Nicholas Schmidle, who was recently expelled from Pakistan for writing a detailed report in the NY Times on the tribal areas and the NWFP, has today written in the Washington Post:      

“Foreign journalists are barred from almost half the country; in most cases, their visas are restricted to three cities — Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. In Baluchistan province, which covers 44 percent of Pakistan and where ethnic nationalists are fighting a low-level insurgency, the government requires prior notification and approval if you want to travel anywhere outside the capital of Quetta. Such permission is rarely given. And the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where the pro-Taliban militants are strong, are completely off-limits. Musharraf’s government says that journalists are kept out for their own security. But meanwhile, two conflicts go unreported in one of the world’s most vital — and misunderstood — countries.”

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The language loved by Bush and Musharraf has translated into a global disaster bringing death and misery to millions

• 
• • Simon Jenkins
  • The Guardian,
  • Wednesday January 30, 2008

Nothing and nobody can stop bombs going off. No citizen, no police force, no army, no government and no global military alliance can prevent a determined suicide bomber from blowing himself up. It will happen and innocent people will die as a result, horribly, as they do on the roads, from drugs and alcohol, or from natural disasters - again without responsible authority being able to stop it.

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From the Daily Times: [Note: The Daily Times has the unique (or conspicuous) distinction of publishing stories that (i) Baitullah Mesud had threatened Benazir Bhutto before she arrived in Karachi on Oct. 18, 2007 (strongly denied by Mehsud) and (ii) he was behind her assassination. Now it scores another first by reporting this ‘alleged’ interview in which he by threatening to attack the White House, provides yet another excuse to Bush administration to send troops to Pakistan.]

ISLAMABAD: Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud said in an interview with Al Jazeera that he wanted to destroy the White House, New York and London.

“Very soon, we will be witnessing jihad’s miracles,” he said in his first-ever television interview that lasted 25 minutes. His face was obscured but his long jet-black hair was visible.

“Our primary aim is to finish Britain [and] the US, and to crush the pride of the non-Muslims,” Baitullah Mehsud told Admad Zaidan, Al Jazeera’s bureau chief in Islamabad, at an undisclosed location. Mehsud was recently chosen the leader of a militant coalition named the Taliban Movement of Pakistan, a collection of 40 groups that have come together to battle the Pakistani army and, as he claimed in the interview, fight US and Britain on their home soil. He accused President Pervez Musharraf of working for the interests of “the nonbelievers”. He said his coalition would fight back and “teach him a lesson”. Mehsud said the Taliban coalition was carrying out a “defensive jihad”. “The army is bombarding our houses and fighting with us,” he said, “We have formed this coalition to guarantee the safety of civilians.” daily times monitor

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The following text was first published in Italian in: Giuletto Chiesa (Editor), Zero, Perché la versione ufficiale sull’ 11/9 è un Falso  [Zero: Why the Official Version on 9/11 is a Falsehood], Piemme, Casale Monferrato, 2007. Read more »

President Pervez Musharraf, left, with Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who succeeded Mr. Musharraf as chief of the army last year. General Kayani previously led the ISI, Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency.  

By Carlotta Gall and David Rohde 

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency has lost control of some of the networks of Pakistani militants it has nurtured since the 1980s, and is now suffering the violent blowback of that policy, two former senior intelligence officials and other officials close to the agency say. Read more »

This is completely a banana republic. The state agencies engineer, manufacture, and release stories. The clueless, helpless, incompetent or simply timid media persons mostly report without questioning, probing and investigating. Now we are being fed this lie about a 15-year old boy as a ‘key suspect.’ Why announce an arrest if there is any serious intent to arrest members of a ‘cell’? Why alert other members of the cell? The real objective is to create ‘favorable’ news flow when Musharraf is visiting Europe. Read more »

By Larisa Alexandrovna  

Scotland Yard says they’re not investigating assassin

The assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto last December may never be solved, because Pakistani officials refused to demand an autopsy and hosed away evidence at the scene of her killing.

Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, President Bush, CIA Director Michael Hayden, and news reports have all claimed that al Qaeda was responsible. However, some current and former US and British intelligence officials now say the evidence points instead to Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence Agency (ISI), the country’s security services. Read more »

The following is a must read for Musharraf and all political leaders! 

Arab News Editorial:  Cynicism With Reason 

January 12, 2008

We ought to be celebrating President George Bush’s declaration that a Palestinian state is “long overdue”. We ought to be positively over the moon about his newly discovered belief that the Palestinian people “deserve it”. We should be excited by his call for an end to the Israeli occupation, all the more because “occupation” is a word so rarely used by the Americans in relation to the Israelis. Read more »

Today, some Pakistani papers have carried the Sunday Times story by Christina Lamb. The story acknowledges that the Brtish police team’s manadate is not to investigate who killed Benazir but how she was murdered. However, it goes on to state that the ‘evidence amassed by Scotland Yard detectives points towards Al Qaeda militants being responsible for the assasination.” What a piece of nonsense is this? What evidence? The crime scene was washed. The doctors were threatened. The Islamabad police is an accomplice in the cover up. The government said it on day one, Bush endorsed it quickly. Mushraff, Bush and his British poodles seem to be the only ones saying it was Al Qaeda.

As for the Sunday Times’ Christina Lamb. Here is a point to think about.

Sometimes these MI6 planted stories are really laughable. The Sunday Telegraph of 30 July 2000 carried a story by Christina Lamb, ‘Diplomatic Correspondent’ which claimed that Saddam Hussein had sent belly dancing assassins to London to murder his opponents there. Lamb sourced this to ‘a Foreign Office official’, the traditional euphemism for MI6.

This may seem comic, frivolous even - at worst a waste of public money. But it’s more serious than that. The Sunday Times was a serious, respectable newspaper until Andrew Neil became its editor in the mid-1980s and turned it into a mouth-piece for MI5 and the MOD to run their rubbish through.

By Wayne Masden (www.opednews.com)

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ISLAMABAD - AFP

Queuing for hours to buy bread for his family, Liaqat Ali dismisses the US-led “war on terror” as an election issue come crucial February 18 polls-for him it’s all about flour.                                 

On top of suicide bombings and Islamic militancy culminating in the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto last month, Pakistan is in the grip of a wheat shortage.   Read more »

January 2, 2008

Op-Ed Contributors

By THOMAS H. KEAN and LEE H. HAMILTON

Washington

MORE than five years ago, Congress and President Bush created the 9/11 commission. The goal was to provide the American people with the fullest possible account of the “facts and circumstances relating to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001” — and to offer recommendations to prevent future attacks. Soon after its creation, the president’s chief of staff directed all executive branch agencies to cooperate with the commission. Read more »

Ahmed Quraishi who is a presenter for the government TV channel, is  believed by some to be a mouth piece of the secret forces within the establishment.  The following sentences from an article he published on December 12, 2007 need to be investigated by international agencies for his “sources”, specifically those Pakistani security analysts who told him about the “chatter” of getting Benazir Bhutto killed. Read more »

Jan 9, 2008

Many who deny government complicity in 9/11/01 maintain that some of the best evidence against official involvement in the crime of the century lies in the Bush administration’s unbroken record of sheer incompetence, an argument bolstered by the perception that key members of the administration, notably The Commander Guy, spent that entire day running around like headless chickens. On the contrary, they did no such thing. Rather, the administration was highly competent and enormously successful that day — they just had different criteria for success than would sane people. And they’ve been highly competent ever since. You just have to adjust your standards for evaluating success, then view the past six years through the PNAC/neocon lens. Read more »