials said their attack was intended to deter Mr. bin Laden, whom they call the financier and intellectual author of this month's bombings of two American embassies in Africa, which killed 263 people, including 12 Americans. They said the damage inflicted on the Khost camps was moderate to heavy.
But the communications infrastructure used by Mr. bin Laden is based on portable satellite telephones, not a centralized command-and-control system that can be destroyed with a missile, intelligence officials said. The strongest power that binds his loose-knit network of confederates is his money, which is hidden inside a thus-far impenetrable global maze.
And history does not favor superpowers trying to subdue men dug into the mountains of Afghanistan.
Mr. bin Laden has said he spent the 1980's supporting the mujahedeen from their political base in Peshawar, Pakistan, near the foot of the Khyber Pass. He was most strongly allied with the most fundamentalist leaders of the Afghan resistance, particularly Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the head of the group called the Islamic Party. After the fall of the Soviet-backed Government, Mr. Hekmatyar spent most of his brief tenure as Prime Minister hurling missiles and mortars at Kabul, trying to dislodge more moderate rebel leaders from power.
The more militant Afghan rebels, like Mr. Hekmatyar, denounced the United States and backed Iraq during the Persian Gulf war in 1991, as did Mr. bin Laden. A year after the Persian Gulf war, posters throughout eastern Afghanistan displayed heroic, if imaginary, portraits of Saddam Hussein and Mr. Hekmatyar standing side by side.
No amount of money or moral support could keep the veterans of the Afghan resistance from killing one another after the fall of Kabul. The chaos that their infighting created led to the rise of the Taliban, the militant armed religious party that now controls most of Afghanistan and harbors Mr. bin Laden.
In the nine years since the Soviet withdrawal, Afghan resistance veterans have hoarded the remaining weapons sent by the C.I.A. and set up military training centers at resistance camps like the one near Khost, according to United States officials. In those years, thousands of Islamic outcasts, radicals and visionaries from around the world came to the borderlands of Afghanistan to learn the lessons of war from the mujahedeen. Mr. bin Laden sponsored many of those foreigners.
In a 1994 interview, a commander loyal to Mr. Hekmatyar, Noor Amin, said that "the whole country is a university for jihad," or holy war.
"There are many formal training centers," Mr. Amin said. "We have had Egyptians, Sudanese, Arabs and other foreigners trained here as assassins." United States officials said the former mujahedeen camps it attacked on Thursday were precisely that kind of "university for jihad."
Mr. bin Laden, stripped of his Saudi citizenship and formally stateless, returned to the anarchy of Afghanistan in 1996 from the Sudan, where United States intelligence analysts believe he built at least three training camps for veterans of the Afghan war.
He said in an interview with CNN last year that one of his main missions during the war, which he helped finance with millions of dollars of his own money, was to transport bulldozers, front-end loaders and other heavy equipment to Pakistan to help build tunnels, military depots and roads inside Afghanistan for the mujahedeen.
It is unclear whether Mr. bin Laden, who inherited about $250 million from a fortune his father made building mosques, palaces and public works for the Saudi royal family, personally helped build the Khost camps during the war against the Soviets, or has substantially upgraded them since returning to the mountains of Afghanistan.
[(c) 'N.Y.Times', 1998, Reprinted for Fair Use Only]
imho, people being protected (by authorities who claim to know better than them) from any form of information that might cause them to pause and think about the current situation, is partly what got us into this mess in the first place.
i was replying to an earlier post, who said that the number of people who died in the sudan bombing was far less than the number who died in the wtc (and therefore the bombing of sudan was not as bad?).
i was replying by giving an an example of someone who also massacred thousands of civilians. in this case, though, the perpetrator, being supported by the u.s., was not subject to sanction.
sure, i condemn the legacy of colonialism left behind by the europeans. i also condemn the colonialism now being practiced by the u.s. do you?
i also condemn vicious governments and armies, worldwide, anywhere. this includes the taliban, syria, the russian federation. and also israel. do you?
ok so these are uncomfortable facts for the u.s. but running around with your eyes shut and hands over your ears is not a way to resolve the situation. bush's rhetoric of a christian holy war might seem attractive in the short run, but the shit he's flinging will come back and hit the fan at some point.
to try and understand the situation and deal with it, you have to understand history. for instance, you do know of course that many of the weapons floating around afghanistan were originally provided by the cia? and what happened to them? are you sure, for instance, that all the stinger anti-aircraft missiles have been accounted for and that none have made their way to the u.s. to be used after a bombing attack on kabul?
for an account of the massacre in the independent nespaper (u.k.), see: http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=54872 .
according to an israeli government commission of inquiry (the kahan commission):
The Commission determined that the massacre at Sabra and Shatilla was carried out by a Phalangist unit, acting on its own but its entry was known to Israel ... the Commission asserted that ... Mr. Sharon was found responsible for ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge when he approved the entry of the Phalangists into the camps as well as not taking appropriate measures to prevent bloodshed.
the report is archived at the jewish virtual library at us-israel.org http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/History/kahan.htm l.
pretty much on the anniversary of the massacre, sharon, protected by by israeli soldiers, visited a shrine in jerusalem contested by arabs and jews.
now sharon is prime minister of israel.
there's been a significance difference in the quality of life of all people in afghanistan since the ussr and usa decided to fight out the cold war there.
narrowly, as far as i know (from watching bbc streams), pakistan has agreed only to the terms of a u.n. security council resolution. although i don't know what this says it is unlikely to be a complete rubber stamp of u.s. wishes. thus overflies and/or use of pakistan air basese are probably allowed. launching a ground invasion, like desert storm is probably not, (yet).
but i think the more general point of the piece -- that obl wants to provoke massive retaliation as a prequel to more moves on his part -- is worth considering.
taking into account the highly complex and sophisticated nature of the plot so far -- one that has been years in the planning, apparently -- it would be foolish to not at least entertain the notion that provoking retaliation isn't part of the wider game plan.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/09/14/afgha nistan/index.html.
here's the lead:
An Afghan-American speaks
You can't bomb us back into the Stone Age. We're already there. But you can start a new world war, and that's exactly what Osama bin Laden wants.
By Tamim Ansary
in the fall of 2000, toysmart, an online toy retailer partly owned by the walt disney corporation, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, and announced that it was including its customer data base as one of the assets to be liquidated. disney had injected $45 million into toysmart but finally pulled the plug in may 2000, and shortly after toysmart filed for bankruptcy.
it then emerged that toysmart considered its database of customer information to be a liquidisable asset, that it would sell, in effect, to the highest 'trustworthy' bidder.
the federal trade commission disagreed with toysmart, and for a while considered blocking the sale, before finally allowing it to proceed under restricted conditions. notably, these conditions did not include any obligation on the part of toysmart's creditors to either inform or obtain permission from toysmart's customers. in the end, the data did not provoke a bidding frenzy: the highest offer had come from disney itself ($50,000), with the next highest offer being $15,000 from a market research firm in maine.
for more info search google, cnet, etc., with relevant terms.
for some interesting stuff on complex internet structure, see xerox parc's 'internet ecologies' area at http://www.parc.xerox.com/istl/groups/iea/.