"Pakistan court acquits five gang-rape suspects; Men accused of attack ordered by tribal council" April 22, 2011|By Pamela Constable, Washington Post
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan’s Supreme Court yesterday acquitted and freed five men accused of gang-raping a village woman in 2002 on the orders of a tribal council. The case received worldwide attention, and the victim, Mukhtar Mai, became an international icon of women’s rights....
Women’s groups and human rights monitors in Pakistan called the high court verdict a travesty of justice and said it showed that the country’s judicial system is patriarchal and prejudiced against women....
Then we simply have to occupy and drop more missiles on them.
Those women are certainly better off dead, right?
In June 2002, a village council ordered Mai, then 33, to be gang-raped in retaliation for an alleged romantic relationship between her 13-year-old brother and a woman from another tribe. The police arrested 14 village men after the case drew media attention.
Look, I'm not trying to minimize it because rape is a horrible violation of a person's humanity; however, I am sick of the Muslim-hating media flogging the issue.
Mai, who is now 42 and runs a girls’ school in her village in southern Punjab, told Geo television yesterday that she feared for her life after the verdict but would not halt her struggle for women’s rights in Pakistani society....
Like this one?
Tomas Munita for The New York Times Hameeda Sarfraz, in the dark burqa, teaches Islamic religious lessons to children in her village, about 50 miles north of Islamabad, Pakistan.
Mai’s case, which shocked the world nine years ago, revealed the cruel side of Pakistan’s traditional tribal culture, in which women are often punished or sold as brides to compensate for the perceived sins of their relatives.
How many drone strikes have they made?
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Then they deserved this:
"US strike kills 23 in Pakistan; Attack by drone comes despite rising tensions" April 23, 2011|By Jane Perlez and Ismail Khan, New York Times
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A US drone attack killed 23 people in North Waziristan yesterday, Pakistani military officials said, in a strike against militants that appeared to signify unyielding pressure by the United States on Pakistan’s military amid increasing opposition to such strikes.
Yes, this was a day or two after they asked us to stop.
Kind of a f*** you moment.
The strike came a day after the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, met with the Pakistani military chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani....
An in-yo-face f*** you.
The assault was the second display of the United States’ determination to continue drone attacks since the head of Pakistan’s spy agency, Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, met this month in Washington with CIA Director Leon E. Panetta to request a halt to the strikes.
Yesterday’s attack could further fuel antidrone sentiment among the Pakistani public. A government official in North Waziristan told Pakistani reporters that five children and four women were among the 23 who were killed.
Hey, they are better off that way than under Pakistan's cruel tribal culture, right?
The attack singled out forces of a militant commander, Hafiz Gul Bahadur, whose loyalists cross the border into Afghanistan to fight US and NATO soldiers, the government official said.
Bahadur operates under a peace accord with the Pakistani Army that ensures that militants under his control do not attack Pakistani soldiers but concentrate on allied soldiers.
Pakistan harbors more than a dead bin Laden?
Those killed yesterday were gathered in Spinwam, an area close to Mir Ali in North Waziristan that became a hub for militants in the past several months, the official said.
Then I'm sure those women and children deserved it.
In the increasing public war of nerves between the US and Pakistani militaries, Pakistan’s government is allowing a planned anti-NATO protest to go ahead in Peshawar this weekend.
Never saw a further word about them in my paper.
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Plenty of this, and very interesting given the recent bin Laden ploy:
"Mullen links Pakistan’s spy agency to militant group" April 21, 2011|By Zarar Khan, Associated Press
ISLAMABAD — The top US military officer accused Pakistan’s spy agency yesterday of links to a powerful militant faction fighting in Afghanistan and said that relationship was at the heart of tensions between Islamabad and Washington.
The comments by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are a sign that the United States is not stepping down in a bruising dispute with Pakistan in recent months that has threatened their vital, if often uneasy, alliance in the campaign against militants.
Mullen, who is visiting Pakistan, made the comments to local Geo TV in an interview ahead of a meeting with the country’s army chief of staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. The two men reportedly enjoy a good relationship, but Mullen said he would bring up the issue of the militant Haqqani network with him in talks about tensions between the two countries.
The what?
