Taliban: "We will punish OBL, but show us the proof he is the terrorist"

Taliban representative Sayed Rehmatullah Hashimi claimed, on a American TV channel, a decade ago, that Taliban would have trailed OBL if sufficient proof of his being a terrorist was provided. Further he accused USA of converting him into a hero, which he wasn't in the first place.

This tells me one thing, Talibans are not hypocrite, not by the least bit, they stood by their words and principles despite the consequences that they wouldn't produce a person to the accusers, unless sufficient proofs are given to them.

It is so surprising, how things are put by media today. This is just a glimpse which hints that the truth could be something really really different from what we are shown today.

In an interview, taken by Ray Suarez, for PBS on 21st March 2001 Rehmatullah said:

"Osama Bin Laden existed 17 years before we existed. He was there during the Soviet occupation, and the fact is that such people were [provoked] and indirectly instigated by certain governments in the West to go and fight the Soviet Union. And such people were called the heroes of independence, freedom fighters. Very good titles. And now when these people are not needed anymore, they have been transformed into terrorists, exactly like [Yasser] Arafat [head of the Palestinian Authority] was a terrorist and now a hero when they need him.

So we don’t know as to what is the definition of terrorism. And we were never taught to. Osama Bin Laden was not famous. Even I didn’t know who he was. What happened is in ’98 all we know that Afghanistan was fired with 75 cruise missiles trying to kill a man whose name was Bin Laden and we were all shocked because until then we were called the puppets of America by many countries.

And then when we went to the U.S. embassy asking for clarification of what happened, and the ambassador himself there was confused. He didn’t know what to say. And all we came to know is that they wanted a man called Bin Laden and he was accused in Kenya and Tanzania or whatever, and we told them why did you try to kill him before giving him a fair trial. And why did you make him so famous? He has been made so big. He is famous throughout the world. Seven thousand children were named after him only one year in Pakistan. T-shirts with his name, clocks, shoes, everything. He has been made that way.

And despite whatever happened, despite the cruise missiles that killed 17 Afghans, innocent people, we didn’t declare war. We were polite because we had a lot of problems at home, so we went to talk to the United States as to what to do next.

We gave them the proposal that since you have made it difficult for us to expel him from our country because he is being made a hero now, he is famous now. So we told the United States that if you have evidence of his terrorist acts in Kenya and Tanzania, we would be more than happy to have those evidence and try them in Afghanistan because finding anybody guilty of killing civilians will face capital punishments in our constitution. But we were not given any kind of evidence. All we were told was that they did not believe in our judicial system. They rejected this.

The second proposal we gave after the rejection of this was that we were ready to accept an international monitoring group to monitor his activities in Afghanistan so that he is not active against any man, any country. That was also ignored…

So we don’t know as to what we should do because the United States only told us so far that they wanted Bin Laden in New York, and that’s very difficult for us. They do not recognize our government. We don’t have an extradition treaty. They have made this man very famous, and this man has helped Afghans in their very hard time. He has helped the Afghans with his own personal money – millions of dollars during the Soviet occupation.

So for the Afghans, he is a good guy. If we were to hand this good guy to the U.S., what kind of justification will we give to our people? So we need some kind of evidence so that we can prove to our people that this man is involved in some kind of horrendous act somewhere. We don’t need him anymore. But we are not being given anything so far."

For complete interview please visit: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/afghanistan/hashimi.html 
This would be a shocking revelation for most, ... I have heard all of this but this is the first time I have come across something this concrete: A Taliban representative speaking through his teeth, listen to what he say:
Seeing is Believing, watch the talkshow by Charlie Rose and here what Rehmatullah has to say: