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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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 Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 5:19 am Post subject: Eric Margolis Taliban and Bin Laden Apologist |
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I have been waiting to get this F*ck for a while.
Eric Margolis
Foreign Correspondent / Defense Analyst & Columnist
Archives
Biography
Contact Info.
Publications
� 2007 Eric Margolis
Archives > December 03, 2000
THE US-RUSSIAN CRUSADE AGAINST OSAMA BIN LADEN
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THE US-RUSSIAN CRUSADE AGAINST OSAMA BIN LADEN
NEW YORK - The United States and Russia may soon launch a joint military assault against Islamic militant, Osama Bin Laden, and against the leadership of Taliban, Afghanistan�s de facto ruling movement.
Such an attack would probably include US Delta Force and Navy Seals, who would join up with Russia�s elite Spetsnaz and Alpha commandos in Tajikistan, the Central Asian state where Russian has military bases and 25,000 troops. The combined forces would be lifted by helicopters, and backed by air support, deep into neighboring Afghanistan to attack Bin Laden�s fortified base in the Hindu Kush mountains.
How well such an raid would succeed remains in question: US special forces have had a dismal record of fiascos over the past quarter century. Russia�s special forces, though more capable than similar American units, experienced some success but also many failure in the Afghan War. Assassinating irksome Third Worlders is the specialty of Britain�s very able and very deadly SAS commandos.
In such an attack, the US would also launch cruise missile attacks, and Russia air strikes, would pound Afghan government installations and communications to punish Taliban.
The United States blames Bin Laden for the 1998 bombing of US embassies in East Africa, and the October bombing of destroyer �USS Cole� in Yemen. Washington accuses the shadowy Saudi, who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, of masterminding world anti-American terrorism. Bin Laden tops the FBI�s �Ten Most Wanted� list with a US $5 million price on his head.
Russia accuses Bin Laden and Taliban of aiding resistance forces in Chechnya, whose forgotten people continue to battle Russian colonial rule. Moscow also fears Taliban threatens the Russian - backed communist dictators - or �Red Sultans� - of Central Asia. Russia is determined to avenge its defeat in Afghanistan, and regain control of this vast, resource-rich region.
Washington recently joined the �Shanghai Five,� an unofficial pact between Russia, China, and three Central Asian states to combat �Islamic terrorism� - meaning the region�s anti-communist Islamic independence movements. The US agreed to share intelligence with them and provide some funding for the crusade against Islamic insurgents.
The Clinton Administration�s anti-Muslim alliance with Russia is strategically wrong and morally disgraceful. Leading human rights groups are condemning Russia for war crimes and mass murder in Chechnya, widespread torture, rape, looting, collective punishment, and operating concentration camps. Russia has killed some 140,000 Chechen civilians to date and covered that nations with millions of anti-personnel mines.
America has no business colluding with the perpetrator of these crimes, nor with China�s brutal repression of Sinkiang Muslims, nor aiding pro-Moscow police states in Central Asia. All of Washington�s new �friends� in the anti-Islamic crusade are major violators of human rights.
America has a better case against Bin Laden, who proclaimed jihad, or holy struggle, to �liberate Arabia and Palestine from American rule.� He may have been behind the terrorist bombings in East Africa; perhaps, too, of the �USS Cole.� But Washington has to date shown no real proof, only leaks and claims by dubious �anti-terrorism experts.�
Old comrades from the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan who know Bin Laden, tell me the US has blown him out of all proportion into a mythical caricature, the latest of long list of Muslim boogemen beginning with the 19th-Cerntury �Mad Mullah.� Bin Laden�s alleged attacks may have actually been done by other Saudi extremists of the Wahabi sect.
Afghanistan�s Taliban refuses Washington�s demands to hand Bin Laden, a hero to many Muslims, until the US shows proof of his crimes , which it has not. When Bin Laden and other mujihadin battled heroically against the Russians in Afghanistan, the US hailed them as �freedom fighters.� But when these �jihadis� called for liberation of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf from US domination, they were branded �Islamic terrorists.� In 1998, the Clinton Administration showered cruise missiles on guerilla camps in Afghanistan and an innocuous drug plant in Sudan, killing over 100 civilians and fighters.
