“Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban have rejected President Bush’s ‘second chance’ offer to surrender terrorist suspect Osama bin Laden, a Taliban official said Saturday. A Taliban official in Kabul, asked about the Bush offer, said the militia’s position had not changed. ‘We will not hand over him to America without getting credible evidence about his involvement in terrorism,’ said Mullah Khaksar Akhund, the deputy interior minister.”
My question, however, is this: why DON’T we show them the evidence? Would this not be prudent? Have we tried? I don’t doubt his guilt, but doesn’t it make sense that the Taliban’s governing body wouldn’t want to extradite OBL w/o seeing evidence of his crimes, or is the assumption that they simply KNOW he’s guilty, prima facie, and are just being unnecessarily pigheaded about it?
Please note that this is a thread borne of ignorance, not out of some free-floating, anti-American cynicism. Apparently, I, like many Americans, I suspect, am not as informed as I’d like to be in regards to the intricacies of these particular foriegn relations. Best to learn as much as possible before holding forth with an argument built upon a shaky foundation of half-truths and credulousness, no?
A shit load of evidence has been published. A general report has been published on the 'net that is a bit watered down so as to avoid giving away intellegence secrets. There are other reports with varying degrees of more detail that have been given to the heads of other nations and presumably the Taliban. In any event they have certainly seen the general report which is damning.
So what’s the problem. Virtually all of the evidence on the public report is circumstantial. OBL is way too smart to leave any kind of a trail. All of his orders are verbal to very trusted aids. There’s no way we could ever meet the standard of evidence that the Taliban would require. Even if we had video tape of OBL telling a group of terrorists to crash a group of planes into buildings, the Taliban would probably just say that the evidence was a fabrication of US Imperialist and Zionists.
A shit load of evidence has been published. A general report has been published on the 'net that is a bit watered down so as to avoid giving away intellegence secrets. There are other reports with varying degrees of more detail that have been given to the heads of other nations and presumably the Taliban. In any event they have certainly seen the general report which is damning.
So what’s the problem. Virtually all of the evidence on the public report is circumstantial. OBL is way too smart to leave any kind of a trail. All of his orders are verbal to very trusted aids. There’s no way we could ever meet the standard of evidence that the Taliban would require. Even if we had video tape of OBL telling a group of terrorists to crash a group of planes into buildings, the Taliban would probably just say that the evidence was a fabrication of US Imperialists and Zionists.
Another problem is that the evidence likely contains sensitive information regarding sources and methods of gathering information.
For an example, I would like to point out the original World Trade Center bombing. When they brought the perp to trial, in the evidence was included a lot of stuff that they had gathered by intercepting cell phone calls. Once it got out that the CIA/FBI/NSA was monitoring the cell phones of suspected terrorists, they lost that avenue of information gathering.
The variation on Islamic law that the Taleban preaches holds that terrorists cannot be convicted without eyewitness testimony. Since we have no eyewitness testimony to prove even that the planes that flew into the World Trade Centers were hijacked, let alone by operatives of bin Laden, they are not going to accept our circumstantial evidence, no matter how convincing it would be to a rational person.
Of course, this is the same government that presumes that a woman who is seen in public with a man not related by blood or marriage to herself is a prostitute (if she is not married) or an adulterer (if she is married) and punishes her accordingly for these offenses. I believe the prescribed punishment for prostitution is public flogging, and for adultery, public stoning. There is no defense to these charges.
To expect a concern for anything even remotely resembling justice from these people is absurd.
Anyway, we don’t want Bin Laden handed over - that would actually be a disaster, IMO. I think Bush made the offer for one reason only - he knew it wouldn’t be accepted. It was a good PR move, to show just how intransigent the Taliban are being.
As for evidence - Bin Laden himself pretty much admitted that his group did the bombings in that first taped statement he made last week. What more evidence could you ask for?
Anyway, from a tactical viewpoint, you don’t want to play this ‘evidence’ game, because it puts control of the situation. Now they can claim to be ‘studying’ the evidence and get a halt of the bombing while they either shore up their defenses or sneak Bin Laden out of the country. Then they can claim that the evidence proves nothing even if it does, and force the U.S. to release it publically to the world. And now the U.S. is on the defensive, and these guys start to take the moral high ground. And of course, it gives them information that they can use to either kill informatants, close leaky communication channels, or whatever.