MANHATTAN 911

(Pages A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S)

Reflections conducive to a nonviolent future,
following the massacre of Sept. 11, 2001.

• On the negative side, China has assisted Pakistan with its nuclear weapons and missile programs. Despite taking a public position similar to the United States on South Asian nuclear issues after the Indian nuclear explosion, the Chinese leadership privately encouraged Islamabad to explode a nuclear device. Although Beijing has ratified the CWC and claims that it does not produce or possess chemical weapons, in fact, China has an advanced chemical weapons program. Similarly, while China is a party to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), it has continued its production and possession of biological weapons. Finally, China continues to supply missile technology to Pakistan and possibly to Iran, despite its pledges to the contrary....
  
  Under “congagement,” the United States would enhance economic, political, and cultural ties with China and promote Chinese membership in international organizations—including the WTO. The United States would also seek enhanced military-to-military ties, including possible joint exercises for humanitarian operations. It would also continue with efforts to integrate China into select regional organizations and to promote inclusive multilateral security dialogues.
     --Zalmay Khalilzad, "US Strategy Toward China," part of a "Taking Charge" Report issued by the Rand Foundation outlining challenges for the new Bush Administration (India Abroad 11/13/2000)
  
  
• The [Afghanistan-America] Foundation is honored to have as its National Honorary Co-Chairmen two former White House National Security Advisors, Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Gen. Brent Scowcroft. Also closely advising and working with the Foundation are Dr. Zalmay Khalilzad, RAND Corp.; Dr. Tom Gouttierre, Director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies, University of Nebraska, Omaha, and Vice-President of the Afghanistan - America Foundation. Dr. Frederick Starr, former President of Oberlin College and now Chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at the School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University; and Dr. Barnett Rubin, Council on Foreign Relations, serve on the Foundation's White Paper Task Force. Dr. Tom Greene, a retired career Foreign Service Officer and former Deputy Special Envoy to the Afghan Resistance, currently serves as the Executive Director of the Foundation. The Foundation's staff consists of young Afghan and American scholars with expertise in human rights law, international relations, and Afghanistan politics and history.
     --Foundation Website (Founded 1996)
  
  
• According to [Afghanistan Foundation Chairman Don] Ritter: "For one, we have a deeply moral and historical obligation to Afghanistan given its critical role in helping to end the Cold War. America needs to play a new and expanded leadership role to help solve the problem of Afghanistan for vital U.S. national interests as well as to forge new partnerships between old foes and new friends. The United States must generate a partnership among Russia, Pakistan, Iran and the new Central Asian countries of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. Working together toward a peaceful and stable Afghanistan gives the United States an important opportunity to work on common issues of concern to these nations including counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, refugees as well as Central Asian economic and energy development."
     --Press Release (6/12/1998)
  
  
• For any policy to succeed, Washington must secure U.S. domestic support. This can be done by engaging in a public diplomacy campaign to explain the importance of Afghanistan. The country’s role as a host to terrorists, its proximity to critical regions, and its past role and sacrifice in defeating the Soviets all should be emphasized. Particularly important is bringing in groups concerned with the Taliban’s mistreatment of women one of the major few interest groups in the United States concerned with Afghanistan.
     --Khalilzad, etal. (Afghanistan Foundation 1999)
  
  
• According to three sources in the meeting where Khalilzad presented this paper, he was roundly rebuked by House staff for advocating what was considered an unrealistic and soft approach towards the Taliban government that was not interested in engagement. Indeed, only months later, Khalilzad seemed to come around to this view.
     --Eli J. Lake (UPI 1/18/2001)
  
  
• In an article in the Winter 2000 edition of the Washington Quarterly, published by the Center for Strategic International Studies, Khalilzad argues in no uncertain terms for supporting the Pashtun majority in Afghanistan to roll back the Taliban government and working "discreetly" with Iran and Russia to destabilize the government in Kabul. "Facts on the ground, rather than U.N. resolutions and international conferences, are what determine the behavior of the Taliban and other factions in Afghanistan. Preventing the Taliban from consolidating control over all of the country is a necessary precondition toward moderating its policies," he wrote in the Washington Quarterly.
     --UPI (@FreeRepublic 1/18/2001)
  
