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CIA Ignored ISI Support for Lashkare Taiba

November 28, 2009 at 8:02 am · Filed under CIA, ISI, Terrorism in India ·Tagged , , , , , ,

 In a new book about his years fighting terrorism, former French investigating magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere casts fresh light on those early years after 9/11. At the time, he says, the Bush administration was so keen to get Pakistan’s help in defeating al Qaeda that it was willing to turn a blind eye to Pakistani support for militant groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, nurtured by the ISI agency to fight India in Kashmir. 

Basing his information on testimony given by jailed Frenchman Willy Brigitte, who spent 2-1/2 months in a Lashkar training camp in 2001/2002, he writes that the Pakistan Army once ran those camps, with the apparent knowledge of the CIA.  

The instructors in the camp in Pakistan’s Punjab province were soldiers on detachment, he says, and the army dropped supplies by helicopter. Brigitte’s handler, he says, appeared to have been a senior army officer who was treated deferentially by other soldiers. 

CIA officers even inspected the camp four times, he writes, to make sure that Pakistan was keeping to a promise that only Pakistani fighters would be trained there. Foreigners like Brigitte were tipped off in advance and told to hide up in the hills to avoid being caught.

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CIA Had No Problem with Waterboarding one Detainee 119 Times

August 27, 2009 at 7:43 am · Filed under CIA, Human Rights ·Tagged , ,

After years of delay, the CIA declassified a raft of documents on August 24, 2009, with lots of detail about the Bush Administration’s harsh treatment of detainees following the September 11 attacks. The biggest document, with the most new detail, is a 2004 report by the CIA Inspector General (CIA IG) that is highly critical of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program. Here are five new things you need to know about the disclosures: 

1. The CIA IG concluded that the public had been misled about the interrogation program. While the report stops short of accusing any public official of lying, it makes clear that the public statements that the U.S. Government made about its conduct differed from what was actually happening, creating a liability for the CIA if the information ever got out.

“The EITs [Enhanced Interrogation Techniques] used by the Agency under the CTC [Counterterrorist Center] Program are inconsistent with the public policy positions that the United States has taken regarding human rights,” the report reads. In particular, the IG notes that President Bush in June of 2003 issued a statement in observance of the “United Nations International Day In Support Of Victims of Torture.” The report quotes Bush’s statement at length, including this assertion: “The United States is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example.”

Later in the report, the IG writes: “Although the current detention and interrogation Program has been subject to DoJ [Department of Justice] legal review and Administration political approval, it diverges sharply from previous Agency policy and practice, rules that govern interrogations by U.S. military and law enforcement officers, statements of U.S. policy by the Department of State, and public statements by very senior U.S. officials, including the President.”

2. The CIA IG found that the CIA used waterboarding in a way that had not been approved by the Justice Department, calling into question the legality of the technique.

In one passage, the IG notes that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel had approved the waterboarding of detainees based on the assumption that the waterboarding would be similar to the practice used in a U.S. military training program.

The IG quotes medical experts at the CIA asserting that the “the [U.S. military] waterboard experience is so different from the subsequent Agency use as to make it almost irrelevant.” An interrogator/ psychologist who had helped to administer the program admitted the difference, saying the CIA use of waterboarding was “for real.” The differences included duration, frequency, the amount of water used, and the way air passages were obstructed.

3. The CIA IG repeatedly brought what it viewed as abuses or violations of law to the attention of Attorney General John Ashcroft and the Justice Department, without any positive result. After a review of the program determined that one detainee had been waterboarded “in a manner inconsistent with” the description of the technique in military training and in the Justice Department legal guidance, the matter was brought directly to Ashcroft by the CIA general counsel. According to the report, Ashcroft disagreed with the CIA IG assessment. Ashcroft responded by telling the CIA that he saw no problem with waterboarding one detainee 119 times, deciding that the “CIA is well within the scope of the DoJ opinion and the authority given to CIA by that opinion.” This is not the only difference of opinion between the Justice Department and the CIA IG. At another point, the IG reports to prosecutors that one CIA employee had threatened a detainee with a powerdrill and a handgun, both unauthorized techniques for which he did not seek approval. The Justice Department announced its decision not to prosecute this CIA employee on September 11, 2003, exactly two years after the attacks on New York and Washington D.C.

4. The CIA IG concluded that while high-value detainees did produce valuable intelligence, the measurement of the effectiveness of harsh interrogation techniques “is a more subjective process and not without some concern.” The CIA lists four reasons for this muddled view.

First, “the Agency cannot determine with any certainty the totality of the intelligence the detainee actually possesses.”

Second, “each detainee has different fears of and tolereace for” harsh techniques.

Third, “the application of the same” harsh technique “by different interrogators may have different results.”

The fourth reason that the effectiveness of harsh techniques could not be known objectively remains classified, and was redacted from the released document.

5. The initial harsh interrogation program, begun in 2002, was poorly managed, some interrogators were poorly trained and informed, and they used techniques that were substantially harsher than what had been approved by the White House and the Justice Department. “[T]he Agency—especially in the early months of the Program—failed to provide adequate staffing, guidance, and support to those involved with the detention and interrogation of detainees,” the report states. There were a number of episodes when people working for the CIA behaved outside of approved techniques. Perhaps the most serious case involved an Afghan citizen, who had been implicated in rocket attacks on U.S. military bases. Once captured, in June of 2003, the suspect was held at a military base. “During the four days the individual was detained, an Agency independent contractor, who was a paramilitary officer, is alleged to have severely beaten the detainee with a large metal flashlight and kicked him during interrogation sessions.” The detainee died in custody. The contractor, who had not been trained or authorized to conduct interrogations, received a relatively light punishment. He did not have his contract renewed by the CIA.

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Who Does the Interrogation of Terrorists in the USA?

July 28, 2009 at 6:36 am · Filed under CIA, War Against Terror ·Tagged ,

In the aftermath of 9/11, the CIA, lacking experience in interrogating jihadis, turned to experts from a military school where soldiers are trained to resist torture. These experts came up with a range of “coercive” interrogation techniques, including the now-infamous water-board. When these methods were employed at the Guantanamo Bay detention center, the methods led to an angry confrontation over their legality between interrogators from the FBI and the CIA. Eventually, the FBI withdrew from the interrogations — an less than amiable divorce, so to speak.

Yet, the President’s task force on interrogation and transfer policies for terrorism suspects is readying a proposal for a new unit that will once again join together several agencies. The task force, comprising experts from the FBI, CIA and the military — will be a big element in any new interrogation blueprint presented to the White House.

Unsurprisingly, the plan is being greeted with skepticism by many in the intel community. One veteran interrogator says the proposal “is either stupid, or very stupid.” He argues that inter-agency teams are doomed to fail because of the practical problems of dealing with multiple bureaucracies, and the political infighting between their bosses. Turf battles are inevitable, because each member of the team “carries the equities of his own agency.”

A national security expert says the differences are more fundamental: the agencies have divergent missions and requirements. In any interrogation, she says, “they’re looking for very different things: for the military, it’s what’s over the next hill; for the Bureau, it’s evidence that will hold up in a courtroom; for the CIA, it’s information that gives the President decision advantage.” Reconciling all these interests may be impossible.

But some intel experts say pooling the different agencies’ interrogation resources may be the practical solution to a basic problem: although the U.S. has captured thousands of terrorism suspects in the six years after 9/11, it still lacks the ability to consistently extract information from them. “A small professional cadre of interrogators, which can be brought in by any agency that needs their services, would be a good idea,” says Carl Ford, an ex-CIA hand who headed the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

The agencies may have different missions, but that should not prevent them from sharing the expertise they’ve accumulated in recent years. After 9/11, it should not be a problem to unify the agendas. The key is strong leadership.

But who exactly should lead the interrogation team? The task force has not yet formed a view on which agency should have overall command, although some reports suggest the CIA has been ruled out. Maddox himself believes the team should report to the Pentagon, since the military has the greatest experience in interrogating terrorist suspects.

Intel experts disagree, arguing that the military’s interrogators tend to be low-ranking soldiers who are unlikely to have much understanding of the psychological aspects of interrogation — or the broader strategic implication of the information gleaned. “Military guys, they want to know the location of the next IED, the next arms cache — immediately actionable information,” says the retired interrogator. “Intel people, we like a more long-term view. We want to know about the structure of a terrorist organization, the larger objectives.”

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Operation Blue Tulsi: Destroying Pakistan’s Nuclear Assets

July 13, 2009 at 9:41 am · Filed under Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto, CIA, ISI, Indo Pak Relations, Lawyers' Agitation ·Tagged , , , , ,

PPP government was dismissed in 1996 because Rehman Malik, DG FIA and Asif Zardari had promised Indians and Israelis access to Pakistan’s nuclear facilities. 

In 1994-95 Rehman Malik was working in tandem with this immediate boss Ghulam Asghar, head of the FIA, and under the auspices of Asif Zardari, collecting information about Pakistan’s nuclear installations. Malik offered the Indians direct access to Kashmiri and Afghan fighters he would capture.

 In July 2001 Janes Information Group reported that RAW and Mossad were cooperating to infiltrate Pakistan to target important religious and military personalities, journalists, judges, lawyers and bureaucrats.

In the late eighties, two junior intelligence officers one Pakistani other Indian faced each other on opposite sides of the law. The Pakistani intelligence officer had caught the Indian agent on Pakistani soil with incriminating evidence. Indian agent knew his life had come to an end. However, everything has a price. And his freedom was worth a little less than half a million rupees. A few days later the Indian agent was sitting back at home, free as a bird. And life went on for several more years until the fateful year of 1994 when the two old “chaps” met again. This time officially. The Indian agent had climbed the ladder to an important post in the government. At this side of the border the junior Pakistani agent, against all odds had become one of the top bosses at Federal Investigation Agency. Of course, this was the infamous Rehman Malik.

The Indian side wanted Pakistani Government’s help in reducing cross-border terrorism. But Rehman Malik offered a lot more than mere reduction in “cross-border”. He had been appointed as Additional Director FIA and yielded immense power through the country. Additionally he had become the right-hand-man of Asif  Zardari, stashing his looted money all over the world. He offered them direct access to the jihadists which he would capture. Somewhere along the line Israel also became a party to the deal and soon Mossad agents were carrying out investigations of the captured (ISI backed) jihadists on Pakistani soil. There were millions to be made from the deal and of course Rehman Malik was working in tandem with this immediate boss Ghulam Asghar, head of the FIA and under the auspices of Asif Ali Zardari. ISI, Pakistan Military and top brass quietly kept a close watch. Although painful but capture of a few foot soldiers was bearable in the bigger national interest.

By 1995 in a little over a year the Benazir Bhutto government had expelled 2000 Arab mujahidin of the Afghan-Soviet War and imprisoned number of Pakistani mujahidin.

Secondly and more significantly, Benazir Bhutto on her official visit to US in April 1995 met in secret with an Israeli delegation. On her return she faced stiff resistance from a block of military and civilian bureaucracy which had generated great suspicions of her dealings with India and Israel. Just four months later she thwarted a coup attempt against her headed by Major General Zahirul Islam Abbasi. Director General of Military Intelligence Major General Ali Kuli Khan tipped-off General Abdul Waheed Kakar who immediately ordered Chief of General Staff Lt. General Jehangir Karamat to suppress the coup. A total of 36 army officers and 20 civilians were arrested from Islamabad and Rawalpindi.

