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Several Medecines sans Frotieres warehouses in Taliban-controlled areas have been looted in the last week, disrupting the distribution of aid to the Afghan people. The Taliban already kicked all foreign aid workers out of the country, now it looks like they’re raiding the stores of aid supplies that those agencies left behind for distribution by their Afghan employees. (Just saw a link to this article from the Guardian at Dangerousmeta about the Taliban seizing two UN food warehouses, too. When you’re stealing from international aid organizations that are providing aid to your country in the first place, you’re at the end of your rope. In even more recent news, the Taliban have returned at least one of the food warehouses to UN control.) ...

Yesterday, the New York Times ran transcripts of the communications with air traffic control of three of the four hijacked planes from 9/11: American Airlines flight 11 American Airlines flight 77 United Airlines flight 175 Here’s a link to the accompanying story. This MSNBC article (link via Dangerousmeta) describes the reaction among the students and teachers at a madrisa (see this article or more on madrisas) to the videotape of the attack on the World Trade Center. The students had never seen the World Trade Center, New York, or a television, so seeing the footage of the attack was obviously a shock to them. Despite the fact that the students are quite possibly being trained as terrorist shock troops for the ongoing conflict in the Kashmir, they and their teacher were appalled by the footage. Many of the people who disapprove of Westerners don’t know the first thing about America. Osama bin Laden and the hijackers from the 9/11 don’t have that excuse. ...

Our latest disagreement with the Taliban: the number of people who were killed by an attack on the Afghan village of Karam, and what they were up to. The Taliban says 200 villagers died in the attack, Donald Rumsfeld says that the Taliban are “accomplished liars.” I honestly have no idea who’s telling the truth. The attack has been a public relations boon for the Taliban – since they made the claims, governments of Islamic countries around the world are getting cold feet about our continued bombing of Afghanistan. ...

Mozilla 0.9.5 is out. Interesting new features include tabbled browsing (a la Opera), and a site navigation bar for those sites which support it using the link element. It also comes with Venkman, a debugger for JavaScript. I received two emails about cluster bombs in response to my comments on them the other day. Both of them noted a danger inherent to the use of cluster bombs that I left out – the fact that usually some of the bombs in the cluster are duds. Rather than exploding when the bomb is initially dropped, they lay on the ground waiting for some unfortunate soul to come into contact with them. These unexploded munitions remain an indefinite risk, like land mines. In fact, some cluster bombs are used to deliver land mines rather than standard bomblets. (I really hope we’re not using that type in Afghanistan, which is already one of the most heavily mined countries in the world.) The second thing is that cluster bombs are not just an anti-personnel weapon. They can be used for taking out vehicles and structures that aren’t hardened, rendering airstrips useless, and for other such tasks. ...

Here are a few links to some non-specific stuff: Falwell-Robertson-bin Laden quiz. Phil Agre’s latest set of attack-related links. Does the word skyfall mean anything to you? I know you already saw this: Bert is Evil turns up on a poster in a protest. Life repurposes art. President Bush gave a live press conference on TV tonight. Here’s a transcript. Unfortunately, the press conference was held before the White House press corps, and in my opinion, not one really tough question was asked. Compare: Tony Blair sat down to an interview with Al-Jazeera, Bush faces the nation before the White House press corps. President Bush also mispronouis nces both “Islamic” and “Muslim.” I find that irksome. (This post marks the end of conflict-related non-partisanship at rc3.org. I’m going back to criticizing the president, although I will no longer refer to him as “Dubya.”) ...

The Taliban are now accusing the United States of targetting civilians in the attacks on Afghanistan, which strikes me as the worst sort of hypocrisy. Anyone who watched Beneath the Veil on CNN knows that Taliban soldiers execute and rape civilians with regularity in their ongoing war against the United Front (aka Northern Alliance) and apparently think nothing of it. These are also the people who publicly execute women for wearing makeup, showing any of their skin in public, or teaching girls over a certain age. ...

So I heard yesterday that we bombed the residence in Kandahar of Mullah Omar (the Taliban supreme leader). I question whether that’s a valid military target, and whether it breaches the United States’ prohibition on assassination. What would our reaction be if Osama bin Laden had bombed the White House? I read in an email from the IP list that CNN’s transcript of Tony Blair’s speech to the Labour Party conference was truncated (it was also terribly transcribed). Anyway, here’s a link to the full text of the speech at the Labour Party web site. (Humorously, it’s in a directory called LONGSPEECHES.) ...

Dan Gillmor’s latest column reminds us not to lose sight of important issues not related to our war against terrorism. I’m having trouble keeping track of the issues directly related to the war, and most other things have been completely off my radar screen. Slate has a story on evolution of the myth that 4,000 Jews who worked in the World Trade Center called in sick on 9/11. Robert Fisk takes it to the media in his rant against sycophantic war reporting. ...

Phil Agre released two more sents of attack related links (10/6, 10/7) over the weekend. One question I have not seen clearly addressed in any news stories I’ve read is what we hope to accomplish, specifically, through our current attacks on the Taliban. Maybe I’ve missed it. Is our goal to blow up Osama bin Laden wherever he’s hiding? Is our goal to destroy all of the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan? Is our goal to depose the Taliban? Is it to weaken the Taliban so that they can be defeated by the Northern Alliance? Are our objectives a secret? It will be impossible to judge whether we have succeeded, and indeed, when we should disengage, if we’re not clear on what it is we’ve set out to do. ...

It’s war. So now the nation shifts to war footing. I don’t know how much war coverage I’ll link to here, probably more than I intend to right now. The thing to remember when it comes to media coverage of war is that it’s impossible to tell how accurate it is at the time. Whenever you see reportage or even worse talking heads on TV saying something, you should immediately apply a plausability test. That’s true whether you’re watching CNN, reading the New York Times, or checking out the Frontier Post from Pakistan online. ...