Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: goldworldnet who wrote (201737)	11/9/2001 1:56:29 PM
From: gao seng	Respond to of 769670

The PLA wants a timeout to regroup. Nuts to them, IMO. Freed French journalist tells of paranoia affecting Kabul regime War on Terrorism: Afghanistan By John Lichfield in Paris 09 November 2001 Children as young as ten are being jailed by the Taliban security services as part of a violent and often clumsy repression of anyone vaguely suspected of being a potential dissident, a French journalist expelled from Afghanistan reported yesterday. In his first dispatch since being released from prison in Jalalabad at the weekend, Michel Peyrard of Paris-Match gave a terrifying but sometimes amusing and refreshingly human portrait of life inside the Taliban-controlled country. The American bombing is having some effect, he says. But it is the paranoia of the Taliban leaders themselves – and the hatred of ordinary Afghans for their "Arab" sponsors and allies – which most threatens "to undermine the foundations" of the fundamentalist regime in Kabul. While imprisoned for 25 days as a suspected spy, Mr Peyrard managed to befriend his guards, who were mostly the uncles, cousins or nephews of the governor of his detention centre (himself a wheeler-dealer and closet dissident). At one point, the French journalist persuaded the guards – nominally members of the Taliban counter-intelligence service – to take him on a sight-seeing tour of Jalalabad. The trip ended with lunch in the bazaar, cut short when they were spotted by a group of the feared "Arabs". Mr Peyrard, who was arrested after entering Afghanistan disguised as a woman, describes the ambivalent attitudes of the guards, the detention centre governor and other Taliban officials to their own leadership and the US-led assault on their country. "These mullahs only think of themselves," he reports a young Taliban guard called Gol as saying. "When the Americans started their bombing, they put their families out of harm's way in Pakistan. But I haven't seen my own wife for two months." Another guard called Youssouf said: "It was a great honour to join the intelligence services but now I'm fed up. I want to listen to music again ... One day, God willing, I will get out of this hell." However, a couple of days later, the same guard was shown a propaganda leaflet dropped by a US plane. "Is this really the future you want for your women and children?" the leaflet asked. It showed a photograph of Taliban religious police beating a woman. "Who are these Americans to interfere with our customs?" Youssouf asked indignantly. Mr Peyrard said the younger guards liked to practise their English with him, repeating: "This is a jail. This is a cell. This is a mouse." When the American planes came over, they would shout: "This is Mister Bush." News that an olive grove near Jalalabad, converted into a training camp for Osama bin Laden's "Arabs", had been destroyed by a cruise missile was greeted by the Taliban guards "more with jubilation than with sorrow", Mr Peyrard reports. The number of people in his detention centre rose constantly while he was there, he said, so much so that it had to relocate to new premises. The other prisoners included ordinary criminals but, increasingly, political detainees. Many were Taliban leaders or military commanders, suspected on the slightest evidence, or no evidence at all, of being potential traitors. In some cases, they were been arrested simply because they belonged to religious or tribal groups which had rallied to the Taliban towards the end of the Afghan civil war. Since they had been the last to join, they were suspected of being potentially the first to rebel. The detainees included several children, he said. When one political prisoner escaped, the Taliban intelligence service arrested his three nephews, aged 10, 13 and 19. The eldest was tortured and subjected to a mock execution. news.independent.co.uk