Then in November 1995 Egyptian Embassy blast occurred. Al-Qaeda was quick to claim it. Although the real reasons of the handlers of bombers remain hidden to this day, but in the next few days a silent but significant event happened. General Abdul Waheed Kakar who was given an extension in his tenure he refused it and Lt. General Jehangir Karamat was appointed as the Army Chief by the then President Farooq Leghari on December 18, 1995. Lt. General Jehangir Karamat was the senior most general at the time, therefore the least controversial within the military. The other three generals who were in the position to become COAS were Lt Gen Javed Ashraf Qazi, Lt Gen Naseer Akhtar, and Lt Gen Mohammad Tariq. Lt. Gen. Ghulam Muhammad Malik had already retired in October 1995.

Maj Gen Naseem Rana was heading the ISI at the time, taken his charge in October 1995. Lt Gen Shujat Ali Khan was heading the ISI’s Internal Wing.

In the backdrop of these events in Pakistan, in March 1995 Israel’s Air Force chief had visited India with an entourage that included key Mossad officials. It was at this point that in a meeting Pakistan’s nuclear program was discussed. A year later Indian nuclear and missile program head, Abdul Kalam had a “top secret” visit of Israel in June 1996. It was “top secret” because no one knew about it. As it turned out, everyone knew about it even before he left India. All the much publicized secrecy and visit of such a top level official achieved the aim and nearly nobody bothered with the entourage which included a manager from the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) – Alok Tiwari. The “top secret” meetings between Abdul Kalam and his Israeli counterparts were related to purchase of UAVs. However, in every single one of those “top secret” meetings Alok Tiwari was missing.

Just a few days later, after coming back to India Tiwari accompanied Air Chief Marshal S. K. Sareen to Israel in Israel in July 1996. In fact this was his third trip. He had also visited Israel in April 1996 along with India’s first Defence Attaché to Israel.

First Wave

In late July 1996 MQM organized a province wide strike. Simultaneously a large bomb exploded at Lahore airport and a second at Faisalabad railway station. On 14th August 1996 12 SSP activists were gunned down during an Independence Rally by unidentified gunmen. By end August Punjab had been engulfed in sectarian violence, Shias and Sunnis were being gunned down in broad daylight. The political and security situation worsened by the murder of Murtaza Bhutto and reinstatement of Manzoor Wattoo as Chief Minister of Punjab. The country seemed in a political and economic turmoil with violence erupting throughout the country. At the same time, out of blue Ataullah Mengal returned from his self-imposed exile.

While everyone was busy with the current crisis a team of agents working directly under Rehman Malik were gathering information on Kahuta and A.Q. Khan. Beginning November 1996 ISI saw an increase in Indian troops movement, which finally sent alarm bells ringing through the echelons of Rawalpindi and Islamabad.

Suddenly, all the pieces fell in place and Ghulam Asghar and Rehman Malik’s shenanigans seemed a lot deeper than mere money grabbing tactics. By fourth of November a thick load of evidence had been gathered on Ghulam Asghar and Rehman Malik working with the consent of Asif Zardari towards gathering information on the progress of Pakistan’s nuclear program.

On November 5, 1996, Farooq Leghari dissolved Benazir Bhutto’s government. At the other side of the border, this caused the immediate visit of Israeli naval chief Vice-Admiral Alex Tal to India. Back at home, Ghulam Asghar and Rehman Malik were imprisoned on undisclosed charges.

Second Wave

In February 1997, Indian Defence Secretary T. K. Banerji led a high level defence delegation to Israel to discuss the “exchange of technology” between two countries. Other than the official purpose the most important topic was Pakistan’s nuclear program. By the end of the visit the two countries had decided to do “whatever” it takes to neutralize the threat.

In March next year the BJP won Indian elections and one of the immediate policies adopted was to tackle Pakistan’s nuclear issue by any means possible. With such enthusiastic approach the government even decided to take the most extreme measures if needed. In the next two months the official and diplomatic delegations between India and Israel came to a halt, however, there was a sudden rise in non-diplomatic delegations between the two countries. The last official visit was of Gen. Prakash Malik to Israel in March 1998, who was also the first serving Indian Chief of Army Staff to visit Israel since normalization. In April 1998 two out-of-the ordinary incidents happened. Air India announced its discontinuation of Tel Aviv flight on 1 April 1998 and early April the Confederation of Indian Industry announced an unplanned “Study Mission” to Israel. This was the prelude to the second wave which officially started on 11th May 1998 when India exploded its nuclear bombs.

Night of 27-28 May

Pakistan resisted testing its nuclear bombs for nearly two weeks until 27th May 1998. On 27 May 1998 in a top level meeting Lt. Gen. Naseem Rana, (DG ISIP briefed the PM Nawaz Sharif and army chief of the increasing intelligence reports of possible Indian attack on Pakistan’s nuclear installations. However, the panic this created was nothing compared to the next two meetings.

The first report pertained to the sighting of an unidentified F-16 aircraft at the periphery of Pakistan’s airspace on 27th May. Knowing India did not have F-16, the obvious suggestion was presence of Israeli Air Force in the area (especially with the reports of Indian COAS visiting Israel just a month ago).

And the second report coming just before 1am on 28th May recorded unusual movements of Indian aircrafts just across the border which suggested India was preparing for preventive airstrikes against Pakistan. The obvious response of nuclear tests on 28th May.

The tests confirmed once and for all that Pakistan has nuclear capability.

Deduction

It seemed probable that BJP Government had decided to fire its nuclear bombs to force Pakistan into test firing its – if it has any. After a delay of two weeks, doubts had started rising in nearly every analytical discourse that Pakistan did not have the nuclear capability otherwise it would have responded. This was the golden opportunity to take out Pakistan/Pakistan’s nuclear installations before that Pakistan got the capability. The important visit of Indian COAS to Israel in March – in the light of proceeding events – could only be regarding Israel’s support for the planned attack. Whatever, the reasons and aims, the end result was establishment of Pakistan as a nuclear state, which completely changed the Great Nuclear Game.

Third Wave

Pakistan’s test firing of nuclear bombs was a shock for the rest of the world. No one expected, in the first place for Pakistan to have the capability and secondly to fire them if it had. For India and Israel, who were two top most interested parties in destroying Pakistan’s nuclear assets, this meant a complete overhaul of their strategy.

A year later Indian National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra came to meet Barak in September 1999 and this time he was accompanied with a familiar face – Alok Tiwari. Within a year, Alok Tiwari and another security analyst finalized a document based on their discussion the preceding year.

In June 2000 L. K. Advani visited Israel in which new deals related to Mossad and Shabak espionage and cooperation with RAW are finalized and as a result Israel was allowed to establish its own network to operate from India.

By July 2000 a heavy deployment of Israeli agents in Indian Occupied Kashmir was reported. Near the end of 2000 Israel’s top intelligence officers were reported to have visited India and discussed amongst other issues, Kashmir and Pakistan’s nuclear assets. By the end of the visit the top spies of the two country had agreed to cooperate on the operation detailed inside the thick volume titled: “Operation Blue Tulsi”.

Operation Blue Tulsi: Preparation

Preparation for the mega Operation Blue Tulsi began fervently in early 2001. By mid 2001 eyebrows were being raised over RAW and Mossad’s cooperation and in July 2001 Janes Information Group reported that RAW and Mossad are cooperating to infiltrate Pakistan to target important religious and military personalities, journalists, judges, lawyers and bureaucrats. In addition, bombs would be exploded in trains, railway stations, bridges, bus stations, cinemas, hotels and mosques of rival Islamic sects to incite sectarianism.

At the same time the Balouchistan Liberation Army rose out of dead like a second incarnation and Balach Marri a Moscow graduate declares himself as the leader of BLA. Within weeks in Balochistan numerous training camps sprouted with each camp reported to be training up to a 100 militants. Intelligence of RAW, Mossad and CIA agents operating in Balochistan started coming in.

In mid 2001 reports appeared that Special Operations Division of Mossad, also known as Metsada, specializing in assassinations and sabotage have been based in India since May 2001 to train RAW operatives and Mossad and Shin Bet or Shabak were operating a number of teams in Indian Held Kashmir and were also operating a delicate spy network from Indian soil. In July 2001 RAW increased its budget for Indian consulates in Afghanistan by nearly 10 times.

Within days after Sep 11, a story was leaked into press that Pakistan is dismantling and spreading its nuclear assets to safer places implying that it would be much more difficult to pinpoint them and much more easier for extremists to get hold of. These news stories were shortly followed by another piece on 28 October 2001 which stated that Pentagon was looking into plans to dispatch an elite unit into the Pakistan to disarm its nuclear arsenal. The special unit which was trained to slip into foreign countries to ferret out and disarm nuclear weapons and operated under Pentagon control with CIA assistance and would be getting special help from Israel’s Sayeret Matkal also known as Unit 262.

In December 2001 Indian PM, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, while addressing the parliament said, “the question was not whether there should be or should not be a war, the question was under what circumstances there will be war … and whether there will be a war.”

In December 2001 Benazir Bhutto while visiting India said in her interviews, “President, Musharraf, as an army general, had planned the Kargil invasion in Jammu and Kashmir while I was the PM.” Later she also said, “Pakistan army as an institution had brought back Osama bin Laden”.

This rhetoric of Benazir Bhutto was perfectly in line with the agreement signed by US and India in 2002. Late in 2002 US and India signed an agreement on cooperation in disarming Pakistan’s nuclear assets and the two player offensive team of Operation Blue Tulsi found a third partner in the form of CIA. As a result of this deal Abdullah Mehsud was freed from Guantanamo Bay and returned to Pakistan with millions in cash.

Benazir Bhutto’s statements in India were the major reason Musharraf’s declaration of Benazir Bhutto as a “security risk” during a chat with Pakistan’s leading editors and correspondents in April 2002. Pakistani security agencies already had a great deal of intelligence regarding Benazir Bhutto, Asif Zardari and Rehman Malik’s involvement with Mossad and India in 1995-96 and their collaboration against Pakistan’s nuclear assets.

In January 2002 under orders from L. K. Advani RAW and other intelligence agencies submited a detailed report on military options for solving Kashmir issue and in case of a full-fledged war, for neutralizing Pakistan’s nuclear assets. One major outcome of the report was creation of Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) in March 2002 with the authority to conduct external operations supported by a huge budget.

Also, a Lawyers’ Struggle surfaced in October 2003 under the leadership of Hamid Ali Khan (now drowned under the infamous Lawyers’ Movement). The first prominent protest of the “struggle” was held on 15 October 2003 in which the President of the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) Hamid Ali Khan said, “Musharraf’s very presence within the army and holding of other important offices and Shaikh Riaz Ahmad’s continuation as chief justice after his retirement are undoubtedly illegal and unconstitutional… Let’s think collectively, move forward collectively and act collectively to outs usurper generals and judges (who had collaborated with Musharraf including Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. However, like a B-grade movie twist, four years later Iftikhar Chaudry becomes the hero to these same lawyers who wanted to oust him. Like a script from past, this protest had followed a “Long March”. And the “struggle” then moved to other cities one by one asking Musharraf, Riaz Ahamad and among others Iftikhar Chaudhry’s removal from office. At this point along with Hamid Ali Khan, Kazim Khan was at the forefront. Lacking the charisma and cunning of their successors, assassination of a leader, and shortage of “unlimited” billions of rupees their names and their Lawyers’ Struggles has been confined to the dusty pages of history with their names ascribed against the words, “traitors”.

Also, there is no evidence to support that assassination attempts on Pervez Musharraf were somehow related to the timing of the Lawyers’ Struggle.

