The Strange Case of Benazir Bhutto’s Claims and Osama bin Laden’s Death
Jennifer Briney wrote back in 2008 on Little Country Lost:
In a November 2, 2007 interview, less than two months before she would be assassinated, Benazir Bhutto was asked by reporter David Frost of Al-Jazeera English about a letter that she had sent to Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf. The letter outlined who she believed should be investigated in the event of her assassination. While giving her answer, she listed as one of the suspects a “key figure in security … a former military officer in Pakistan” who had dealings with, among others, “Omar Sheikh, the man who murdered Osama bin-Laden.”
If that name, Omar Shieikh, sounds familiar it’s because he was a key figure in some huge stories between 1999 and 2002. His full name is Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, and multiple variations of those names are used to describe him including Omar Sheikh and Saeed Sheikh. Here’s how you may have…
Media Roots Radio: Spying, Fear & Self-Censorship, Building Up Your Community
Via Media Roots:
This discussion covers U.S. imperialism: wars, costs, media and government propaganda; the culture of fear, self-censorship and the erosion of privacy in the US; information as power and how communication is an important tool to strengthen and build communities.
CIA Held Fake Vaccination Drive To Get Osama’s Children’s DNA
A-ha! For years I’ve been telling everyone that so-called “vaccinations” are a government scam to harvest our DNA (and render us autistic to boot). The Guardian reports on a beyond-bizarre CIA plot:
The CIA organised a fake vaccination program in the town where it believed Osama bin Laden was hiding in an elaborate attempt to obtain DNA from the fugitive al-Qaida leader’s family. A senior Pakistani doctor was recruited to organize the vaccine drive in Abbottabad, even starting the “project” in a poorer part of town to make it look more authentic.
DNA from any of the Bin Laden children in the compound could be compared with a sample from his sister, who died in Boston in 2010, to provide evidence that the family was present. It is not known exactly how the doctor hoped to get DNA from the vaccinations, although nurses could have been trained to withdraw some blood in the…
Pakistani Journalist Found Dead After Criticizing Pakistan’s Chief Intelligence Agency
Via The New York Times:
The Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad knew he was a marked man. Mr. Shahzad, who covered national security and terrorism, had received repeated threats from Pakistan’s powerful spy agency. Yet he courageously kept doing his job — until somebody silenced him. His body, his face horribly beaten, was buried on Wednesday.
Suspicion inevitably falls on Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s chief intelligence agency. For the sake of justice, and the shredded credibility of Pakistan’s government, his murderers must be found quickly and held accountable.
Mr. Shahzad disappeared from Islamabad on Sunday, two days after he published an article suggesting a militant attack on a naval base in Karachi was retaliation for the navy’s attempt to crack down on Al Qaeda militants in the armed forces. American analysts doubt an Al Qaeda cell infiltrated Pakistani security, but they have long worried about individual sympathizers.
Whatever the case, the attack humiliated the ISI…
WikiLeaks: U.S. Troops Were Yards from Osama Bin Laden’s Abbottabad Compound in 2008
James Ball writes in the Guardian:
US forces were stationed just a few hundred yards from Osama Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound in October 2008, according to reports within the WikiLeaks embassy cables.
The revelation that US forces were so close to the world’s most wanted man in 2008 comes after material from the Guantánamo files suggested the US may have received the intelligence that led them to Bin Laden as early as 2008.
The US soldiers were due to perform a routine posting “training the trainers” of Pakistan’s 70,000-strong federal military unit, the Frontier Corps.
Abbottabad is home to the Pakistan Military Academy, the country’s version of Sandhurst in Britain, and trains officers from across the nation. The academy is streets away from where Bin Laden was tracked down and killed.
Was Pakistan Hiding Osama Bin Laden?
Bin Laden was discovered not in the godforsaken, lawless borderlands but living in a million-dollar mansion in a touristy suburb nearby Pakistan’s top military academy. Steve Coll of the New Yorker writes that the Pakistani military was obviously sheltering bin Laden and that al-Qaeda’s other top leaders are likely being given safe haven as well, but the United States simply cannot press the issue — Pakistan has nuclear weapons and is “too big to fail”:
Abbottabad in the hills to the north of the capital of Islamabad, is in an area where much of the land is controlled or owned by the Pakistan Army and retired army officers. The city is most notable for housing the Pakistan Military Academy, the Pakistan Army’s premier training college, equivalent to West Point.