The US engineered a punishing Iraq-style embargo of war-ravaged Afghanistan at a time when many of its 18 million people are starving and homeless. Though Taliban controls 95% of the country, the US refuses to recognize or aid the Islamic regime. Washington and the US media have launched a fierce propaganda campaign against Taliban, accusing it of encouraging the opium trade, harboring �terrorists,� and abusing women. The woman�s issue has resonated loudly in the west, particularly on college campuses.
All the women�s groups now shrilly lamenting that Afghan women must go veiled were silent when the Soviets slaughtered close to 2 million Afghans - half women �from 1979-1989; silent about 500,000 Afghans maimed by Soviet mines since then; silent about thousands of women raped during the post-war anarchy before Taliban restored internal order.
Taliban is battling the opposition Northern Alliance in the northeast corner of Afghanistan bordering Tajikistan. The Alliance commander, Ahmad Massoud, is a long-time collaborator with the Russians. His cornered forces are being increasingly aided by Russian arms, pilots, artillery, air support, as well as covert help from Iran, India and, likely, the US - all of them fueling the decade-old Afghan civil war.
The Clinton Administration, which shamefully financed Russia�s massacre of the Muslim Chechen, is now actually helping Russia re-enter Afghanistan, an act of dazzling geopolitical folly that will endanger Pakistan and further convince the Muslim world that the United States is its sworn enemy. American money now pays for the killing of Palestinians in the Mideast, the slaughter of the Chechen, the death of 500,000 Iraqi children(UN figures, not mine),and now the punishment of ravaged Afghanistan - all this under the banner of a war against terrorism.
Instead of trying to overthrow Taliban, which will surely pave the way for a second Russian occupation of Afghanistan, the US and its allies should recognize Taliban as the legitimate Afghan government, and work with Kabul to curtail the opium trade, which is currently beyond anyone�s control in a nation that is starving and desperate.
The west may not like the fierce Taliban, but it is the legitimate government of Afghanistan and the only power holding that nation together. Taliban is also only force blocking Russia�s plans to restore its former rule in Central Asia, and to reoccupy strategic Afghanistan. |
http://www.ericmargolis.com/archives/2000/12/the_usrussian_c.php
Last edited by Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee on Mon Aug 27, 2007 7:11 am; edited 1 time in total |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 6:41 am Post subject: |
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I have been waiting to get this F*ck for a while.
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I like Eric Margolis, and I've been reading his column for over twenty years now. He's an old style Cold War conservative but doesn't buy into the whole neo-con analysis of the Middle East.
If you read the column posted, you'll see the Cold War, anti-Soviet angle of Margolis' thinking. |
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thepeel
Joined: 08 Aug 2004
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| Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 6:49 am Post subject: |
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Em opposed the war in Iraq the whole way. I've gone back through his archives and read his stuff leading up to March, 2003. He called it all. Right down to the quagmire. The man deserves serious respect.
But I don't see the point of printing this article now. A better choice would be
http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Margolis_Eric/2007/07/22/4359095.html
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Fears are growing the U.S. may be planning to attack Pakistan's "autonomous" tribal region bordering Afghanistan.
The Bush administration is ready to lash out at old ally Pakistan, which Washington now blames for its humiliating failures to crush al-Qaida or defeat Taliban resistance forces in Afghanistan. Limited "hot pursuit" ground incursions, intensive air attacks, and special forces raids by U.S. forces into Pakistan's tribal are being studied.
The U.S. claims the 27,200- sq.-km region, home to 3.3 million Pashtun tribesmen, is a safe haven for al-Qaida and Taliban, and a hotbed of anti-American activity. Indeed it is, thanks mostly to the U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan.
I spent a remarkable time in this wild medieval region during the 1980s and '90s, travelling alone where even Pakistani government officials dared not go, visiting the tribes of Waziristan, Orakzai, Khyber, Chitral, and Kurram, and their chiefs, called "maliks."
These tribal belts are always called "lawless." Pashtun tribesmen could shoot you if they didn't like your looks. Rudyard Kipling warned British Imperial soldiers over a century ago, when fighting cruel, ferocious Pashtun warriors of the Afridi clan, "save your last bullet for yourself."