By mid 2004 the government had ample evidence that BLA and some Baloch leaders were conspiring against the government, aided by foreign countries.

On 13th August 2004 the Chief Minister of Baluchistan, Jam Muhammad Yousaf is quoted by The Herald (Sep 2004-Karachi): “Indian secret services (RAW) are maintaining 40 terrorist camps all over the Baluch territory”. While this was happening on ground, there was talk of “Peace Talks” everywhere in the air. And Jan Muhammad Jamali had become a laughing stock of the media for his suggestion of foreign agents operating in Balochistan, which despite the ground facts forcefully opposed such thoughts.

Operation Blue Tulsi: Start

1st January 2005 was the starting date. The local agents got the signal and the operation started with the ominous rape of a female doctor in Sui on 2nd January 2005. As expected the incident created headlines all round and culprits not being found created a much supported backlash. This was shortly followed by rocketing of gas installation at Sui on 7th January which put a hole in Pakistan’s gas supply for nearly a week.

2005 was a busy year with Baloch terrorists continuously creating havoc in Balochistan and adjacent areas and ended with assassination attempts on Musharraf in December. After President Musharraf escapes a rocket attack on his life in December 2005 and the Inspector General Frontier Corps survives an assassination attempt, Navtej Sarna, the Indian External Affairs Ministry’s spokesman said, “The Government of India has been watching with concern the spiralling violence in Balochistan and the heavy military action, including use of helicopter gun-ships and jet fighters by the Government of Pakistan to quell it… We hope the Government of Pakistan will exercise restraint and take recourse to peaceful discussions to address the grievances of the people of Balochistan”.
The Indian Government had realized that the two assassination attempts would surely result in backfire on the Indian assets in Balochistan, which it needed to safeguard for its final aim, especially Akbar Bugti. Just as suspected, the Government of Pakistan intensifies its operation against Baloch militants.

And in April 2006 Government of Balochistan is setup with its offices in Jerusalem under Azaad Khan Baloch. In a laughingly stupid mistake, Azaad Khan Baloch who is representing Balochis of Pakistan decided to spell his name according to Hindi transliteration with double “a” in Az”aa”d, rather than a single “a” as used in Pakistan, i.e. Azad. Or more probable, “Azad Khan Baloch” is not a Pakistani.

Meanwhile in Balochistan the government operation against Akbar Bugti intensified who took shelter in the rugged mountain range and coordinated the activities of his militants from there. Ultimately the military found him and during the process of capture Akbar Bugti died because of cave-roof collapse on 26 August 2006.

Starting March 2007, every incident occurring in the country was tied to the aim of ousting Musharraf, including the much profitable Lawyers’ Movement. Intelligence agencies were having a field-day bringing in pile after pile of reports proving involvement of CIA, RAW, Mossad and MI6 towards Musharraf’s ouster. True to some extent but unlike analyzed, ouster of Musharraf was just one milestone towards the main goal, which every agency completely missed. Thus, all their efforts went into controlling the situation to secure Musharraf, while in the backdrop, silently the wheels kept turning. While Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan were burning Swat was sitting quietly, unnoticed and out of radar. Within a period of few months, the numbers of “Pakistani Taliban” in Swat surged and just as well their ammunition, latest military equipment a country like Pakistan would dream of. A portion of this ended up in the ill-fated Lal Masjid. While intelligence and military were busy keeping Musharraf’s seat safe in Pakistan, a new political game started in UAE.

Rehman Malik enthusiastically started pursuing the goal of National Reconciliation Ordinance. He became instrumental in the final deal between Benazir Bhutto, US and Pervez Musharraf and NRO. Since Benazir Bhutto did not have much to lose without NRO she was never  interested in it. That was the reason two options were thrown at Musharraf, i.e. either eliminating the two term condition or NRO. Rehman Malik on the other hand was vehemently pursuing NRO, as of the three (Asif Zardari, Benazir Bhutto and Rehman Malik) the Government of Pakistan only had clear evidence against Rehman Malik and it was enough to put him in jail for life (i.e. involvement in espionage and working with Mossad and RAW). However, at that point no one knew the real motivations of Rehman Malik other than that he was working to get the path clear for Benazir’s return. Amazingly, FBI also was putting its weight behind NRO rather than eliminating the two term condition. While, if US had really wanted Benazir Bhutto as PM, logic dictates that they would want the two term condition eliminated to assure her easy succession to the premiership. It needs to be noted here that Rehman Malik had also tried to do a similar deal in 2005, which never materialized. This time it did.

Near the end of 2007, intelligence and military were convinced that a conspiracy had been hatched in the country with the sole aim of removing Musharraf from power. Assassination of Benazir Bhutto, simultaneous rioting throughout the country, terrorist activities occurring in every province had considerable similarities to the Bush Administration backed Color Revolutions. In order to keep Musharraf in power the government kept giving into one demand after the other. As a result Rehman Malik becomes head of Interior Ministry, Yusuf Raza Gilani becomes the PM and sweeping changes are made in the security and intelligence community. Still, the government saw the war finally over when in one move Gilani puts ISI under Interior Minister on 27 July 2008. Until that time ISI and top brass had thought all Rehman Malik wanted was to get-rid of extremist elements from ISI and Pakistan’s establishment.

It was the end of July 2008 when the alarm bells started ringing again in the high echelons. Intelligence machinery went into extra high gear and millions later it came back with the name: Operation Blue Tulsi.

Operation Blue Tulsi: the Revelation

The Establishment, only now realized the full extent of the operation which they had been witnessing since the beginning of 2000. More worryingly, the current operation had eerily similar modus operandi to the 1995-96 debacle – which left the country tethering onto its nuclear assets – just that this time it was vastly more sophisticated and greater in size. In matter of hours the priorities changed. Keeping Musharraf in power suddenly paled in comparison to the real threat.

In 1995-96 India came up with a plan to destroy Pakistan’s nuclear facilities before that Pakistan developed a nuclear capability. The plan was prepared by a RAW agent Alok Tiwari (who has recently been compromised). At that time Mossad was already active in Pakistan and once it heard about the project for elimination of Pakistan’s nuclear facilities jumped in by first streamlining the project further and then using its assets in Pakistan. Somewhere in early 1996 the operation was given go-ahead. At that point FIA Director General Ghulam Asghar and his ADG Rehman Malik in a deal with India and Israel were hunting down Pakistan based Kashmiri and Arab militants. These two proved to be the front line in the operation and when contacted by Indian agents fully agreed to supply all the necessary information regarding Kahuta and A. Q. Khan’s operations. Towards mid 96 demonstrations and chaos erupted throughout the country. The aim was to destabilize the country enough that when the two confirmed Pakistan did not have any nuclear capabilities India would go-ahead with all out assault. General Jehangir Karamat who was already weary of the two chaps and Asif Zardari’s complicity took immediate action and Benazir Bhutto’s government was dissolved. The duo of Asghar and Malik and Zardari had already come into military’s radar the year before when they tried to lure General Abdul Wahed Kakar.

Then five years later, Alok Tiwari submited an updated version of his older report. Israel was again consulted and this time L. K. Advani vehemently pursued it. Towards the end of 2000 a delegation of top Mossad brass visited India and the combined operation titled: Operation Blue Tulsi was finalized and put into operation which had only one aim:

Destroy Pakistan’s nuclear assets followed by its Balkanization.

Approach

Resurrect Baloch insurgency. Pakistan was fine with it, as it had 30 years of experience with it, starting with the Afghan-Soviet War.

Buy officials in military, bureaucracy, politics and law. ISI was fine with it, as it had 60 years of experience in dealing with traitors.

Plant agents in top positions in Taliban, FATA and NWFP. A shocker for everyone.

Taliban were the foster child of ISI and the agency had no contingency for enemy agents in top positions. The best option they came up with was to buy back the agents with more money and as a result they were deceived time and again and again. Top on the list, Baitullah Mehsud. The twenty million dollars he got in suitcases was one of the stupidest moves in the world espionage history and ISI top brass to this day are vengefully pursuing him.

Milestones

Friendly political government. Asif Zardari in place, Aslam Raisani in Balochistan (though first choice Akbar Bugti unfortunately dead, MQM’s omnipresence in Sindh, Fazlur Rehman and ANP in NWFP)

Friendly judiciay. Iftikhar Chaudhry, Munir A. Malik, Atizaz Ahsan

Friendly Civil Society. Ansar Burney, Asma Jehangir

Unrest in NWFP and immediate threat of Taliban taking control of Islamabad. Back in 2002 US had agreed with India that if ever Pakistan seemed to destabilize or falling into the hands of extremists, it would help India in destroying Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities. The situation they agreed upon is well defined by the Pakistani media’s current theme song of “Taliban are coming to Islamabad”

Immediate Countermeasures

By August 2008 the operation was too deep rooted and it was clear if attention was diverted towards saving Musharraf there was more than a probability of loosing nuclear capability in near future. With Musharraf gone, ISI estimated a window of opportunity of 18 to 20 months before either Taliban or Asif Zardari with his shenanigans destabilized Pakistan. In the greater interest Musharraf decided to step down peacefully.

Operation Blue Tulsi: In Operation

Musharraf stepped down and Asif Ali Zardari took over, but by then the order had been sent and the agents in Swat Valley and FATA who had been preparing for the day for the last eight years launched an all out assault on the military with a single aim of destabilizing Pakistan.

In the eventful month of December 2007 Baitullah Mehsud had already announced officially the formation of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. Although right after the victory of PPP Baitullah Mehsud has negotiated peace with the government which led to the great debacle of US$ 20 million by August 2008 he was again involved with the military in a full on battle. ISI and military by this time had realized the foremost importance of ridding the Taliban off foreign agents and assets by any means and costs.

At one end Pakistan military still is trying to safeguard its own assets while tracing out and eliminating foreign agents, while at the other end US is trying its best to safeguard its prime asset of Baitullah Meshud who had taken over after the death of Abullah Mehsud. Until  recently, there had been not a single drone attack on Baitullah Mehsud, while ISI aligned Taliban had been bombed repeatedly, as a result of which many have turned their backs against Pakistan. Only in the recent months four drone attacks on Baitullah Mehsud’s territory have been reported.

Operation Blue Tulsi and Future

Currently the entire country is gripped by the ongoing operations of military against the Taliban. Media which once championed itself as the sympathizers of the Taliban and were chanting “Taliban are coming to Islamabad” have suddenly changed their tunes, especially after being declared by the Taliban as kafirs and thus “killable”.

The economy is in doldrums and corruption is rampantly high but the top brass knows Pakistan is first and for Pakistan nuclear assets come first. Thus, until the country is cleansed of all the foreign agents in FATA and Taliban, the military and intelligence has only one goal, to stop Operation Blue Tulsi at this stage, making sure it never goes into Phase TWO – attacking and destroying Pakistan’s nuclear assets because extremist elements have destabilized Pakistan. 

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60 Drone Attacks: 14 Al-Qaeda & 687 Civilians Killed

June 14, 2009 at 10:30 am · Filed under CIA, War Against Terror ·Tagged ,

Jun. 1, 2009                       Time
By Bobby Ghosh and Mark Thompson/Washington

The wilds of Waziristan, the tribal belt along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, make an unlikely showcase for the future of warfare. This is a land stuck in the past: there are few roads, electricity is scarce, and entire communities of ethnic Pashtun tribesmen live as they have for millenniums. And yet it is over this medieval landscape that the U.S. has deployed some of the most sophisticated killing machines ever created, against an enemy that has survived or evaded all other weaponry. If al-Qaeda and the Taliban could not be eliminated by tanks, gunships and missiles, then perhaps they can be stamped out by CIA-operated unmanned drone aircraft, the Predator and the Reaper. (See a diagram of a Reaper here.)

