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B-52
Carpet Bombing Commences
Excerpts
from articles describing the start of B-52 carpet bombing of
Taleban front lines north of Kabul and in the Mazar-i Sharif
area, and an array of other news pertaining to the current state
of the military campaign ...
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America
intensified its attacks on Taliban front-line positions yesterday,
launching the first raids by giant B52 bombers north of Kabul.
The
appearance of B52s cheered anti-Taliban commanders, who have
spent the past week deriding American "pin pricks",
and raised their hopes that the enemy positions might at last
collapse. As a B52 barrelled across the sky, its four vapour
trails clearly visible, the whole landscape appeared to shake.
It
sent down one salvo of bombs, setting off a series of at least
15 explosions over a distance of half a mile, before returning
for a second attack.
A payload
of bombs from a B52
blots out Taliban positions on
Tutakhan Hill, north of Kabul, 10/31/01
Previous
air raids on the strategic sector of the Taliban front line
guarding the approaches to Kabul have been carried out by smaller
fighter-bombers which release one or two bombs at a time.
The
attacks continued throughout the day, and commanders said that
it was the most intense since America began bombing the front
line on Oct 17. "This is the most successful day so far,"
said Alou Zeki, commander of a sector of the front to the west
of the Soviet-built Bagram air base. "If it continues like
this, the front line will collapse and the Taliban can be defeated."
...
The Pentagon indicated that additional US forces would move
into Central Asia over the next few weeks from where they could
attack targets in northern Afghanistan.
Several
thousand troops, including Green Berets, have been in southern
Uzbekistan for some weeks. Independent observers in northern
Afghanistan have said that US F-15 Strike Eagle aircraft attacking
Taliban front lines have flown off towards Uzbekistan.
...
Charles Heyman, editor of Jane's World Armies, said the movement
of further assets to Uzbekistan came amid signs that the Americans
were preparing to set up a forward operations base in northern
Afghanistan as a prelude to a ground invasion in the spring.
...
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Source:
Excerpts
from an article describing the B-52 strikes and other details
of the military campaign ...
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The
Pentagon confirmed today that it is using heavy B-52 Stratofortresses
to carpet bomb front-line forces from Afghanistan's ruling Taliban
militia arrayed against opposition troops in northern Afghanistan.
B-52's conducted carpet bombing on and
around Tutakhan hill, north of Kabul,
pounding the hard-line Taleban Islamic
movement in some of the heaviest strikes
of the campaign so far, 10/31/01.
"That
is part of our campaign," Rear Adm. John D. Stufflebeem
told reporters at the Pentagon. "That is part of our capability.
We do use it and have used it. The B-52s are being utilized
in areas all over the country, including against Taliban troops
in the north."
The
B-52s have been flying since the beginning of the air campaign
on Oct. 7 out of a British base on the island of Diego Garcia
in the Indian Ocean. Stufflebeem said the B-52s have the capacity
to drop precision munitions and "large loads" of dumb
bombs that are particularly lethal against entrenched forces
in the field.
Asked
about how extensively the Taliban's military capabilities have
been degraded by more than three straight weeks of heavy airstrikes,
Stufflebeem said that their command and control networks have
been severely damaged.
"They're
having some difficulty communicating one to another," said
Stufflebeem, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of
Staff. "They're still attempting to communicate with [Taliban
leader Mohammad] Omar. They're also trying to get resupplied
and reinforced and they're having difficulty with all of that.
We certainly have many reports that they're under severe stress."
...
Stufflebeem also said that the U.S. military has received numerous
reports about the whereabouts of Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden,
the man held responsible by the Bush administration for masterminding
terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 against the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon.
Those
reported sightings, Stufflebeem said, typically have placed
bin Laden somewhere between Kandahar in the south and the Afghan
capital of Kabul. On the humanitarian front, Stufflebeem said
that Air Force C-17s have now flown 61 sorties over Afghanistan,
traveled 400,000 miles and dropped more than 1 million humanitarian
daily rations for starving Afghan civilians.
