This article in the New York Times points to a flaw in our war on Drugs as well as our war on terrorism. It is a great thing to convict Haji Bashir Noorzai but it is in the greater scheme of things almost meaningless. Haji Bashir Noorzai is not the problem he was just a leader. the real problem is the 1 million member Noorzai tribe and its ties to Taliban, commerce in Afghanistan, Hawala money trade and heroin. The Noorzai must be treated as a criminal body in the same manner the LCN crime families are targeted. But at the same time they must also be reated militarily as Al Qaida is targeted. The Noorzai are effectively a fusion of organized crime and international terrorism. Thre is no meaningful difference between the man who funds a terrorist bomb and the man who explodes the bomb.
Best wishes,
Barry O'Connell
Manhattan Jury Convicts Man Linked to Taliban Leader in Drug Smuggling Case
Published: September 23, 2008
A federal jury in Manhattan found an Afghan tribal leader guilty on Tuesday of taking part in an international narcotics trafficking conspiracy that sent millions of dollars worth of heroin around the world, including into the United States.
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Drug Enforcement Administration
Haji Bashir Noorzai faces a potential life sentence.
The jury deliberated for about three hours before returning its verdict against Haji Bashir Noorzai, whose case drew widespread attention because of his prominent role in the drug trade and his ties to one of the most wanted men in the world, Mullah Mohammad Omar, the fugitive Taliban leader.
“You have seen the defendant for what he is,” a federal prosecutor, David A. O’Neil, told the jury in closing arguments on Monday, “a drug dealer on a massive scale, a global heroin trafficker driven by greed for money and for power, a man who has made himself rich off the misery of others.”
Prosecutors had portrayed Mr. Noorzai as a businessman who would do anything to keep control of his lucrative heroin operations in Afghanistan, no matter who was in power.
They said Mr. Noorzai owned vast tracts of land in the southern province of Kandahar, on the Pakistan border, where he used hundreds of farmers to cultivate opium poppy plants, workers in remote labs to process them into heroin, and smugglers to ship drugs worldwide, including into New York City.
Mr. Noorzai’s lawyer, Ivan S. Fisher, did not flatly deny that his client was involved in the drug trade, but he said in closing arguments that the question was whether Mr. Noorzai had ever sent drugs to the United States — “intentionally, unintentionally, in any way at all.” Mr. Fisher made it clear that the answer was no.
“What is it we’re doing,” he told the jury, “running around the world going after every opium grower?”
As the jury foreman announced the verdict, Mr. Noorzai, who is in his 40s, listened impassively, just as he had shown little emotion throughout the trial.
After court, Mr. Fisher said his client would appeal.
“We are enormously disappointed by the verdict,” he said. “It must be very difficult for an American jury to give a defendant associated with high levels of the Taliban a fair trial. It is our view that this jury was unable to do that.”
Afterward, jurors said that the defendant’s connection to the Taliban had no bearing on their decision.
“I’m still intimidated by him — his looks, his demeanor,” one juror, Martha Ramos, said after the jury was dismissed.
Another juror, Monica Lopez, said, “He seemed very stoic throughout the trial.”
Michael J. Garcia, the United States attorney, said that with the verdict, “Noorzai’s decades-long criminal career has finally ended, and one of Afghanistan’s most prolific heroin exporters now faces a potential life sentence to be served in a U.S. prison.”
Judge Denny Chin of Federal District Court said he would sentence Mr. Noorzai on Jan. 7.
Prosecutors said Mr. Noorzai developed a relationship with the Taliban, paying it 10 percent of his drug profits and turning over arms and fighters in return for being allowed to continue his drug operations even after the Taliban banned opium production in 2000.
Ms. Lopez and Ms. Ramos said that before deliberations, some jurors questioned the credibility of certain witnesses involved in the drug trade, and the strength of the case against Mr. Noorzai, who did not testify. But after the judge instructed them on the law, Ms. Lopez said, “There was no choice but to convict.”
Prosecutors built their case around testimony from several men who had been convicted in drug cases and who described Mr. Noorzai’s role in the conspiracy; on secretly recorded phone conversations; and on statements Mr. Noorzai gave to federal agents after he flew to New York in 2005.
A Drug Enforcement Administration agent, Patrick Hamlette, said that Mr. Noorzai admitted he was aware his heroin was carried into the United States concealed in suitcases and clothes.
Indeed, the fact that Mr. Noorzai, who has said he led an Afghan tribe of a million members, was even talking to the authorities after coming to America under murky circumstances, gave the trial much of its intrigue.
Before trial, Mr. Fisher had asked that charges be dismissed on the ground that Mr. Noorzai had been promised safe passage by American contractors if he agreed to provide information about the financing of terrorism.
But the court ruled that even if the government had used such tactics, they did not invalidate the charges and could not be used as a defense during trial.
Still, hints surfaced, as one did when an F.B.I. agent testified under cross-examination that Mr. Noorzai believed he was a “guest” of the United States.
