The India of Times is sketchy as well? Sorry.
I always thought the Times of India was fairly reliable. Correct me if I'm wrong someone.
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by Nordic » Sat Feb 26, 2011 3:32 pm
The India of Times is sketchy as well? Sorry.
by cptmarginal » Sat Feb 26, 2011 5:23 pm
by Nordic » Sat Feb 26, 2011 5:27 pm
by seemslikeadream » Mon Feb 28, 2011 11:30 am
I Had Ray Davis's Job, in Laos 30 Years Ago
Same Cover, Same Lies
By ROBERT ANDERSON
The story of Raymond Allen Davis is one familiar to me and I wish our government would quit doing these things - they cost us credibility.
Davis is the American being held as a spy working under diplomatic cover out of our embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. You can understand why foreign countries no longer trust us and people are rising up across the Middle East against the Great Satan.
In the Vietnam War the country of Laos held a geo-strategic position, as does Pakistan does to Afghanistan today. As in Pakistan, in Laos our country conducted covert military operations against a sovereign people, using the CIA.
I was a demolitions technician with the Air Force who was reassigned to work with the CIA’s Air America operation in Laos. We turned in our military IDs cards and uniforms and were issued a State Department ID card and dressed in blue jeans. We were told if captured we were to ask for diplomatic immunity, if alive. We carried out military missions on a daily basis all across the countries of Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam.
We also knew that if killed or captured that we would probably not be searched for and our families back home in the U.S. would be told we had been killed in an auto accident of some kind back in Thailand and our bodies not recovered.
Our team knew when the UN inspectors and international media were scheduled to arrive - we controlled the airfields. We would disappear to our safe houses so we could not be asked questions. It was all a very well planned operation, 60 years ago, involving the military and diplomats out of the US Embassy. It had been going on a long time when I was there during the 1968 Tet Offensive. This continued for a long time, until we were routed and had to abandon the whole war as a failure.
In Laos the program I was attached to carried out a systematic assassination of people who were identified as not loyal to U.S. goals. It was called the Phoenix program and eliminated an estimated 60,000 people across Indochina. We did an amazing amount of damage to the civilian infrastructure of the country, and still lost the war. I saw one team of mercenaries I was training show us a bag of ears of dead civilians they had killed. This was how they verified their kills for us. The Green Berets that day were telling them to just take photos of the dead, leave the ears.
Mel Gibson made a movie about all this, called Air America. It included in the background the illegal drug operation the CIA ran to pay for their operations. Congress had not authorized funds for what we were doing. I saw the drug operation first hand too. This was all detailed in The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred McCoy. I did not connect all this until the Iran-Contra hearings when Oliver North was testifying about it. Oliver North was a leader of the Laos operation I was assigned to work with.
Our country has a long history of these type programs going back to World War Two. We copied this from of warfare from the Nazis in WWII it seems. We justified it as necessary for the Cold War. One of the first operations was T.P. Ajax run by Kermit Roosevelt to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953to take over their oil fields.
In that coup the CIA and the State Department under the Dulles Brothers first perfected these covert, illegal and immoral actions. Historians have suggested that Operation T.P. Ajax was the single event that set in motion the political force of Islamic fundamentalism we are still dealing with today.
Chalmers Johnson also a former CIA employee wrote a series of books too on these blowbacks that happen when the truth is held from the American public.
If we had taken a different approach to our problems in those days an approach that did not rely on lying to our own and the people of other countries and killing them indiscriminately our country would not be in the disaster it is abroad today..
I was young and foolish in those days of the Vietnam War, coveting my Top Secret security clearance, a big thing for an uneducated hillbilly from Appalachia. We saw ourselves much like James Bond characters, but now I am much wiser. These kinds of actions have immense and long reaching consequences and should be shut down.
But I see from the Ray Davis fiasco in Pakistan that our government is still up to its old way of denying to the people of the world what everyone knows is true.
When will this official hypocrisy end, when will our political
class speak out about this and quit going along with the lies and tricks? How many more of our people and others will die in these foolish programs?
Davis is in a bad situation now because most of the people of the world, as we see across the Middle East, are now aware of the lies and not going to turn their head anymore.
I say “most” everyone knows, because our own public, the ones suppose to be in control of the military and CIA, is constantly lied to. It is so sad to see President Obama repeating the big lie.
by Nordic » Mon Feb 28, 2011 6:32 pm
The story of Raymond Allen Davis is one familiar to me and I wish our government would quit doing these things - they cost us credibility.
by RocketMan » Mon Feb 28, 2011 7:53 pm
The article goes on to explain a motive for why the US, which on the one hand has been openly pressing Pakistan to move militarily against Taliban forces in the border regions abutting Afghanistan, would have a contract agent actively encouraging terrorist acts within Pakistan, saying:
Davis was also said to be working on a plan to give credence to the American notion that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are not safe. For this purpose, he was setting up a group of the Taliban which would do his bidding.
by 8bitagent » Mon Feb 28, 2011 10:08 pm
RocketMan wrote:Pakistani and Indian Newspapers Say US CIA Contractor Raymond Davis Organized Terrorist ActivitiesThe article goes on to explain a motive for why the US, which on the one hand has been openly pressing Pakistan to move militarily against Taliban forces in the border regions abutting Afghanistan, would have a contract agent actively encouraging terrorist acts within Pakistan, saying:
Davis was also said to be working on a plan to give credence to the American notion that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are not safe. For this purpose, he was setting up a group of the Taliban which would do his bidding.
by seemslikeadream » Mon Feb 28, 2011 11:09 pm
The nationalism bias of journalists
BY GLENN GREENWALD
Harvard
Former Bush OLC official Jack Goldsmith defends the decision of The New York Times and several other American media outlets to conceal from their readers that Raymond Davis worked for the CIA -- even though those papers published President Obama's misleading description of him as "our diplomat in Pakistan" and the NYT told its readers about what it deceitfully called "the mystery about what Mr. Davis was doing with this inventory of gadgets." This concealment stands in stark contrast to The Guardian, which quickly told the truth about Davis to its readers. But what's most notable is Goldsmith's reasoning. He argues that this concealment reflects the fact that American national security reporters are "patriotic" -- by which he means they are driven by a desire to protect American "interests" -- and this, he believes, is a good thing:
This is an example of an underappreciated phenomenon: the patriotism of the American press. For a book I am writing, I interviewed a dozen or so senior American national security journalists to get a sense of when and why they do or don’t publish national security secrets. They gave me different answers, but they all agreed that they tried to avoid publishing information that harms U.S. national security with no corresponding public benefit. Some of them expressly ascribed this attitude to "patriotism" or "jingoism" or to being American citizens or working for American publications. This sense of attachment to country is what leads the American press to worry about the implications for U.S. national security of publication, to seek the government’s input, to weigh these implications in the balance, and sometimes to self-censor. (This is a natural and prudent attitude in a nation with the fewest legal restrictions in the world on the publication of national security secrets, but one abhorred by critics like Greenwald.) The Guardian, al Jazeera, and Wikileaks, by contrast, worry much less, if at all, about U.S. national security interests. . . .