Law and honour
But there is law: The traditional Pashtun tribal code, Pashtunwali, that strictly governs behaviour and personal honour. Protecting guests was sacred. I was captivated by this majestic mountain region and wrote of it extensively in my book, War at the Top of the World.
The 40 million Pashtun -- called "Pathan' by the British -- are the world's largest tribal group. Imperial Britain divided them by an artificial border, the Durand Line, now the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Pakistan's Pashtun number 28 million, plus an additional 2.5 million refugees from Afghanistan. The 15 million Pashtun of Afghanistan form that nation's largest ethnic group.
The tribal agency's Pashtun reluctantly joined Pakistan in 1947 under express constitutional guarantee of total autonomy and a ban on Pakistani troops entering there.
But under intense U.S. pressure, President Pervez Musharraf violated Pakistan's constitution by sending 80,000 federal troops to fight the region's tribes, killing 3,000 of them.
In best British imperial tradition, Washington pays Musharraf $100 million monthly to rent his sepoys (native soldiers) to fight Pashtun tribesmen.
As a result, Pakistan is fast edging towards civil war.
The anti-communist Taliban movement is part of the Pashtun people. Taliban fighters move across the artificial Pakistan-Afghanistan border, to borrow a Maoism, like fish through the sea. Osama bin Laden is a hero in the region.
The U.S. just increased its reward for bin Laden to $50 million and plans to shower $750 million on the tribal region to try to buy loyalty.
Can't be bought
Bush/Cheney & Co. do not understand that while they can rent President Musharraf's government in Islamabad, many Pashtun value personal honour far more than money, and cannot be bought.
Any U.S. attack on Pakistan would be a catastrophic mistake.
First, air and ground assaults will succeed only in widening the anti-U.S. war and merging it with Afghanistan's resistance to western occupation.
Second, Pakistan's army officers who refuse to be bought may resist a U.S. attack on their homeland, and overthrow the man who allowed it, Gen. Musharraf. A U.S. attack would sharply raise the threat of anti-U.S. extremists seizing control of strategic Pakistan and marginalize those seeking return to democratic government.
Third, a U.S. attack on the tribal areas could re-ignite the old movement to reunite Pashtun parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan into independent "Pashtunistan." That could begin unravelling fragile Pakistan, leaving its nuclear arsenal up for grabs.
The U.S. military has grown used to attacking small, weak nations like Grenada and Iraq. Pakistan, with 163 million people, and a poorly equipped, but very tough 550,000-man army, will offer no easy victories.
Those Bush administration and Harper government officials who foolishly advocate attacking Pakistan are playing with fire. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 7:04 am Post subject: |
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If we done exactly as he had not said the US would have done the correct thing in Afghanistan.
BJWD you ought to go through all he as written and you will see what he is about.
Go back before 9-11 |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 7:18 am Post subject: |
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| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
If we done exactly as he had not said the US would have done the correct thing in Afghanistan.
BJWD you ought to go through all he as written and you will see what he is about.
Go back before 9-11 |
What shocking revelations do you think BJWD will discover from delving into the Margolis canon? Like I say, I've been reading him for decades now, and his opinions are not what I would call particularly outrageous. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 7:28 am Post subject: |
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anyone can see it if they are looking for it.
Last edited by Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee on Mon Aug 27, 2007 8:08 am; edited 1 time in total |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 7:32 am Post subject: |
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he will see it when he checks it.
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Well, I've been checking it for years, and I'm dying to know what putrid forays into offensiveness I've been overlooking. Could you maybe just give me a hint about what is suppoed to be so damned outrageous about Eric Margolis? |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 7:40 am Post subject: |
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| No , cause then it would lead me to an accusation that requires a very high level a proof almost to "beyond a reasonable doubt " . It is something that I can not prove but something that I am personally sure of. It is an accusation that only someone ought to make publicly only if I they had enough proof to really back it up. |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 7:45 am Post subject: |
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No , cause then it would lead me down an argument that requires a very high level a proof almost to "beyond a reasonable doubt " . It is something that I can not prove but something that I am personally sure of.