  
• April 28, 2001: Jamiat Ulemai Islam (JUI) chief Maulana Fazalur Rehman has said the U.S. government was about to launch an attack on Afghanistan and claimed that American commandos had landed at Chitral airport for this purpose.
     --Dawn (Pakistan 4/28/2001)
  
  
• The US has already brought in the Central Asian states into its Central Command (Centcom) responsibility. The military exercise by Centcom that airlifted units of the 82nd Air Mobile Division direct from the US to Central Asia for the conduct of the Centrabat-97 exercise in September 1997, clearly demonstrated the US' intention to build new structures for regional security in Central Asia. The Russian sources consider that the US has already defined the areas of Central Asia and the Caucasus as "zones of American responsibility" and these are already subject to intelligence monitoring and tactical planning. Except for Tajikistan, the others have joined the NATO affiliates, the North American Cooperation Council (NACC) and PfP, which provide mechanisms for individually tailored programmes of security cooperation, like training and joint exercises. The new military-security profile of each Central Asian state, which is currently evolving in response to the Afghan conflict, may influence decisively the future security policy environment of Russia and even India....
  
  The Afghan conflict no longer looms large on the international stage. The West is only worried about the international terrorist threat emanating from Afghanistan. The international activism has made no significant headway in resolving the post-Soviet Afghan crisis. Since 1991, one after another, four chiefs of the UN Special Mission on Afghanistan (UNSMA) have concluded that their mission is "impossible". Dr. Norbert Heinrich Holl, the last one to quit, admitted that his two years efforts had yielded precious little. The UN peace-making formula included "shuttle diplomacy," forming of "technical groups", and "intra-Afghan dialogue" to evolve a common denominator of peace. The UNSMA's new chief, Lakhdar Brahimi, advocated a "six-plus-two" approach as the only route to peace. The UN peace broker now feels that the "decisive factor" for peace lies not among the warring Afghan factions, but among the meddling neighbours. To this effect, Brahimi toured the regional countries, including India, in September 1997, to assess opinion and shore up support.
     --P Stobdan (IDSA Strategic Analysis Aug. 1999)
  
  
• The [Afghanistan peace] talks began in late March in Jeddah after Iranian President Seyed Mohammad Khatami, the current OIC chairman, launched fresh peace efforts in February with consultation of Pakistan Chief Executive General Pervez Musharraf.
     --NNI (afghan-info 5/7/2000)
  
  
• Despite the cease-fire commitment made by the Afghan factions at their two recent rounds of talks held at the OIC General Secretariat in Jeddah in March and May 2000, with the attendance of the UN Secretary General's representative, a real end to the warring has not been achieved as yet, and national concord and the return of Afghanistan to the Islamic and international arena, have continued to be elusive.
     --OIC Ad Hoc Committee on Afghanistan (Deliberations 9/13/2000)
  
  
• The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) was established on 12 Rajab 1389H (25 September 1969) on the occasion of the first Conference of the Muslim World World which was held in Rabat - capital of Kingdom of Morroco - in the wake of the criminal arson attack against the Holy Mosque of Al-Aqsa on 21 August 1969 at the hands of Zionist elements in the occupied city of Al-Quds. This perfidious and terrorist crime was a violation of the Muslim's sancities, dignity and faith and was denounced and condemnde by the entire world. The leaders of the Islamic Were duty-bound to respond to thisblatant challenge wich came in the form of an aggression against the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, the first of Two Qiblas and third Holiest Mosque, through the reaffirmation of their unity and aligned atand. They thus came to the historical decision of establishing an international organization whose mission would be that of meeting the Islamic Ummah's need to crystalize its unity and express its solidarity.
     --Profile (IRNA)
  