As General Michael Hayden said last year in his comments on Gabriel Schoenfeld’s fine book on national security secrecy, the government is "kind of out of Schlitz" when trying to persuade the foreign media not to publish a national security secret. American journalists display "a willingness to work with us," he said, but with the foreign press "it's very, very difficult."
Note that Goldsmith isn't merely pointing out that American journalists are "patriotic" or "jingoistic" as individuals. He's saying that these allegiances shape their editorial judgments. And "patriotism" to Goldsmith doesn't merely mean some vague type of "love of country," but much more: this "sense of attachment" creates a desire to advance "U.S. national security interests," however the reporter perceives of those.
Leave aside just for the moment the question of whether it's good or bad for American journalists to allow such nationalistic allegiances to mold their journalism. One key point is that allowing such loyalties to determine what one reports or conceals is a very clear case of bias and subjectivity: exactly what most reporters vehemently deny they possess. Many establishment journalists love to tout their own objectivity -- insisting that what distinguishes them from bloggers, opinionists and others is that they simply report the facts, free of any biases or policy preferences. But if Goldsmith is right -- and does anyone doubt that he is? -- then it means that "the American press" generally and "senior American national security journalists" in particular operate with a glaring, overwhelming bias that determines what they do and do not report: namely, the desire to advance U.S. interests.
Indeed, Goldsmith's main point is that media entities that are free of this bias (he names The Guardian, Al Jazeera and WikiLeaks) are willing to disclose truths which "patriotic" American media outlets will conceal. That, of course, is exactly what happened in the Davis case, and in so many other episodes as well. Bizarrely, Goldsmith believes he's defending the American media by arguing that subjective policy goals and nationalistic loyalty are what drives their reporting. But that "defense" is squarely at odds with how most reporters hold themselves out to the public: as beacons of journalistic objectivity who do not allow their opinions or outcome preferences to shape what they report. Goldsmith's factual premise is certainly correct: nationalistic bias is a central ingredient in how American national security journalists and their editors "report" the news.
This was exactly the point I made the other day when highlighting a passage from NYT Executive Editor Bill Keller in his long article about Wikileaks and Julian Assange, in which he explained why the NYT published WikiLeaks documents. Keller assured the public that -- despite publication of these documents -- "the journalists at The Times have a large and personal stake in the country's security" and are thus "invested in the struggle against murderous extremism." Keller understands the War on Terror -- in which, he said, the NYT sides with the U.S. -- as one "directed not just against our people and our buildings but also at our values and at our faith in the self-government of an informed electorate."
Keller -- without even realizing it -- has ingested a whole slew of biases about the War on Terror: that it's about a "struggle against murderous extremism"; that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars -- the subjects of the WIkiLeaks documents -- are designed to enhance "the country's security"; that The Terrorists hate us for our freedoms; that the War on Terror makes us safer; and that the U.S. is one of the Good Guys in the world (or at least the ones who deserve the allegiance of the NYT). One is perfectly entitled to agree or disagree with Keller's premises, but whatever it is, that outlook is anything but "objective."
And now we arrive at the question of whether reporters ought to have these nationalistic biases. There's certainly nothing wrong with journalists, as individuals, harboring feelings of patriotism or any other political outlook -- as long as it doesn't interfere in their journalistic duties. One such duty is to inform their readers of what's newsworthy and to avoid misleading them; another key duty is to serve as an adversarial check on those in political power ("the Fourth Estate") rather than dutifully serving as their stenographers and propagandists. And here is where Goldsmith's claims about what motivates these reporters becomes so problematic.
A desire to promote American policy or its "interests" will often directly conflict with core journalistic obligations. It's often the case that disclosing the truth about the American government (a journalistic duty) will undermine the government's policy aims or subvert government "interests." The same is true for serving as an adversarial watchdog on government officials: exposing their false statements and lies, uncovering their corruption and deceit, contradicting their propaganda; doing that can also undermine American interests. Reporters who engage in journalism with the goal of advancing U.S. interests or promoting their nationalistic allegiance -- which Goldsmith suggests is the majority of them -- are engaged in activism and propaganda, not adversarial journalism. That's fine, I suppose, if they acknowledge their biases, but those who are driven by these allegiances while pretending to be "objective" are engaged in a game of deceit.
Ultimately, the most important point here may be Goldsmith's recognition that the biases and concealments of the American media are becoming increasingly irrelevant. That's because, as he explains, "the growing scrutiny of American military and intelligence operations by an increasingly powerful global media that is relatively indifferent to U.S. national security interests is an important reason why U.S. national security secrets are harder than ever to keep." This is also why WikiLeaks is so vital: because, as Jay Rosen repeatedly points out, as a "stateless organization," they are free of the nationalistic allegiances which Goldsmith argues shapes (and restricts) the American media's reporting.
One can debate whether it's good that American media outlets are driven in their reporting by an allegiance to the U.S. government and what these reporters define as America's "national interests." But what's not debatable is that this is far away from an "objective" press, and even further away from an adversarial one. America's "establishment media" is properly described as such precisely because their overarching objective is to promote and defend establishment interests in what they report to -- and conceal from -- their readers. That's precisely why so many people are increasingly turning to other outlets that are emancipated from those biases -- foreign media, the Internet, whistle-blowing sites -- in order to remain informed.
* * * * *
For one of the best analyses yet on the NYT's concealment of Raymond Davis' CIA employment -- and for a definitive refutation of its Public Editor's defense of that concealment -- see this typically insightful article from The New Yorker's Amy Davidson.
Raymond Davis Incident Shows How Tangled U.S.-Pakistan Web Is
by Conn Hallinan
Was American CIA agent Raymond Davis secretly working with the Taliban and al-Qaeda to destabilize Pakistan and lay the groundwork for a U.S. seizure of that country’s nuclear weapons? Was he photographing sensitive military installations and marking them with a global positioning device? Did he gun down two men in cold blood to prevent them from revealing what he was up to? These are just a few of the rumors ricocheting around Islamabad, Lahore and Peshawar in the aftermath of Davis’s arrest Jan. 27, and sorting through them is a little like stepping through Alice’s looking glass.
But one thing is certain: the U.S. has hundreds of intelligence agents working in Pakistan, most of them private contractors, and many of them so deep in the shadows that Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), doesn’t know who they are or what they are up to. “How many more Raymond Davises are out there?” one ISI official asked Associated Press.
