This Reuters wire story (via a mention at Cursor) notes that a recent interview of Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader on the run since November, has been published by the Arab newspaper Ashraq al-Awsat (based in London). The crux of the story is that according to Omar, Osama Bin Laden is still alive.
So while the media makes hay about the recent revelations that the Bush administration had warnings about Bin Laden and terrorists enrolling in flight schools from the CIA and FBI pre-9/11, the fact of the matter that seems to recede further each day from the public consciousness is that Bin Laden and Omar are still at large, and that whether they’re “dead or alive”, the US military (oh excuse me, the “allied effort”) has no fucking clue.
Incidentally, I noted with some amusement this bit from the above-mentioned Reuters story: “[…] the article would also be published on what it called the official Internet site of the Taliban. It did not carry the address for the site.” A quick Google search brought up this Wired article from last October about the mysterious site, which was at www.afghanistan-ie.com until just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks when it mysteriously vanished off the face of the Internet. As mentioned in the article, WHOIS still shows the domain registered to Pakistan’s largest ISP Brain.net, and lists the “administrative contact” as the “Taliban Govt Web Page”. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine shows us what the site looked like as of July 2001.
(A fascinating tidbit gleaned from the Wired piece surrounding the background of Brain.net: it grew out of Brain Computers in Lahore, the owners of which wrote one of the world’s first computer viruses back in the early ’80’s.)
At any rate, I did more surfing and I think it’s safe to say that www.taliban.org is definitely not the Taliban’s official site, despite the spot-on cheesy design.