Taliban are 'demonized': Imprisoned Canadian offers no criticism of his imprisoners

QUETTA, Pakistan - Montreal computer programmer Ken Hechtman ventured into Taliban-held Afghanistan last Sunday without permission or a translator, with just $150 and some maps from a bookstore, a rented Pakistani cellphone that doesn't work across the border, and dreams of making his name as a war reporter while telling the true story of Afghanistan.

What he got instead was six days in a Taliban jail where he was shackled at the feet for two days next to cellmates who included a heroin dealer and a carjacker, and threatened with execution.

So if he shows up in the US, he'll be OK if he's immediately arrested and relieved of his belongings?

"I don't see why everyone complains about the US", Ken said. "I didn't even have to wear leg shackles."

After his experience with the Taliban, Hechtman, a veteran activist who said he had been arrested eight times in the United States for protesting and squatting for liberal causes, is even more convinced that they ''have been demonized. ... I am not going to defend the Ministry of Vice and Virtue - they are everything they say they are. But the rest of them are not monsters.''

You went into the middle of the war to find out THAT?

I'm sure there are plenty of wonderfully nice Taliban, just as there were plenty of wonderfully nice German soldiers during WWII. I'm sure there are plenty of guys that, under different circumstances, we could happiliy sit down for a cup of tea with.

That doesn't change the fact that they're pointing guns at us (some willingly, some unwillingly), we are at war with them, they are a threat to our security (because they hinder us from getting at Osama bin Satan) and we have to shoot them.

I thought computer people were smarter than this. Adds a new phrase to the English vocabulary: to "pull a Hechtman."

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