Lots, it would appear. Five months ago, the Pakistani government directed its embassies in the U.S. to issue visas without letting the ISI or Pakistan’s Interior Ministry vet them. According to the Associated Press, this opened a “floodgate” that saw 3,555 visas for diplomats, military officials and employees issued in 2010.
Many of those visas were for non-governmental organizations and the staff for the huge, $1 billion fortress embassy Washington is building in Islamabad, but thousands of others covered consular agents and workers in Lahore (where Davis was arrested), Karachi and other cities. Some of those with visas work for Xe Services (formally Blackwater), others for low-profile agencies like Blackbird Technologies, Glevum Associates, and K2 Solutions. Many of the “employees” of these groups are former U.S. military personnel—Davis was in the Special Forces for 10 years—and former CIA agents. And the fact that these are private companies allows them to fly under the radar of congressional oversight, as frail a reed as that may be.
How one views the incident that touched off the current diplomatic crisis is an example of how deep the differences between Pakistan and the U.S. have become.
The Americans claim Davis was carrying out surveillance on radical insurgent groups, and was simply defending himself from two armed robbers. But Davis’s story has problems. It does appear that the two men on the motorbike were armed, but neither fired their weapon and, according to the police report, one did not even have a shell in his pistol’s firing chamber. Davis apparently fired through the window of his armored SUV, then stepped out of the car and shot the two men in the back, one while attempting to flee. He then calmly took photos, called for backup, climbed into his car, and drove off. He was arrested shortly afterwards at an intersection.
The Pakistanis have a different view of the incident. According to Pakistani press reports, the two men were working for the ISI and were trailing Davis because the intelligence agency suspected that the CIA agent was in contact with the Tehrik-e-Taliban, a Pakistani group based in North Waziristan that is currently warring with Islamabad. As an illustration of how bizarre things are these days in Pakistan, one widespread rumor is that the U.S. is behind the Tehtik-e-Taliban bombings as part of a strategy to destabilize Pakistan and lay the groundwork for an American seizure of Islamabad’s nuclear arsenal.
The ISI maintains close ties with the Afghan Taliban based in Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province, as well as its allies, the Hizb-e-Islami and the Haqqani Group. All three groups are careful to keep a distance from Pakistan’s Taliban.
Yet another rumor claims that Davis was spying on Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group with close ties to the ISI that is accused of organizing the 2008 massacre in Mumbai, India. The Americans claim the organization is working with al-Qaeda, a charge the Pakistanis reject.
When Davis’s car was searched, police turned up not only the Glock semi-automatic he used to shoot the men, but four loaded clips, a GPS device, and a camera. The latter, according to the police report, had photos of “sensitive” border sites. “This is not the work of a diplomat,” Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah told the Guardian (UK), “he was doing espionage and surveillance activities.”
The shooting also had the feel of an execution. One of the men was shot twice in the back and his body was more than 30 feet from the motorbike, an indication he was attempting to flee. “It went way beyond what we define as self-defense, “ a senior police official told the Guardian (UK). “It was not commensurate with the threat.” The Lahore Chief of Police called it a “cold-blooded murder.”
The U.S. claims that Davis is protected by diplomatic immunity, but the matter might not be as open and shut as the U.S. is making it. According to the Pakistani Express Tribune, Davis’s name was not on a list of diplomats submitted to Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry on Jan. 25. The day after the shooting the embassy submitted a revised list that listed Davis as a diplomat.
Washington clearly considered Davis to be important. When he asked for backup on the day of the shooting, another SUV was dispatched to support him, apparently manned by agents living at the same safe house as Davis. The rescue mission went wrong when it ran over a motorcyclist while going the wrong direction down a one-way street. When the Pakistani authorities wanted to question the agents, they found that both had been whisked out of the country.
Almost immediately the Obama administration sent Sen. John Kerry, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to Islamabad to apologize and pressure Pakistan to release Davis. But the incident has stirred up a hornet’s nest in Pakistan, where the CIA’s drone war has deeply alienated most Pakistanis. Opposition parties are demanding that the CIA agent be tried for murder. A hearing on the issue of whether Davis has diplomatic immunity is scheduled for Mar. 14.
In the meantime, Davis is being held under rather extraordinary security because of rumors that the Americans will try to spring him, or even poison him. Davis is being shielded from any direct contact with U.S. officials, and a box of chocolates sent to Davis by the Embassy was confiscated.
The backdrop for the crisis is a growing estrangement between the two countries over their respective strategies in Afghanistan.
The U.S. has stepped up its attacks on the Afghan insurgents, launched a drone war in Pakistan, and is demanding that Islamabad take a much more aggressive stance toward the Taliban’s allies based in the Afghan border region. While Washington still talks about a “diplomatic resolution” to the Afghan war, it is busy blowing up the very people it will eventually need to negotiate with.
This approach makes no sense to Pakistan. From Islamabad’s point of view, increasing attacks on the Taliban and their allies will only further destabilize Pakistan, and substitutes military victory for a diplomatic settlement. Since virtually every single independent observer think the former is impossible, the current U.S. strategy is, as terror expert Anatol Lieven puts it, “lunatic reasoning.”
Pakistan wants to insure that any Afghan government that emerges from the war is not a close ally of India, a country with which it has already fought three wars. A pro-Indian government in Kabul would essentially surround Pakistan with hostile forces. Yet the Americans have pointedly refused to address the issue of Indian-Pakistan tension over Kashmir, in large part because Washington very much wants an alliance with India.
In short, the U.S. and Pakistan don’t see eye to eye on Afghanistan, and Islamabad is suspicious that Americans like Davis are undermining Pakistan’s interests in what Islamabad views as an area central to its national security. “They [the U.S.] needs to come clean and tell us who they [agents] are, what they are doing,” one ISI official told the Guardian (UK). “They need to stop doing things behind our back."
There are a lot of unanswered questions about the matter. Was the ISI onto Davis, and was he really in contact with groups the Pakistani army didn’t want him talking to? What did Washington know about Davis’ mission, and when did it know it? Did Davis think he was being held up, or was it a cold-blooded execution of two troublesome tails?
Rumor has it that the CIA and the ISI are in direct negotiations to find an acceptable solution, but there are constraints on all sides. The Pakistani public is enraged with the U.S. and resents that it has been pulled into the Afghan quagmire. On the other hand, there are many in Washington—particularly in Congress—who are openly talking about cutting off the $1.5 billion of yearly U.S. aid to Pakistan.
What the incident has served to illuminate is the fact that U.S. intelligence operations are increasingly being contracted out to private companies with little apparent oversight from Congress. At last count, the U.S. Defense Department had almost 225,000 private contractors working for them.
