Taliban chop drivers' noses, ears in Afghanistan

[maddezmom]

Taliban chop drivers' noses, ears in Afghanistan
18 Mar 2007 07:05:56 GMT

ASADABAD, Afghanistan, March 18 (Reuters) - Taliban guerrillas chopped noses and ears of at least five truck drivers in eastern Afghanistan as punishment for transporting supplies to U.S.-led troops, officials and residents said on Sunday.

The drivers were part of a convoy headed for a coalition military base when they were attacked in the province of Nuristan on Saturday.

"The number of drivers who had their noses and ears cut varies, it is between five and eight," Ghulamullah, the police chief of Nuristan who uses only one name, said citing locals and officials in the area.

Several trucks were destroyed in the attack.

more:http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/ISL6437.htm

[tblue]

1. Speechless. There are no words.........

[rpannier]

2. Another stunning success of the scrub admin

If we had kept our focus this wouldn't have happened.
But not scrub.
In another example of snatching defeat from the jaws of success, we diverted significant resources from Afghanistan and went to Iraq.
We're losing in Iraq (and by losing, I mean the equivalent of the Indianapolis Colts playing a 9-man high school football team losing) and the fortunes of the Taliban are improving in Afghanistan.

As they say on the Stephanie Miller show, "Thank you president bush."

[oblivious]

3. It says "cut" and "chop" Do you suppose that means "cut off" as in 'removed'?

[sarcasmo]

4. These are some prehistoric fucks living in the middle east.

[BayCityProgressive]

5. There are many on the Right

who would and have done the same thing here in the US.

[youngdem]

8. Yeah, they should have attached electrodes to their genitals like our civilized soldiers did in Iraq

War is hell. Treason is cause for penalty of death. To the Taliban (who ruled the country before the invasion) these men are traitors aiding the enemy. They are lucky to not be killed outright.

I don't condone ANY of this shit, but to generalize about 'prehistoric fucks' in the Middle East seems unfair considering our own Army's official penalties for aiding the enemy in a time of war includes death.

[bobthedrummer]

15. A close cousin of mine served 2 tours in Vietnam in the USMC

he shared a lot of things with me including his ear necklaces. He committed suicide many years later.

[ck4829]

6. Hey, wasn't chopping off noses and ears something the Mujahideen did to captured Soviets?

I remember hearing that THEY did it too, interesting.

[papau]

7. But we liked the Mujahideen under Reagan/Cheney/Bush etc back then -and no doubt sold them the knife

n/t

[UpInArms]

9. REAGAN PRAISES FREEDOM FIGHTERS

http://www.iamawlodge1426.org/news68.htm

Between 1980-85 the CIA funds the recruitment and training of thousands of volunteers from three dozen Muslim countries to fight in Afghanistan. Among these "Afghan Arabs" is Osama bin Laden, heir to a Saudi construction fortune, as well as top officials from Islamic movements throughout the Middle East and Asia. Many of these fighters and groups later join to form the Al Qaeda network and turn against their former American and Saudi sponsors. President Reagan says that "The resistance of the Afghan freedom fighters is an example to all the world of the invincibility of the ideals we in this country hold most dear, the ideals of freedom and independence."

In 1985 the Reagan administration sharply escalates covert action in Afghanistan. Through the 1980s the US channels $2-3 billion in weapons and supplies through the CIA and ISI as part of the largest US covert action program since World War II. The Mujahideen enjoy widespread bipartisan support. Senator Orrin Hatch (Republican) praises these "freedom fighters" for their "determination and raw courage."

By 1987, the US is sending more than 65,000 tons of arms annually to the Mujahideen, especially Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the most ruthless and puritanical faction. CIA and Pentagon operatives help the ISI establish a network of schools in Pakistan and bases in Afghanistan to train the Mujahideen in secure communications, covert financial transactions, guerilla warfare, urban sabotage and heavy weapons. Mujahideen use of Stinger antiaircraft missiles helps turn the tide of war against the Soviets.

...more...

Who Is Osama Bin Laden?