Looking at maps and satellite photos, I saw the wide expanse of the Academy not far from where the million-dollar, heavily secured mansion where bin…
Pakistani Teenager Tells Of Failed Suicide Bomb Mission
Coat of Arms of the Taliban regime (1996-2001). Photo: Falerístico (CC)
With the increasing number of suicide bombing, it is often asked, what were they thinking? Why did they do this? After 14-year-old Umar Fidai’s explosive vest failed to detonate, he discusses how the Taliban trained him and his regret towards his actions. BBC News reports:
In early April a suicide blast ripped though a Pakistani shrine packed with thousands of devotees, leaving scores dead. Both attackers were schoolboys in their early teens. But one survived and told the BBC’s Aleem Maqbool what made him want to take his life and the lives of others.
“All I was thinking was that I had to detonate myself near as many people as possible. When I decided it was the right time, it was a moment of happiness for me,” said 14-year-old Umar Fidai.
“I thought that there would be a little bit of pain, but then…
Arrest For Pakistani Brothers Who Made Curry From Corpses
Ever acquire a habit and get totally carried away? For years a pair of brothers dug up fresh graves in search of corpses to make into curry dishes, after the cuisine “became an addiction.” Via Guardian:
Police in Pakistan have arrested two men for allegedly digging up a newly buried corpse and eating its flesh in a curry.
The two brothers are said to have cut the legs from the body of a 24-year-old woman and cooked the flesh in a steel pot. Some of the gruesome dish had already been eaten when police raided the brothers’ home in a remote part of Punjab province.
A senior police officer, Malik Abdul Rehman, told the Guardian the brothers had been eating corpses for at least a year, but some local media reports alleged that they had been human flesh eaters for a decade.
Rehman said that the brothers, Muhammad Arif, 40, and Farman Ali, 37,…
The Horrifying ‘Spider Trees’ Of Pakistan
Ah, the wonders and surprises of Mother Nature. The 2010 floods in Pakistan caused an unexpected evolution in arachnoid behavior — to escape the rising waters, millions of spiders took to living in trees. The UK’s Department for International Development has an eye-popping Flickr gallery of what is now typical across Pakistan. The sticky, web-cocooned trees have proven extremely effective at catching pests and curbed the mosquito population. (The trees in the below picture are festooned with dead bugs.)
‘Slackistan,’ Pakistan’s First Slacker Film
Yahoo News reports:
In a country scarred by Taliban attacks and hobbled by political bickering, film director Hammad Khan found himself riveted by a creature so out of touch with reality that it almost inspires jealousy: the Pakistani slacker.
He found such youth roaming the Pakistani capital’s tree-lined boulevards in tight jeans, sipping lattes at Western-themed coffee shops and partying underground — with plenty of liquor to boot. They had no story, really. So Khan had to tell it.
The result is “Slackistan,” Pakistan’s first slacker film.
The movie shows a side of this South Asian nation rarely seen in the West, where media typically tie it to terror and Islamist fundamentalism. But in Pakistan, censors unhappy with some of the slacker portrayals have demanded so many changes that the film may not get released here.
“Things have gone from bad to worse in Pakistan. You look at these kids and wonder, ‘Does anything affect them?’”…
Dewey Clarridge’s Private C.I.A.
A fascinating profile of Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, once (and in his own mind always) a CIA spy, by Mark Mazzetti in the New York Times:
Duane R. Clarridge parted company with the Central Intelligence Agency more than two decades ago, but from poolside at his home near San Diego, he still runs a network of spies.
Over the past two years, he has fielded operatives in the mountains of Pakistan and the desert badlands of Afghanistan. Since the United States military cut off his funding in May, he has relied on like-minded private donors to pay his agents to continue gathering information about militant fighters, Taliban leaders and the secrets of Kabul’s ruling class.
Hatching schemes that are something of a cross between a Graham Greene novel and Mad Magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy,”…
Christians Are Being Violently Pushed Out Of Middle East
Coptic cross. Author: Sagredo (CC)
In the wake of the suicide bomb attack on the Coptic Christians in Egypt and the deadly October massacre at a Christian church in Iraq, Paul McGeough writes in the Sydney Morning Herald that Christians are rapidly leaving the Middle East altogether:
…A century ago, they accounted for 20 per cent of the population in the Middle East – today the Vatican estimates that proportion to be 5 per cent and falling in a region in which most regimes impose limits and restrictions on Christian rituals.
Iran has recently been rounding up Christian missionaries and deadly Christian-Muslim violence has erupted again in Nigeria.