The privatization of intelligence adds yet another layer of opacity to an endeavor that is already well hidden by a blanket of “national security,” and funded by black budgets most Americans never see. The result of all this is a major diplomatic crisis in what is unarguably the most dangerous piece of ground on the planet.
by seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 01, 2011 8:29 pm
KEEPING QUIET ABOUT DAVIS
Posted by Amy Davidson
The column by the Times’s Public Editor, Arthur Brisbane, on the case of Raymond Davis—the man who reportedly had some connection to the C.I.A. and is now in Pakistani custody after killing two men who, he has said, he thought were thieves—is genuinely puzzling. The Times reported last week that it had kept silent about Davis’s C.I.A. connection. Brisbane attempted to explain why. Here are the key passages:
The Times jumped on the story, but on Feb. 8, the State Department spokesman, P.J. Crowley, contacted the executive editor, Bill Keller, with a request. “He was asking us not to speculate, or to recycle charges in the Pakistani press,” Mr. Keller said. “His concern was that the letters C-I-A in an article in the NYT, even as speculation, would be taken as authoritative and would be a red flag in Pakistan.”
Mr. Crowley told me the United States was concerned about Mr. Davis’s safety while in Pakistani custody. The American government hoped to avoid inflaming Pakistani opinion and to create “as constructive an atmosphere as possible” while working to resolve the diplomatic crisis.
The Times acceded to the Obama Administration’s wishes, as did the Washington Post and the A.P. Brisbane concludes that “the Times did the only thing it could do,” even though “in practice, this meant its stories contained material that, in the cold light of retrospect, seems very misleading.” So the “only thing” the Times could do was be “misleading”? That question contains a lot of sub-questions. Here are some:
1. What was the risk to Davis, exactly? He is in the custody of Pakistan, one of our allies. It is not like he’s being held hostage in a cave somewhere, or on the run. One suggestion, laid out in the Post, is that a prison guard might have killed him out of anger; the Post mentions that other prisoners had, in fact, been killed by guards in the facility he was held in. Were those prisoners also working for the C.I.A.? (Or whatever agency Davis was affiliated with, as an “operative” or a contractor—his exact status is still not clear.) There was rage, maybe even life-threatening rage, at Davis in Pakistan even when the U.S. was pretending he was an ordinary diplomat—pulling out a Beretta on the streets of Lahore and shooting two people, then claiming immunity, will do that. He was burned in effigy before the Times used “the letters C-I-A.” One could just as easily argue that news that the American media covered up for Davis would make the Pakistani public even madder, and less willing to trust American justice and intentions, encouraging vigilantes.
(In any event, after the Guardian went with the story, the Administration told the Times that it needed twenty-four hours to get the Pakistanis to put him in a safer facility; if it took the Guardian story to persuade the Pakistanis, could one in the Times have facilitated a move weeks earlier?)
Or is the idea that the attacker wouldn’t be a rogue guard, but an Pakistani government operative sent to take him out, or maybe torture him for intelligence? There are a couple of problems with that: (a) the Pakistani government, if not the public, seems to have known who Davis was without American newspapers telling it; and (b) if we think that Pakistani security services torture or kill people because they are C.I.A. operatives, then why are we giving them so much taxpayer money?
Or would the story endanger his safety because it would undermine a claim to diplomatic immunity, exposing him to years in a Pakistani prison (not so good for one’s health) or even capital punishment? If so, does that count as a good reason? I am not sure of the points of international law here, and have read conflicting assertions about what Davis’s standing was, and exactly what sort of immunity he might have been eligible for. I also am not sure of the penalty for double murder in Pakistan. But if Davis isn’t entitled to diplomatic immunity then he isn’t entitled to diplomatic immunity. Do we believe that it’s the role of newspapers to pretend that he is, if he isn’t—to help the government make legally and factually false claims? (Is the press asked to suppress damaging details in cases of Americans charged with murders abroad who aren’t C.I.A. operatives?) And wouldn’t doing so endanger actual diplomats whose claims would, in the future, be treated with greater skepticism?
Maybe the danger was not to Davis but to the C.I.A.’s ability to operate with impunity within Pakistan. But that’s not the argument Brisbane presents, and has its own problems. (Is it the job of newspapers to create “as constructive an atmosphere as possible” for anything the government wants to do?) Anyway, the damage had been done by the incident itself; it was really a matter of making sense of the wreckage. And Davis was not arrested for spying but for killing people recklessly; the widow of one, an eighteen-year old, killed herself. Do journalists need, at the cost of their credibility, to deny these people’s survivors a day in court?
Maybe the Administration had good answers, and a better explanation of the danger to Davis; but those answers weren’t in the Times.
2. Who was the intended audience, or, rather, non-audience, for the silence? Put differently, who was this supposed to be kidding? Crowley, according to the Times, was not asking the paper to suppress something that hadn’t been reported but, as Keller put it, “not to speculate or recycle charges in the Pakistani press.” So news outlets were asked not to tell Americans, among others, what Pakistanis were already reading? (It is also interesting that this involved elevating the “authoritative” Times and disparaging the Pakistani press—which was actually ahead on the story.) Was the government, beyond its protestations about Davis’s safety, concerned about how this might affect American views of our wars, or cause people here to question elements of our involvement in Pakistan or our use of private contractors? (Davis had worked until some point for Blackwater, the company now known as Xe.) This relates to the next question:
3. How did agreeing to the Administration’s request affect not only what the Times, the Post, and the A.P. revealed, but how they reported the story? When Crowley asked the Times “not to speculate or recycle charges,” did he say the charges were false, or did he confirm them—was the problem that the speculation was unsubstantiated, or that it was true? Is “recycle” in this case a synonym for “follow up on,” “investigate,” or “pursue”? (The Times doesn’t exactly say what the paper knew when, although it quotes Washington editor Dean Baquet as saying that it had the information it needed “sometime before” the Guardian ran its piece.) Does feigning ignorance encourage actual ignorance—if nothing else as a way to avoid being “misleading” about what you do and don’t know? One would like to hear much more about how these news outlets, even just internally, interrogated the official story.
The restrictions may have hindered the paper in conveying just why Pakistanis were so angry. That is something that Americans—the families of our soldiers on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and really everyone—deserve, and even need, to know. Brisbane did not accomplish that here, either. How is it that, in an eleven-hundred-word column that includes a quote from Bob Woodward about how “I learned a long time ago, humanitarian considerations first, journalism second,” there wasn’t room to mention that the death toll in the incident was not two, but three? After shooting the two men, Davis called our embassy for help, and a four-wheel-drive vehicle slammed its way through Lahore to get to him, driving recklessly, going up streets the wrong way, breaking traffic laws. Because this is real life and not an action movie, the car hit and killed a bystander. (I live in New York, a city in which, for years, the easiest way for the tabloids to excite rage was to point to diplomats who used their immunity to get out of parking tickets; how would that kind of driving go over here?)