That was the bet President Bush placed during his final months in office, when the CIA greatly increased drone sorties and strikes in Pakistan. The accelerated attacks have been stepped up under President Obama. Nowadays, the low hum of the drones has become a familiar sound in Waziristan, where tribesmen call them machay, or red bees. Their lethal sting has been felt in villages and hamlets across the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA). The main objectives of the campaign: to take out al-Qaeda’s top tier of leadership, including Osama bin Laden, and deny sanctuary in FATA for the Taliban and those fighters who routinely slip across the border to attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Combining high-tech video surveillance with the ability to deliver deadly fire, drones allow joystick-wielding operators on the far side of the world–Creech Air Force Base, near Las Vegas–to track moving targets in real time and destroy them. All this, without spilling American blood and for a small fraction of the cost of conventional battle.

But is the drone war winnable? The White House routinely dodges questions on the subject, and neither the CIA nor the State Department would talk about the program on the record. But officials familiar with the CIA’s operations say at least nine of the top 20 high-value al-Qaeda targets identified last fall have been killed by drone strikes, along with dozens of lesser figures. Many bases and safe houses have been destroyed. On the other hand, Pakistani officials say the majority of strikes have either missed their targets or, worse, killed innocent civilians. One report says that 60 strikes since early 2006 had killed 687 civilians and only 14 al-Qaeda leaders, a ratio few Pakistanis would find acceptable. The campaign, in fact, may be contributing to a swelling of anti-American sentiment in Pakistan and weakening the fragile government of President Asif Ali Zardari.

Moreover, while the drones may seem a technological marvel and strategic asset to those waging the campaign on the American side, they don’t impress the local tribesmen. On the contrary, they feed a perception that the U.S. is a cowardly enemy, too frightened to shed blood in battle. “The militants say that if the Americans want to come and fight, they should fight them face to face,” says Mahmood Shah, a retired brigadier who was once the top Pakistani official in FATA. Shah, a Pashtun himself, says the families of the drones’ victims are required under the tribal code to seek revenge, which makes them ideal recruits for militant leaders like Baitullah Mehsud, the Pashtun commander of the Pakistani Taliban. Mehsud, says Shah, “likes to boast that each drone attack brings him three or four suicide bombers.”

Cheap and Deadly
The Predator and the Reaper are both made by General Atomics, a San Diego defense contractor. The Predator is the older of the two; the first one was delivered to the Air Force in 1994. By the end of the 1990s, the CIA was using it to track bin Laden. Capable of flying for up to 40 hours without refueling, the drone was a “brilliant intelligence tool,” recalls Hank Crumpton, then the CIA’s top covert-operations man in Afghanistan. Although the CIA was keen to weaponize the drone early on, the Air Force resisted the idea until 2000. Even then, firing the weapons was another matter. Crumpton remembers watching someone he is convinced was bin Laden on a video feed from a Predator in late 2000. “The optics were not great, but it was him,” Crumpton says. But back then, “there were too many political, legal and military constraints,” and the CIA couldn’t simply pull the trigger. The equation changed after 9/11. The Predator drew blood for the first time on Nov. 5, 2002, when it destroyed an SUV in Yemen, killing six men, including a top local al-Qaeda leader. (See a diagram of a Reaper here.)

The Predator’s firepower is limited, but the Reaper can deliver laser-guided 500-lb. bombs like those commonly found on the F-16 jet, together with Hellfire missiles. And the hardware comes relatively cheap. The Reaper costs $10 million–chump change compared with manned fighter aircraft; the cutting-edge F-22 Raptor, for instance, costs nearly $350 million. The drones’ relatively low cost is due mainly to the fact that they don’t have a pilot–which may also contribute to the Pakistani leadership’s tacit acceptance of the CIA campaign. “If we were sending F-16s into FATA–American pilots in Pakistani airspace–they might have felt very differently,” says James Currie, a military historian at the U.S.’s National Defense University.

By staring at hours of video footage of houses, vehicles and people, analysts looking at screens in Nevada can detect “patterns of life analyses,” or timelines of movements and meetings in any given area. But the drones’ utility is dramatically enhanced when analysts know exactly what they’re looking for and where. For that, there’s nothing better than human intelligence. Reports from Waziristan suggest the CIA has access to a network of spies. Tribesmen have told TIME of agents who drop microchips (locally known as patrai) near targets; the drones can lock onto these to guide their missiles or bombs with pinpoint precision. But it has proved difficult to verify these claims of human assets and their homing chips.

The drones are far from infallible, however. They can survey only small patches of territory at a time, and it would take thousands of them to cover every nook and cranny of Pakistan’s long frontier. Several crashes have been reported. Thermal cameras are notoriously imperfect. Even under ideal conditions, images can be blurry. In one of several stills from drone video seen by TIME, it’s hard to tell if a group of men is kneeling in prayer or the men are militants in battle formation. “The basic problem with all aerial reconnaissance is that it’s subject to error,” says George Friedman, who heads the security firm Stratfor. “But in a place like Pakistan, errors have enormous political consequences.”

The Political Cost
That they do. Critics of the drones ask if it makes sense for the U.S. to use them when every strike inflames Pakistani public opinion against a pro-U.S. government that is at the point of collapse. “If we wind up killing a whole bunch of al-Qaeda leaders and, at the same time, Pakistan implodes, that’s not a victory for us,” says David Kilcullen, a counterterrorism expert who played a key role in developing the surge strategy in Iraq. “It’s possible the political cost of these attacks exceeds the tactical gains.” And yet Pakistani leaders like army Chief of Staff General Ashfaq Kayani seem to have concluded that using drones to kill terrorists in FATA is generally a good thing. This is a major change in direction; although former President Pervez Musharraf allowed drones to operate, he placed severe limits on where and when they could strike. After Musharraf resigned last summer, the shackles came off. The U.S. struck a tacit bargain with the new administration in Islamabad: Zardari and Kayani would quietly enable more drone operations while publicly criticizing the U.S. after each strike. The arrangement has worked well for the U.S., though the Pakistanis would like to tweak it. Visiting Washington last month, Zardari asked Obama to let Islamabad have direct control of the drones. (See a diagram of a Reaper here.)

Ordinary Pakistanis, though, remain unconvinced that the campaign serves Pakistan’s interests. The drones feature in anti-U.S. and anti-Zardari graffiti and cartoons and are the punch line of popular jokes about American impotence or cowardice: Asked why she’s ditching her U.S. boyfriend, a Pakistani woman says, “He shoots his missile from 30,000 ft.”

The accusation of cowardice is especially damaging in the tribal areas, where bravery is regarded as an essential quality in an ally. Kilcullen warns that if the U.S. hopes to eventually win over the tribesmen, as it did with Iraqi insurgents, “we can’t afford to be seen as people who fight from afar, who don’t even dare to put a pilot in our planes.” The drones seem to be uniting militant groups against the U.S. and the Zardari government. Waziristan warlord Maulvi Nazir signed a nonaggression pact with the Pakistani military in 2007 and sent his fighters to battle Mehsud. But because he continued to mount attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan, he became the target of drone strikes. Enraged, he recently buried the hatchet with Mehsud and joined forces with him and a third warlord in a united front against the U.S., Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Mehsud has stepped up his campaign of terrorism on Pakistani soil as well, saying a recent attack on a police-training center in Lahore was a response to the drone attacks.

For all the caveats, the hum of the machay will grow louder in Pakistani skies this summer. The arrival of more U.S. troops in Afghanistan will make it all the more important to deprive al-Qaeda and the Taliban of their safe haven in Pakistan. Obama is widely expected to authorize a broadening of the drone attack to include the southwestern Pakistani province of Baluchistan and its capital, Quetta, where the Taliban high command is thought to be hiding.

But in the long term, the Pakistani frontier can be safe only when the tribes are more favorably disposed toward the U.S. and the Pakistani government than toward the militants. The U.S. hopes that can be achieved by supplementing the drones with development aid, much of it earmarked for the tribal areas. But can that money start working its magic before the resentments roused by the drone campaign metastasize into an irreversible jihad? On that question of timing may hinge the success or failure of a modern war fought in an ancient environment.

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CIA: Interrogation Techniques for Al-Qaeda

June 14, 2009 at 6:15 am · Filed under CIA, War Against Terror ·Tagged , , ,

mohammed_1204The most successful interrogation of an Al-Qaeda operative by U.S. officials required no sleep deprivation, no slapping or “walling” and no waterboarding. All it took to soften up Abu Jandal, who had been closer to Osama bin Laden than any other terrorist ever captured, was a handful of sugar-free cookies.

Abu Jandal had been in a Yemeni prison for nearly a year when Ali Soufan of the FBI and Robert McFadden of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service arrived to interrogate him in the week after 9/11. Although there was already evidence that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks, American authorities needed conclusive proof, not least to satisfy skeptics like Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, whose support was essential for any action against the terrorist organization. U.S. intelligence agencies also needed a better understanding of al-Qaeda’s structure and leadership. Abu Jandal was the perfect source: the Yemeni who grew up in Saudi Arabia had been bin Laden’s chief bodyguard, trusted not only to protect him but also to put a bullet in his head rather than let him be captured.

Abu Jandal’s guards were so intimidated by him, they wore masks to hide their identities and begged visitors not to refer to them by name in his presence. He had no intention of cooperating with the Americans; at their first meetings, he refused even to look at them and ranted about the evils of the West. Far from confirming al-Qaeda’s involvement in 9/11, he insisted the attacks had been orchestrated by Israel’s Mossad. While Abu Jandal was venting his spleen, Soufan noticed that he didn’t touch any of the cookies that had been served with tea: “He was a diabetic and couldn’t eat anything with sugar in it.” At their next meeting, the Americans brought him some sugar-free cookies, a gesture that took the edge off Abu Jandal’s angry demeanor. “We had showed him respect, and we had done this nice thing for him,” Soufan recalls. “So he started talking to us instead of giving us lectures.”

It took more questioning, and some interrogators’ sleight of hand, before the Yemeni gave up a wealth of information about al-Qaeda — including the identities of seven of the 9/11 bombers — but the cookies were the turning point. “After that, he could no longer think of us as evil Americans,” Soufan says. “Now he was thinking of us as human beings.”

Soufan, now an international-security consultant, has emerged as a powerful critic of the Bush — era interrogation techniques; he has testified against them in congressional hearings and is an expert witness in cases against detainees. He has described the techniques as “borderline torture” and “un-American.” His larger argument is that methods like waterboarding are wholly unnecessary — traditional interrogation methods, a combination of guile and graft, are the best way to break down even the most stubborn subjects. He told a recent hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee that it was these methods, not the harsh techniques, that prompted al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah to give up the identities of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla. Bush Administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, had previously claimed that Abu Zubaydah supplied that information only after he was waterboarded. But Soufan says once the rough treatment began — administered by CIA-hired private contractors with no interrogation experience — Abu Zubaydah actually stopped cooperating.

The debate over the CIA’s interrogation techniques and their effectiveness has intensified since President Obama’s decision to release Bush Administration memos authorizing the use of waterboarding and other harsh methods. Defenders of the Bush program, most notably Cheney, say the use of waterboarding produced actionable intelligence that helped the U.S. disrupt terrorist plots. But the experiences of officials like Soufan suggest that the utility of torture is limited at best and counterproductive at worst. Put simply, there’s no definitive evidence that torture works.

The crucial question going forward is, What does? How does an interrogator break down a hardened terrorist without using violence? Iinterrogators who have worked for the U.S. military as well as others who have recently retired from the intelligence services agree with Soufan: the best way to get intelligence from even the most recalcitrant subject is to apply the subtle arts of interrogation rather than the blunt instruments of torture. “There is nothing intelligent about torture,” says Eric Maddox, an Army staff sergeant whose book Mission: Black List #1 chronicles his interrogations in Iraq that ultimately led to the capture of Saddam Hussein. “If you have to inflict pain, then you’ve lost control of the situation, the subject and yourself.”

The Rules of the Game
There is no definitive textbook on interrogation. The U.S. Army field manual, updated in 2006, lists 19 interrogation techniques, ranging from offering “real or emotional reward” for truthful answers to repeating questions again and again “until the source becomes so thoroughly bored with the procedure, he answers questions fully and candidly.” (Obama has ordered the CIA to follow the Army manual until a review of its interrogation policies has been completed.

Some of the most interesting techniques are classified as “emotional approaches.” Interrogators may flatter a detainee’s ego by praising some particular skill. Alternatively, the interrogators may attack the detainee’s ego by accusing him of incompetence, goading him to defend himself and possibly give up information in the process. If interrogators choose to go on the attack, however, they may not “cross the line into humiliating and degrading treatment of the detainee.”

But experienced interrogators don’t limit themselves to the 19 prescribed techniques. Matthew Alexander, a military interrogator whose efforts in Iraq led to the location and killing of al-Qaeda leader Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, says old-fashioned criminal-investigation techniques work better than the Army manual. “Often I’ll use tricks that are not part of the Army system but that every cop knows,” says Alexander. “Like when you bring in two suspects, you take them to separate rooms and offer a deal to the first one who confesses.” (Alexander, one of the authors of How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq, uses a pseudonym for security purposes.)

Others apply methods familiar to psychologists and those who deprogram cult members. James Fitzsimmons, a retired FBI interviewer who dealt extensively with al-Qaeda members, says terrorism suspects often use their membership in a group as a psychological barrier. The interrogator’s job, he says, “is to bring them out from the collective identity to the personal identity.” To draw them out, Fitzsimmons invites his subjects to talk about their personal histories, all the way back to childhood. This makes them think of themselves as individuals rather than as part of a group.

Ultimately, every interrogation is a cat-and-mouse game, and seasoned interrogators have more than one way to coax, cajole or trick their captives into yielding information. Lying and dissimulation are commonplace. When a high-ranking insurgent spoke of his spendthrift wife, Alexander said he sympathized because he too had a wife who loved to shop. The two men bonded over this common “problem”; the insurgent never knew that Alexander is single. The Army manual even includes a “false flag” technique: interrogators may pretend to be of other nationalities if they feel a captive will not cooperate with Americans.

Other countries that have experienced insurgencies and terrorism have evolved rules too. From Britain, with its Irish separatists, to Israel, with its Palestinian militants, most such countries have tended to move away from harsh techniques. But institutional relapses can occur: human-rights lawyers and Palestinians with experience in Israeli prisons say some violent interrogation techniques have returned in recent years.

The Tricks of the Trade
Each interrogator has his own idea of how to run an interrogation. Soufan likes to research his captive as thoroughly as possible before entering the interrogation room. “If you can get them to think you know almost everything to know about them — their families, their friends, their movements — then you’ve got an advantage,” he says. “Because then they’re thinking, ‘Well, this guy already knows so much, there’s no point in resisting … I might as well tell him everything.’” When Abu Zubaydah tried to conceal his identity after his capture, Soufan stunned him by using the nickname given to him by his mother. “Once I called him ‘Hani,’ he knew the game was up,” Soufan says.

To get Abu Jandal’s cooperation, Soufan and McFadden laid a trap. After palliating his rage with the sugar-free cookies, they got him to identify a number of al-Qaeda members from an album of photographs, including Mohamed Atta and six other 9/11 hijackers. Next they showed him a local newspaper headline that claimed (erroneously) that more than 200 Yemenis had been killed in the World Trade Center. Abu Jandal agreed that this was a terrible crime and said no Muslim could be behind the attacks. Then Soufan dropped the bombshell: some of the men Abu Jandal had identified in the album had been among the hijackers. Without realizing it, the Yemeni prisoner had admitted that al-Qaeda had been responsible for 9/11: For all his resistance, he had given the Americans what they wanted. “He was broken, completely shattered,” Soufan says. From that moment on, Abu Jandal was completely cooperative, giving Soufan and McFadden reams of information — names and descriptions of scores of al-Qaeda operatives, details of training and tactics.

Alexander, who conducted more than 300 interrogations and supervised more than 1,000 others in Iraq, says the key to a successful interrogation lies in understanding the subject’s motivation. In the spring of 2006, he was interrogating a Sunni imam connected with al-Qaeda in Iraq, which was then run by al-Zarqawi; the imam “blessed” suicide bombers before their final mission. His first words to Alexander were, “If I had a knife right now, I’d slit your throat.” Asked why, the imam said the U.S. invasion had empowered Shi’ite thugs who had evicted his family from their home. Humiliated, he had turned to the insurgency. Alexander’s response was to offer a personal apology: “I said, ‘Look, I’m an American, and I want to say how sorry I am that we made so many mistakes in your country.’”

The imam, Alexander says, broke down in tears. The apology undercut his motivation for hating Americans and allowed him to open up to his interrogator. Alexander then nudged the conversation in a new direction, pointing out that Iraq and the U.S. had a common enemy: Iran. The two countries needed to cooperate in order to prevent Iraq from becoming supplicant to the Shi’ite mullahs in Tehran — a fear commonly expressed by Sunnis. Eventually the imam gave up the location of a safe house for suicide bombers; a raid on the house led to the capture of an al-Qaeda operative who in turn led U.S. troops to al-Zarqawi.

The Ticking Time Bomb
Proponents of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques say the noncoercive methods are useless in emergencies, when interrogators have just minutes, not days, to extract vital, lifesaving information. The worst-case scenario is often depicted in movies and TV series like 24: a captured terrorist knows where and when a bomb will go off (in a mall, in a school, on Capitol Hill), and his interrogators must make him talk at once or else risk thousands of innocent lives. It’s not just fervid screenwriters who believe that such a scenario calls for the use of brute force. In 2002, Richard Posner, a Court of Appeals judge in Chicago and one of the most respected legal authorities in the U.S., wrote in the New Republic that “if torture is the only means of obtaining the information necessary to prevent the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Times Square, torture should be used … No one who doubts that this is the case should be in a position of responsibility.”

The CIA’s controversial methods, argue their defenders, were spawned by precisely that sense of urgency: in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, amid swirling rumors of further attacks to come — including the possibility of a “dirty” nuclear bomb — the Bush Administration had no choice but to authorize the use of whatever means necessary to extract information from suspected terrorists. “We had a lot of blind spots after the attacks on our country,” former Vice President Cheney explained in a May 21 speech in Washington. “We didn’t know about al-Qaeda’s plans, but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a few others did know. And with many thousands of innocent lives potentially in the balance, we didn’t think it made sense to let the terrorists answer questions in their own good time, if they answered them at all.”

But professional interrogators say the ticking-time-bomb scenario is no more than a thought experiment; it rarely, if ever, occurs in real life. It’s true that U.S. intelligence managed to extract information about some “aspirational” al-Qaeda plots through interrogation of prisoners captured after 9/11. But none of those plots have been revealed — at least to the public — to have been imminent attacks. And there is still no conclusive proof that any usable intelligence the U.S. did glean through harsh interrogations could not have been extracted using other methods.

In fact, a smart interrogator may be able to turn the ticking-bomb scenario on its head and use a sense of urgency against a captive. During combat raids in Iraq, Maddox grew used to interrogating insurgents on the fly, often at the point of capture. His objective: to quickly extract information on the location of other insurgents hiding out nearby. “I’d say to them, ‘As soon as your friends know you’ve been captured, they’ll assume that you’re going to give them up, and they’ll run for it. So if you want to help yourself, to get a lighter sentence, you’ve got to tell me everything right now, because in a couple of hours you’ll have nothing of value to trade.’”

That trick led to Maddox’s finest hour in Iraq. At 6 a.m. on December 13, 2003, the final day of his tour of duty, two hours before his flight out of Baghdad, he began interrogating Mohammed Ibrahim, a midranking Baath Party leader known to be close to Saddam Hussein. More than 40 of Ibrahim’s friends and family members associated with the insurgency were already in custody. For an hour and a half, Maddox tried to persuade him that giving up Saddam could lead to the release of his friends and family. Then Maddox played his final card: “I told him he had to talk quickly because Saddam might move,” he says. “I also said that once I got on the plane, I would no longer be able to help him. My colleagues would just toss him in prison. Instead of saving 40 of his friends and family, he’d become No. 41.” It worked. That evening, Ibrahim’s directions led U.S. forces to Saddam’s spider hole.

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Pakistanis Join Al-Qaeda

June 12, 2009 at 1:09 pm · Filed under CIA, War Against Terror

American officials say they are seeing the first evidence that dozens of fighters with Al Qaeda, and a small handful of the terrorist group’s leaders, are moving to Somalia and Yemen from their principal haven in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

In communications that are being watched carefully at the Pentagon, the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency, the terrorist groups in all three locations are now communicating more frequently, and apparently trying to coordinate their actions, the officials said.

Some aides to President Obama attribute the moves to pressure from intensified drone attacks against Qaeda operatives in Pakistan, after years of unsuccessful American efforts to dislodge the terrorist group from their haven there.

But there are other possible explanations. Chief among them is the growth of the jihadist campaigns in both Somalia and Yemen, which may now have some of the same appeal for militants that Iraq did after the American military invasion there in 2003.

Somalia is now a failed state that bears some resemblance to Afghanistan before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, while Yemen’s weak government is ineffectually trying to combat the militants, American officials say.

Small numbers
The shift of fighters is still small, perhaps a few dozen, and there is no evidence that the top leaders — Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri — are considering a move from their refuge in the Pakistani tribal areas, according to more than half a dozen senior administration, military and counterterrorism officials interviewed in recent days.

Most officials would not comment on the record about the details of what they are seeing, because of the sensitivity of the intelligence information they are gathering.

Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, said in remarks here on Thursday that the United States must prevent Al Qaeda from creating a new sanctuary in Yemen or Somalia.

The steady trickle of fighters from Pakistan could worsen the chaos in Somalia, where an Islamic militant group, the Shabab, has attracted hundreds of foreign jihadists in its quest to topple the weak moderate Islamist government in Mogadishu. It could also swell the ranks of a growing menace in Yemen, where militants now control large areas of the country outside the capital.

“I am very worried about growing safe havens in both Somalia and Yemen, specifically because we have seen Al Qaeda leadership, some leaders, start to flow to Yemen,” Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in remarks at the Brookings Institution here on May 18.

Complicating American strategy
For the United States, the movement creates opportunities as well as risks. With the Obama administration focusing its fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda on the havens in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a shift of fighters and some leaders to new locations could complicate American efforts to strike a lasting blow.

