until proven guilty in a
court of law. Are we to play cop and judge, jury and executioner too?
Can you live with yourself if you allow that to be the Democracy and freedom we export to the HIPC's (highly indebted poorer countries?)
bin Laden was cut off from the world, and, our govenment knew it. Tim Weiner is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist:
March 4, 1999
U.S. Says Osama bin Laden has had falling out with Taliban
By TIM WEINER
WASHINGTON -- The suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, his protectors in Afghanistan, have had a violent falling-out, raising the possibility that his days of refuge may be numbered, senior American officials said Wednesday.
Three American officials and two Taliban representatives said a fight broke out three weeks ago in Afghanistan between bin Laden's bodyguards and a group of Taliban officers assigned to watch over him.
After the fight, the officials said, bin Laden was expelled from Kandahar, where he had taken refuge with his family. He was isolated in the countryside and was stripped of his satellite telephones, which American officials said allowed him to plot with fellow radicals throughout the world.
"There is friction between him and the Taliban," one senior American official said. "They have tried to constrain him for the first time, and tried to limit his communications."
"It's a good sign," he said, indicating that bin Laden, the Saudi exile indicted on charges of masterminding the deadly bombings of two American Embassies in Africa in August, may have worn out his welcome with the Taliban, an armed religious movement that has sheltered him since 1996.
The Taliban has shown no sign that it is willing to deliver bin Laden to the United States. But one official said the Taliban had sent a clear signal that its desire to protect bin Laden is waning.
Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, a senior Taliban official, said the Saudi fugitive had become a problem. "His presence is not a benefit to the people of Afghanistan," he said, because it contributes to the nation's pariah status. But bin Laden poses "a puzzle for the Afghan leadership" to solve, he said, because the Islamic Taliban cannot be seen to betray a fellow Muslim.
The senior American officials said they were not certain where bin Laden is, only that he and his Taliban guards move from place to place in the stony wilds of Afghanistan. Officially, the Taliban also say they have no idea of bin Laden's whereabouts.
But a Taliban representative said the Afghans had sent an emissary to the United States asking how to deal with bin Laden without seeming to double-cross him, and had asked Saudi Arabia if it would take care of his wives and children.
Most of the Taliban officials and the three senior American officials who discussed the situation demanded anonymity, but all gave similar accounts of the breach between bin Laden and the Taliban.
On Feb. 10, they said, bin Laden's bodyguards became furious when a group of 10 or more Taliban officers tried to replace them. By one account, automatic weapons were fired.
After the fight, "bin Laden found himself in a confined and difficult situation," said Mujahid, the Taliban's representative-designate at the United Nations.
Three days later, the Taliban leadership formally replaced bin Laden's bodyguards with members of their intelligence service and foreign ministry, instructing their men to keep bin Laden from public view, the officials said.
"Our leadership decided to cut all communications from him, and even his telephone set has been taken from him," Mujahid said. "He has been told no foreigner can talk to him. Ten bodyguards were provided for him. The duty of the bodyguards was to supervise him and observe that he will not contact any foreigner or use any communication system in Afghanistan. He is now isolated."
The fight broke out over the degree of control the Taliban would have over bin Laden, another Taliban representative said.
It came a week after Karl F. Inderfurth, an Assistant Secretary of State, met in Pakistan with Jalil Akhund, the Taliban's deputy foreign minister, and repeated American demands to turn over bin Laden.
The Taliban, citing Islamic law and Afghan custom, say they cannot expel him.
"The situation is a puzzle for the Afghan leadership," Mujahid said. "In World War II, we couldn't hand over German citizens living in Afghanistan to the Allied forces. Regarding Osama bin Laden, if we would do something in this regard, it is totally against the Afghan character." bin Laden is considered a hero in Afghanistan for his financial and military support of the Afghan rebels, who defeated Soviet invaders in the 1980's.
"On the other side," said Mujahid, "his presence is not a benefit to the people of Afghanistan."
The Taliban, a radical Islamic movement with few friends among nations, desperately wants international recognition and foreign aid. It will receive little while it shelters bin Laden.
Though mutual mistrust complicates any cooperation, and some senior American intelligence officials are not convinced that the Taliban will ever betray bin Laden, the Taliban's leaders have at least three ways to deal with him that would be acceptable to the United States, senior American officials said.
They could arrange secretly for members of another nation's intelligence service to learn of his whereabouts in Afghanistan.
They could deliver him discreetly to a neighboring country, where American law-enforcement and intelligence officers could try to apprehend him.
Or they could keep bin Laden incommunicado in the hope that he might fade as a source of anti-American terrorism.
Some American officials think this last solution the best, since it holds no risk of making bin Laden a martyr, which could inspire fresh attacks against the United States from his followers.
http://www.samsloan.com/ladental.htm
Why don't you ask yourself who is really in charge? These people want WAR AT ALL COST!