Brisbane called this “a brutally hard call.” And, again, the Obama Administration may have told the Times things that the paper still hasn’t told its readers, which would make all of this seem a little more sensible than it does now. But that’s not what we’re left with. What we get, instead, is Brisbane’s credo: “Editors don’t have the standing to make a judgment that a story—any story—is worth a life.” It’s not so simple. Unless you are only covering the Oscars, you get into areas in which lives can be changed by your reporting, or your failure to report. You can’t simply abdicate. For one thing, doing so may cost more lives: reporting, say, that bad training or poor command judgment caused soldiers to kill civilians may make people angry at American soldiers, but it might lead to changes that keep more civilians from being killed, and stave off a subsequent cycle of anger and retribution. Our best defense when our government does something wrong is that we hold it accountable—that an eighteen-year-old widow can trust that we care, a little, about her abandonment. That is the nature of our system, and what prevents rage at an American operative from becoming rage broadly directed at “Americans.”
Also: governments are lazy, and politicians confuse risks to their careers with risks to their countries. If they can prevent the publication of embarrassing stories simply by repeating the word “danger,” then they will misuse and overuse that tactic. The press can’t let that happen. It’s a matter of responsibility.
by cptmarginal » Wed Mar 02, 2011 2:43 pm
LAHORE – Hundreds of especially-trained CIA contractors who worked closely with Indian intelligence agency RAW and Israel’s Mossad in the Middle East, Asia and Africa over the last two decades are covertly operating across Pakistan these days, The Nation reliably learnt on Tuesday.
Well-informed sources revealed that the Obama administration deployed more than 400 pro-India and pro-Israel CIA agents in 2010 in the big cities of the nuclear-armed country, including in Quetta, Peshawar, Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad.
Sources believed that the American spies with pro-India mindset had been deployed in Quetta to fuel militancy in the largest but poor province of Balochistan while the US operatives who worked with Israeli agents before 9/11 had been sent to the country’s insurgency-hit region bordering war-torn Afghanistan.
The Foreign Intelligence Estimates (FIE) cell of the CIA, which is responsible for training, brainwashing and recruiting individuals to launch intelligence networks outside the United States, had awarded special contracts to those security companies where the Indian and Israeli lobby is very strong.
Washington hired these contractors from private security companies like LLC, Xe services or Blackwater. Leading Indian and Israeli tycoons are secretly and heavily funding such companies to carry out clandestine operations in the Middle East, Asia and Africa as per their interests. Sources said that the US government had sent hundreds of Cobra operatives to Pakistan on a secret spy mission after the Indian and Israeli lobbies in Washington strongly recommended to the Obama administration that ‘these guys are quite fit to operate in the Af-Pak region”, sources said.
Most of the CIA contractors are double-agents, as on the one hand they are hired by the American CIA, but on the other, they are undercover personnel of the Indian and Israeli lobby and assigned with special tasks in different regions.
The contactors were awarded in 2008 and 2009 and the spy operatives landed in Pakistan in July 2010 after the prime minister gave special powers to Ambassador Hussain Haqqani to issue all visas to US diplomats and officials without scrutiny. Subsequently, the Pakistan Embassy in Washington issued thousands of visas to US operatives without getting administrative approval from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and clearance of security agencies.
Islamabad: A Washington-based investigative journalist- Wayne Madsen- has claimed that a CIA contractor firm- XE Services- formerly Blackwater, has been carrying out false flag terrorist attacks in Pakistan.
"WMR has learned from a deep background source that Xe Services, the company formerly known as Blackwater, has been conducting false flag terrorist attacks in Pakistan that are later blamed on the entity called Pakistani Taliban," The News quoted Madsen, a member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), Association for Intelligence Officers (AFIO), and the National Press Club, as saying.
"However, it is Xe cells operating in Karachi, Peshawar, Islamabad and other cities and towns that have, according to our source who witnessed the US-led false flag terrorist operations in Pakistan. Bombings of civilians is the favoured false flag event for the Xe team and are being carried out under the orders of the CIA," he claimed, adding that the source was now under threat from the FBI and CIA for revealing facts about the false flag operations in Pakistan.
Earlier this year, Wayne Madsen Report (WMR) had claimed that "intelligence sources in Asia and Europe are reporting that the CIA contractor firm XE Services, formerly Blackwater, has been carrying out false flag terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, Somalia, the Sinkiang region of China, Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq, in some cases with the assistance of Israeli Mossad and Indian RAW personnel. "
He also stated that although the Pakistan Taliban had taken responsibility for the recent bomb attack of a pro-Palestine Shia rally in Quetta that killed 54 people, it was "actually carried out by one of the Xe covert cells in the country, acting in concert with the CIA, Israeli Mossad, and Indian Research and Analysis Wing (RAW)."
Madsen said that the ultimate goal of those cells was "to destabilize Pakistan to the point where it has no choice but to allow the Western powers to secure its nuclear weapons and remove them from the country, in a manner similar to the procurement by the West of South Africa's nuclear weapons, prior to the stepping down of the white minority government in the early 1990s."
When the Pakistani authorities wanted to question the agents, they found that both had been whisked out of the country.
Almost immediately the Obama administration sent Sen. John Kerry, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to Islamabad to apologize and pressure Pakistan to release Davis.
by seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 02, 2011 11:37 pm
US Undercover Campaign in Pakistan Thrown Into Disarray
Blowback From the Arrest of the CIA's Raymond Davis
By DAVE LINDORFF
The ongoing case of Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor facing murder charges in Lahore for the execution-style slaying of two apparent agents of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, is apparently leading to a roll-back of America's espionage and Special Operations activities in Pakistan.
A few days ago, Pakistan's Interior Department, which is reportedly conducting a careful review of the hundreds of private contractors who flooded into Pakistan over the last two years, many with "diplomatic passports," and many others, like Davis, linked to shady "security" firms, arrested an American security contractor named Aaron DeHaven, a Virginia native who claims to work for a company called Catalyst Services LLC.
The Catalyst Services LLC website describes the company, with offices in Afghanistan, Dubai, the US and Pakistan, as having experience in "logistics, operations, security and finance," and as having a staff led by "individuals who have been involved in some of the most significant events of the last 20 years," including "the break-up of the Soviet Union, the US effort in Somalia, and the Global War on Terror."
DeHaven is being held on a 14-day remand, charged with overstaying his visa and with living in an unauthorized area.