But in the tribal areas of Pakistan, Qaeda and Taliban forces have drawn for protection on Pashtun tribes with whom they have deep familial and tribal ties. A move away from those areas could expose Qaeda leaders to betrayal, while communications among militants in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen have created a new opportunity for American intelligence to zero in on insurgents who gave up many electronic communication devices shortly after the Sept. 11 atta A senior Obama administration official attributed some of the movement to “the enormous heat we’ve been putting on the leadership and the mid-ranks” with Predator strikes, launched from both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mr. Obama’s strategy so far has been to intensify many of the strikes begun under the Bush administration.

“There are indications that some Al Qaeda terrorists are starting to see the tribal areas of Pakistan as a tough place to be,” said an American counterterrorism official. “It is likely that a small number have left the region as a result. Among these individuals, some have probably ended up in Somalia and Yemen, among other places. The Al Qaeda terrorists who are leaving the tribal areas of Pakistan are predominantly foot soldiers.”

c Measuring the numbers of these movements is almost as difficult as assessing the motivations of those who are on their way out of the tribal areas.

But American officials say there is evidence of a shift. One senior American military official who follows Africa closely said that more than 100 foreign fighters had trained in terrorism camps in Somalia alone in the past few years. Another senior military officer said that Qaeda operatives and confederates in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia had stepped up communications with one another.

“What really has us worried is that they’re communicating with each other much more — Al Qaeda in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen,” the senior military officer said. “They’re asking, ‘What do you need? Financing? Fighters?’ ”

ks to avoid detection. Mr. Obama’s strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan placed the defeat of Al Qaeda as the No. 1 objective, largely to make sure that the group could not plot new attacks against the United States.

Thus, the movement of the fighters, and the disruption that causes, has been interpreted by some of the president’s top advisers as a sign of success.

But the emergence of new havens, from which Al Qaeda and its affiliates could plot new attacks, raises difficult questions for the United States on how to combat the growing threat, and creates the possibility that increased missile strikes are in the offing in Yemen and Somalia.

“Those are issues that I think the international community is going to have to address because Al Qaeda is not going away,” Admiral Mullen told a Senate committee on May 21.

The C.I.A. says its drone attacks in Pakistan have disrupted Al Qaeda’s operations and damaged the group’s senior ranks. American officials say that strikes have killed 11 of the top 20 Qaeda leaders in the past year.

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CIA: Osama is Alive & Living in Pakistan

June 12, 2009 at 6:52 am · Filed under CIA, War Against Terror ·Tagged ,

CIA Director Leon Panetta said on June 11 that Pakistan’s military offensive against the militants would help the United States catch Osama bin Laden who was still hiding in that country. Mr Panetta told reporters after a speech on Capitol Hill that finding Bin Laden remained one of CIA’s top priorities.

Fit Chile 2The combination of increased CIA activity and the Pakistani military offensive will give the United States a better chance of nabbing him, he added. Mr Panetta also indicated the possibility of conducting joint operations with Pakistani forces to catch Bin Laden and other senior Al Qaeda leaders.

In his speech, the CIA chief said his agency had increased the number of officers and agents in Pakistan and they were providing valuable information about the Al Qaeda network, particularly in Fata.

The agents, he said, had provided useful information about possible terrorist targets in Fata.

Asked whether he was sure that Bin Laden was in Pakistan, Mr Panetta said: ‘The last information we had, that’s still the case.’

US intelligence officials say that although the Al Qaeda reclusive leader has eluded a US manhunt since the September 11, 2001, he was not only alive but maintained some links with his top lieutenants as well.

‘Finding Bin Laden is one of our major priorities,’ Mr Panetta said. ‘One of our hopes is that the Pakistanis move in militarily, combined with our operations, we may be able to have a better chance’ to find the Al Qaeda leader, he said.

Mr Panetta said Al Qaeda ‘remains the most serious security threat’ to the United States and its leaders and continued to plot against America.

Besides Pakistan, he said, his agency was also focussing on countries where Al Qaeda might find safe haven, like Somalia and Yemen.

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Was Benazir Working for the Americans?

March 14, 2009 at 12:29 pm · Filed under CIA, Dr Qadeer Khan, PPP ·Tagged , , ,

bilawal4By Dr Sachithanandam Sathananthan,

The author  earned his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. He serves as a Visiting Research Scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University School of International Studies.

 

Sep 12, 2008
There is great euphoria among Pakistani liberals over the presumed ‘return to democracy’. They are yet to discover Late Neo-colonialism. The manoeuvres against Musharraf bear uncanny resemblances to organised ‘people’s power’ the CIA unleashed during ‘colour revolutions’ and upheavals against Hugo Chavez.

 

The widely expected victory for PPP leader Asif Ali Zardari in the presidential election brought to a high point the tortuous process of regime change in Pakistan. Anyone who has followed the ‘colour revolutions’ that installed pro-American rulers in Georgia (Rose Revolution, 2003), Ukraine (Orange Revolution, 2004) and Kyrgyzstan (Tulip Revolution, 2005) could surely not have missed the tell tale signs.

 

The earliest foreboding surfaced in the backroom manoeuvres by United States (US) and British intelligence services to engineer panic about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear assets. It was a repeat of the duplicitous hysteria they generated over non-existent weapons of mass destruction that Iraq allegedly possessed. A carefully worded article, co-authored by former State Department officials Richard L. Armitage and Kara L. Bue, signalled the shift in US policy. After formally acknowledging then President Pervez Musharraf’s many achievements, the authors continued: ‘much remains to be accomplished, particularly in terms of democratization. Pakistan must…eliminate the home-grown jihadists…And…it must prove itself a reliable partner on technology transfer and nuclear non-proliferation.’ And the denouement: ‘We believe General Musharraf…deserves our attention and support, no matter how frustrated we become at the pace of political change and the failure to eliminate Taliban fighters on the Afghan border.’

 

Translation: Musharraf has to go.

Almost simultaneously a 2006 country survey in The Economist, titled ‘Too much for one man to do’, began on a jingoistic overkill: ‘Think about Pakistan, and you might get terrified. Few countries have so much potential to cause trouble, regionally and worldwide’. The following year a Carnegie Endowment report faulted western governments that ‘contribute to regional instability by allowing Pakistan to trade democratisation for its cooperation on terrorism’. Senior US State Department officials repeatedly accused Musharraf of ‘not doing enough’ to combat Islamists within Pakistan and prevent their infiltration across the Durand Line into southern Afghanistan.

 

12novbb_sletterSensing the way wind was blowing, then Benazir Bhutto redoubled efforts to convince Washington and London that, if she were to become Prime Minister, she would gladly do their bidding. She underscored her enthusiasm to serve and ensured her party was fully responsive to America’s Late Neo-colonialism. She summoned senior party members to Dubai on 9 June 2007 for a ‘briefing’ by a team from the US Democratic Party’s National Democratic Institute (NDI), ostensibly on the subject of elections in Pakistan. The ruling Republican Party’s International Republican Institute (IRI) had conducted the previous four ‘briefings’ in June and September 2006 and March and April 2007. Benazir leaned towards the Democratic Party in the last one no doubt as a hedge against the party’s possible victory at the forthcoming US Presidential Election.

Even a cursory knowledge of US Imperialism’s standard operating procedure is sufficient to surmise at least some among the IRI and NDI officers were covert intelligence operatives; and that their ‘briefings’ went beyond ‘tutelage of natives’. Rather they have been grooming the PPP as America’s satrap.

 

Benazir’s predilection to collaborate with the West has its roots in the Bhutto family’s micro political culture. Her grandfather, Shah Nawaz Bhutto was a minor comprador official in the British colonial regime. The British rewarded his ‘loyal’ services with the title Khan Bahadur and later appointed him President of a District Board and still later elevated him to knighthood.

Her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s populist programmes did not dilute that legacy, which left a lasting impression on Benazir; she firmly believed the path to political power in Pakistan meanders through the Embassy of the United States, the current neo-colonialist.

 

She promised to offer the International Atomic Energy Agency access to Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan to ’satisfy the international community’, an euphemism for the major powers; and to allow the US-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan to operate inside north-western Pakistan. By the time Benazir visited the Senate in September 2007, she had convinced the Bush Administration of her unswerving loyalty; for ’she received a standing ovation from a select gathering of US lawmakers, diplomats, academics and media representatives. This contrasted sharply with her previous visits to the US capital when she received little attention.’ To deepen ‘Washington’s renewed interest in her, Benazir cautioned that supporting Musharraf was ‘a strategic miscalculation’ and pleaded ‘the US should support the forces of democracy’, which, of course, refers to her PPP.

 

So, President George W Bush enabled Benazir’s return from exile by arm-twisting Musharraf to promulgate the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO). The NRO of 5 October granted amnesty to politicians active in Pakistan between 1988 and 1999 and effectively wiped the slate clean of corruption charges for Benazir and her husband Asif Zardari. Three weeks later Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made it appear the Bush Administration wished to bring together ‘moderate’ forces, implying a scenario in which Musharraf and Benazir would join forces as President and Prime Minister respectively; and Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte corroborated Rice: ‘Our message’, he intoned, ‘is that we want to work with the government and people of Pakistan’.

 

However, Musharraf saw through the US Administration’s transparent ploy to lull him into believing it would not remove him and install Benazir in his place. So, he swiftly invited Nawaz Sharif, leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), back from exile in Saudi Arabia to counter Benazir. But he could not consolidate his position, especially because he mishandled the judiciary, and was compelled to resign on 18 August 2008.

 

In a nutshell, the reason for ‘Washington’s renewed interest’ in Benazir is Musharraf’s firm opposition to US Late Neo-colonialism, to its manoeuvres to occupy, pacify and ravage Pakistan. In the 19th century British colonialism waged the ‘war on piracy’ on the high seas ostensibly to bring ‘the light of Christian civilization’. But the British were the most successful pirates, as Spanish and Portuguese historians would gladly confirm. The ‘war on piracy’ was the duplicitous justification trotted out to dominate lucrative maritime trade routes that were in the hands of Chinese, Arab and Tamil maritime empires and to invade kingdoms and/or countries essential to control trade and plunder resources. During most of the 20th century heroic anti-colonial movements and anti-imperialist wars rolled back much of colonial rule, which in some instances however morphed into neo-colonialism. Indonesia after Sukarno, Iran after Mosaddeq and Chile after Allende are well known examples.

 

The ‘war on terror’ and ‘promoting democracy’ are the 21st century equivalents of the 19th century British gobbledygook. American Late Neo-colonialism purveys them as moral justification and uses as political cover for intervening and, where necessary, invading resource-rich and strategic countries to overthrow nationalist leaders, install puppet regimes and savage the countries’ wealth. And of course the US is by far the most powerful terrorist force.

It succeeded in Iraq (for now); but the CIA-organised regime change could not dislodge Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who rejected the neo-colonialist 1989 Washington Consensus and supported alternative nationalist economic models.

 

Politically challenged Pakistani liberals — a motley crowd that includes members of human rights and civil liberties organisations, journalists, analysts, lawyers and assorted professionals — are utterly incapable of comprehending the geo-strategic context in which Musharraf manoeuvred to defend Pakistan’s interest. So they slandered him an ‘American puppet’, alleging he caved in to US pressure and withdrew support to the Afghan Taliban regime in the wake of 9/11 although in fact he removed one excuse for the Bush Administration to ‘bomb Pakistan into stone age’, as a senior State Department official had threatened.

 

Nevertheless American discomfort with Musharraf’s government was palpable by late 2003, after he dodged committing Pakistani troops to prop up the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. When he offered to cooperate under the auspices of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), naïve Pakistani media and analysts lunged for his jugular, condemning him once again for succumbing to US demands. But in fact he nimbly sidestepped American demands: he calculated that diverse ideological stances of the 57 Muslim member-counties would not allow the OIC to jointly initiate such controversial action and therefore Pakistan’s participation cannot arise, which proved correct.

