Hardball: US Wants Names of Pakistani Operatives

Pakistani officials tell The New York Times that the Obama
administration has demanded the names of top-level intelligence
operatives in order to find out whether or not they aided Osama bin
Laden. It's the latest sign of growing tensions between Pakistan and
Washington. Pakistan has always rejected demands to name operatives in
its Inter-services Intelligence Directorate, which aided the fight
against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s and is believed to
have maintained close ties with bin Laden since.

India Insists OBL Killed in ISI Safe House

Indian media is reporting that the hideout in which Osama Bin Laden was killed by US Navy Seals was an ISI safe house. The ISI is the Pakistani intelligence service.

Quoting Pakistani officials, a number of media reports state that Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden could not have hidden in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad (where he was killed) without the knowledge of the Pakistani military, especially its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

The website of the leading Indian weekly magazine India Today published a report from its Pakistan correspondent titled "Osama Dead: Pak May Have Known About His Presence in Abbottabad." The report noted growing speculation that Osama bin Laden was killed at a safehouse operated by the ISI. Two more reports were published by the websites rediff.com and timesofindia.com that indicated that the ISI knew bin Laden's whereabouts.

It should be noted that the website of the Urdu-language Pakistani daily Roznama Jang reported earlier today that Pakistani army forces did not participate in the operation to kill bin Laden.[1] The report quoted a statement of the Pakistani Foreign Office as confirming that Osama bin Laden was killed in the operation but the "Pakistani security forces did not take part in the operation."

The Pakistani military's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is known to be the most powerful player in Pakistan, virtually dictating Pakistan's foreign relations with Afghanistan, India, and the United States. It has been known over the past several decades for its support to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. Last month, Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated in Islamabad that the ISI continues to support the Haqqani Network, the second largest group of militants among the Taliban in Afghanistan.

...

Following are excerpts from the India Today report:[2]

"A senior Pakistan military official has told India Today that it was impossible for the army to have not known that Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was in Abbottabad. This has further fuelled speculation that Osama was killed in an ISI safehouse. Bin Laden was killed in the operation late on Sunday night at a mansion in Abbottabad, 80 kilometers north of Islamabad.

A report titled "More Shame and Retribution Heading ISI's Way" and published on the Indian website rediff.com also noted that Osama bin Laden could not have lived in Abbottabad without the knowledge of the Pakistani military. Following are excerpts from the report:[3]

...

"Nothing in the Af-Pak region goes unnoticed by the ISI, and if bin Laden managed to play hide-and-seek with the world all this while, it was only thanks to ISI's patronage. Although the U.S. has claimed that Pakistan was not in the know of this operation, terror groups would not believe so.

"They are aware that nothing is possible unless there has been a certain degree of support from the establishment. Moreover, Osama was living in a place close to the army headquarters in Abbottabad, about 70 kilometers northeast of Pakistan's capital Islamabad. This is not a fact that would have gone unnoticed by the ISI.

...

In a report, a correspondent of The Times of India newspaper filed a report from Washington under the title "Hiding bin Laden: Finger of Suspicion at ISI." Following are excerpts from the report:[4]

...

"The finger of suspicion is now pointing squarely at the Pakistani military and intelligence for sheltering and protecting Osama bin Laden before U.S. forces hunted him down and put a bullet in his head in the wee hours of Sunday. The coordinates of the action and sequence of events indicate that the Al-Qaeda fugitive may have been killed in an ISI safehouse.

"U.S. analysts uniformly suggested that the Pakistani security establishment's claim of a role in the operation is clearly aimed at ducking charges of its military's possible role in hiding bin Laden…

"In fact, top U.S. officials have openly suggested for months that the Pakistani military establishment was hiding bin Laden. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came closest to publicly exposing Pakistan's role last May [in 2010] when she accused some government officials there of harboring Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. 'I am not saying they are at the highest level...but I believe somewhere in this government are people who know where Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda and where Mullah Omar and the leadership of the Taliban are,' Clinton said on May 10 last year, adding, 'We expect more cooperation (from Pakistan) to help us bring to justice capture or kill those who brought us 9/11.'

"Taken together with President Obama's pointed reference to President Zardari and leaving out any mention of Pakistani forces' involvement, it would seem that Washington believes that Pakistan's military intelligence establishment, including the ISI, was sheltering bin Laden. The ISI was accused as recently as last week by top U.S. military official Admiral Mike Mullen of having terrorist links, and named as a terrorist support entity by U.S. officials, according to the Guantanamo cables.

Hmmm. Yes, I believe the ISI would have sheltered Bin Laden. I doubt that the ISI was in on the operation, because the US would have feared that they would tip Bin Laden off.

For more on the Headley case (Headley was one of the planners of the Mumbai massacre; Indian media have accused the ISI of being involved in that too), go here and here and here and here and here.

Hmmm.

Labels: Abbottabad, David Headley, ISI, Mumbai terror attacks, Osama Bin Laden, Pakistan
Posted by Carl in Jerusalem

Pakistan's Deadly Games - Rushdie

Are we really supposed to believe that Pakistan didn’t know Osama bin Laden was living there for five years? Salman Rushdie on why it’s time to declare the country a terrorist state.