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Holy cow, I am just salivating with suspense now! It all sounds so mysterious. Well, I guess all I can do is ask BJWD to report back on his own findings if and when he looks into the archives. If he wants to, that is. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 7:49 am Post subject: |
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| That is sometimes the way it is. Everyone can make up their own mind. As I said I already have my own opinion. |
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thepeel
Joined: 08 Aug 2004
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| Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 7:50 am Post subject: |
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| Dude I don't have time to research this stuff right now. I might be able to on Saturday afternoon, but I'd rather be at the beach. Why don't you give me a big hint and I'll use the powers of google to narrow it down. I promise not to get into a "proof" war with you. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 1:51 pm Post subject: |
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At any rate look here he sounds like Igothisguitar.
anyway look at this
A
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rchives > September 09, 2003
THE TRUTH ABOUT 9/11
Two years after the Sept 9 suicide attacks on the United States, this earthshaking event remains clouded by mystery and misunderstanding.
Was al-Qaida behind the operation. Most likely, but not for certain. Secretary of State Colin Powell promised a white paper proving al-Qaida�s guilt. It never came. A tape that surfaced in 2002, purporting to show Osama bin Laden gleefully chortling over the attacks, was a fake.
The 9/11 attacks were planned in Germany and Spain, not Afghanistan, by young men, mostly Saudis, who were educated and westernized.
Afghanistan�s Taliban regime, until four months before 9/11 a recipient of US aid, had nothing to do with the attacks, but did provide a base for al-Qaida, which numbered only 300 members.
Most of the �thousands of terrorists� in Afghanistan cited by the US were actually independence-fighters from neighboring Central Asia. Taliban refused to hand bin Laden, a national hero of the 1980�s anti-Soviet war, to the US without proof of his guilt in 9/11, which the US declined to provide.
9/11 allowed far right neo-conservatives, some borderline neo-fascists, to seize control of US national security policy. They immediately launched the invasion of Afghanistan and began preparing war against Iraq. We now know both invasions, intended to seize major oil regions, were planned long before 9/11.
President George Bush was widely regarded pre-9/11 as a hapless, rather comical figure enmeshed in the Enron scandal. The savage assaults transformed him into a savior on a white horse, bathed in fulsome praise by the fawning American media.
The Bush Administration created a firestorm of war fever and national hysteria that quickly obscured its failure to protect the nation from an attack that Mideast observers, including this column, had predicted was coming.
Bush declared a war on terrorism and dispatched US armed forces to attack Muslim mischief-makers around the globe. This, however, was not a real war, but rather a police action against disparate bands of violent anti-American extremists determined to drive US political and economic influence from their lands, and aid the struggle in Palestine.
Declaring war on terrorism made no more sense than declaring war on evil.
Few Americans understand their nation became a modern imperial power after World War II, or that it had recreated in the Mideast a modern version of the British Empire � the American Raj. Most were simply unaware, or uncaring, that their governments had been overthrowing regimes, assassinating foreign leaders, promoting dictatorships, and waging undeclared wars on foreign nations since the late 1940�s.
Fewer understood the US was de facto ruler of Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf states, and overlord of Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Washington kept highly repressive feudal or military dictatorships in power in all these nations that advanced Washington�s strategic interests and brutally crushed all opponents.
Most Americans were unaware that Israel was fighting Palestinians with US-supplied arms, financed by US taxpayers, or that in the eyes of most Mideasterners, and all extremists, Israel and the United States had become indistinguishable.
Osama bin-Laden kept tirelessly repeating this theme, calling for revolution against the American Mideast Raj and its Arab vassal rulers. That, far more than truck bombs, was bin Laden�s real threat to US interests.
The US government unwisely chose to try to suppress bin Laden�s statements by intimidating the media, particularly al-Jazeera, whose offices in Baghdad, Kabul and Basra were bombed by US forces.
Excerpts from bin Laden�s speeches made him look a hero in the Muslim World; the full texts, which went unpublished, showed bin Laden at his most fanatical and dangerous.
Interestingly, Bin Laden recently predicted he will shortly die a martyr.
The ghastly 9/11 attacks were what Imperial Britain called the �cost of empire.� Angry, fanatical natives would strike back, using any means to punish the high-tech empire seeking to rule them. Britain had Maxim guns; America, terrifying B-52�s.
Bush�s knee-jerk military response to essentially political problems, an historic blunder, has left the US mired in deepening guerilla wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, costing over US $7 billion monthly and growing numbers of American casualties.