 

Washington of course was not amused and the Bush Administration grew increasingly hostile to Musharraf’s determination to prioritise Pakistan’s interests when steering the ship of the state through the choppy waters of the unfolding New Great Game, in which the West — led by the US — is manoeuvring to contain growing Russian and Chinese influences in Central and West Asia. His foreign policy decisions over time convinced Washington that under his leadership, Pakistan would side with enemies of US and Britain in the New Great Game. First, he refused to isolate Iran; instead he vigorously pursued energy cooperation to build the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline in the face of stiff American opposition. Second, Washington was alarmed by Musharraf’s preference for deepening Pakistan-China bilateral relations and forging nuclear cooperation; and more so when he offered Beijing naval facilities at the Gwadar port on Balochistan’s Arabian Sea coast overlooking the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic chokepoint through which passes approximately 30 per cent of world’s energy supplies.

Perhaps the last straw was his success in gaining Observer Status for Pakistan in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Russia and China are spearheading the SCO, which includes four other countries: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan; Iran and India are also Observers. The SCO is widely perceived as a rising eastern counterweight to western security and economic groupings and Islamabad drifting towards the SCO was simply unacceptable in Washington.

 

To rub salt into its wounds, Musharraf refused permission to interrogate Dr. AQ Khan and firmly rejected Washington’s demands that NATO troops be allowed into the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) to hunt down Osama bin Laden and his associates.

By early 2006 it was clear Washington was looking for nothing less than a pliable leader in Islamabad, a firm political foothold in Pakistan and a Pakistani foreign policy that complemented US strategic aims in Central Asia.

 

What perhaps angered Washington the most were actions Musharraf took to wind down the ‘war on terror’ within Pakistan.

 

Immediately after taking power, he outlawed three Islamic extremist groups and, after 9/11, intensified military operations in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) bordering Afghanistan.

 

Washington would have gone along with Musharraf had he focussed on military operations to curb Islamists. Military action alone cannot defeat guerrillas; but it can kill many of them and in turn induce new recruits — well known points reiterated by William R Polk in Violent Politics (2007) – so that the so-called ‘war on terror’ would not end any time soon.

 

That could supplement US Administrations’ assiduous manufacture of the ‘Islamic threat’ through the 1990s to launch an endless ‘war on terror’ — the New Cold War — to rescue America’s permanent war economy. For after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US economy (and by extension west European economies) faced perhaps its biggest crisis: the ‘Communist threat’ ceased to be credible; it could not be exploited to terrify the American people into acquiescing to rising military expenditure that keeps wheels of the permanent war economy rolling and to expanding the repressive security apparatuses.

 

So the Bush Administration deftly replaced the ‘Communist threat’ with the ‘Islamic threat’, no doubt following Machiavelli’s famous advice in The Prince, that a wise ruler invents enemies and then slays them in order to control his own subjects. The apparently counterproductive bombings, arrests, torture, kidnappings and disappearances (sanitised as Extraordinary Rendition) carried out by US forces while the CIA covertly funded, armed and supported Islamists are intended not to eliminate the ‘Islamic threat’ but to contain it within manageable limits and to spawn the next generation of ‘terrorists’.

 

Sometimes, plans go awry; ‘culling’ may not contain the resistance, as seen in Afghanistan from time to time. Nevertheless, the strategy is to ‘feed terrorism’ and simultaneously ‘cull terrorists’ so that the perpetual New Cold War oils America’s moribund permanent war economy.

Musharraf, however, did not play ball. He complemented military force to defeat Islamists with political initiatives.

 

He signed a peace treaty with tribal elders in North Waziristan (within FATA) to marginalise the Islamists. To combat the Islamists’ religious ideology, he promoted ‘enlightened moderation’, a veiled reference to secularism and tolerance. Musharraf’s vision of a secular Pakistan has its roots in exposure to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s legacy when he attended school in Ankara during his father’s diplomatic posting to Turkey. In fact, after taking power in Pakistan he often held up Ataturk as his role model. He planned to ‘wean away’ the people from the ‘extremists’ through education is how he described his approach to this writer. Towards this end, he introduced educational reforms and re-wrote school history text books; enacted laws protecting women’s rights and diluted Islamic laws against women; and he liberalised the media. To deny Islamists their traditional rallying cry — Kashmir — he opened path breaking negotiations with India to remove that arrow from the Islamists’ quiver.

 

When Musharraf skilfully combined military operations against Islamists with a political front promoting secularism to ideologically disarm them, the US administration saw red. By secularising Pakistani society over time Musharraf would de-fang the ‘Islamic threat’ within Pakistan and extricate the country out of the contrived orbit of ‘war on terror’.

 

That would greatly diminish Washington’s leverage to intervene in the country to distance Islamabad from Beijing and exploit energy resources abundantly found in Balochistan and, in the long run, perhaps derail US administration’s well laid plans to bring Afghanistan to heel and to dominate Central Asia and its oil-rich Caspian Sea basin.

 

But Musharraf was in no mood to back down. So the Bush Administration slipped regime change into gear. Taking advantage of his missteps, the anti-Musharraf media blitz, NGO and student mobilisations, lawyers agitations, protests by political parties and civil society organisations seemingly coming from all directions in fact displayed a fantastic degree of organisation, coordination and financing clearly beyond the ken of the fratricidal activists and often ad hoc institutions and never witnessed before in the country. Very likely they will not be seen again either; indeed later the activists were singularly incapable of organising any significant agitation when three women were buried alive for defying their parents’ choice of husbands. The manoeuvres against Musharraf bear uncanny resemblances to organised ‘people’s power’ the CIA unleashed during ‘colour revolutions’ and upheavals against Hugo Chavez.

 

The Bush Administration began reaping the rewards of unseating Musharraf within 24 hours of his resignation. Chief of Army Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani travelled to Kabul to meet NATO and Afghan commanders on 19 August. About 10 days later Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen informed a Pentagon news conference on 28 August that Kayani and his lieutenants held a ’secret meeting’ with their US counterparts on a US aircraft carrier, reminiscent of American gun boat diplomacy in Latin America and unthinkable in Pakistan under Musharraf’s watch..

 

Mullen touchingly chronicled how he ‘learned to trust’ Kayani and bent over backwards to emphasise that Kayani is no American puppet, that Kayani’s ‘principles and goals are to do what’s best for Pakistan.’ But a few sections of the US media, weaned on decades of Pentagon-speak from the debacle in Vietnam to the illegal invasion of Iraq, saw through the verbal obfuscation. And when a reporter pointedly queried Mullen whether Kayani’s ‘goal for Pakistan also aligned a hundred per cent with the US goal’, the Admiral waffled: ‘[Kayani] knows his country a whole lot better than we do. And again, I just think that’s where he is, that’s where he’ll stay.’ Translation: US administration has got Kayani on tight leash.

 

And to maintain there is no substantial change from Musharraf’s policies, Kayani’s spokesman Maj-Gen Athar Abbas and Mullen alleged the meetings had been arranged several weeks earlier, when Musharraf was President, to facetiously imply he had approved the contacts.

The import of ‘coordination’ between American, NATO, Afghan and Pakistan militaries will become clearer over the next weeks and months. For now the suspicion is unavoidable that the US Administration has at long last begun frog-marching Pakistan into the US-created Afghan quagmire to further destabilise the country and justify intervention.

 

Musharraf had resolutely opposed precisely this eventuality. He rejected US demands that the Pakistani army assist NATO forces in Afghanistan. He underlined the country will not repeat the catastrophic mistakes of the 1980s when it got embroiled in America’s war in Afghanistan against the then Soviet Union, for which the Pakistani people continues to pay a heavy price. Rather, he insisted his army will fight only Pakistan’s war within Pakistan’s borders.

 

The consequences of the PPP leadership following the US into the Afghan quagmire will soon be evident. Already, within 16 days of Musharraf’s resignation, US forces carried out the first ground assault in Angoor Adda area within Pakistan’s borders — which Musharraf had disallowed — with the connivance of the new leadership. Obviously there is more to come since the Bush Administration has eagerly caricatured the Pakistan-Afghanistan border as ‘The New Frontier’ in the New Cold War.

 

For the moment, there is great euphoria among Pakistani liberals over the presumed ‘return to democracy’. The comments by Ayesha Tanmy Haq are typical: ‘We have removed a dictator by the citizenry showing that real power lies with them.’ The hapless liberals have yet to discover Late Neo-colonialism and its devious manoeuvres for regime change; they have in fact effectively legitimised them by opposing Musharraf. They are agonisingly unaware of the labyrinthine geo-politics and economic imperatives underlying the New Cold War. They are blissfully going along with the collaborationist leaders who are bartering away the country’s future for the proverbial pieces of silver.

 

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Is Geo an Extension of CIA in Pakistan?

March 14, 2009 at 12:21 pm · Filed under CIA, ISI, Pakistan ·Tagged , , ,

rickshawBy Moin Ansari

 

Why does Geo collude with foreign media?

Why does it focus on creating chaos and general discontent?

Why does it act like an instrument of an political party?  

Why does Geo behave like the arm of a foreign force?

Why did Geo deliberately broadcast false bad news about the economy when the stock market was booming?

What hand did Geo play in scaring the foreign investors away from Pakistan?

Why did Geo repeat the false news about the growth figures which led to the crash of the stock market?

Why does Geo show wrong Pakistani maps?

Why does Geo almost never cover the insurgencies in India?

Why is Geo so infatuated with Anti-Pakistan Bollywood films?

Why is Geo bent upon creating a “Indianization” of Pakistan? 

Why does Geo pay so much attention to Bollywood?

Why does Geo show dead bodies? Is this all part of a psy-op or is it part of an agenda?

Why does Geo generally show the Indian version of events and why does its news sound like a translation of CNN news?

Why did Geo not focus on showing 250 million people sleeping on sidewalks in India?

Why is Geo not reporting Gen. Kayani’s statement that he suspects a foreign hand in the assassination to destabilize and denuclearize Pakistan? The silence is deafening!

“Why does Geo almost never cover the insurgencies in India?

Why is Geo so infatuated with Anti-Pakistan Bollywood films?

Why is Geo bent upon creating a “Indianization” of Pakistan?

Why does Geo pay so much attention to Bollywood?”

 

 

Mr Husain Haqqani of the Hudson institute is on the payroll of JINSA and AIPAC (public information posted on Rupee News) is a known neocon with his own agenda. His wife Ms. Isphani is involved with VOA and Geo pursuing the same Neocon agenda.

 

A company is known by the company it keeps. Geo certainty deals with some “colorful” characters. Its genesis, consultants, and affiliations leave much to be desired.

We have attempted to put together a thesis and a case on why Geo has exacerbated the conditions in Pakistan and why it is biased. We discuss the origins of Geo and its connections with shady operatives. The information on the CIA psy-ops discusses how the CIA operates in other countries.

 

Geo has connived with shady characters who are associated with foreign powers. Geo’s track record in showing dead bodies, and repeating nonsense on the economy, and providing place and comfort to the enemy.

 

Geo employs a lot of good reporters, but it also employs program hosts whose credentials and loyalty to Pakistan is questionable. For example, Mr Shaharyar Azhar is a known follower of Neocon philosophy and ideas always highlighting the negative news about Pakistan and not taking India or other countries to task. There are reports in the press that Geo has been instrumental in the campaign of disinformation about Pakistan. It has become a willing or unwilling instrument of those who wanted to destabilize Pakistan.

