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NEWS FROM AFGHANISTAN
The incident occurred in Badakhshan province when German soldiers of NATO-led International Security Assistance Force [ISAF] photographed local women without asking for permission.
© Steve McCurry
“To protest unauthorized snap shots, a group of angry women and children who were returning from a wedding party hurled stones at the convoy of German soldiers in Faramughal village of Argo district last week, injuring two troopers,” Daily Cheragh reported.
Similar incidents had been reported in the insurgency-plaguing south and southeast provinces where the US-dominated coalition forces have been conducting anti-Taliban and al-Qaeda operations over the past three years.
Abdul Majid, governor of Badakhshan in talks with a 20-member delegation of the village assured such incident will not be repeated in the future.
The Independent Kabul Daily Cheragh
A fortnight later — an Afghan woman was stoned to death in Badakhshan.
MARLA RUZICKA IN AFGHANISTAN
RFE/RL correspondent Charles Recknagel met Ruzicka when she arrived in Kabul in 2001. Recknagel says that for anyone meeting Ruzicka for the first time, her optimism and youthful idealism belied what would later prove to be a pragmatic ability to mobilize large amounts of U.S. government assistance.
“In conflicts, ordinary citizens see and fear occupying armies. Sometimes their homes and lives are destroyed by fighting. Marla tried to help those civilians. In doing that, she showed the gentle side of her country. She was an American civilian who cared enough about other ordinary people to come thousands of miles to help them, and who successfully lobbied the U.S. Congress for money to directly help them too.”
FBI PROTECTS OSAMA BIN LADEN’S “RIGHT TO PRIVACY” IN DOCUMENT RELEASE
Judicial Watch has obtained documents through the Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] in which the FBI has invoked privacy right protections on behalf of al Qaeda terror leader Osama bin Laden. In a September 24, 2003 declassified Secret FBI report obtained by Judicial Watch, the FBI invoked Exemption 6 under FOIA law on behalf of bin Laden, which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton: “It is dumbfounding that the United States government has placed a higher priority on the supposed privacy rights of Osama bin Laden than the public’s right to know what happened in the days following the September 11 terrorist attacks. It is difficult for me to imagine a greater insult to the American people, especially those whose loved ones were murdered by bin Laden on that day.”
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Feb. 02, 2005 — Afghanistan has rejected proposals by a senior UN drug official that aid given to the war-ravaged country should be linked to the results it showed in fighting opium production.
War-scarred Afghanistan is the
world's largest producer of opium
The newly-created Afghan counter-narcotics ministry in Kabul said on Wednesday it had objected to a recent statement from the world body that created conditions for investment. The ministry statement attributed the UN suggestion to Antonio Maria Costa and ended “Afghanistan will not accept aid conditionality”.
Costa, a senior official from the UN Organisation for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said last week that international aid to Afghanistan should be made conditional on the country showing real results and progress in the fight against opium production.
RECENT DIARY —
Something Stinks About the Arrest of Noorzai
by BooMan Mon Apr 25th, 2005
DUTCH SPECIAL FORCES IN WAR ON TERROR
AMSTERDAM April 18, 2005 — The Netherlands is deploying 165 soldiers to the operation Enduring Freedom, which the US launched after the 11 September terrorist attacks in 2001, alongside US forces tracking terrorist operatives.
Defence Minister Henk Kamp was scheduled to attend the ceremony at the departure from Eindhoven’s airbase and give a short speech to the troops.
The Dutch commando unit will supply the largest number of troops, supplemented by special forces from the marine corps. The unit will be supported by 85 soldiers with the Chinook transport helicopter detachment.
Dutch F-16 at Baghram
AFGHAN DEMONSTRATIONS TEST WARLORDS-TURNED-ADMINISTRATORS
Demonstrations rocked two of Afghanistan’s five largest cities on March 7th — Kandahar in the south and Mazar-e Sharif in the north. According to a statement by the Afghan Interior Ministry on, Kandahar residents took to the streets in protest over “security issues and child kidnapping.” The demonstrations, in which people chanted slogans against the United States and in support of the ousted Taliban regime, must have had a deja vu effect in Kabul’s circles of power. After all, it was popular disgust with insecurity in Kandahar that propelled the Taliban onto the political scene in 1994.
EUROCORPS
Oui – Liberté – Egalité – Fraternité
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Will Afghani women ever attain their freedom to participate in society, developing their talents through education? Starting a career or open a shop?
Oui – Liberté – Egalité – Fraternité
the Afghans are an interesting people. They are extremely friendly, and gracious hosts, full of life…
…but there is a fierce and independent streak too. It will be hard for any government to change some of the long-held views about women.
It’s a shame, because Afghan women are so tough and resourceful that they are capable of really contributing to the improvement of conditions in Afghanistan.
</stereotypes>
If you haven’t read this, please click the link and read the whole thing. It can be a big help in understanding events in Afghanistan.
Kabul was a grim, monastic place in the days of the Taliban; today it’s a chaotic gathering point for every kind of prospector and carpetbagger. Foreign bidders vying for billions of dollars of telecoms, irrigation and construction contracts have sparked a property boom that has forced up rental prices in the Afghan capital to match those in London, Tokyo and Manhattan.