Meanwhile, the English-language Express Tribune in Pakistan reports that according to ISI sources, 30 "suspected US operatives" in Pakistan have "suspended" their operations in the country, while 12 have fled the country.
The paper quotes the Pakistan Foreign Office as saying that 851 Americans claiming diplomatic immunity are currently in Pakistan, 297 of whom are "not working in any diplomatic capacity." The paper says that the country's Interior Department claims that 414 of the total are "non-diplomats." The majority of these American operatives, the paper says, are located in Islamabad (where the US is building a huge fortress-like embassy reminiscent of the one in Baghdad), with the others in Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar. Most are suspected of being involved in covert missions that report to the US Joint Special Operations Command, with many suspected of being active-duty Special Forces personnel from the Army's Delta Force. (The website of the JSOC says its responsibility is "synchronizing Department of Defense plans against global terrorist networks and, as directed, conducting global operations.")
As I reported earlier, both Pakistani and Indian news organizations are claiming, based upon intelligence sources, that Davis was involved in not just intelligence work, but in orchestrating terrorist activity by both the Pakistani Taliban and the terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which has been linked to both the assassination of Benezir Bhutto and the capture and beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Multiple calls to members of both groups were found by police on some of the cell phones found on Davis and in his car when he was arrested in Lahore.
It is unclear how far the blow-up in Pakistan over the exposure of America's role in stirring up unrest in that country will go. Clearly, the ISI and the Pakistani military have long had their own complicated relationship with the Pakistani Taliban, and much of the current anger in both the ISI and the military has to do with the US being found to be working behind their backs, including in its contact with those groups.
But things have been complicated too by mounting public outrage over Davis's brazen slaughter of the two Pakistanis, who reportedly were tailing him because of concerns about the nature of his activities, and who reportedly were both shot in the back. This public outrage has been further stoked by both a subsequent suicide by the 18-year-old bride of one of the victims, and by the death of an innocent bystander mowed down by a second vehicle carrying several more US contractors which sped to Davis in response to his call for assistance following the shooting. That vehicle, after running down the bystander, raced to sanctuary at the US Consulate. The men in the car, never identified by the consulate, were spirited out of the country by the US so they could avoid arrest.
Further complicating matters for the US, the province of Punjab, of which Lahore is the capital, is run by the opposition party, headed by former Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Sharif, who still has presidential aspirations, has no incentive at all to make things easy for the country's ruling party by letting Davis go. Indeed, with public opinion running almost 100% in favor of trying Davis for murder, Sharif can only gain by insisting that the court system have the final say.
Pakistan's central government, led by President Asif Ali Zardari, clearly wants to put the Davis incident behind it by having him declared to have diplomatic immunity. Foreign Officials allege that Zardari pressured the Foreign Office in early February to backdate a letter identifying Davis as being a "member of staff" of the US Embassy in Islamabad, which would have afforded him such immunity from prosecution. But the country's foreign minister at that time, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, reportedly refused, saying, "On the basis of the official record and the advice given to me by the technocrats and experts of the Foreign Office, I could not certify him (Raymond Davis) as a diplomat. The kind of by blanket immunity Washington is pressing for Davis, is not endorsed by the official record of the Foreign Ministry."
He has subsequently been ousted and replaced by Zardari.
The reality is that the US, which as required, on Jan. 25 submitted to the Foreign Office its annual list of those employees of the US Embassy whom it classified as "diplomats" warranting diplomatic immunity. The list had 48 names on it, and did not include Davis. Only after Davis's Jan. 27 shooting of the two Pakistani motorcyclists, on Jan. 28, did the US submit a "revised" list, to which Davis's name had been appended.
The US initially said Davis was an employee of the Lahore Consulate, and Davis himself told arresting police officers that he was a contractor working out of the Lahore Consulate, a role that would not afford him any diplomatic immunity, as consular workers, under the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations only receive immunity for their "official duties," and in any case lose even that limited immunity in the case of "grave crimes."
His current legal problems, and the public demand that he be tried (and then hanged) for the killings, has definitely led to a reduction in US undercover operations in Pakistan, and to a pullback of at least some of the Special Forces personnel operating there. It will take considerable finesse for the US and the Zardari government to put the the relationship back together--if the Pakistani military and the ISI even want to restore it--finesse that the US has not been very good at displaying.
So far, in fact, the US response to Davis's arrest has been to bluntly and publicly threaten Pakistan with a loss of foreign and military aid--a threat that seems empty given the American need for Pakistani assistance in supplying its military in Afghanistan, and its need for at lease covert permission to continue sending Predator and Reaper drones across the border to attack Taliban suspects in the tribal border areas. US bluster, and some clumsy efforts to forge records that would purport to show Davis had diplomatic immunity--all widely exposed in the Pakistani media--have only served to further stoke public outrage.
Meanwhile, local authorities in Lahore at the prison where Davis is being held, are so worried that the US may try to have him killed to prevent him from spilling the beans about his activities--for example explaining why the camera he was carrying held photographs of Pakistani military installations as well as of mosques, madrassas and other schools--that they have reportedly posted special guards (unarmed as an added precaution) around his cell, and have been monitoring his food. Davis was reportedly even denied a box of chocolates sent by the US Consulate in Lahore, for fear it might have been laced with poison.
by chump » Fri Mar 04, 2011 11:37 pm
ABC News: Pakistan Tried to Trade 'Lady al Qaeda' For CIA Contractor
U.S. Nixed Deal To Swap Raymond Davis for Aafia Siddiqui
The government of Pakistan offered to trade a CIA contractor currently jailed in that country for a Pakistani neuroscientist suspected by U.S. intelligence to be an al Qaeda operative, ABC News reported...
... Who Is Aafia Siddiqui?
Siddiqui was convicted of trying to shoot FBI agents and military officers in an Afghanistan police station in 2008. Siddiqui was arrested after she was found with a list of New York city landmarks and instructions on how to construct explosives.
In 2004, FBI director Robert Mueller described Siddiqui as an "al Qaeda operative and facilitator." The FBI had issued a global alert for Siddiqui and her first husband in 2003, for their suspected ties to al Qaeda. Siddiqui later remarried an al Qaeda operative, who was the nephew of the Sept. 11, 2001 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Muhammed. Her husband, Ammar al-Baluchi, is currently being detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Siddiqui was never charged with any terrorism-related crimes, however. Shortly after the FBI alert, she and her children disappeared, only to surface in Afghanistan five years later. Siddiqui has claimed she was held in secret American prisons, including Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, during that time. American officials have consistently denied that she was ever in American custody...
LHC rejects petition to block Davis ‘transfer’ to Adiyala jail
LAHORE: The Lahore High Court (LHC) on Friday rejected a petition requesting the court to rule out a possible transfer of US national Raymond Davis from Kot Lakhpat prison to Adiyala jail in Rawalpindi, DawnNews reported.
