Israel Approves More Illegal Settlements

Byrnzie

Jason P wrote:

Byrnzie wrote:

Jason P wrote:

We said give us Bin Laden. They told us to fuck off.

No they didn't. They said provide us with evidence of his guilt. And the U.S refused. Big difference.

How can you ask us to keep our eyes open when you bury your head in the sand?

:fp:

Care to elaborate?

Byrnzie

Thought not.

Jason P

catefrances wrote:

the atheists???? youre gonna have to be more specific.. there are millions of us.

afghanistans strategic importance has nothing to do with iran.

The US has separation of state and church. Technically, we are a godless nation. Based on how we are using the definition of ethnic cleansing in this thread, that fact cannot be refuted.

And everyone claims we are the key factor for everything that goes wrong in the history of mankind. So atheists are the biggest problem in the world, or so it seems.

And the strategic value of Afghanistan has nothing to do with Iran? Is it the Poppy fields then?

Or the barren wasteland? Which reportedly has billions of dollars of raw minerals. Except no one in their right mind will go there to extract them.

Jason P

Byrnzie wrote:

Care to elaborate?

You tend to take broad strokes of information and make them definitive fact as it benefits your opinion. i.e. Reagan killed all those South Americans, not the South Americans who were killing the South Americans.

But you require definitive fact backed by definitive fact when a topic doesn't agree with your opinion.

At least that is my opinion. And my opinions are not always right.

Idris

Byrnzie is accurate about the US saying that it did not need to provide any proof to the Taliban. I remember watching the video of it myself.

Maybe YouTube has it now?

Jason P

Idris wrote:

Byrnzie is accurate about the US saying that it did not need to provide any proof to the Taliban. I remember watching the video of it myself.

Maybe YouTube has it now?

catefrances

Jason P wrote:

catefrances wrote:

the atheists???? youre gonna have to be more specific.. there are millions of us.

afghanistans strategic importance has nothing to do with iran.

The US has separation of state and church. Technically, we are a godless nation. Based on how we are using the definition of ethnic cleansing in this thread, that fact cannot be refuted.

And everyone claims we are the key factor for everything that goes wrong in the history of mankind. So atheists are the biggest problem in the world, or so it seems.

And the strategic value of Afghanistan has nothing to do with Iran? Is it the Poppy fields then?

Or the barren wasteland? Which reportedly has billions of dollars of raw minerals. Except no one in their right mind will go there to extract them.

well that's bullshit. the US isn't an atheist state. have you forgotten the origins of your own country?


energy and the control of that energy.. that is what its about. if you are saying that the US interest in iran has to do with energy resources then I will back you up... if however you are of the opinion that the US interest in iran is based on something else then I shall have to take my leave. why is your focus on iran anyways???

Jason P

catefrances wrote:

well that's bullshit. the US isn't an atheist state. have you forgotten the origins of your own country?


energy and the control of that energy.. that is what its about. if you are saying that the US interest in iran has to do with energy resources then I will back you up... if however you are of the opinion that the US interest in iran is based on something else then I shall have to take my leave. why is your focus on iran anyways???

From what I see and observe, we are an atheist state. Some people may go to church, but don't practice what is preached. I'd say less then 20% of Americans are truly religious. The midwest is higher in percentage of church goers, but when I lived on the west coast religious influence was dormant.

The strategic asset of Afghanistan is its location. Check out a map and see. We have a place to base military operations centered around Iran, Russia, China, and Pakistan. That is the asset.

catefrances

Jason P wrote:

catefrances wrote:

well that's bullshit. the US isn't an atheist state. have you forgotten the origins of your own country?


energy and the control of that energy.. that is what its about. if you are saying that the US interest in iran has to do with energy resources then I will back you up... if however you are of the opinion that the US interest in iran is based on something else then I shall have to take my leave. why is your focus on iran anyways???

From what I see and observe, we are an atheist state. Some people may go to church, but don't practice what is preached. I'd say less then 20% of Americans are truly religious. The midwest is higher in percentage of church goers, but when I lived on the west coast religious influence was dormant.