  
• The date of August 21st corresponds with the anniversary of the criminal arson attack perpetrated against the blessed Mosque of Al-Aqsa. Today, this anniversary is commemorated at a time when the Palestinian people, the occupied city of Al-Quds and the holy shrines are facing a brutal Israeli aggression which has been escalating over the last twelve months.
     --OIC Appeal (To the Security Council 8/21/2001)
  
  
• Of retaliatory strikes launched by Israeli forces on Monday and Tuesday, Powell said that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ''is responding in a way that he believes is appropriate to defend his people and to defend his country.''
     --AP (NYTimes Online 12/4/2001)
  
  
• In the present regional environment the United States needs Israel more than Israel needs the United States. Israel can assist U.S. efforts to enhance Gulf security and to counter threats from Iran and Iraq. Strengthening Israel-Jordan security relations are a key element of this effort. Other options the United States should investigate include basing U.S. equipment in Israel, such as bombers. This action would send a clear, potent signal to potential adversaries that the United States is a guarantor of the security of Israel and of the peace process in general.
     --Dr. Zalmay Kalilzad (Peacewatch 93 5/2/1996)
  
  
• The president, who was flanked by Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, said the freeze applied to the assets of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a foundation based in Richardson, Tex., that raised $13 million last year and that says it is the largest Muslim charity in the United States.
     --Judith Miller (NYTimes 12/4/2001)
  
  
• Mr. Tenet also said the United States planned to send more intelligence operatives into southern Afghanistan, the officials said, and urged the president of Pakistan to go further in cracking down on militant clerics and other extremists....
  
  Pakistan has been quietly expanding the use of three isolated military bases by American Special Operations forces. C.I.A. officials told their Pakistani counterparts over the weekend that they would need more help on the ground in the coming weeks. One of the most pressing requests was for more information about the base formerly used by the anti-Soviet mujahedeen in the mountainous Tora Bora region of eastern Afghanistan where some people think Mr. bin Laden may be hiding.
     --Douglas Frantz (NYTimes 12/4/2001)
  
  
• "The threats we are picking up are very generic," Mr. Ridge said. "They warn of more attacks but are not specific about where or what type. We do know that the next several weeks, which bring the final weeks of Ramadan and important religious observations in other faiths, have been times when terrorists have planned attacks in the past."
     --Alison Mitchell (NYTimes 12/4/2001)
  
  
• The dry powder used in the anthrax attacks is virtually indistinguishable in critical technical respects from that produced by the United States military before it shut down its biowarfare program, according to federal scientists and a report prepared for a military contractor.
     --William J. Broad (NYTimes 12/3/2001)
  
  
• --In what could be an embarrassment to the Musharraf government, senior officials of his military regime have admitted that as many as 8,000 Pakistani citizens who went to Afghanistan to fight along with the Taliban militia is either dead or missing. (PIT)
  
  --The mood against Pakistan is so hostile in Kabul that Pakistan would not dare open its embassy there, says a report in The New York Times. India, one of the first countries to establish its diplomatic presence in Kabul, fears that its diplomat may be mistaken for Pakistanis as they travel through Kabul. (Jang)
  
  --The rift within the Northern Alliance between the old and new generations of Afghan politicians widened yesterday when Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun fighting near Kandahar, emerged as the likely leader of a new interim government. He seems set to supplant Burhanuddin Rabbani, the former president and nominal leader of the Alliance, whose influence is on the wane. (Guardian)
  
  --Mr Rabbani’s position was undermined further when a Northern Alliance figure claimed that he and other senior Alliance leaders, including Haji Abdul Qadir, the eastern Pashtun leader, had secret meetings with Pakistani Intelligence chiefs who were intent on wrecking Bonn because they want to ensure a greater role for Islamabad in shaping a future Afghan government. (Times UK)
  
