Posted on 12/29/2001 3:48:31 PM PST by NativeNewYorker
THE video begins innocently enough: a wildlife documentary presented by Sir David Attenborough shows him raving about rare insects and exotic plants against the backdrop of an active volcano. There is no sign of Al-Qaedas evil here, nor at the end of the tape, which features Princess Diana and Prince Charles at the start of a visit to Kuwait more than a decade ago, writes Mark Franchetti. Sandwiched incongruously between them, however, is a macabre insight into the gruesome world of Osama Bin Ladens disciples: a group of Arab soldiers, somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan, are tossing a severed head around for the camera. They taunt the bloody skull, shaking it by the hair, lift an eyelid to simulate blinking, and throw stones at it, while chanting a chorus in praise of Allah. The film is just one among a surreal video library collected from the caves of Tora Bora, Bin Ladens underground redoubt in the White Mountains of eastern Afghanistan, and from Al-Qaeda safe houses nearby. The innocuous beginning and end appear to have been added to fool anyone who might have stumbled across the tapes. The videos were stolen by villagers before American special forces could retrieve them, and are now quietly traded on the backstreets of Jalalabad with audio cassettes, documents, CD-Roms, and several passports of suspected Bin Laden supporters. It is the videos, though, that offer the darkest insight into the psychology of Al-Qaeda members, revealing for the first time what they were watching as well as producing for propaganda and educational purposes. One film, entitled Preparing for Martyrdom, is a lengthy weapons training video recently shot by Arab terrorists at an Al-Qaeda training camp at Durunta, a few miles west of Jalalabad. Arabic-speaking instructors, their faces blacked out, demonstrate how to use weapons ranging from handguns to anti-aircraft guns. The same video includes footage of Abdullah Azam, a Jordanian Palestinian extremist revered by Bin Laden as a father figure, who was assassinated in Pakistan in 1989. Azam is shown delivering tirades against America and Israel before a crowd of worshippers. Our leaders are wasting time with public works, he rants, in a clip between demonstrations on a grenade launcher and a sniper rifle. Other tapes feature news reports from recent conflicts involving Muslims, including Bosnia, Algeria, Israel, Chechnya, Lebanon and Afghanistan. Religious music has been taped over the original commentaries. The grisly highlights include the beheading with a knife of a hostage in Chechnya and a prisoner being tortured with a sizzling piece of metal. Another close-up shows a victims tongue being cut out. It is not clear how much of the collection was made inside Afghanistan, and how many of the tapes came instead from supporters in Pakistan and further afield. Under Taliban rule, ordinary Afghans faced public floggings and up to three months in jail if caught watching television, but members of Al-Qaeda had free access to satellite television. As soon as the Arabs left all hell broke loose, said one trader. In Jalalabad, neighbours went through the safe houses and took whatever they could, and in Tora Bora it was the same. I took four tapes but had to destroy two because my father is a very religious man and became terribly angry. I have no idea what was on the tapes I burnt. Who knows, maybe Bin Laden himself. |
You notice that Muslim Arabs don't really object to Saddam Hussein spraying Sunni Muslim Kurds with chemicals. No outcry from Arabs for a homeland for the Kurds. Thousands of them have been killed by their fellow Muslims.
Maybe next time they'll cut off his head. Then we'll see how he feels about them.
First and foremost our soldiers do not enjoy killing people, no matter what certain members of the press would have you believe. I was an American soldier both active and reserves, both at home and overseas, I know and you don't. We hate killing. We know verry well what consequences our actions have, but we will defend this country and it's people, even you, no matter what. For you to put any moral equivelancy between the actions of those animals and our soldiers is disgusting at best.
Second, and I can not stress this enough, WE DID NOT START THIS. It is not our fault our soldiers have been put into the position of having to kill these people. I know some in the press and certain other "activists" would have you believe that certain actions in our foreign policy have driven them to attack our innocent civians, but this is simply not true. It has been stated better before than I can possibly express here. We do not target civians. We did not start war. We do not kill for pleasure.
It has been the U.S. throught our history who protects the inocent. It is the U.S. who has rebuilt and protected even our vanquished foes. We free the oppresed, succle the starving. In every war the we have fought we have strived to act with compassion for our enemies, after we have defeated them, and we did not need any Geneva Convention to guide us.
There aren't enough nukes to do the job. What's Plan B?
I hope copies of the tapes that have been taken from Tora Bora and elsewhere in Afghanistan are spread far and wide so that the apologists will SHUT THE F--- UP ONCE AND FOR ALL!!!!!! It's one thing to hear about what goes on..... .but quite another to SEE it. That clip is the most disturbing thing I've ever seen-aside from 9-11.
There is no peace or goodness in Islam. It MUST be destroyed.
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