The strategic asset of Afghanistan is its location. Check out a map and see. We have a place to base military operations centered around Iran, Russia, China, and Pakistan. That is the asset.

so now youre extending afghanistans strategic importance for the US to Russia, China and Pakistan? I don't need to check out a map.. Ive know where everything is for many years now.

so your pledge of allegiance and the fact that the words in god we trust are printed on your money means nothing?

Jason P

catefrances wrote:

so now youre extending afghanistans strategic importance for the US to Russia, China and Pakistan? I don't need to check out a map.. Ive know where everything is for many years now.

so your pledge of allegiance and the fact that the words in god we trust printed on your money means nothing?

I'd consider it a key piece in the game of R.I.S.K. It's becoming less of a key piece as time goes on and technology advances. Scram Jets and carrier based drones will eliminate the need for foreign bases.

Using the term "god" in the pledge in public places can get you fired or suspended nowadays. Any sign of religion in public places will get you sued. Money gets a pass due to the amount of money it would take to redo the entire US currency circulation. My guess is that the “pass” has it’s days numbered.

Jason P

Cate, how do you see Afghanistan is an energy asset? They are not an oil nation.

Idris

Something else Afghanistan has,

http://www.asianews.it/news-en/More-than-US$-3-trillion-in-rare-earths-and-precious-metals-under-Taliban-feet-20817.html

More than US$ 3 trillion in rare earths and precious metals under Taliban feet


There's gold in that war!

Geologists working with the Pentagon claim to have discovered $1 trillion worth of precious and base metal deposits in Afghanistan.

U.S. and Afghan officials are hopeful that these mineral deposits will convert the war-torn country into a global mining giant, fundamentally altering the economy of Afghanistan and perhaps the war itself.



http://www.wealthdaily.com/articles/afghanistan-mineral-discovery-a-1-trillion-find/2553

riotgrl

Jason P wrote:

catefrances wrote:

so now youre extending afghanistans strategic importance for the US to Russia, China and Pakistan? I don't need to check out a map.. Ive know where everything is for many years now.

so your pledge of allegiance and the fact that the words in god we trust printed on your money means nothing?

I'd consider it a key piece in the game of R.I.S.K. It's becoming less of a key piece as time goes on and technology advances. Scram Jets and carrier based drones will eliminate the need for foreign bases.

Using the term "god" in the pledge in public places can get you fired or suspended nowadays. Any sign of religion in public places will get you sued. Money gets a pass due to the amount of money it would take to redo the entire US currency circulation. My guess is that the “pass” has it’s days numbered.

Where does that happen that you can't say the pledge as it is currently written? We say the pledge and sing the national anthem at school every day and have a 'moment of silence'. No one is getting fired, suspended, or sued. Although, I really think the role of religion is far more subtle in that it informs most Americans value system and beliefs about our nation as a whole. Most people believe that we were founded as a Christian nation and that most, if not all, our founding fathers were religious fundamentalists in the same vein that people are today. I think it is that belief about our origins and our puritan 'work ethic', amongst other characteristics, that still brands us as a religious nation regardless of whether people attend church on a regular basis.

Jason P

Idris wrote:

Something else Afghanistan has,

http://www.asianews.it/news-en/More-than-US$-3-trillion-in-rare-earths-and-precious-metals-under-Taliban-feet-20817.html

More than US$ 3 trillion in rare earths and precious metals under Taliban feet


There's gold in that war!

Geologists working with the Pentagon claim to have discovered $1 trillion worth of precious and base metal deposits in Afghanistan.

U.S. and Afghan officials are hopeful that these mineral deposits will convert the war-torn country into a global mining giant, fundamentally altering the economy of Afghanistan and perhaps the war itself.



http://www.wealthdaily.com/articles/afghanistan-mineral-discovery-a-1-trillion-find/2553

Who is going there to get it? No one.