  --The American hunt for Osama bin Laden appeared to have gone tragically wrong for the second time in two days yesterday, when US bombers were said to have killed scores of civilians in eastern Afghanistan as well as mujahedin fighters supporting the battle against al-Qa'ida. (Independent)
  
  --A 20-year-old American who joined the Taliban six months ago gives one of the first accounts today of what went on inside the siege of the Qala-i-Jhangi fortress, where up to 600 prisoners died. Northern Alliance forces bombed their rebellious Taliban prisoners, poured diesel fuel into the basement where they were held, fired rockets and finally flooded the area. "We spent the night in the freezing cold water," said Abdul Hamid, a white, educated-sounding American from Washington, who would not give his American name. (Guardian)
  
  --Hamid was identified by his parents as John Phillip Walker Lindh, of Northern California, according to the Newsweek Web site. (Reuters)
  
  --The Kuwait-based International Islamic Committee for Human Rights has asked Pakistan to grant asylum to "Afghan Arabs", a committee official said Sunday. "Pakistan remains the only safe haven for" Afghan Arabs, Secretary-General Mubarak al-Mutawa said in a statement. Mutawa said the committee, which was established in 1995 and has branches around the Arab world, last week sent a request to Pakistan to grant political and humanitarian asylum to Arab and foreign fighters currently in Afghanistan. Afghan Arabs are Arabs, such as Osama bin Laden, who originally went to Afghanistan to help fight the Soviet invasion of the country in the 1980s. Mutawa offered to coordinate with international legal and Islamic organisations if the Pakistani government agreed to provide shelter for the Afghan Arabs. The lawyer described the handling of last week's three-day prison battle near Mazar-i-Sharif as an "international crime", calling for an investigation into the incident that would refer those responsible to an international court. (Jang)
  
  --While it is hard to establish a direct link between poverty and extremism, religious intolerance has risen sharply in the last decade - the same period in which the country's [Pakistan's] poverty profile worsened, unemployment figures rose, and development expenditure in crucial sectors like education and health, either remained frozen. or declined. (Dawn Pakistan)
  
  --After 23 years of war, the past five under the Taliban's restrictive interpretation of Islamic law, freedom is coming quietly to the young women in this ultraconservative patch of eastern Afghanistan. Nowhere is that freedom more evident than in Jalalabad's dusty schools, where the brilliant and the fortunate are now attempting to make up for lost time. (Christian Science Monitor)
     --(Afghanistan Online 12/3/2001)
  
  
• Enron and its employees were the largest contributors to President Bush's campaigns over the years, and Enron gave more money to politicians in the last election cycle than did any other energy company. Since 1993, its employees and its chairman, Kenneth L. Lay, have donated nearly $2 million to Mr. Bush. In the 2000 election cycle, more than $1 million was donated to federal political campaigns, most of it to Republicans.
  
  Mr. Lay also had powerful friends. He recruited Wendy L. Gramm, the top commodities regulator in the administration of President Bush's father and the wife of Senator Phil Gramm, Republican of Texas, to serve on Enron's board in 1993. The appointment came just five weeks after Ms. Gramm helped push through a ruling at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that exempted many energy contracts from regulation....
  
  Last spring, when the Bush administration drafted a new national energy policy, Mr. Lay had a 30-minute meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney to discuss the report. The policy blueprint endorsed breaking up monopoly control of electricity transmission networks, an Enron goal that was spelled out in a memorandum Mr. Lay discussed during his meeting with Mr. Cheney....
  