The petition, filed by Rana Ilmuddin Ghazi, stated that the government was planning to shift Davis from Kot Lakhpat prison to Adiyala jail which would make Davis’ handover to the United States easier.
The petition requested the court to issue a directive to block the transfer.
During the hearing, Chief Justice Lahore High Court Ijaz Chaudhry said that the government had not issued any notification regarding transferring Davis to Adiyala jail. He rejected the petition and said such applications waste the time of the court.
Earlier on Thursday, a sessions court rejected Davis’ claim that he enjoyed diplomatic immunity and decided to go ahead with his trial.
Additional District and Sessions Judge Mohammad Youssuf Aujla, who is hearing the double murder case against Mr Davis in Kot Lakhpat jail, rejected his plea to postpone the trial till a decision on the immunity issue.
“As the accused has not appended required documents with his earlier application, his plea for immunity is rejected,” Asad Manzoor Butt, counsel for the complainants, quoted the judge as having said.
Pakistanis say 'blood money' might win release of jailed CIA contractor
By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 4, 2011
LAHORE, PAKISTAN - An American effort to win freedom for a CIA security contractor jailed here has focused on an assertion that he is shielded by diplomatic immunity. But many here say that the release of the contractor, Raymond Davis, would also require a bow to a tradition enshrined in Islamic law: the payment of blood money.
To date, there has been no sign of progress in an impasse between the United States and Pakistan over whether Davis should stand trial in the killing of two Pakistanis more than a month ago. In Pakistan, protesters are vowing to riot if Davis is released, intelligence agents are threatening to limit cooperation with the CIA and some politicians are demanding something U.S. officials deem a non-starter - the release of a Pakistani woman convicted of trying to murder American military officers. U.S. officials maintain that Davis, who has claimed self-defense, has immunity and is being detained illegally.
But some senior government and police officials say they see a window of opportunity. In Pakistan, disputes over killings are regularly solved out of court as an agreement between the victims' heirs and those responsible for deaths. The former must forgive, and the latter must pay diyat, or compensation.
Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani has suggested such a payment as one possible solution. In a recent interview, another senior Pakistani government official said that "the opinion of the government and many sensible people" is that the payment of money could prompt the families of those killed in the episode to drop their cases.
But this is a country seething with anti-American sentiment, and as with everything surrounding the case, the idea of compensatory payments has been divisive. Most prominently, religious groups - normally the champions of Islamic law - have taken to the streets to oppose compensation and scold the government for "pressuring" the relatives of the victims to accept it.
"This is not a case for compensation," said Liaqat Baloch, secretary general of the religious party Jamaat-e-Islamic, who spoke after a rally in Lahore where throngs of men called for Davis to be hanged. Baloch said that the families would not accept U.S. money and that "the people of Pakistan" would provide any funds they might need.
In interviews, relatives of the two men shot by Davis in a street altercation and a motorcyclist killed by a U.S. consulate vehicle that was rushing to Davis's rescue said they had not been approached by the Pakistani or U.S. governments. The relatives said that representatives from religious parties had been the only regular visitors and that their arguments against accepting compensation had been persuasive.
"We can't straightaway accept money and let it go," said Ijaz ur-Rehman, 39, the brother of the dead motorcyclist.
U.S. officials declined to say whether diyat is under discussion in the Davis case. A Pakistani newspaper reported Sunday that the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad has pursued the option at least twice, paying $10,000 to relatives of each of two men fatally struck by embassy cars in 2010. Alberto Rodriguez, an embassy spokesman, said only that "the embassy has acted responsibly whenever there have been incidents involving accidents with embassy employees."
The payment of compensation to settle killings is controversial among human rights activists and some lawyers in Pakistan. Critics argue that it allows those with money to kill with impunity and trivializes homicide as a personal, not societal, crime - objections that could complicate U.S. efforts to pursue payments.
But lawyers and police say the practice is common both in urban and rural areas, where such settlements can forestall or end lasting intertribal battles. Although the United States seems unlikely to take any step that looks like an admission of guilt, experts say public sentiment would demand some compensation be paid.
"From a Pakistani public opinion perspective, this is probably going to be the easiest way to get out of the logjam," said Babar Sattar, an attorney and newspaper columnist. "It is an Islamic principle that's been followed for centuries . . . if somebody wants to get away from the pain of dealing with something like this."
Of course, the families of the dead men must forgive in exchange for payment, and this they have not yet done.
Mokhtar Ahmed, 50, an uncle of Faizan Haider, one of the men fatally shot by Davis, said several people whose affiliations he did not know have visited the family and offered to mediate a settlement, insisting it is futile to battle the United States.
"But now we think we should not budge," he said.
"Blood for blood," said Wasim Shamshad, whose brother, Faheem, was also killed in the shooting. "Islam says whatever the crime is, the punishment should be the same."
by chump » Fri Mar 04, 2011 11:37 pm
ABC News: Pakistan Tried to Trade 'Lady al Qaeda' For CIA Contractor
U.S. Nixed Deal To Swap Raymond Davis for Aafia Siddiqui
The government of Pakistan offered to trade a CIA contractor currently jailed in that country for a Pakistani neuroscientist suspected by U.S. intelligence to be an al Qaeda operative, ABC News reported...
... Who Is Aafia Siddiqui?
Siddiqui was convicted of trying to shoot FBI agents and military officers in an Afghanistan police station in 2008. Siddiqui was arrested after she was found with a list of New York city landmarks and instructions on how to construct explosives.
In 2004, FBI director Robert Mueller described Siddiqui as an "al Qaeda operative and facilitator." The FBI had issued a global alert for Siddiqui and her first husband in 2003, for their suspected ties to al Qaeda. Siddiqui later remarried an al Qaeda operative, who was the nephew of the Sept. 11, 2001 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Muhammed. Her husband, Ammar al-Baluchi, is currently being detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Siddiqui was never charged with any terrorism-related crimes, however. Shortly after the FBI alert, she and her children disappeared, only to surface in Afghanistan five years later. Siddiqui has claimed she was held in secret American prisons, including Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, during that time. American officials have consistently denied that she was ever in American custody...
LHC rejects petition to block Davis ‘transfer’ to Adiyala jail
LAHORE: The Lahore High Court (LHC) on Friday rejected a petition requesting the court to rule out a possible transfer of US national Raymond Davis from Kot Lakhpat prison to Adiyala jail in Rawalpindi, DawnNews reported.
The petition, filed by Rana Ilmuddin Ghazi, stated that the government was planning to shift Davis from Kot Lakhpat prison to Adiyala jail which would make Davis’ handover to the United States easier.
