"In Pakistan’s Swat Valley, focus back on normal living; With Taliban ousted, residents are more secure" by Tim Craig Washington Post May 17, 2015
MINGORA, Pakistan — Here in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, known for gorgeous sunsets and the calming sound of cresting river rapids, there has been plenty of misery over the past decade.
First, Pakistani Taliban militants swept into this conservative part of northwest Pakistan, killing more than 2,000 people.
Then Pakistan’s army showed up to battle the Taliban, forcing 1.5 million residents to flee their homes. And even after soldiers regained control and residents returned, the 2012 shooting of schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai was a reminder that life here remained cruel and unpredictable.
Now, with security finally improving, residents are releasing years of stress by flocking to new shopping and entertainment outlets that would have been unthinkable when the Taliban was executing men for shaving or women for dancing.
‘‘Before, we were very scared of them. Our education system was totally down, because when you would go to school, every morning there would be a man lying with his head cut, thrown by the Taliban on the road,’’ said Arsalan Khan, 25, a resident of this medium-size city. ‘‘Now, we can just focus on how to live normally.’’
Must have been all the drone strikes.
You ready for takeoff?
Though Swat’s residents have long been more educated and wealthier than those in many other rural areas of Pakistan, the changing lifestyles here offer a glimpse into how quickly an area can start modernizing when fears of Islamist militants fade.
Even before the Taliban gained effective control over this area in 2007, the mountains that tower over this agricultural region served as a barrier to technology and social changes. But residents say that isolation is quickly being replaced with demand for new haircuts, music, movies, and fashion styles.
‘‘We now want to dress like the people of Punjab,’’ said Abid Ibrahim, 19, referring to the eastern province that includes Lahore, often referred to as Pakistan’s most progressive city. ‘‘We want to make ourselves look like models, and with the hairstyles from magazines like developed people.’’
What's next, dating Dutch?
Ibrahim was at an amusement and gaming center called Motion Rider, which opened in Mingora in February. Life-size posters of a soldier in US military combat gear and European soccer stars Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo hang on the walls, and customers play Xbox games on big-screen televisions.
They are swatting around freedom!
The main attraction is a 3-D movie theater where seats move in sync with the action on the screen.
I no longer go to the movies, even though I still pay for the tickets.
On a recent visit, patrons were watching ‘‘Into the Forest,’’ a psychedelic ride in which viewers dodge neon trees, bees, butterflies, and giant mushrooms.
Bunch of beatniks.
‘‘Everyone had been very depressed, but now people just want to have fun,’’ said Syad Imad, 36, who owns Motion Rider.
Several new Pakistani clothing chains from major cities have also opened in the past year. One store sells women’s jeans, even though most women in Swat still wear a burqa or cover their faces with a headscarf in public.
Still, residents say the mere presence of women out shopping, unescorted by male relatives, is a sign of progress.
‘‘I am very optimistic about the future of Swat,’’ said Iffat Nasir, an activist and school principal, who added female enrollment in school is steadily increasing. ‘‘I see Swat becoming a very modern place.’’
Some analysts are less certain, noting the area still lags in expanding rights for women, tempering the influence of religious madrassas, and reinvigorating tourism. And they say advancements in Mingora and other population centers are not reflective of far-flung areas of the entire 3,300-square-mile valley, home to about 2 million people.
‘‘It’s still not back to what it was pre-Taliban times,’’ said Zebunnisa Jilani, who founded the Swat Relief Initiative, a local aid group. But, she added, ‘‘I’ve been to a lot of Pakistan, and I now think Swat is one of the safest places.’’
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"Pakistan arrests suspects in attack that killed 47 Shiites" Associated Press May 21, 2015
ISLAMABAD — Pakistan’s interior minister on Wednesday said police have arrested the suspected mastermind and several gunmen involved in last week’s Karachi bus attack that killed 47 minority Shi’ite Muslims.
Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan’s announcement in Islamabad came just hours after the army said it had killed 13 militants in airstrikes in a tribal region bordering Afghanistan.
Khan said the arrests were the result of an ‘‘excellent coordination between police and intelligence agencies’’ in Sindh province, of which Karachi is the capital. The minister did not say when the arrests were made or give any details on the affiliation of the gunmen. He said some of those arrested confessed to taking part in the attack.