And they will not take NO FOR AN ANSWER!
Black Programs - Pentagon Defied Laws, Misused Funds
by Tim Weiner
Source: New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/library/politics/072299pentagon-spend.html
July 23, 1999
WASHINGTON -- Congress says in a new report that the Pentagon defied the law and the Constitution by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on military projects that lawmakers never approved, including a super-secret Air Force program. The Pentagon acknowledged some of the accusations Wednesday night, saying honest mistakes led to its failure to notify Congress about the way it was spending money.
The House Appropriations Committee, expressing anger and astonishment in a report that accompanied this year's military spending bill, which is scheduled to be debated by the House on Thursday, said the practice had eroded trust between the nation's lawmakers and military commanders. Representative Jerry Lewis, Republican of California and chairman of the committee's defense spending panel, said the Pentagon's actions showed its belief "that it can even move money to a program Congress has closed down, maybe presuming, 'Oh, well, nobody will know.'"
"What do we have to do to make them understand what we mean when we say no?" Lewis asked.
The Pentagon spokesman, Kenneth H. Bacon, said Wednesday night that the failure to notify Congress about the military's redirecting of appropriated funds had taken place. "We work very hard to respond to the directives Congress gives us," Bacon said. "Do we get it right 100 percent of the time? Of course not."
He acknowledged that the Air Force wrongfully started and financed a highly classified, still-secret project, known as a "black program," without informing Congress last year. The committee said that act was illegal. It also raises questions about civilian control of black programs, whose costs and nature are the most highly classified secrets in the Pentagon. Military officials refused to discuss any details of the black program.
The committee's 313-page report says the Air Force tried to buy an $800 million military communications satellite without lawful authority, and illegally diverted from an unspecified program hundreds of millions of dollars to update its C-5 transport plane. It also says the Pentagon spent millions of dollars on a "Star Wars" missile defense program that was previously canceled by Congress.
One rule of journalism = ASK WHO BENEFITS?
But Greenberg, other insurance executives and President Bush had pushed terrorism insurance as a needed prescription for the U.S. economy. "This is not an insurance problem as much as an economic problem. It may slow down economic growth at a time when economic growth is vital," Greenberg said in January 2002. As the United States moved toward war with Iraq in early 2003, Greenberg and other insurers began expressing more interest in terrorism insurance. In a March 2003 conference call, Greenberg said: "We began writing property coverage countrywide for high-profile buildings, and other facilities ... since the terrorist thing began, and we had a full year, a little over a year of doing it. ... We've done quite well. We're in a risk business, and our job is to assess risk, and we've done that reasonably well. I hope we can write a lot more of it."
But analysts were expecting a slowly developing market for terrorism insurance. Chris Winans, an insurance analyst, said as few as one in ten policyholders were signing up for terrorism insurance. Even Greenberg admitted that few policyholders were taking terrorism insurance. "The only ones who are... are those companies or properties that are high profile, and that's true for the whole industry," he said.
The law requires the federal government - and by extension, American taxpayers - to cover 90 percent of losses caused by foreign terrorists exceeding $10 billion in 2003, $12.5 billion in 2004 and $15 billion in 2005. The federal government's coverage would be limited to $100 billion per year. Meanwhile, insurance companies could still receive federal aid if their terrorism-related losses exceeded a set percentage of their premium income. But insurers would still collect premiums to cover property owners against terrorist acts.
In short, the bill provides a subsidy to large commercial property owners, through lower risk premiums, and to insurance companies, by allowing them to write terrorism insurance at a fraction of its true cost. During the first half of 2002, property and casualty insurers - the types of companies most likely to be affected by a terrorist attack like that on the World Trade Center - reported a 66 percent increase in profits. Despite the terrorist attacks, property and casualty insurers generated $25 billion in new premiums in 2001, a trend that is expected to continue. According to Fortune magazine, the large insurance companies recorded $258 billion in total revenues in 2001 and total profits of almost $8 billion.
Greenberg and other insurance executives did not get everything they wanted in the bill, like limits on punitive damages. But the bill became law in part because Bush reached a deal with Democrats that required civil lawsuits arising from terrorist attacks to be tried in federal courts - keeping trial attorneys from searching for state courts where large trial verdicts might be possible. (According to some published accounts, Greenberg also pressed the White House following 9-11 to keep claims arising from the World Trade Center attack to a federal court in Manhattan to avoid state courts where insurers might face juries sympathetic to victims and billions of dollars of verdicts in compensatory and punitive damages to victims and survivors of the attack.)
http://www.commoncause.org/justwatch/pioneers.cfm?mode=pioneer&pioneerID=24
No wonder they had to shut Howard up. No one wants to talk about special interests, WHY?
BECAUSE THERE IS ONLY ONE GAME IN TOWN.
Join over 600, 000 in the silent non violent revolution, voting everyday, all day, early and often, with our $$ for a real power shift in Washington.