State of Pakistan

From Newsweek 

September 4, 2010

What America Has Lost

By Fareed Zakaria

Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden’s terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself. Today, Al Qaeda’s best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet, and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives. Read more »

Why the Courts have not heard the appeal of Omar Saeed Sheikh of  Jaish-e-Mohammed even after eight years? Omar Saeed Sheikh, best known for killing Daniel Pearl, is a notorious terrorist currently in Hyderabad jail. Some mainstream media people who cry hoarse about the pervasiveness of ‘conspiracy theories’ in Pakistan ought to answer why Omar Seed Sheikh’s appeal case has not been decided since 2002?  If such well known, high profile and convicted killers [called militants by some] go unpunished, there is no other choice but to conclude that they are protected by very powerful forces in the establishment.

Let’s look for reasons in this article of September 21, 2001 Read more »

Political analysts and media, particularly those who do not see the link between 9/11, War on Terror, and US foreign policy, should take a note of the following apparently innocuous Bloomberg story about the oil activity in Iraq.  Between bigotry and paranoia of the right-wingers and the blissful ignorance of the ‘Burger Generation’ there is a real world out there - driven by self-interests. Economic interests overshadow most interests.

Points to be noted about this story:

1. Iraq’s crude oil output is projected to increase by five times to equal that of Saudi Arabia

2. The biggest oil servicing and drilling companies are rapidly expanding operations in Iraq.

3. The British Petroleum (BP) is developing the Rumaila oil field, which, according to BP, may become the second largest oil field in the world after Ghawar (located in the Eastern provinces) of Saudi Arabia. Read more »

From the Wall Street Journal

March 22, 2010

By Jess Bravin 

WASHINGTON—A suspected al Qaeda organizer once called “the highest value detainee” at Guantánamo Bay was ordered released by a federal judge in an order issued Monday.

Read more »

By Katherine Shaver
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 21, 2010

Thousands of demonstrators protested the seventh anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq on Saturday in a march through downtown Washington. Many expressed concern that health care and the dismal economy have begun to overshadow the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Read more »

General Pervez Musharraf acknowledged in his book, ‘In the Line of Fire’, that Omar Saeed Sheikh - the man who was convicted for killing Daniel Pearl, Wall Street Journal’s correspondent, in 2002 - was recruited by MI6, the British intelligence agency.

We also know that Omar Saeed Sheikh conducted terrorist strikes in India and was also very close to the sectarian terrorist outfits in Pakistan besides being very close to the former Intelligence Bureau Head, Brig. (rtd) Ijaz Shah.  Omar Saeed was also linked (in the reports of the Associated Press, CNN, Fox News, ABC News, among others) to transferring $100,000 to Mohd. Atta, who allegedly led the hijackings of 9/11. Read more »

We have been able to secure an electronic version of Prof. Michel Chossudovsky’s Book, America’s “War on Terrorism”. This book is not available in Pakistan though it can be ordered through Amazon.com. You can download this as a pdf file.

DOWNLOAD BOOK

The book starts with a reference to a report by Dan Rather of CBS News [ CBS Evening News with Dan Rather;  CBS, January 28, 2002] that on September 10, 2001 Osama bin Laden had been admitted to a Pakistani military hospital in Rawalpindi. What follows is a massive documentary evidence work according to Amazon.com 

Michel Chossudovsky is professor of economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Canada and author of several books. He is Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), a think-tank based in Montreal.  He has taught as visiting professor at academic institutions in Western Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia, has acted as economic adviser to governments of developing countries and has worked as a consultant for international organizations including the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the African Development Bank, the United Nations African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (AIEDEP), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the International Labour Organization (ILO), the World Health Organisation (WHO), and the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). 

The New York Times

March 3, 2010 

By CARLOTTA GALL 

Mary Fitzgerald/The Irish Times

Once a promising protégé for the United States, Brig. Sultan Amir, who is known as Col. Imam, has taught insurgent tactics.

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan — With his white turban, untrimmed beard and worn army jacket, the man known uniformly here by his nom de guerre, Col. Imam, is a particular Pakistani enigma.

A United States-trained former colonel in Pakistan’s spy agency, he spent 20 years running insurgents in and out of Afghanistan, first to fight the Soviet Army, and later to support the Taliban, as Pakistani allies, in their push to conquer Afghanistan in the 1990s. Read more »

Inside the Beltway  

Originally published 05:00 a.m., February 22, 2010, updated 01:24 p.m., February 22, 2010

Jennifer Harper INSIDE THE BELTWAY

EXPLOSIVE NEWS

A lingering technical question about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks still haunts some, and it has political implications: How did 200,000 tons of steel disintegrate and drop in 11 seconds? A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center.

“In order to bring down this kind of mass in such a short period of time, the material must have been artificially, exploded outwards,” says Richard Gage, a San Francisco architect and foun Read more »

Published in DAWN

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

By Yousuf Nazar

Even after seven years, the US has failed to try the alleged mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. — File Photo

A columnist recently lamented the “emotionally charged thinking of Pakistanis” that leads them to believe conspiracy theories that present the events of Sept 11, 2001 as a plot hatched by mysterious elements in the American establishment. Read more »

Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad has once again stated that the September 11 attacks were a staged event, rejecting claims that his comments are a publicity stunt.

“What do I gain from a publicity stunt? I am merely going by a public statement. I am not going to be a Prime Minister anymore unless you (pointing to a journalist) want me to …” the former Malaysian prime minister told reporters on Friday. Read more »

The Wall Street Journal

November 20, 2009

If it accomplished nothing else, the Obama administration’s announcement last Friday to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in lower Manhattan blew the Nidal Hasan murders out of the news. The KSM fiasco deserves all the attention it gets. What Hasan represents, however, is a more immediate concern.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is an old-school jihadi. They sit in far-off redoubts, assembling terror teams of foreign nationals who now must figure out how to get themselves and their plot inside the U.S. Not impossible, but harder than before 9/11.

Hasan is new school. He is what’s known as a homegrown terrorist. Virtually all the Islamic terrorist plots thwarted in the U.S. in recent years were homegrown, not designed from afar by a KSM. Read more »

By: Peter Chamberlin

We are fighting a war that is like no other.  The illusion is made as real; the real is made as dust.  Nothing is as it seems in this war, even though this is the era of instant news.  This alteration of our very understanding of reality has been necessary for us to pursue a war policy of pure evil, even though we have paraded ourselves before the world as warriors in defense of truth and light.  The human race is begging for an end to the path of destruction that trusted American leaders have steered the world onto., longing to turn onto a permanent path of Light.  It is high time the United States either showed the world the way into the Light, or got out of the way of those who can. Read more »

By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press Writer

Sat Jan 31, 10:21 am ET

WASHINGTON – The “War on Terror” is losing the war of words.

The catchphrase burned into the American lexicon hours after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is fading away, slowly if not deliberately being replaced by a new administration bent on repairing the U.S. image among Muslim nations. Read more »

By Yousuf Nazar   

Who stands to gain the most from the Mumbai attacks?   

The Pakistani media was quick to dismiss Indian allegations about the complicity of elements from Pakistan in Mumbai attacks. Some channels even carried stories that there was no Aslam Amir in Faridkot, only to contradict themselves later. We need to reflect upon the whole paradigm of ‘terrorism’.  For this purpose, it is essential to to take a holistic view including examination of some important and critical events since 9/11, US’s strategic interests in the Middle East and Central Asia, the relationship between the US and Pakistan authorities, and the murky nature of CIA’s involvement with the so-called Islamic militants.  Read more »