FOUR: Rise of the Taliban - Who are the Taliban? Before being pushed out of power following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001 - perpetrated by bin Laden-trained terrorists in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan - for five years the Taliban's strict control of Afghanistan had included a very tough and fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law. In a book called Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace (Johnson, et al
created initially as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Pakistani ISI" (Cogan, 2008). Author Mohammed Kakar - who was a professor at Kabul University and present in Kabul at the moment of the Soviet takeover / coup - writes that in 1977, two years prior to the Soviet invasion, then president Daoud was "increasingly annoyed" by the "clandestine activities" the Soviets were engaged in (Kakar, 1997, p
.certain hard-headed, unromantic, uncompromising attitude towards the world," Brian Leiter writes in the journal Philosophical Issue (Leiter, 2001)
The Taliban blew up the Buddhas ostensibly because Buddhism was not tolerated in this new radical Islamic state. The man who did the demolition of the great statues - they rose 175 feet and 121 feet into the air - was Mawlawi Mohammed Islam Moham-medi; he was interviewed by journalist Christian Parenti in Mother Jones magazine (Parenti 2006)
The "mutilated body of [President] Najibullah," with "banknotes stuffed into his mouth," was strung "from a lamp-post on one of the central intersections of the city." In his book, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, author Ahmed Rashid writes that many of the young militants in the mid-1990s "who gathered around the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar were the children of the jihad who were "deeply disillusioned with the factionalism and criminal activities" (Rashid 23) of the once-respected Afghanistan government
interests. Luca Ratti writes in the Journal of Transatlantic Studies (Ratti, 2006) that realism is "
; and two, a coup took place in Afghanistan in 1978, led by a communist-led group called the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA); the Soviets supported PDPA against a subsequent mujahideen threat, Gibbs writes, and the Soviets saw an opening for their communist ideology. The PDPA instituted "sweeping reforms" that were designed to "mobilize the landless poor" and fragment the "traditional social and economic structures," according to David Seddon in the journal Critical Asian Studies (Seddon, 2003)
But no concrete evidence of a link has been forthcoming." (Cohn 25) in other words there is no real connection between the Iraq government and Al-Qaeda other than the fact that terrorist organizations' ideologies, such as those of Al Qaeda, are similar to many others and are fed by U
Clarke defends the destruction of the factory, but in truth it posed no threat to our way of life, unless we expected al-Qaeda to spray us with aspirins in the hope that we would overdose. (Cook 34) There is little doubt that the actions of the U
, by making martyrs of a nation of presumable innocents.(Jones 26) the political positioning that has become increasingly obvious has undermined the faith of individuals in the nature and necessity of the War in Iraq, as people feel they were sold a bill of goods, rather than leveled with in regards to the strategic importance of the Iraq in the global war on terrorism in both the short- and long-term
These stereotypes now run deep, and changing them is a long-term project. (Maluf 74) Within the commentary that preceded the full invasion of Iraq and the subsequent designation of this action as war there are countless objections to full scale military action
One researcher even furthered the opinion that the idea of terrorism, as a state sponsored event, should be reaffirmed in political ideology, even though at least a decade of evidence is contrary to such state sponsorship. (Mylroie 24) What occurred is just that, the U
On this list that there was little real need to add more to the fodder, though out of fear and misguided ideas we seem to have done just that by invading Iraq and continuing to be seen and represented as blind aggressors against Islam. (Preble 20) the Abu Ghraib prison scandal is just one example of how a picture is worth a thousand words and how the world will likely continue to see the U
They also go on to point out that Clinton expelled the inspectors without the consent or consultation of the UN Security Council who for all intents and purposes was the overseer of the inspection process and the inspectors. (Reese, Killgore & Ritter 22) Another well documented myth is that Iraq and some active terrorist organization, of which Iraq is not one, have benefited from the dissolution of the Soviet Union, through the proliferation of Soviet weapons scientists and their knowledge
And even where isolated incidents have occurred, the individuals have been in contact with state officials, not terrorist organizations. (Weiss 117) The resulting truths seem to somehow escape the public and the U
Given that the Constitution has assured the rights of the prisoner to question the legality of his detention, it is certainly extraordinary to discover that Congress has authorized suspensions of habeas corpus on four occasions. The first occurred when President Lincoln (on April 27, 1861) "…suspended the writ of habeas corpus" in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Missouri (Brooks, 834)
S. Congress passed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) which required a one-year period for a defendant to seek habeas corpus review in death penalty cases (Fulks, 2009)
The idea that the Executive Branch can decide when habeas corpus applies and when it doesn't is an anathema to Constitutional guarantees. History of the Habeas Corpus University of Virginia history professor Paul Halliday writes that the writ of habeas corpus has served the Anglophone legal cultures for "…more than four centuries," and its purpose is basically to assure that a prisoner will be brought before a judge and not simply thrown into incarceration without specific charges against him (Halliday, 2010, p
C. The second instance was after the Civil War when Congress gave authorization to President Grant to suspend habeas corpus in the "Ku Klux Klan Act" (Jackson, 2003, p
In the United States, the Judiciary Act of 1789 fully recognized the power of federal courts to issue writs for federal prisoners, but in 1915 the High Court (Frank v. Mangum) "…broadened federal habeas corpus review to ensure that states supplied some 'corrective process'" so criminal defendants could also embrace habeas corpus rights (Scheb, 2008, 261)