 

The Government of Pakistan and the ISI got wind of Geo plans and recommended to the President to take action against Geo. The Emergency imposed by the previous government was to thwart the campaign of disinformation that was running concurrently by Time magazine and Newsweek Magazine and the Neocon News agencies in the West.

 

Geo’s dangerous general policies are the main reason that the Pakistan was not allowing Geo to resume its transmission. Amazingly Geo is now starting a new “English News” channel to continue its activities against the country. Where is the funding for all this coming from?

Whether Geo is an unwilling victim of its sponsors and her affiliates in the USA or India, or is Geo running a planned campaign and got caught with its pants down.

 

Some facts about Geo, and some example of how Geo demorolizes the population and the general body of the Pakistani dispora.

 

GEO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CRASH OF THE STOCK MARKET: Geo repeatedly telecasted false news about the Pakistani economy, the political situation and hence the stock market crashed in Pakistan In a pre-orchestrated campaign.

 

Geo focuses on the negative news and instead of focusing on solutions it shows bodies of dead people in contradiction of PEMRA and all decency requirements.

 

Geo focuses on petrol prices but does not inform the viewers that most private cars in Pakistan now run on CNG (liqufied petroluem gas) which costs $5 for a tank full. Most people driving cars are not affected by the rise in petrol (gasoline) prices.

 

In a planned manner Geo suppresses and ignores good news like 5.1 billion dollar of oil refinery in Pakistan

Geo usually ignores good  news like $28 Billion Emar international island development

 

Geo is averse to good news about Pakistan–there is no discussion of the Bullet Trains in Pakistan.

 

Geo does not focus foreign interference in Pakistani affairs.

 

Geo did not discuss the 89 separatist movements in India in 2007 …from Seven Northeastern sister states, to the Naxalite insurrection, to Bihar to Kashmir, to Assam etc…

 

Geo Dramas: 50 percent of the dramas are Indian dramas on Geo and 25 percent are with mix cast (Indian and Pakistani) and Indian film

 

Geo focuses on showing beheading of people and other depressing news.

 

Geo did not cover for 36 hours the killing of 3000 Muslims in Gujrat?

Urdu is not used by many hosts. Morning host shows are in English and “Urdlish” (a horrible combination). The younger generation is being spoiled by using them as instruments of hedonism.

 

Some of the shows are way beyond the pale on being modern. Nudity is not modernity. Science and Technology is modernity.

 

Geo plays into the hands of the opposition parties. It does not discuss opportunities for development.

When Mr Shaharayar interviewed the President of Azad Kashmir, he interrupted him and did not allow him to speak about the problems with the article of accession of Kashmir to India (which is now lost) if it ever existed.

 

Geo continues to use Indian jargon like “partition”. Partition signifies a temporary dissection of the whole. India was never whole. Even during British times there were more than 500 states in the Subcontinent. Some of them banded together to make Pakistan and others banded together to make India.

 

Discussion of Kashmir, Manvanagar, Junagarh are non-existent on Geo. Most Geo maps show Kashmir as part of Pakistan. Azad Kashmir is never shown. Some Geo maps sill show the Nothern Areas as part of India or part of Kashmir.

Kamran Khan was getting Rs 25 lakh per month. Income vs. salary?

Dr Shahid Mahmud used to get Rs 22 laks per month. He was a member of NSF student.

Hamid Mir the Editor of “Ausaf” get Rs. 22 Lakh per month.

Nadia Khan gets Rs 6 lacs per month. Income vs. salary?

 

When Geo was not able to broadcast the 8-hour cricket match, Geo said they lost 1 billion Rupees, After the ban Goo kept on broadcasting for 36 hours without any income?Let us investigate the players involved with Geo from information that is publicly available. We see these links which will be analyzed.

 

Geo was started with the help of an ex US Naval Petty Officer by the name of Hazinski who has links with Mr. Casper Weinberger and many Indian channels.

According to (http://www.intelligentmc.com/people.html) “Most recently, he re-designed the central International Broadcast Center for the Voice of America in Washington and is consulting on new network launches for the VOA”. Mr Hazinski is the principal of the company called IntelligentMC (http://www.intelligentmc.com/Welcome.html,2870 Peachtree Road #713, Atlanta, GA 30305-2918, USA, email: info@intelligentmc.com, url: http://www.intelligentmc.com).the other principal of Intelligent MC is Mr. Todd Frantz. “Todd comes to IMC from 10 years at CNN in Atlanta”. He has links to “Cox Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research at The University of Georgia”

David Hazinski, associate professor at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, is the principle architect of GEO-TV and managed the station’s launch. Hazinski was contacted by the Jang Group, Pakistan’s largest newspaper publisher and GEO-TV’s owner, after he shepherded the successful launch of a similar station in India in January 2001. Aaj Tak, the first all-news, Hindi-language channel in India, now has a 60% share of the news audience in India.

As one of the owners of Intelligent Media Consultants, an Atlanta-based company that helps its clients design efficient and profitable network operations through the creative application of broadcast technology, Hazinski has worked all over the world launching news operations in markets starved for unbiased reporting. “This is really the cutting edge of technology and journalism,” says Hazinski, a former NBC news correspondent who says he and his partners have helped launch at least a dozen news operations in the last 10 years. “These are new markets. They haven’t been exposed to lots of TV.”

Because most of Intelligent Media’s clients are unfamiliar with broadcast news techniques, Hazinski says he is able to tailor unique approaches that maximize their limited budgets. “These people are willing to try new things because they don’t want to pay the outrageous costs associated with news production in the United States,” he says. “Right now, based on what we learned in Pakistan, we’re convinced we can launch a network today for half of what it would have cost three years ago. And no one would see any quality difference on the air – even if we aired it in the U.S.”

At GEO-TV’s main broadcast center in Karachi, Hazinski built a newsroom around 24 Mac G4s running Final Cut Pro. News footage is captured with 40 Sony PD150s and 15 PD100s. NewTek Video Toaster 2 systems are used at bureaus in Islamabad and Lahore to switch between the main broadcast center.

In addition to designing a systems approach for GEO-TV, Hazinski helped teach the station’s staff how to use the equipment and how to produce television news. Greg Pope, a freelance editor and producer formerly with CNN, spent one month in Karachi this summer training GEO-TV’s news staff, which primarily consists of newspaper journalists. “We basically had to convert people from print journalists to TV journalists,” says Pope, adding that he had never taught production techniques in a classroom setting to non-English speaking students. “These print people were basically issued cameras and editing equipment and within months were transformed from pen and paper to this new electronic media. Some of them didn’t even know how to use a keyboard when we started.”

 

Considering the steep learning curve for the Pakistani journalists, Pope says he was amazed at their perseverance and enthusiasm. “These people are tired of having Western news and government news shoved down their throats,” says Pope, who estimates that he taught 100 people to shoot and edit video. “They want their own voice. They want to represent themselves in their own way.”

 

But there is still a chance that the government will shut down GEO-TV. Pope says that while he was training the news staff, it was widely believed that there were spies for PTV within their ranks. However, in recent years the Jang Group has won many battles for freedom of the press, so there is hope that GEO-TV will succeed. “If they have minimal government interference, [GEO-TV] will change the face of Pakistan,” says Pope.

 

Geo has been blamed for participating in and highlighting events per CNN instructions.

 

Saboteurs trained in Afghanistan have been inserted into Pakistan to aggravate extremist passions here, especially after the Red Mosque operation.

 

Chinese citizens continue to be targeted by individuals pretending to be Islamists, when no known Islamic group has claimed responsibility. . A succession of “religious rebels” with suspicious foreign links have suddenly emerged in Pakistan over the past months claiming to be “Pakistani Taliban”. Some of the names include Abdul Rashid Ghazi, Baitullah Mehsud, and now the Maulana of Swat. Some of them have used, and are using, encrypted communication equipment far superior to what the Pakistani military owns.

 

karachi-partyVOA Launches Urdu TV For Pakistan, 11/13/2005

Washington, D.C. – The Voice of America (VOA) will launch Beyond the Headlines-its new television program in Urdu-on Monday, Nov. 14. The half-hour program will air on GEO TV in Pakistan at 7:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and on selected international satellites, including AsiaSat (Virtual Channel 409) and IOR (Virtual Channel 420).

 

Beyond the Headlines (Khabron se Aage), a fast-paced, contemporary production designed with young and urban Pakistanis in mind, will continue VOA’s 63-year tradition of broadcasting accurate and balanced information. Programs will examine international developments, technology, politics, social issues, education, religion, sports, and entertainment.

“We look forward to opening this important new channel of communication between the American people and Pakistan,” said Steven J. Simmons, a member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which oversees all United States international radio and television services. Simmons is chairman of the BBG’s Voice of America Committee, and has played a key role in increasing radio and TV service to Pakistan, including Beyond the Headlines.

 

“We’re particularly delighted with our partnership with GEO TV, the leading cable/satellite broadcaster in the Urdu language,” Simmons added. “This new program, together with our expanded radio service, demonstrates our growing commitment to reach the people of Pakistan with new, engaging programs on both radio and TV.”

 

“The links between Pakistan and the United States are strong and growing, and our new show is a reflection of that,” said VOA Director David S. Jackson. “Beyond the Headlines will focus not only on the big issues of the day, but also on features, business, and culture stories that illuminate the world we live in. For example, we’ll show how Pakistanis live and work and go to school in the U.S. We want to provide a unique mix of stories that viewers can’t find anywhere else.”

Farah Ispahani is the managing editor and executive producer for Beyond the Headlines. She joined VOA earlier this year, bringing more than 20 years of experience in print and television media at such news organizations as CNN, ABC, and NBC. Before she joined VOA, Ispahani, who is a fluent Urdu speaker, was instrumental in the launch of CNN’s Paula Zahn Now and Anderson Cooper 360.

 

Anchoring Beyond the Headlines will be Aneka Osman. A familiar face to Pakistanis, Osman worked as an English language news anchor on Pakistan Television. She has covered regional and national security issues, Pakistan-India relations, the conflict in the Middle East, and Pakistan’s general elections. She has also worked on Prime Television, the UK-based Pakistani channel, and on the Business Plus Channel.

Ayaz Gul is VOA Urdu’s Chief Reporter and Pakistan Coverage Coordinator for Radio Aap ki Dunyaa (Your World Radio), VOA’s Urdu radio service, and Beyond the Headlines. Gul, who is based in Pakistan, has been filing on-the-scene reports in Urdu and English for VOA since 1996, and his reports are translated into numerous languages throughout VOA. Prior to joining VOA, he worked for the Japanese network NHK and for the German news agency DPA as a reporter specializing in Pakistan’s foreign and domestic news.

 

VOA’s Urdu Service broadcasts 12 hours a day of news and information to millions of Pakistanis and other Urdu speakers on Radio Aap ki Dunyaa. The program is distributed by medium wave at 972 kHz, digital audio satellite, the Internet and a three-hour shortwave broadcast. The launch of Beyond the Headlines adds two-and-half hours of television to the Urdu Service’s weekly broadcast schedule.

 

The Voice of America, which first went on the air in 1942, is a multimedia international broadcasting service funded by the U.S. government through the Broadcasting Board of Governors. VOA broadcasts more than 1,000 hours of news, information, educational, and cultural programming every week to an estimated worldwide audience of more than 100 million people. Programs are produced in 44 languages.

For more information, call VOA’s Office of Public Affairs at or E-Mail publicaffairs@voa.gov

 

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