Come on, gang.  What's wrong with this story?

1. Afghani women buy "Lipstick, bracelets, compact cases, perfume, 
   nail polish, hair-clips, even shiny black handbags" in the 
   repressive culture alleged to exist in Afghanistan.  As though
   the merchants bring it in and sell it in the markets, but the 
   women who buy it go to prison.

2. Women were thrown into prison with the offending contraband 
   still in hand, so they could leave it on the prison floor when 
   they were hauled out for the stonings.

Reminds one of  the hash pipes and hypodermics found all over
the floors in our American courtrooms, where druggees are 
prosecuted and hauled out to serve their sentences in our "war on 
drugs", leaving their paraphernalia behind.

This is the obvious swill of wartime propaganda, not even
sophisticated.  This is at the level of WW II wartime comic-books.

What does it mean when liars are shipped out to the front lines 
to tell stories like this one?  Is it possible the home front is 
having a little trouble supporting this war on peasants, and they
need the moral outrage?

Let me ask a simple question for the authors and publishers of
this material:  Even supposing (for the moment) these stories are 
true, which atrocity would a woman prefer for herself and family:

The Afghani whippings and stonings of the Afghani clerics?

Or the "daisy cutter" fuel-air bombs, cluster bombs, famines, 
errant cruise missiles, and land mines served up to them for 
their own good by the United States?

In this propaganda campaign of "save the Afghani women from the 
Muslims", I hear strange echoes of Janet Reno "saving" the 17
Little children from David Koresh.

J

==================================================
Kabul's 'room of pain' unlocks torture secrets 
by Philip Sherwell and Julian West in Kabul
(Filed: 25/11/2001) 


THE evidence lies scattered on the filthy concrete floor.
Lipstick, bracelets, compact cases, perfume, nail polish,
hair-clips, even shiny black handbags: each one enough to condemn
a woman to the "room of pain" in the Taliban's Afghanistan.

On the wall nearby are rust-coloured stains and long, deep
scratches: the blood and fingernail gouges left behind by women
tortured in this room as punishment for their alleged crimes
against Islam.  Kabul's infamous women's prison yielded its grim
secrets last week after the zealots of the Taliban fled the city.

It was here that the feared religious police incarcerated and
tortured women deemed to have breached the codes of dress and
behaviour imposed by the mullahs at the Ministry for the
Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.  Accused female
adulterers and criminals were also brought here before being
taken to public squares and stadiums to be stoned, flogged or
have limbs amputated.

Workers at the prison recall hearing inmates' screams seeping
from behind the locked doors of the room of pain.  From the wall
of the small stone-walled torture chamber dangles a green rope
used to tie up prisoners still shrouded in their head-to-ankle
burqas.

The Northern Alliance, the city's new ruler, has appointed a
senior official to investigate the abuses committed in the
women's jail under its director, the Pakistani cleric Mullah
Kebale.

The full scale of the atrocities will probably never be known,
however, as the Taliban burnt the prison's files and records when
they fled.  More alarmingly, the retreating Taliban forces also
drove away almost 100 women inmates as they headed south in a
fleet of pick-up trucks towards Kandahar.

Relatives broke down in hysterics after they came to the
unguarded jail the next morning, only to find that their
daughters, sisters and mothers had disappeared.  Left behind in
spartan cells that housed up to 20 women and their children were
their lice-infested mattresses and ragged clothes.  The departure
was so abrupt that their laundry still hung from washing lines
strung across a small courtyard surrounded by barbed wire.

Some of the warders' torture implements, including thick metal
manacles and the long rubber whips with which the religious
police routinely beat their victims, were abandoned in the rush.

So were many of the beauty products and jewellery secretly worn
by women under their burqas, only for the items to land them in
jail when they were discovered.  Under the Taliban, even white
shoes and shiny handbags were considered too racy for a woman to
wear outdoors.

Yet some women took enormous risks running underground beauty
parlours.  Last week The Telegraph visited one such parlour in a
bedroom on a squalid housing estate where a woman called Mehbooba
maintained an Aladdin's cave of perming lotion, hairspray,
lipstick, nail polish and hand-carved wooden curlers.

On a shelf is a handpainted sign reading "Yamarut Beauty
Parlour", which the 41-year-old Moscow-trained beautician had
hidden during the Taliban's rule.  For six years, women from the
neighbouring flats secretly visited her.

"We had to be fashionable," said Mehbooba.  "Even though we
weren't seen, it was important to us, it helped to keep our
spirits alive." Had she or her clients been discovered they would
have ended up in the room of pain.

Others were hauled into the squalid prison and beaten for
offences such as walking or talking with a man who was not a
close relative, or for briefly lifting their veils to look at an
item in a shop.

Sharbano, 32, had been a prison officer at the jail before the
Taliban seized the city in 1996 and banned women from working.
The next time she returned to the compound was to visit a friend
who had been arrested because her husband was suspected of
supporting the alliance.

She still shakes as she describes the "savagery" of the three
Taliban who forced the woman down on to the floor, covered her
body with a blanket and then whipped her repeatedly with a thick
cable.

Shan Fahim was a policeman stationed in the main headquarters.
He recalls the screams and cries of women held there and says the
torturers were "animals".  He said: "They could not hide their
excitement when they discussed what they had done.  They just
used the name of Islam as an excuse to justify their actions.
They were not normal people."

Wajihah Shah, a 30-year-old mother-of-three, returned to her job
as prison administrator last week.  The religious police beat her
twice, once for travelling alone in a taxi with the driver, and
the other time for attending an unauthorised sewing evening with
female friends.

She is now helping to investigate the abuses at the prison.  On
her first day back at her desk, she removed her burqa and
revealed a face made up with mascara and lipstick - just the sort
of decadent excesses that would have landed her inside the same
jail under the Taliban.