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Source:
Victims
of the Taleban
Complete
article of the shocking story of the victims of a heinous Taleban
atrocity - caution, if you are in any way susceptible to becoming
emotionally wrought when reading a story regarding horrific
torture, you would be well-advised to bypass this story ...
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Karimullah
is an Afghan who does not want to relate his war story. In a
land where everyone is quick to tell their tale, his silence
makes him unique.
He
stood alone in the narrow midday shadows of the hospital courtyard
when I saw him yesterday, a mix of glittering fury and blank
despair. He had hobbled into the Red Crosss orthopaedic centre
in Golbahar on Saturday.
Even
among the other amputees, his injuries stood out. Mines can
take off both legs and both arms, or the limbs of one side,
or, more often, just a single leg or foot. Karimullah's injuries,
however, had a different cause. When, reluctantly, he had finished
accounting for the loss of his left foot and right hand there
was nothing to do but leave the man to his blade-eyed stare.
The
son of Tajik parents, now 26 years old, he fled Kabul when the
Taleban arrived in 1996. Moving north to a village in Northern
Alliance territory with his wife and two children, he found
work in a vineyard. But he lost his job and home to a Taleban
advance in 1998. He joined the Mujahidin.
A
shell hit his post on the Samali Plain in 1999. It killed four
of his comrades. Karimullah escaped to a Pashtun village whose
inhabitants handed him over to the Taleban. Tried by a "military
tribunal" in Kabul, after torture he was sent to the city's
Pulecharkhi jail for having served with the Alliance.
"I
had been there 12 weeks when three Talebs came into my cell,"
he said. "They called my name out and said I was to be
released." Baffled but relieved, Karimullah was led to
a Datsun pick-up.
"They
began driving me to the Ghazi stadium," Karimullah said.
"I was silent at the beginning, but as we neared it I asked,
'What is this? What of my release?' They told me, 'Wait you
will be released'."
The
Datsun drove into the centre of the stadium. Karimullah recalls
thousands of faces staring at him in silence from the stands,
and between 10 and 14 mullahs on chairs in a line in the middle
of the field. He was pulled from the truck and told to lie spreadeagled
on the grass.
"The
mullahs didn't even ask my name or speak to the crowd. Seven
doctors approached me. They wore grey uniforms, surgical masks
and gloves. I could see one was crying. They injected me. After
five minutes my body was numb though I was still conscious.
Then they put clamps on my hand and foot and began to cut them
off with special saws. There was no pain but I could see what
they were doing."
I
asked him if he stared at the sky. He told me he was transfixed
by the sight of his foot being removed.
"There
was a sigh and murmur from the crowd when they finished. It
had taken about five minutes. Taleban guards threw me into the
back of the pickup One was crying too. Nothing was said. Even
now I am unaware why I was chosen for amputation".
He
was taken to Kabul's Wazir Akbar Khan hospital. After a week
eight of his former prison guards visited him. They brought
him apples and 600,000 afghanis (£10).
“They
apologised. They told me they had not known what would happen.
I threw the money and apples back at them. I screamed that they
had told me I would be released and instead had taken my foot
and hand for nothing. They left.”
On
the tenth day he was discharged. A taxi took him to his parents’
home. They had no idea what had happened to him.
Karimullah’s
eight-year-old sister, Razia, answered the taxi-driver’s
knock on the door. She burst into tears when she saw her brother
sprawled in the back of the cab. Worse was to follow. “My
mother had been ill for some time so was very weak. When she
saw me, she collapsed. She regained consciousness for a few
hours, but then had a heart attack and died.
“I
thought the worst day of my life had been in the stadium. Coming
home was worse. Her name was Masherin. She was 42.”
He
became a beggar, his mutilation carrying with it the stigma
and shame of the punishment normally meted out to a thief.
Then,
a few weeks ago, a cousin, a Mujahidin commander, got a message
through the lines offering him help. Borrowing a spare prosthetic
leg from a mine victim in Kabul, Karimullah limped northwards
for days, crossing the front with other refugees. The Red Cross
is preparing a prosthetic leg for him, but some scars cannot
be repaired.