“If this phenomenon continues, Christianity in the Middle East will disappear,” the Reverend Khalil Samir, an Egyptian Jesuit in Beirut, told reporters on the eve of a Vatican conference that discussed the crisis last year. “This is not an unreal hypothesis – Turkey went from 20 per…
CIA Chief in Pakistan Pulled After Legal Action Reveals Covert Drone Attacks
Declan Walsh writes in the Guardian:
The CIA has pulled its station chief from Islamabad, one of America’s most important spy posts, after his cover was blown in a legal action brought by victims of US drone strikes in the tribal belt.
The officer, named in Pakistan as Jonathan Banks, left the country yesterday, after a tribesman publicly accused him of being responsible for the death of his brother and son in a CIA drone strike in December 2009. Karim Khan, a journalist from North Waziristan, called for Banks to be charged with murder and executed.
In a rare move, the CIA called Banks home yesterday, citing “security concerns” and saying he had received death threats, Washington officials told Associated Press. Khan’s lawyer said he was fleeing the possibility of prosecution.
“This is just diplomatic language they are using. Banks is a liability to the CIA because he’s likely to be called to court.…
Ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s Dying Words: ‘You’ve Got to Stop This War in Afghanistan’
Jason Ditz writes on Antiwar.com:
Family members are reporting that the late Richard Holbrooke, the US Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan who died yesterday following heart surgery, gave as his last words “you’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.”
The dying words stand in stark contrast to Holbrooke’s living words, which were almost uniformly supportive of President Obama’s repeated escalations of the Afghan War. They’re also a major inconvenience to the president at a time when he’s trying to spin the ever worsening war as a runaway success.
Indeed, President Obama has already released a statement praising Holbrooke and saying he deserves much of the credit for the “progress” in the disastrous conflict, and reiterated that “he understood” how important the war is. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also issued a statement on Holbrooke, and it too centered on how important the escalation of the war was.
Osama bin Laden Living Comfortably in Pakistan
It’s no great surprise to learn that bin Laden isn’t hiding in a mountain cave, considering that he’s probably been receiving kidney dialysis and other medical treatment for years. Barbara Starr reports for CNN:
Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) — Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri are believed to be hiding close to each other in houses in northwest Pakistan, but are not together, a senior NATO official said. “Nobody in al Qaeda is living in a cave,” said the official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the intelligence matters involved.
Rather, al Qaeda’s top leadership is believed to be living in relative comfort, protected by locals and some members of the Pakistani intelligence services, the official said…
Colorado Man’s Rambo-Style Mission To Kill Osama Fails
A middle-aged-dad-type from Colorado was arrested in the mountains of Pakistan, where, armed with a sword, pistol and night-vision goggles, he was on a solo go-for-broke mission to find and kill Osama bin Laden. Amazingly, he made it pretty far, reaching the isolated region where Osama is rumored to be hiding. Las Vegas Sun reports:
“A lot of kids grow up and say, `I want to be Rambo,’ you know? Well, he is,” said Gary Faulkner’s brother, Scott, 43.
“He’s as normal as you and I,” Scott Faulkner said. “He’s just very passionate, and, as a Christian, he felt, when Osama mocked this country after 9/11, and it didn’t feel like the military was doing enough, it became his passion, his mission, to track down Osama, and kill him, or bring him back alive.”
Scott Faulkner said his brother sold all his tools to finance his trip and was prepared to die in Pakistan.…
Pakistan And Conspiracy Theory
Which country around the world loves conspiracy theories the most? I always thought Italy, with its long history of Machiavellian plotting, might win that award, but the New York Times makes a case for Pakistan:
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Americans may think that the failed Times Square bomb was planted by a man named Faisal Shahzad. But the view in the Supreme Court Bar Association here in Pakistan’s capital is that the culprit was an American “think tank.”
No one seems to know its name, but everyone has an opinion about it. It is powerful and shadowy, and seems to control just about everything in the American government, including President Obama.
“They have planted this character Faisal Shahzad to implement their script,” said Hashmat Ali Habib, a lawyer and a member of the bar association.
Who are they?
“You must know, you are from America,” he said smiling. “My advice for the American nation is, get free of…
Pakistan Knows Where Osama Bin Laden Is – But Won’t Tell
So says author Stephen Tanner in an interview with CNN’s Afghanistan Crossroads:
Osama bin Laden – remember him? Where is he, and is the U.S. getting closer to killing or capturing him?
Those are the questions hovering over several recent developments in the Afghanistan war: the capture of Afghan Taliban military leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the killing of two key Taliban commanders and an increase in drone attacks.
But several authorities on the eight-year Afghanistan war say no one should expect to see bin Laden in handcuffs anytime soon.
“No, I don’t think we’re getting any closer,” says Stephen Tanner, author of Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the War against the Taliban.
Tanner says the ISI, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, knows where bin Laden is hiding, but is not ready to say…