Both a Pakistani militant group linked to the Islamic State, which is fighting in Iraq and Syria, and a Pakistani Taliban splinter group have claimed responsibility for the May 13 assault during which gunmen stormed a bus with members of the Ismaili Shi’ite branch, forced them to bow their heads, then shot and killed them.
Oh, ISIS is now in PAKISTAN, huh? Even after they stayed out of Yemen? Or because they did?
Sindh province’s chief minister, Qaim Ali Shah, said during a news conference Wednesday that the arrested men were the same people who last month killed Sabeen Mahmud, a women’s rights activist gunned down after she hosted a discussion forum about nationalists in the country’s Baluchistan region, which has been engulfed in a low-level insurgency for years.
Baluchistan is also a CIA base, which is why it gets little coverage in my pre$$.
Also Wednesday, the military said jets killed 13 militants in airstrikes near the Datta Khel village in North Waziristan, where the army has been carrying out a major operation against local and foreign militants.
My pre$$ very quiet about it.
North Waziristan was once considered to be headquarters of the Pakistani Taliban, who have been trying to overthrow the government. Pakistan says it has cleared 90 percent of the region since launching an offensive.
And yet airstrikes were necessary?
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Look what else the Globe dug up and found:
"US releases papers reportedly seized from bin Laden" by Connie Cass and Robert Burns Associated Press May 21, 2015
WASHINGTON —A leader cut off from his underlings, disappointed by their failures, beset by their complaints, and regretting years of separation from much of his extensive family, according to images of the papers released by US officials.
Despite some surprising quirks in the collection, the overall message of the 103 letters, videos, and reports made public Wednesday hews to the terror group’s familiar mission: In the name of God, find a way to kill Americans. Kill Europeans. Kill Jews.
The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the documents, released as online images, were among books, US think tank reports, and other materials recovered in the May 2011 raid that killed bin Laden at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
PFFFFFFFFT!
This comes out on the heels of Psyop Hersh "revelations!" that reinforce the LIES!
The information was declassified and made public after a review by government agencies, as required by a 2014 law. Hundreds more documents found at the compound will be reviewed for possible declassification and release, the office said Wednesday, four years after bin Laden’s death.
Uh-huh.
The documents, as translated by US intelligence, mix the mundane language of business — personnel training, budget matters, financing for ‘‘workshops and collaborating groups’’ — with fervent religious appeals and updates on terror plots, written in flowery language full of praise for God.
The documents include a fill-in-the-blanks job application for Al Qaeda candidates that not only asks typical human resources questions about education and hobbies but also, ‘‘Do you wish to execute a suicide operation?’’ It requests an emergency contact should the applicant become a martyr.
This is such poor propaganda. Yeah, they had job applications, right. So stinks of CIA.
Drone strikes against Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, the near-suffocation of the group’s affiliate in Iraq beginning in 2007, and other developments severely undercut bin Laden in the years before his death. The terrorist threat shifted to Al Qaeda affiliates in other areas, including in Yemen and North Africa.
One letter from bin Laden mocks President George W. Bush’s war on terror, saying it had not achieved stability in Iraq or Afghanistan and questioning why US troops were ‘‘searching for the lost phantom’’ — weapons of mass destruction in Iraq....
By associating bin Laden with such criticism the propaganda pre$$ mouthpiece in effect discredits such criticism.
Nice shell game they got going, huh?
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"Porn tied to bin Laden site not released" Washington Post May 22, 2015
WASHINGTON — Newly declassified documents from the compound in Pakistan where Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011 have revealed the late Al Qaeda leader’s remarkable English-language library, including books by Noam Chomsky, Bob Woodward, and even 9/11 conspiracy theorist David Ray Griffin.
Awwww, gee! Really laying it on thick.
Yet the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which released the files on Wednesday, has not released all the material found in the compound.
In fact, there’s reportedly a rather notorious stash that the US government doesn’t want you to see: a cache of pornography.
Why not? That would totally destroy the piety of Tim Osman, 'er, the long-dead CIA asset and scapegoat bin Laden.