The petition requested the court to issue a directive to block the transfer.
During the hearing, Chief Justice Lahore High Court Ijaz Chaudhry said that the government had not issued any notification regarding transferring Davis to Adiyala jail. He rejected the petition and said such applications waste the time of the court.
Earlier on Thursday, a sessions court rejected Davis’ claim that he enjoyed diplomatic immunity and decided to go ahead with his trial.
Additional District and Sessions Judge Mohammad Youssuf Aujla, who is hearing the double murder case against Mr Davis in Kot Lakhpat jail, rejected his plea to postpone the trial till a decision on the immunity issue.
“As the accused has not appended required documents with his earlier application, his plea for immunity is rejected,” Asad Manzoor Butt, counsel for the complainants, quoted the judge as having said.
Pakistanis say 'blood money' might win release of jailed CIA contractor
By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 4, 2011
LAHORE, PAKISTAN - An American effort to win freedom for a CIA security contractor jailed here has focused on an assertion that he is shielded by diplomatic immunity. But many here say that the release of the contractor, Raymond Davis, would also require a bow to a tradition enshrined in Islamic law: the payment of blood money.
To date, there has been no sign of progress in an impasse between the United States and Pakistan over whether Davis should stand trial in the killing of two Pakistanis more than a month ago. In Pakistan, protesters are vowing to riot if Davis is released, intelligence agents are threatening to limit cooperation with the CIA and some politicians are demanding something U.S. officials deem a non-starter - the release of a Pakistani woman convicted of trying to murder American military officers. U.S. officials maintain that Davis, who has claimed self-defense, has immunity and is being detained illegally.
But some senior government and police officials say they see a window of opportunity. In Pakistan, disputes over killings are regularly solved out of court as an agreement between the victims' heirs and those responsible for deaths. The former must forgive, and the latter must pay diyat, or compensation.
Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani has suggested such a payment as one possible solution. In a recent interview, another senior Pakistani government official said that "the opinion of the government and many sensible people" is that the payment of money could prompt the families of those killed in the episode to drop their cases.
But this is a country seething with anti-American sentiment, and as with everything surrounding the case, the idea of compensatory payments has been divisive. Most prominently, religious groups - normally the champions of Islamic law - have taken to the streets to oppose compensation and scold the government for "pressuring" the relatives of the victims to accept it.
"This is not a case for compensation," said Liaqat Baloch, secretary general of the religious party Jamaat-e-Islamic, who spoke after a rally in Lahore where throngs of men called for Davis to be hanged. Baloch said that the families would not accept U.S. money and that "the people of Pakistan" would provide any funds they might need.
In interviews, relatives of the two men shot by Davis in a street altercation and a motorcyclist killed by a U.S. consulate vehicle that was rushing to Davis's rescue said they had not been approached by the Pakistani or U.S. governments. The relatives said that representatives from religious parties had been the only regular visitors and that their arguments against accepting compensation had been persuasive.
"We can't straightaway accept money and let it go," said Ijaz ur-Rehman, 39, the brother of the dead motorcyclist.
U.S. officials declined to say whether diyat is under discussion in the Davis case. A Pakistani newspaper reported Sunday that the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad has pursued the option at least twice, paying $10,000 to relatives of each of two men fatally struck by embassy cars in 2010. Alberto Rodriguez, an embassy spokesman, said only that "the embassy has acted responsibly whenever there have been incidents involving accidents with embassy employees."
The payment of compensation to settle killings is controversial among human rights activists and some lawyers in Pakistan. Critics argue that it allows those with money to kill with impunity and trivializes homicide as a personal, not societal, crime - objections that could complicate U.S. efforts to pursue payments.
But lawyers and police say the practice is common both in urban and rural areas, where such settlements can forestall or end lasting intertribal battles. Although the United States seems unlikely to take any step that looks like an admission of guilt, experts say public sentiment would demand some compensation be paid.
"From a Pakistani public opinion perspective, this is probably going to be the easiest way to get out of the logjam," said Babar Sattar, an attorney and newspaper columnist. "It is an Islamic principle that's been followed for centuries . . . if somebody wants to get away from the pain of dealing with something like this."
Of course, the families of the dead men must forgive in exchange for payment, and this they have not yet done.
Mokhtar Ahmed, 50, an uncle of Faizan Haider, one of the men fatally shot by Davis, said several people whose affiliations he did not know have visited the family and offered to mediate a settlement, insisting it is futile to battle the United States.
"But now we think we should not budge," he said.
"Blood for blood," said Wasim Shamshad, whose brother, Faheem, was also killed in the shooting. "Islam says whatever the crime is, the punishment should be the same."
by MacCruiskeen » Wed Mar 16, 2011 8:55 am
BBC, 16 March 2011 Last updated at 12:26 GMT
Lahore acquits CIA contractor Raymond Davis of murders
breaking news
A Pakistani court has acquitted a US CIA contractor of two counts of murder at a hearing held at a prison in Lahore, a government official has said.
Raymond Davis, 36, was alleged to have shot dead two men in the eastern city of Lahore in January following what he said was an attempted armed robbery.
The acquittal came when relatives of the dead men pardoned him in court.
They confirmed to the judge overseeing the case that they had received compensation [from whom?] - known as "blood money" .
Under Pakistani law, relatives of a murder victim can pardon the killer.
Reports say about 18 family members of the two dead men were in court on Wednesday and confirmed that they wanted Mr Davis to be freed and pardoned because they had received "blood money" [from WHOM?].
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12757244
by Nordic » Wed Mar 16, 2011 1:39 pm
MacCruiskeen wrote:BBC, 16 March 2011 Last updated at 12:26 GMT
Lahore acquits CIA contractor Raymond Davis of murders
breaking news
A Pakistani court has acquitted a US CIA contractor of two counts of murder at a hearing held at a prison in Lahore, a government official has said.
Raymond Davis, 36, was alleged to have shot dead two men in the eastern city of Lahore in January following what he said was an attempted armed robbery.
The acquittal came when relatives of the dead men pardoned him in court.
They confirmed to the judge overseeing the case that they had received compensation [from whom?] - known as "blood money" .
Under Pakistani law, relatives of a murder victim can pardon the killer.
Reports say about 18 family members of the two dead men were in court on Wednesday and confirmed that they wanted Mr Davis to be freed and pardoned because they had received "blood money" [from WHOM?].
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12757244
FFS. The British Bumlicking Corporation tells us plainly that the family was bribed to "pardon" the killer, but doesn't deign to tell us (or even to ask) who bribed them! As if it wasn't obvious, or as if it didn't matter, or as if not-offending-the-CIA was part of their public remit.
"Blood money". FFS.
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 44 guests