One juror, Ms. Lopez, said jurors picked up on the issue, but added that it played no role.
“We weren’t allowed to consider that,” Ms. Lopez said. “Several of us thought he was tricked; people even used the word entrapment. But some of us thought there was no other way to prosecute individuals who violate the law outside the country.”
Judge Chin told jurors Mr. Noorzai’s arrest was “entirely lawful.”
BAMIYAN, Afghanistan (AFP) – "We got him!" screamed Afghan archaeologist Anwar Khan Fayez as he leapt from the pit beneath the towering sandstone cliffs, where the Bamiyan Buddhas once stood.
Seven years after Taliban militants blew up the two 1,500-year-old statues in a fit of Islamist zealotry, a French-Afghan team in September uncovered a new, 19-metre (62-foot) "Sleeping Buddha" buried in the earth.
The news that a third Buddha escaped the Taliban's wrath has caused excitement in this scenic valley, where the caverns that housed the ruined statues are an eerie reminder of Afghanistan's past and present woes.
"It was a happy moment for all of us when the first signs appeared. Our years-long efforts had somehow paid off," Fayez told AFP.
The team, led by France-based archaeologist Zemaryalai Tarzi, made the find while hunting for a lost 300-metre reclining Buddha mentioned in an account by seventh-century Chinese monk Xuan Zang.
The Afghan-born Tarzi began mapping the site nearly 30 years ago but decades of conflict and the rise of the 1996-2001 Taliban regime put the search on hold.
Then in March 2001 came the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, until then the world's largest standing Buddha statues.
Hewn into the cliffs in the sixth century by Buddhist pilgrims on the famed Silk Route, the statues had survived attacks by several Muslim emperors down the ages, while even Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan had spared them.
But with the backing of Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda movement, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar declared that they were idols that were against Islamic law.
Defying international appeals, the Taliban spent a month using first anti-aircraft guns and then dynamite to obliterate them.
Saddened but with renewed determination, Tarzi and his team returned soon after US-led forces and the Northern Alliance ousted the Taliban in late 2001 to renew their search for the giant missing Buddha.
What they found instead, in September this year, were parts of a previously unknown, smaller Buddha figure, including a thumb, forefinger, palm, parts of its arm, body and the bed on which it lay.
"This is the most significant find since we started here," Abdul Hameed Jalia, the director of monuments and historical sites for Bamiyan province, told AFP at the excavation site of the new 19-metre Buddha.
"At first they found part of the leg but they weren't sure what it was," said Jalia. "But when they found more, Mr Fayez screamed out of happiness and ran to our office to find Mr Tarzi."
Fayez said the head and other parts were largely destroyed, possibly by Arab invaders in the ninth century.
"We have not found the whole statue. But we can tell from other parts that it appears to be 19-metres long," Fayez said.
The site has now been covered with earth to protect the Buddha from both the ravages of the harsh Afghan winter and from the attention of antiquities thieves.
Tarzi told AFP in an e-mail that he and a number of French colleagues aimed to return next summer to dig out the rest of the statue.
Meanwhile, there are fresh clues about the 300-metre Buddha, officials say.
What appear to be the remnants of a gate complex that may have led to the statue have been discovered under an apparently collapsed section of cliff between the two holes left by the Taliban.
"Mr Tarzi's team has found signs that indicate that the big lying Buddha is there and has 70 percent hopes that they will find it," said Najibullah Harar, head of Bamiyan's information and culture department.
Amid hopes that they could one day be rebuilt, Afghan, Japanese and German teams are also stabilising the sites of the destroyed statues -- the bigger 55-metre figure known as Salsal and the 38-metre statue known as Shahmama.
Boulder-sized chunks of the Buddhas still lie where they fell, each individually labelled. Ghostly outlines of the two figures are still etched in the rockface and twisted metal shell casings litter the ground.
Archaeologists' efforts have been helped by the fact that Bamiyan -- inhabited by Shia Muslims from the Hazara ethnic minority that was once persecuted by the Taliban -- has been a relative oasis of calm.
But ongoing debate over whether to reconstruct the Buddhas reflects the uncertainties that haunt post-Taliban Afghanistan.
"It is the desire and the wish of the Bamiyan people to see, if not both, then at least one rebuilt," Habiba Sorabi, the governor of Bamiyan province, told AFP in an interview at her office overlooking the statues.
Rebuilding the Buddhas could help foster a tourist industry in the desperately poor region, which lies 200 kilometres (124 miles) northwest of the relatively prosperous capital Kabul, she said.
UNESCO declared Bamiyan a World Heritage Site in 2003 and there have been discussions with international partners about using the process of anastylosis, by which ruined monuments are reassembled from old fragments and new materials.
"But unfortunately the central government does not want to work on it," added Sorabi, who is the only female provincial governor in Afghanistan. "It is a shame."