“Where I am not soft is on the heart of that discussion, which is the Haqqani network very specifically. The Haqqani network very specifically facilitates and supports the Taliban, who move in to Afghanistan to kill Americans. The ISI has a long-standing relationship with the Haqqani network — that doesn’t mean everybody in the ISI but it’s there …,’’ he said.
Yeah, yeah, we got the point:
"Haqqani.... credited with introducing suicide bombing to the region.... cultivated as a "unilateral" asset of the CIA and received tens of thousands of dollars in cash for his work.... He may have had a role in expediting the escape of Osama Bin Laden.... In July 2008, CIA officials confronted Pakistan officials with evidence of ties between Inter-Services Intelligence and Haqqani. Haqqani has been accused of involvement in the 2008 Indian embassy bombing in Kabul.... The Haqqani Network is based in Pakistan and is believed to have links to Al Qaeda."
The NEXT OSAMA?
A spokesman for the spy agency, known by its acronym ISI, declined comment.
It has previously denied US accusations, typically by anonymous officials in Washington, that it supports the Haqqani network and other Taliban factions.
Maybe they do, maybe they don't; however, we know he is a CIA asset.
Tensions between the ISI and the CIA spiked this year after American CIA contractor Raymond Davis shot and killed two Pakistanis he said were trying to rob him.
Actually, he killed two ISI men that were tailing him.
See: Pakistan Releases "Al-CIA-Duh" Man
They Don't Want Your Blood Money
Nothing murky about trying to GIVE NUCLEAR and BIOLOGICAL MATERIAL to "Al-CIA-Duh."
REMEMBER THAT the NEXT TIME a BIG BOOM GOES OFF, Americans!!!
The incident angered and embarrassed the government and the ISI, which complained the CIA was running covert operations in the country.
Yeah, GIVING WMD to its "Al-CIA-Duh" assets!!!!
A day after Davis was released from jail after compensation was paid to the families of his victims, an American missile strike killed scores of people close to the Afghan border, prompting Kayani to make a rare public condemnation of the tactic.
NATO and US officials say the Haqqani network is based in northwest Pakistan and is responsible for many of the attacks in Afghanistan. Elements of the Pakistani security establishment are widely believed to tolerate or support the group because they see it as a future safeguard for their interests in Afghanistan once the Americans withdraw....
Or future patsy for the false-flag nuclear attack.
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I wonder where he got the info.
"US saw Pakistan agency as terrorist, leaked papers say" April 26, 2011|By Chris Brummitt, Associated Press
ISLAMABAD — Guantanamo Bay prison authorities named Pakistan’s main intelligence agency a terrorist organization along with Hamas and other international militant networks, according to leaked documents that are likely to damage already rocky relations between the spy body and the CIA.
The 2007 documents from the Guantanamo Bay prison were part of a batch of classified material released by the WikiLeaks website and included interrogation summaries from more than 700 detainees.
The publicity about the documents in Pakistan coincided with a visit to Islamabad yesterday by General David Petraeus, top US commander in Afghanistan.
Wikileaks is definitely a propaganda operation.
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, which falls under the control of the country’s powerful military, declined to comment, but it has consistently denied any ongoing links with Islamist militants.
The ISI is included in a list of more than 60 international militant networks, as well as Iran’s intelligence service, that appear in guidelines for interrogators at Guantanamo.
Do the guidelines say anything about how to properly waterboard people?
The documents say the groups are “terrorist’’ entities or associations and say detainees linked to them “may have provided support to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, or engaged in hostilities against US and coalition forces.’’
Shiite Iran helped those who call them heretics and wish to slay them?
The CIA and the ISI have worked closely together since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to hunt down Al Qaeda operatives sheltering in Pakistan. But US officials have often voiced suspicions that elements of the ISI were either linked to or supporting militants even as the two countries publicly talked of their alliance in the campaign against extremism.
This is really making me sick when you consider that WESTERN INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES CREATE, DIRECT, and FUND the "terrorists."
Those suspicions appear to be bolstered in part by documents about some individual detainees that were first reported by the Guardian newspaper in Great Britain....
Bolstered by torture.