They would be there already.

gimmesometruth27

same headline, different day.

shameful.

the fact that the american government's policy is to support this kind of rogue behavior is an embarrassment.

Byrnzie

Jason P wrote:

Byrnzie wrote:

Care to elaborate?

You tend to take broad strokes of information and make them definitive fact as it benefits your opinion. i.e. Reagan killed all those South Americans, not the South Americans who were killing the South Americans.

The Reagan administration funded, trained, and publicly defended those death squads. They also supplied them with the weapons and helicopters needed to carry out the genocide.
They were as guilty as those doing the actual killing. And if you can't see that then we have nothing more to discuss.

And you accuse me of burying my head in the sand?

Jason P wrote:

But you require definitive fact backed by definitive fact when a topic doesn't agree with your opinion.

Did the Afghans offer to hand over Bin Laden if provided with evidence of his guilt, or didn't they? This has nothing to do with opinions.

Bronx Bombers

Byrnzie wrote:

Did the Afghans offer to hand over Bin Laden if provided with evidence of his guilt, or didn't they? This has nothing to do with opinions.

Over three years and on as many continents, U.S. officials met in public and secret at least 20 times with Taliban representatives to discuss ways the regime could bring suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden to justice.

Talks continued until just days before the Sept. 11 attacks, and Taliban representatives repeatedly suggested they would hand over bin Laden if their conditions were met, sources close to the discussions said.

Throughout the years, however, State Department officials refused to soften their demand that bin Laden face trial in the U.S. justice system. It also remained murky whether the Taliban envoys, representing at least one division of the fractious Islamic movement, could actually deliver on their promises.

The exchanges lie at the heart of a long and largely untold history of diplomatic efforts between the State Department and Afghanistan's ruling regime that paralleled covert CIA actions to take bin Laden. In the end, both diplomatic and covert efforts proved fruitless.

In interviews, U.S. participants and sources close to the Taliban discussed the exchanges in detail and debated whether the State Department should have been more flexible in its hard-line stance. Earlier this month, President Bush summarily rejected another Taliban offer to give up bin Laden to a neutral third country. "We know he's guilty. Turn him over," Bush said.

Some Afghan experts argue that throughout the negotiations, the United States never recognized the Taliban need for aabroh, the Pashtu word for "face-saving formula." Officials never found a way to ease the Taliban's fear of embarrassment if it turned over a fellow Muslim to an "infidel" Western power.

"We were not serious about the whole thing, not only this administration but the previous one," said Richard Hrair Dekmejian, an expert in Islamic fundamentalism and author at the University of Southern California. "We did not engage these people creatively. There were missed opportunities."

U.S. officials struggled to communicate with Muslim clerics unfamiliar with modern diplomacy and distrustful of the Western world, and they failed to take advantage of fractures in the Taliban leadership.

"We never heard what they were trying to say," said Milton Bearden, a former CIA station chief who oversaw U.S. covert operations in Afghanistan in the 1980s. "We had no common language. Ours was, 'Give up bin Laden.' They were saying, 'Do something to help us give him up."

State Department officials assert that despite hours of talks and proposals that were infuriatingly vague, the Afghan rulers never truly intended to give up bin Laden.

U.S. negotiators started out "very, very patient," one official said. But over the course of many meetings, the envoys "lost all patience with them because they kept saying they would do something and they did exactly nothing."

The meetings took place in Tashkent, Kandahar, Islamabad, Bonn, New York and Washington. There were surprise satellite calls, one of which led to a 40-minute chat between a mid-level State Department bureaucrat and the Taliban's supreme leader, Mohammad Omar. There was a surprise visit to Washington, made by a Taliban envoy bearing a gift carpet for Bush.

The diplomatic effort to snare bin Laden began as early as 1996, when officials devised a plan to use back channels to Sudan, one of seven countries on the U.S. list of terrorist-supporting states. Under the plan, bin Laden would be arrested in Khartoum and extradited to Saudi Arabia, which would turn him over to the United States.