“I
am finished. I have no future,” Karimullah said. “I
have had everything taken from me by the Taleban. Before they
came to Kabul I was a student in the tenth grade, an educated
man with some chances before me.
“Someone
told me a rich Pashtun had committed a crime and paid the corrupt
mullahs to use a prisoner of war for public amputation instead
of himself. I don’t know if it’s true. But I hate
them.
“I
dream only of having my hand again so I could carry a gun and
go to the front line and kill and kill. I’d kill them all,
every Taleb and every mullah.”
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Source:
- The Times
[link inactive]
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God
Is a Man-Made Creation
Complete
article with an excellent description of the process by which
the God meme is passed on from generation to generation ...
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| Men
invented the idea of gods to explain what they could not
explain any other way. |
Now the need for gods has gone, man cannot explain everything
but science has come up with enough answers that seem to sketch
out much of the important features in our Universe, there seems
no place for God to be hiding.
Next to my computer is a map of the world.
It
has most of the continents placed in roughly the right place.
The shape of South America is clearly discernible. North America
is a mess. It has Virginia marked but little else has its current
name. Much of the detail is obvious guesswork.
It
is interesting to note that the map maker guessed right in putting
a southern continent covering the pole but showing the North
Pole with no land.
He
got the size of the southern continent a bit wrong though, Antarctica
is not bigger than Asia or joined to the northern tip of Australia
or Tierra del Fuego.
I
see this map as a reasonable metaphor for mankind's current
knowledge of the Universe, we know a lot, we have made some
good guesses about the rest. Time will prove many guesses wrong.
But we know enough to do the equivalent of sailing from Europe
to Japan without expecting to find dragons in our way.
Good
stories never die. God continues to have a hold on us because
it is a good story. The idea of God has been with us for thousands
of years. Good stories get re-told. The story of God is a meme,
an idea that has what it takes to get itself replicated. It
has a hold on us because it is a meme complex, a series of ideas
that get bundled together and get passed on together.
Nobody
hears about God in isolation, suddenly coming across the idea
for the first time in a theology lecture at the age of 18. The
idea of God is so prevalent in our society that we never really
learn it in the way we learn a foreign language, we learn it
in the way we learn our own language. We learn it before we
have become critical thinkers, it pollutes all our thoughts
the way PCBs pollute our mother's milk.
Before
we know for ourselves if God exists or not we know where he
lives, what he does to little boys and girls that are naughty
and that he made all the flowers and the birds and if we are
bad he will tell Santa Claus not to come to give us any presents.
We learn all the baggage that comes along with the central idea
before we are capable of analysing the central concept.
Before
we are capable of knowing what a religious experience is we
know that the Bible is always right. We have leaned lots of
Bible stories and we have been armed with the religious inoculation
against atheism and other religions.
Here
is a short list of ideas that were well established in my head
before I was old enough to decide I didn't believe a word of
it:
- "Don't
tempt me satan."
An excellent all purpose inoculation against reasoned argument
from any quarter. The smart thing is that the more intelligent
the challenge to Christian orthodoxy the more obviously diabolical
the source is shown to be.
The fact that an argument for atheism appears to be reasonable
proves it must come from the horned deceiver himself. If this
piece does not convince you from your God fearing ways it
is because I am only one of the master's lesser imps, the
fallen angel himself is busy writing television sit-com scripts
and rock lyrics. (Note, that was IRONY)
- Unbelievers
go to Hell.
This is a classic memetic strategy, it gives reward to those
that pass on the meme. If you know that your actions will
save a soul from torment it is your duty to act. If catching
that soul before they are old enough to resist indoctrination
improves the chances that the soul will be saved then not
to indoctrinate would surely be a sin.
If frightening children saves their soul then it is your duty
to do it. Accepting that logic is only a small step from accepting
the need to marry your niece when she is thirteen to keep
her in the bosom of the true faith, or of killing your whole
family to save their souls from the satanic messages on MTV.