Relations between the United States and Pakistan hit a new low this year after an American CIA contractor shot and killed two Pakistanis he claimed were robbing him. Since then, the ISI has complained about American drone strikes along the Afghan border and the alleged existence of scores of CIA agents in the country without its knowledge.
In a rare public accusation last week, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said the ISI had continued links to the powerful network of an Afghan warlord that has bases in a northwestern tribal region of Pakistan.
You know his name, readers.
Hours later, Pakistan’s army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, rejected what he called “negative propaganda’’ by the United States.
Petraeus met with Kayani during his trip yesterday, a US Embassy statement said. It gave few details....
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told Parliament late yesterday that the country’s civilian, military, and intelligence leaders had taken steps to end any “trust deficit’’ with the Afghan government....
Allegations of links between the ISI and Islamist militants date to the 1980s, when Pakistan — along with the United States — was supporting the “Afghan Jihad’’ against the Soviet occupation in neighboring Afghanistan.
And that is how the CIA and AmeriKan government came up with "Al-CIA-Duh." They TOOK the LIST of their assets in Afghanistan and turned them into the "terrorists."
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"New suspicions of Pakistan’s role in evasion" by Jane Perlez, New York Times / May 3, 2011
NEW YORK — The killing of Osama bin Laden almost in plain sight in a city that hosts numerous Pakistani military forces seems certain to further inflame tensions between the United States and Pakistan, and raise significant questions about whether elements of the Pakistani spy agency knew where the Al Qaeda leader was hiding.
The presence of bin Laden in Pakistan, something Pakistani officials had long dismissed, goes to the heart of the lack of trust Washington has felt over the last 10 years with its contentious ally, the Pakistani military and its powerful spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence.
Yeah, because the Pakistanis knew he was dead. Speculation on the blogs is now that the US snatched the body from the Pakistanis, picked a "compound" at random to stage an attack then planted the body and call in the press?
Related: Kurdish Forces Captured Saddam and Handed Him To U.S. Forces
Is there anything the U.S. government and its mouthpiece media won't lie about?
With bin Laden’s death, perhaps the central reason for an alliance forged on the ashes of 9/11 has been removed, at a moment when relations between the countries are already at a low point as their strategic interests diverge over the shape of postwar Afghanistan.
Related: Chirps of Peace From Pakistan
Yeah, that's always a problem for the U.S. war machine.
For nearly a decade, the United States has paid Pakistan more than $1 billion a year for counterterrorism operations whose chief aim was the killing or capture of bin Laden, who slipped across the border from Afghanistan after the US invasion in 2001.
The circumstance of bin Laden’s death may not only jeopardize that aid, but will also no doubt deepen suspicions that Pakistan has played a double game, and perhaps even knowingly harbored him.
I can't stand the disingenuous and duplicitous insults.
You see where all this is going, right?
Bin Laden was not killed in the remote and relatively lawless tribal regions along the border, where the United States has run a campaign of drone attacks aimed at Al Qaeda militants, where he was long rumored to have taken refuge, and where the reach of the Pakistani government is limited.
Rather, he was killed in Abbottabad, a city of about 500,000, in a large and highly secured compound that, a resident of the city said, sits near the grounds of a military academy.
You know, that planting of the body and staged firefight is looking reasonable right now.
The academy was visited just last month by the Pakistani military chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, where he proclaimed that Pakistan had “cracked’’ the forces of terrorism, an assessment that was greeted with skepticism in Washington.
In addition, the city hosts three military regiments, and a unit of the Army Medical Corps. According to some reports, the compound and its elaborate walls and security gates may have been built specifically for the Al Qaeda leader in 2005, hardly an obscure undertaking in a part of the city that the resident described as highly secure.
John Brennan, President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, said yesterday it is inconceivable that bin Laden didn’t have some support in Pakistan. He said the White House is talking with the Pakistani government, and pledged to pursue all leads to find out what type of support he might have had.
“There are a lot of people within the Pakistan government, and I am not going to speculate about who, or if any of them, had foreknowledge about bin Laden being in Abbottabad, but certainly its location there outside of the capital raises questions,’’ he said.
The United States acted alone in the special operation, another sign of the strained relationship between the countries.
Related: Chinese Media says PAKISTANI forces got 'Bin Laden!'