But the United States could not persuade the Saudis to accept bin Laden, and Sudan instead expelled him to Afghanistan in May 1996 -- a few months before the Taliban seized power in Kabul.

The Clinton administration did not begin seriously pressing the Taliban for bin Laden's expulsion until the August 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and injured 4,600.

The bombings were "a seminal moment," changing Washington's view of the Taliban, an administration official said. The attacks convinced U.S. policymakers that Omar was no longer simply interested in conquering Afghanistan, but that his protection was allowing bin Laden, a longtime friend, to engage in terrorist ventures abroad.

U.S. officials launched a two-pronged policy to pressure the Taliban into handing over bin Laden. On the one hand, the United States used the United Nations and the threat of sanctions. On the other, it began a hard-nosed dialogue.

Within days of the embassy bombings, State Department officer Michael Malinowski began telephoning Taliban officials. On one occasion, Malinowski, lounging on the deck of his Washington home, spoke by telephone with Omar.

"I would say, 'Hey, give up bin Laden,' and they would say, 'No. . . . Show us the evidence,' " Malinowski said. Taliban leaders argued they could not expel a guest, and Malinowski responded, "It is not all right if this visitor goes up to the roof of your house and shoots his gun at his neighbors."

On Feb. 3, 1999, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Karl E. Inderfurth, the Clinton administration's point man for talks with the Taliban, and Michael Sheehan, State Department counterterrorism chief, went to Islamabad to deliver a stern message to the Taliban's deputy foreign minister, Abdul Jalil: The United States henceforth would hold the Taliban responsible for any terrorist act by bin Laden.

By that time, bin Laden had been indicted for his alleged role in the embassy bombings. The officials reviewed the indictment in detail with the Taliban and offered to provide more evidence if the Taliban sent a delegation to New York. The Taliban did not do so.

Immediately after the U.S. warning, Taliban security forces took bin Laden from his Kandahar compound and spirited him away to a remote site, according to media reports at the time. They also seized his satellite communications and barred him from contact with the media.

Publicly, the Taliban said they no longer knew where he was. Inderfurth now says the United States interpreted such statements "as an effort to evade their responsibility to turn him over."

Others, however, say the cryptic statements should have been interpreted differently. Bearden, for example, believes the Taliban more than once set up bin Laden for capture by the United States and communicated its intent by saying he was lost.

"Every time the Afghans said, 'He's lost again,' they are saying something. They are saying, 'He's no longer under our protection,' " Bearden said. "They thought they were signaling us subtly, and we don't do signals."

U.N. pressure steadily mounted. In October 1999, a Security Council resolution demanded the Taliban turn over bin Laden to "appropriate authorities" but left open the possibility he could be tried somewhere besides a U.S. court.

In response, the Taliban proposed bringing bin Laden to justice, either in Afghanistan or another Muslim country.

One Taliban proposal suggested bin Laden be turned over to a panel of three Islamic jurists, one each chosen by Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

When the United States rejected that proposal, the Taliban countered that it would settle for only one Islamic jurist on such a panel, a source close to the Taliban leadership said.

Taliban leaders also kept demanding the United States provide more evidence of bin Laden's terrorist activities.

"It became clear that the call for more evidence was more a delaying tactic than a sincere effort to solve the bin Laden issue," Inderfurth said.

Throughout 1999 and 2000, Inderfurth, Sheehan and Thomas R. Pickering, then undersecretary of state, continued meeting in Washington, Islamabad, New York and Bonn to review evidence against bin Laden. They warned of war if there were another terrorist attack.

"We saw a continuing effort to evade, deny and obfuscate," Inderfurth said. "They had no interest in an international panel, really. Their only intention was not to hand bin Laden over."

Phyllis E. Oakley, head of the State Department's intelligence bureau in the late 1990s, said her bureau concluded Omar would never give up bin Laden.

Last March, Rahmatullah Hashimi, a 24-year-old Taliban envoy, arrived in Washington on a surprise visit, meeting with reporters, middle-ranking State Department bureaucrats and private Afghanistan experts. He carried a gift carpet and a letter from Omar, both meant for President Bush.