- Suffer
little children to come unto me. This
means allowing children to learn the wonderful works of Jesus.
No parent is going to be convinced by a conspiratorial idea
to tell their children to believe something early while there
is a chance the child will accept it without thinking. That
is a poor reward for passing on the message.
But Jesus is quoted as saying himself that children must be
allowed to learn the message early, for their own good. Tied
up with this is the thoroughly evil idea that the souls of
unbaptized dead children will be denied a place in heaven.
- The
Bible is the word of God. This
is another key belief in the interlocking series of ideas
that help perpetuate religion. The Bible is the revealed word
of God, revealed to the writers of the Bible, which contains
the revealed word of God.
Remember, you learned this before you learned that tautology
was a weak form of argument, and you learned it from the experts
in the Bible, which is the revealed word of God, they must
know what they are talking about. They are men of God. They
know the Bible. The Bible is the Gospel Truth after all.
If you believe that the Bible contains the word of God then
you can prove your point, look! There it is, in the Bible!
I can give you chapter and verse, what more proof do you need?
- Faith
is a virtue. Belief without proof is a virtue for
the religious. To the scientist belief without evidence is
gross professional misconduct. By turning a weakness into
a strength the idea of faith squares the circle and smoothes
down all the rough edges of any religion. Lenin tried to rid
Russia of belief in God, but he kept blind faith in the motherland
and the party instead.
Note,
all those ideas were firmly in place in my head before I was
old enough to use my own brain for myself. That is why Christianity,
and similar well structured religions, have so much power over
their believers.
Before
you confront the central point of whether or not you believe
in God you have such a wealth of ammunition to prove to yourself
that God must exist you don't really need to believe in any
positive way at all.
Once
you break that circle of self proof the Bible becomes just another
book, written by many different people over a long time. For
some reason it is no longer legitimate to add to the Bible,
but obviously in biblical times, it was.
Whoever
gave legitimacy to the writers of the Bible is obviously no
longer around. Christians say it is God who gives the Bible
legitimacy... But that is a cheap debating point unworthy of
me.
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Source:
A
Few Supporting References:
- Top
10 Reasons Believers Follow the Christian God
Did present-day followers create these myths? No, present-day
followers did not create most of these myths. Most were brainwashed
into it ... Creating super-beings was a common practice in
the days in which the christian super-beings were created.
- Protect
Children From Brainwashing
Recent shocking examples of abuse of religion resulting
in harm to children in the United States, and conveying the
extent of the danger in failing to give children the right
to access to a wide array of information on all faiths and
non-faiths during their vulnerable and formative years ...
- If
Humans Created God ... wouldn't different groups
of people create
different belief systems that have little in common other
than a silent and invisible deity (or deities) and a few human-constructed
behavior models?
- Pressures
to Believe Without Doubt
In times past, folks used stories to explain unknowns.
We now call most of those stories myths. In those days, they
were treated as of merit based on the position / status of
the persons conveying the stories as well as the consequences
if one disbelieved the stories being conveyed.
- Everything
From Everlasting Not-Quite Nothing ... well, not
really from not-quite nothing, more like from a world that's
theoretically everywhere and every 'when' while at the same
time nowhere in our substantive experience, a world that has
always been and will always be, the sub-atomic quantum world.
- Intelligent
Designer / 'Irreducible Complexity' / God / 'First Cause'
The evidence is clear that Intelligent Designer and so-called
'irreducible complexity' are little more than code-words for
God and that, in fact, within the area of remaining unknowns
regarding the origins of the universe and life, science is
humankind's only legitimate hope as the myths from the caves
of human ignorance just don't cut it anymore.
- The
Know No God, Know No Jesus,
Know No Angels, Know No Satan crowd ... there are those
of us on the planet who are totally and firmly convinced that
all of the mythical super-beings created by the religious
and superstitious are not worthy of consideration or recognition
as little more than the fears and delusions and desperation
of the human imagination ...
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