My newspaper practically confirmed it by saying the U.S. acted alone.
Almost instantly, the death of bin Laden in such a place in Pakistan led to fresh recriminations from its neighbors. “The fundamental challenge is, how does the West treat Pakistan from now on?’’ said Amrullah Saleh, a former intelligence director for Afghanistan and a fierce foe of Pakistan.
With an occupation?
And you thought Iraq and Afghanistan were difficult!!
Still, it was too soon to say whether bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad reflected Pakistani complicity or incompetence.
At the very least, bin Laden’s death in Pakistan will be highly embarrassing to its military and intelligence establishment.
After bin Laden’s death became public in Pakistan, an ISI official insisted, contrary to Obama’s statement, that he was killed in a joint US-Pakistani operation, suggesting Islamabad knew about it in advance.
President Asif Ali Zardari, the ISI chief, Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, and Kayani met yesterday, but had not issued any statement more than six hours after Obama’s announcement of bin Laden’s death.
Since 9/11, the Pakistani government and the military have played a delicate balancing act between sometimes trying to overtly support the United States in its goal to get rid of Al Qaeda, and local popular sentiment that seemed to, at the very least, tolerate the Islamic militants.
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"Tension rises as US seeks answers from Pakistan; Some members of Congress want to cut aid" by Steven Lee Myers and Jane Perlez, New York Times / May 4, 2011
WASHINGTON — The suspicions have intensified efforts by some members of Congress to scale back US aid to Pakistan, or cut it entirely, as lawmakers described Pakistan as a duplicitous ally undeserving of the billions of dollars it receives each year from Washington.
Actually, the people of Pakistan don't want the increasingly worthless dollars and interference.
Still, Obama administration officials and some members of Congress seemed determined to avoid the kind of break in relations that would jeopardize the counterterrorism network the CIA has carefully constructed over the past few years in Pakistan, and as the administration tries to end the war in Afghanistan, a conflict where Pakistan is a necessary, if difficult, partner.
That would be "Al-CIA-Duh."
On Monday, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan landed in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, and delivered what US officials described as a stern message to senior Pakistani military and intelligence leaders. The envoy, Marc Grossman, told them that patience in Congress was wearing thin, officials familiar with the discussions said....
So is mine.
Top Pakistani officials have denied that Islamabad tried to harbor bin Laden, and US officials said at this point there was no hard evidence that any Pakistani officials visited the compound in Abbottabad, or had any direct contacts with bin Laden. Even as they pledged support for the United States’ deeply strained alliance with Pakistan, several top US officials said it was difficult to believe bin Laden could have spent years in a town populated by current and former Pakistani military officers — with a Pakistani military academy close by — without the complicity of some in the country’s government.
What is even more difficult to believe is that dead man could be wandering around the "compound."
Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, acknowledged she had no evidence that Pakistan’s government knew where bin Laden was hiding, but that the government had much to answer for.
A civilian official in the Pakistani government said he did not know if the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence helped bin Laden hide or was simply unaware of his presence in Abbottabad. Either way, he said, the US raid was an international humiliation for the agency.
In his meetings in Islamabad, Grossman told Pakistani leaders they needed to take steps to stanch the tide of anger in Washington about Pakistan’s behavior, according to Obama administration officials familiar with the meetings.
But we need not take steps to stanch the tide of anger from the drone strikes?
In public, Grossman was more diplomatic....
Translation: governments speak bullshit
The raid has fueled anti-Pakistan sentiment in Congress, yet it is unclear — perhaps even unlikely — that there would be enough support to cut aid to Pakistan.
House Speaker John Boehner, who just returned from a congressional visit to Pakistan and Afghanistan, said any discussion about cutting aid or decreasing engagement with Pakistan in the aftermath of the bin Laden strike was premature and that he would strongly oppose any such move....
Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader, also expressed reluctance about limiting aid to Pakistan, saying the country has been an anti-terror partner of the United States.
“They’ve lost thousands and thousands of their soldiers fighting terrorists,’’ he said. “Now, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have more oversight, and I’m willing to do that.’’
Smells like an occupation to me.
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Related: 'Bin Laden scenario prelude to new war'
The Great Deceit