Hashimi said he had come with a new offer, but U.S. officials now dismiss his visit as just another feint. They say Hashimi simply wanted to know whether the new administration had a fresh idea for breaking the deadlock.

Yet the two sides kept meeting, mostly in Islamabad. Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca saw Taliban ambassador Abdul Salam Zaeef there in early August, and U.S. embassy officials held secret talks with Taliban security chief Hameed Rasoli. The Taliban invited a U.S. delegation to Kandahar, but the United States refused unless a solution for handing over bin Laden was first reached, a source close to the Taliban said.

Even after Sept. 11, as U.S. aircraft carriers and warplanes rushed toward Afghanistan, the Taliban's mysterious maneuvering continued.

Bearden, the former CIA administrator, picked up his phone in Reston in early October and dialed a satellite number in Kandahar. Hashimi answered, still full of optimism that Saudi clerics and an upcoming conference of Islamic nations would give their blessing to Bush's demand that they "cough him up."

"There was a 50-50 chance something could happen," Hashimi told Bearden, "if the Saudis stepped in."

Five days later, bin Laden remained at large and the United States began pummeling Kandahar and other Taliban strongholds.

"I have no doubts they wanted to get rid of him. He was a pain in the neck," Bearden said of bin Ladenu. "It never clicked."

Staff writers Gilbert M. Gaul, Mary Pat Flaherty and James V. Grimaldi and researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company

The Taliban had chances before 9/11 to see the evidence against him and they declined to see it so why would you expect the US to cater to any demands they requested after 9/11?

Byrnzie

Thanks BB. But apparently my head's in the sand.

yosi

catefrances wrote:

Jason P wrote:

Byrnzie wrote:

So stealing another peoples land and erecting Jewish-only settlements on it doesn't constitute ethnic cleansing? I suggest you check the definition of 'ethnic cleansing'.

Ethnic cleansing usually involves attempts to remove physical and cultural evidence of the targeted group in the territory through the destruction of homes, social centers, farms, and infrastructure, and by the desecration of monuments, cemeteries, and places of worship.

Hmmm. Appears you got me there.

But I guess this defintion justifies the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.

no... the US needs no justification for occupation as they tend to not give a shit... besides afghanistan is a strategic asset. israels justification is based on religion and is therefore, bullshit... as religion was made up by men. it holds no water cause it isn't much more than myth. the west kowtows to them because of some sort of misguided guilt.

That is completely backwards. Afghanistan is in no way a strategic asset for the US. It is a dirt poor country with no strategic natural resources. The only strategic reason for the US being there that makes any sort of sense is to deny Al Qaida the use of the country as a safe haven, except we've already accomplished that and maintaining the status quo in that regard (given out penchant for drone strikes) doesn't require the US army to be in-country in force.

The West Bank, on the other hand, has immense strategic importance to Israel: it constitutes the high ground directly above the coastal plain, which is only 9 miles wide at its narrowest, where the majority of Israel's population is situated, and which is home to most of the economic drivers of the country; the West Bank also contains strategic water resources, and the jordan river valley acts as a strategic buffer against invasion from the east. Not saying that any of this justifies the occupation (which I'm vehemently against), but you're just flat wrong on the question of strategic significance.

You're also not quite right about the role of religion in all this - the Israeli governments that initiated the occupation were thoroughly secular. They were willing to coopt messianic ferver to "create facts on the ground," but the strategic concerns outlined above were their primary motivation. Religion has come to be a larger factor as the settlers have become a more powerful political force, but I still think it's largely a complicating distraction. At the end of the day I think the majority of Israelis, and the Israeli government, are concerned with strategic calculations, not religion.

yosi

Byrnzie wrote:

Jason P wrote:

We said give us Bin Laden. They told us to fuck off.

No they didn't. They said provide us with evidence of his guilt. And the U.S refused. Big difference.

What are you talking about?! No one disputed who was responsible. Bin Laden gleefully claimed credit for the attack on video.