Heavy bombing of Afghanistan prior to 9/11, what ever-wrongheaded neo-cons say should have been done, would not have prevented 9/11. Having alert security guards at Boston airport instead of gum-chewing dolts would have.
9/11 might have been averted by proper coordination between FBI and CIA, and if Bush�s astoundingly inept national security staff had done its job. Instead, Attorney General John Ashcroft, today the self-appointed scourge of Muslim malefactors, actually cut anti-terrorism spending just before 9/11.
Nothing can excuse the sickening barbarity of the 9/11 attacks. But nothing should excuse America�s pre-attack delusions of Olympian immunity from the ills of the outside world, some caused by US policies.
Nor America�s casual indifference to the death of 500,000 Iraqi children caused by a cruel US-imposed embargo, nor the bulldozing of Palestinian shanty towns, without realizing that at some point enraged recipients of US geo-strategic discipline would bite back.
Nor the risk of aircraft attacks. This writer was aboard a hijacked Lufthansa A310 in 1993 when the air pirate warned the FBI he would crash the jumbo jet into New York�s Wall Street.
All the flag-waving and heart-rending survivor interviews that will mark this week�s 9/11 anniversary should not � but, of course, will � obscure the painful truth: the faux-macho Bush Administration was asleep while on guard; it refuses to accept responsibility for its dereliction of duty; and continues to persistently misled Americans about the real causes of 9/11. |
http://www.ericmargolis.com/archives/2003/09/the_truth_about_911.php
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erhaps Zahir Shah will manage to bring stability to Afghanistan without turning his demolished nation into an American imperial protectorate, but that seems unlikely. This week, President Bush proclaimed a second Marshall Plan to rebuild ravaged Afghanistan, in spite of his previous vows not to engage in �nation-building� in that nation. Construction of permanent US military bases in Afghanistan and neighboring nations - which we might now call �Chevronistans� and Exxonistans� - and plans to begin pipeline construction as soon as possible, show clearly the US is marching ever deeper into South/Central Asia for reasons of oil and the lust for yet more global power. Hunting al-Qaida is a convenient excuse. |
http://www.ericmargolis.com/archives/2002/04/a_stupid_and_useless_war.php |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 8:51 pm Post subject: |
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A tape that surfaced in 2002, purporting to show Osama bin Laden gleefully chortling over the attacks, was a fake.
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Margolis wasn't the only one who thought the tape was fake.
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Researchers in Switzerland have questioned the authenticity of the recent audio recording attributed to Osama Bin Laden.
A team from the Lausanne-based Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence, Idiap, said it was 95% certain the tape does not feature the voice of the al-Qaeda leader.
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Personally, I can't find anything about whether or not the tape was ever finally confirmed as genuine. So I guess I'll stay agnostic on the question, unless someone comes up with a definitive source either way.
But Joo: If you think it's totally whackjob to suggest that an incriminating document may have been faked, I think you need to review your history a bit better. See my link below on the Zinoviev letter.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2526309.stm
http://tinyurl.com/ysds9v |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 9:06 pm Post subject: |
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I think they are talking about different tapes.
What Margalois was talking about was a video recording.
No apologizes for using a 9-11 conspriacy site for the picture since they are the ones who are still insisting it was a fake.
what the researchers were talking about was an audio recording to the rest of the world.
The researchers and Margolis were talking about two different different tapes.
One of them a video showed Bin Laden's guilt
While the other was an audio tape addressed to the world.
Two different tapes! |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 9:26 pm Post subject: |
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Could you provide some info on the alleged fake video then? All I could find in a google was stuff about videos from 2001 and 2004, but Margolis says that the video he's talking about surfaced in 2002.
And for what it's worth: if you acknowledge that someone could fake an audio recording, it shouldn't be too implausible to imagine that they could also fake a video. Not saying that that is what happened, just that believing it happened does not automatically put you into IGTG territory.
And for what it's worth:
If Rense's point was that the guy on the left does not look like the guy on the right, I agree. He doesn't. Not neccessarily proof of a fake, though, since OBL could change his appearance.
Last edited by On the other hand on Mon Aug 27, 2007 9:31 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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