In 1979 "the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA" was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in support of the pro-Communist government of Babrak Kamal.2:
With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan's ISI , who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan's fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad.3

The Islamic "jihad" was supported by the United States and Saudi Arabia with a significant part of the funding generated from the Golden Crescent drug trade:
In March 1985, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166,... authorize stepped-up covert military aid to the mujahideen, and it made clear that the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to defeat Soviet troops in Afghanistan through covert action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal. The new covert U.S. assistance began with a dramatic increase in arms supplies -- a steady rise to 65,000 tons annually by 1987, ... as well as a "ceaseless stream" of CIA and Pentagon specialists who traveled to the secret headquarters of Pakistan's ISI on the main road near Rawalpindi, Pakistan. There the CIA specialists met with Pakistani intelligence officers to help plan operations for the Afghan rebels.4

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) using Pakistan's military Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) played a key role in training the Mujahideen. In turn, the CIA sponsored guerrilla training was integrated with the teachings of Islam:
Predominant themes were that Islam was a complete socio-political ideology, that holy Islam was being violated by the atheistic Soviet troops, and that the Islamic people of Afghanistan should reassert their independence by overthrowing the leftist Afghan regime propped up by Moscow.5

[papau]

13. CIA using Pakistan's military Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) taught jihad Islam - and

now we wonder where they got their radical ideas.

[UpInArms]

14. Blowback - Chalmers Johnson

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011015/johnson

"Blowback" is a CIA term first used in March 1954 in a recently declassified report on the 1953 operation to overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. It is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of the US government's international activities that have been kept secret from the American people. The CIA's fears that there might ultimately be some blowback from its egregious interference in the affairs of Iran were well founded. Installing the Shah in power brought twenty-five years of tyranny and repression to the Iranian people and elicited the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution. The staff of the American embassy in Teheran was held hostage for more than a year. This misguided "covert operation" of the US government helped convince many capable people throughout the Islamic world that the United States was an implacable enemy.

The pattern has become all too familiar. Osama bin Laden, the leading suspect as mastermind behind the carnage of September 11, is no more (or less) "evil" than his fellow creations of our CIA: Manuel Noriega, former commander of the Panama Defense Forces until George Bush père in late 1989 invaded his country and kidnapped him, or Iraq's Saddam Hussein, whom we armed and backed so long as he was at war with Khomeini's Iran and whose people we have bombed and starved for a decade in an incompetent effort to get rid of him. These men were once listed as "assets" of our clandestine services organization.

Osama bin Laden joined our call for resistance to the Soviet Union's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and accepted our military training and equipment along with countless other mujahedeen "freedom fighters." It was only after the Russians bombed Afghanistan back into the stone age and suffered a Vietnam-like defeat, and we turned our backs on the death and destruction we had helped cause, that he turned against us. The last straw as far as bin Laden was concerned was that, after the Gulf War, we based "infidel" American troops in Saudi Arabia to prop up its decadent, fiercely authoritarian regime. Ever since, bin Laden has been attempting to bring the things the CIA taught him home to the teachers. On September 11, he appears to have returned to his deadly project with a vengeance.

There are today, ten years after the demise of the Soviet Union, some 800 Defense Department installations located in other countries. The people of the United States make up perhaps 4 percent of the world's population but consume 40 percent of its resources. They exercise hegemony over the world directly through overwhelming military might and indirectly through secretive organizations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. Though largely dominated by the US government, these are formally international organizations and therefore beyond Congressional oversight.

[Pavulon]

10. Guess they saw "Apocalypse Now",

the taliban is not the "insurgency" in Iraq.

[aquart]

11. Charmers.

[ShortnFiery]

12. When I lived in Singapore during 1964, there was a revolt where

supposed "communists" broke into a school four miles away from my "America's School" (for Brit and UK contractor's kids), chopped off four teachers heads and displayed them on sticks in front of the school's entrance. :scared:

Ding! Terrorism is used because it works. All family members of contractors were spirited out of the country after martial law was lifted six weeks later. I was only six years old at the time, but I remember everyone being "very tense" within our compound during those six weeks of martial law.

Terrorists will do anything to glean attention and they have been doing it since the beginning of time. Declaring WAR on "a tactic" is another stellar example of the stereotypic "Clueless Ugly American." :shrug:

[Odin2005]

16. This BS wouldn't be happening if we had concentrated of Afganistan...

...instead of *'s disastrous adventure in Iraq. The sad thing is that there are Christo-Fascist loonies in this countries who want to do things just like these barbarians.

[Kablooie]

17. Boy, they really play to the archaic stereotype of Arabian justice.