Reports that pornographic material was found in the compound were first published by the Reuters news agency on May 13, 2011, a few weeks after a US military raid on the site left the Al Qaeda leader dead.
This is such a timed release of damage control crap!
Unnamed officials told Reuters that the pornography was modern and the collection extensive.
And the fetishes were what, women with rubber dicks?
Officials said it was unclear how it came to be in the hideout, which had no Internet connection.
I think we know who planted it.
Reuters also reported that the officials were unsure about the precise location where the material was found or who might have been viewing it.
Actually, I have some ideas:
"US troops and Defense Department employees improperly used their government charge cards to spend more than $1 million in casinos and strip clubs in one year, and the government is still struggling to stop it, according to a report released Monday by the top Pentagon watchdog. The Defense Department inspector general found that in the 12 months ending June 30, 2014, $952,258 was improperly spent using government charge cards in casinos and $96,576 was spent in ‘‘adult entertainment establishments.’’ The numbers would have been higher, the watchdog found, but some transactions were declined. The charges examined included 4,437 made in casinos and 900 made in adult entertainment venues, the IG found. In one example, an enlisted sailor made 12 transactions on a government credit card totaling $1,116 at adult entertainment establishments while traveling on a trip to El Paso. The IG recommended that the government use more data-mining to find potentially improper charges."
Want to know where they were going?
"A supervisory agent and a telecommunications specialist for the Drug Enforcement Administration were arrested Wednesday on charges they were running a New Jersey strip club. A criminal complaint unsealed in federal court identifies David Polos and Glen Glover as part owners of Twins Plus Go-Go Lounge in South Hackensack. The club offers scantily clad and sometimes topless dancers, most of them in the country illegally, according to the complaint. The men, who worked at the DEA’s Manhattan headquarters, face charges they falsified national security forms by failing to disclose outside employment that could put them ‘‘in proximity to crime’’ and at risk for getting blackmailed. Polos and Glover ‘‘had important and sensitive law enforcement jobs with the DEA,’’ US Attorney Preet Bharara said. ‘‘As alleged in the complaint, they also had other secret jobs, which they concealed from DEA in order to maintain their national security clearance, betraying the oaths they had taken and creating needless risk for the agency they worked for.’’
What better place for sex parties, 'eh?
Although it has never been clear whether bin Laden had been viewing the pornography, the reports of adult videos in his compound prompted a flurry of mockery from the likes of the New York Post and Jon Stewart’s ‘‘Daily Show,’’ with some suggesting that the reports had been leaked to make bin Laden look hypocritical.
He had criticized the United States’ culture as sexualized in a 2002 ‘‘letter to America.”
Some experts pointed out that finding pornography on jihadists’ computers had become common by 2011, however, and CNN later reported on a separate case in which Al Qaeda had encoded pornographic movie files with secret documents....
Well, you won't be finding it on here unless the government plants it. The Globe is obscene enough for me, and no wonder CIA-Duh is so inefficient. They keep missing the messages!
The Psyop Isn’t Over, either.
Related: Was Osama a 9/11 Truther (and Also a GamePro Reader)?
Alongside an issue of al-Qaeda’s online magazine Inspire and U.S. articles about terrorism and foreign policy was a copy David Ray Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11, a book that argues that 9/11 was an inside job.
Was Osama...a 9/11 truther? The New Pearl Harbor wasn’t the only conspiracy-friendly tome in bin Laden’s digital library. A document provided to BuzzFeed News also lists Fritz Springmeier’s Bloodlines of the Illuminati, Secrets of the Federal Reserve by virulently anti-semitic conspiracy theorist Eustace Mullins (Another of his works is titled “My Struggle Against the Jews”), and a saved copy of a web article alleging that 9/11 was predicted by a 1995 card game about the Illuminati. (This theory is also popular among members of Reddit’s “conspiracy” message board. It is unknown if Osama had a Reddit account.)
Think of it as a flight swatter.
UPDATE: ISIS Furious About Conspiracy Theories and Truthers!
NDU: A Pakistani man’s unwelcome return to work
Think of it as a flight swatter.
UPDATE: ISIS Furious About Conspiracy Theories and Truthers!
NDU: A Pakistani man’s unwelcome return to work