  The Southern Company has long been Enron's main challenger for influence in Washington. The company has nurtured a loose coalition of Southeast lawmakers — the Senate minority leader, Trent Lott of Mississippi, most prominent among them — in support of its view that the states should retain leeway in deciding the pace and scope of energy deregulation.
     --(NYTimes 12/3/2001)
  
  
• In the meantime, much as we would like to rid the world of the man in Baghdad, only Al Qaeda and its associates, among the world's terrorist groups and state sponsors, are a present danger to Americans. It is in them that our antiterrorism efforts find their appropriate targets. Even Iran and Syria, countries that have sheltered terrorists, do not pose a comparable terrorism danger to Americans.
     --Vincent M. Cannistraro (NYTimes 12/3/2001)
  
  
• The U.S. officials sent a strong message to the Taliban [before Sept. 11]: "Share power with the king and expel bin Laden." This only pushed the Taliban to radicalize its attitude. U.S. policymakers proved irresponsibly blind. They did not understand how strongly bin Laden was tied politically with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. Furthermore, the U.S. administration had envisioned a military solution in Afghanistan, and they made it clear to the Taliban officials at some point in the talks....
  
  Seeking a strong regime in Afghanistan, the Western countries had Saudi Arabia, a country of Sunni influence like Afghanistan, choose from among the Pashtun, Afghanistan's main ethnic group, those who could seize power after years of civil war. That is why the Taliban emerged, with the help of funds provided by the U.S. and Saudi oil giants--Unocal and Delta Oil. Talks between the United States and the Taliban started cautiously under the Clinton administration. But the tone of the talks became different with the Bush administration.
     --Guillaume Dasquie, Co-author of "Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth" (Daily Yomiuri 11/28/2001)
  
  
• [John] O’Neill, formerly the director of antiterrorism for the FBI’s New York office, complained that he was constantly being hampered in his investigations into international terrorism. He claimed that the State Department kept interfering with his investigations into the WTC bombing in 1993, US Embassy bombings in 1998 and the suicide attack on the US destroyer, Cole, in October, 2000. He told Brisard that he was becoming frustrated and that for this reason, he would leave the FBI to join the private sector.
  
  The book also reveals that the first international warrant for the arrest of Osama Bin Laden was issued by Colonel Gaddafi of Libya in 1998, for the murder of two German antiterrorist agents in Libya in 1994, on Bin Laden’s orders. The document, file number 1998/20032, accused Bin Laden of being responsible for the murders. Bin Laden’s involvement with the Libyan opposition faction, the Libyan Islamic Fighting group, put him on a collision course with Gaddafi, because this group had been in turn involved with an attempt by MI5, the British secret services, to assassinate Gaddafi in 1996.
  
  Jean-Charles Brisard claims that the document was forwarded to him by an ex-Interpol officer who told him that the US and British secret services were hiding it from the public.
     --Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey (Pravda 11/20/2001)
  
  
• This year, the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine, blocked O'Neill from returning to Yemen to oversee the FBI investigation of the bombing of the Cole. O'Neill had led the initial team of agents in Yemen after the bombing last fall, but ran afoul of Bodine over what she considered his heavy-handed style, State Department officials said. She considered the FBI contingent too large and objected to the agents' insistence on carrying heavy weapons, they said.
     --NYTimes (AlienJesus.Com 8/19/2001)
  
  
• John O’Neill retired last month as the FBI's counterterrorism head to become chief of security at the World Trade Center, where he is believed to have died on Tuesday helping with rescue efforts. He was 49.
     --CNN (9/12/2001)
  
  
• O'Neill had led a team of FBI agents to Yemen to investigate the suicide bombing of the USS Cole. He had served in Washington as the FBI's section chief in charge of international counterterrorism before taking a similar role with the bureau's New York office in the wake of the 1993 trade center bombing. He retired a month ago to become head of security for the World Trade Center.
     --John L. Smith (LV Review 9/18/2001)
  
  
• Just three days before the attacks, O’Neill told former New York City police commissioner Howard Safir he planned a security review to look for chinks in trade center security. The two dined together at the black-tie wedding reception.
     --AP (terrorattacksamerical.com 9/30/2001)
  
  
• "That Tuesday was his first or second day on the job," Kerik said Friday in an interview with CNN's Larry King Live. . "He was going to go into One World Trade, the tower one, and when the strike came he went into the second tower in an attempt to help people get out of the building and he died there. We found his body today."
     --CNN (9/21/2001)