Four years ago, the Ministry of Vice and Virtue in Kabul was a tool of the Taliban inquisition, a drab office building where heretics were locked up for such crimes as humming a popular love song. Now it’s owned by an American entrepreneur who hopes its bitter associations won’t scare away his new friends.
Outside Kabul, Afghanistan is bleaker, its provinces more inaccessible and lawless, than it was under the Taliban. If anyone leaves town, they do so in convoys. Afghanistan is a place where it is easy for people to disappear and perilous for anyone to investigate their fate.
Even a seasoned aid agency such as Médécins Sans Frontières was forced to quit after five staff members were murdered last June. Only the 17,000-strong US forces, with their all-terrain Humvees and Apache attack helicopters, have the run of the land, and they have used the haze of fear and uncertainty that has engulfed the country to advance a draconian phase in the war against terror. Afghanistan has become the new Guantánamo Bay.
Washington likes to hold up Afghanistan as an exemplar of how a rogue regime can be replaced by democracy…
Meanwhile, human-rights activists and Afghan politicians have accused the US military of placing Afghanistan at the hub of a global system of detention centres where prisoners are held incommunicado and allegedly subjected to torture. The secrecy surrounding them prevents any real independent investigation of the allegations. “The detention system in Afghanistan exists entirely outside international norms, but it is only part of a far larger and more sinister jail network that we are only now beginning to understand,” Michael Posner, director of the US legal watchdog Human Rights First, told us….
Last November, a man from Gardez died of hypothermia in a US military jail. When his family were called to collect the body, they were given a $100 note for the taxi ride and no explanation. In scores more cases, people have simply disappeared.
Prisoner transports crisscross the country between a proliferating network of detention facilities. In addition to the camps in Gardez, there are thought to be US holding facilities in the cities of Khost, Asadabad and Jalalabad, as well as an official US detention centre in Kandahar, where the tough regime has been nicknamed “Camp Slappy” by former prisoners. There are 20 more facilities in outlying US compounds and fire bases that complement a major “collection centre” at Bagram air force base. The CIA has one facility at Bagram and another, known as the “Salt Pit”, in an abandoned brick factory north of Kabul. More than 1,500 prisoners from Afghanistan and many other countries are thought to be held in such jails, although no one knows for sure because the US military declines to comment…
Nader Nadery, of the Human Rights Commission, told us, “Afghanistan is being transformed into an enormous US jail. What we have here is a military strategy that has spawned serious human rights abuses, a system of which Afghanistan is but one part.” In the past 18 months, the commission has logged more than 800 allegations of human rights abuses committed by US troops.
The Afghan government privately shares Nadery’s fears. One minister, who asked not to be named, said, “Washington holds Afghanistan up to the world as a nascent democracy and yet the US military has deliberately kept us down, using our country to host a prison system that seems to be administered arbitrarily, indiscriminately and without accountability.”
What has been glimpsed in Afghanistan is a radical plan to replace Guantánamo Bay…
Guantánamo was suddenly bogged down in domestic lawsuits. It had lost its practicality. So a global prison network built up over the previous three years, beyond the reach of American and European judicial process, immediately began to pick up the slack. The process became explicit last week when the Pentagon announced that half of the 540 or so inmates at Guantánamo are to be transferred to prisons in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.
Since September 11 2001, one of the US’s chief strategies in its “war on terror” has been to imprison anyone considered a suspect on whatever grounds. To that end it commandeered foreign jails, built cellblocks at US military bases and established covert CIA facilities that can be located almost anywhere, from an apartment block to a shipping container. The network has no visible infrastructure – no prison rolls, visitor rosters, staff lists or complaints procedures. Terror suspects are being processed in Afghanistan and in dozens of facilities in Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Jordan, Egypt, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the British island of Diego Garcia in the southern Indian Ocean. Those detained are held incommunicado, without charge or trial, and frequently shuttled between jails in covert air transports, giving rise to the recently coined US military expression “ghost detainees”…
All the host countries are renowned for their poor human rights records, enabling interrogators (US soldiers, contractors and their local partners) to operate. We have obtained prisoner letters, declassified FBI files, legal depositions, witness statements and testimony from US and UK officials, which document the alleged methods deployed in Afghanistan – shackles, hoods, electrocution, whips, mock executions, sexual humiliation and starvation – and suggest they are practised across the network.
Former prisoners claim they were released only after naming names, coerced into making false confessions that led to the arrests of more people unconnected to terrorism, in a system of justice that owes more to Stanley Milgram’s Six Degrees Of Separation – where anyone can be linked to everyone else in the world in as many stages – than to analytical jurisprudence…
The US army came to Afghanistan as liberators and now are feared as governors, judges and jailers. How many US marines know what James Madison, an architect of the US constitution, wrote in 1788? Reflecting on the War of Independence in which Americans were arbitrarily arrested and detained without trial by British forces, Madison concluded that the “accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny”
link
That is one sick article – thanks for the link. I’ll be thinking about this the next time I pass a Support our Troops sticker. Our focus, which is poor, is on Iraq – since it is starting to be viewed as an unjust war – but Afghanistan nobody cares about.
I wonder how we have let our democracy get so out of hand. We vote on going to war – what the bloody hell does that have to do with us. People who could never understand how our weapons work, much less design or build so much as a sling shot, have control over a vast nuclear arsenal. A Greek tragedy or a Roman farce?