Osama bin Laden died on Walpurgisnacht, the night of black sabbaths and bonfires. Not an inappropriate night for the Chief Witch to fall off his broomstick and perish in a fierce firefight. One of the most common status updates on Facebook after the news broke was “Ding, Dong, the witch is dead,” and that spirit of Munchkin celebration was apparent in the faces of the crowds chanting “U-S-A!” last night outside the White House and at ground zero and elsewhere. Almost a decade after the horror of 9/11, the long manhunt had found its quarry, and Americans will be feeling less helpless this morning, and pleased at the message that his death sends: “Attack us and we will hunt you down, and you will not escape.”

HP Main - Rushdie Pakistan Anjum Naveed / AP Photo

Many of us didn’t believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border. An extremely big man, 6-foot 4-inches tall in a country where the average male height is around 5-foot 8, wandering around unnoticed for ten years while half the satellites above the earth were looking for him? It didn’t make sense. Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich man’s house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications. The U.S. administration confesses it was “shocked” by the elaborate nature of the compound.

We had heard—I certainly had, from more than one Pakistani journalist—that Mullah Omar was (is) being protected in a safe house run by the powerful and feared Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) somewhere in the vicinity of the city of Quetta in Baluchistan, and it seemed likely that bin Laden, too, would acquire a home of his own.

In the aftermath of the raid on Abbottabad, the old flim-flam (“Who, us? We knew nothing!”) just isn’t going to wash.

In the aftermath of the raid on Abbottabad, all the big questions need to be answered by Pakistan. The old flim-flam (“Who, us? We knew nothing!”) just isn’t going to wash, must not be allowed to wash by countries such as the United States that have persisted in treating Pakistan as an ally even though they have long known about the Pakistani double game—its support, for example, for the Haqqani network that has killed hundreds of Americans in Afghanistan.

This time the facts speak too loudly to be hushed up. Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man, was found living at the end of a dirt road 800 yards from the Abbottabad military academy, Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point or Sandhurst, in a military cantonment where soldiers are on every street corner, just about 80 miles from the Pakistani capital Islamabad. This extremely large house had neither a telephone nor an Internet connection. And in spite of this we are supposed to believe that Pakistan didn’t know he was there, and that the Pakistani intelligence, and/or military, and/or civilian authorities did nothing to facilitate his presence in Abbottabad, while he ran al Qaeda, with couriers coming and going, for five years?

Pakistan’s neighbor India, badly wounded by the November 26, 2008, terrorist attacks on Mumbai, is already demanding answers. As far as the anti-Indian jihadist groups are concerned—Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Muhammad—Pakistan’s support for such groups, its willingness to provide them with safe havens, its encouragement of such groups as a means of waging a proxy war in Kashmir and, of course, in Mumbai—is established beyond all argument. In recent years these groups have been reaching out to the so-called Pakistani Taliban to form new networks of violence, and it is worth noting that the first threats of retaliation for bin Laden’s death have been made by the Pakistani Taliban, not by any al Qaeda spokesman.

India, as always Pakistan’s unhealthy obsession, is the reason for the double game. Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cleansed of the Taliban would be an Indian client state, thus sandwiching Pakistan between two hostile countries. The paranoia of Pakistan about India’s supposed dark machinations should never be underestimated.

For a long time now America has been tolerating the Pakistani double game in the knowledge that it needs Pakistani support in its Afghan enterprise, and in the hope that Pakistan’s leaders will understand that they are miscalculating badly, that the jihadists want their jobs. Pakistan, with its nuclear weapons, is a far greater prize than poor Afghanistan, and the generals and spymasters who are playing al Qaeda’s game today may, if the worst were to happen, become the extremists’ victims tomorrow.

There is not very much evidence that the Pakistani power elite is likely to come to its senses any time soon. Osama bin Laden’s compound provides further proof of Pakistan’s dangerous folly.

As the world braces for the terrorists’ response to the death of their leader, it should also demand that Pakistan give satisfactory answers to the very tough questions it must now be asked. If it does not provide those answers, perhaps the time has come to declare it a terrorist state and expel it from the comity of nations.

Salman Rushdie is the author of eleven novels—Grimus, Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and, recently, the Booker of all Bookers), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, and Luka and the Fire of Life—and one collection of short stories, East, West. He has also published three works of nonfiction—The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, and Step Across This Line—and co-edited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a former president of American PEN.
The Daily Beast

Bin Laden's Death: Triumph or Tragedy

May 1, 2011 |

Photo Credit: AFP/File


On September 11, 2001, I stood on the perimeter of Lafayette Park, gazing across the lawn to the White House for a good long while, on my walk home from a temp job in the National Press Building. The subways were shut down in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The workers of Washington filled the streets, tuned out of their office buildings, many with no way home, moving dazedly along the pavement on a brilliant fall day against a sonal backdrop of screaming sirens.

As I write in the wee hours of Monday morning, the screaming outside the White House comes from a gathering of hundreds of young people waving American flags, hooting and hollering gleefully, in celebration of the death of Osama bin Laden, whose demise at the hands of U.S. troops was announced very late Sunday night by President Obama.

It's hard to overstate the symbolic victory, both for the Obama administration, and for the American people, of the news of Bin Laden's death. And for the family members and friends of those whose lives were taken by the al Qaeda attacks, a sense of justice is no doubt felt by most. All the same, one thing that is easy to overstate is whatever negative impact the Bin Laden killing will have on the daily operations of the terrorist organization he founded, which, according to national security experts, he wasn't really running himself anymore, anyway. Meanwhile, his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawarhiri, remains at large.

But it's also hard to estimate the amount of blowback (or lack thereof) the U.S. and its allies will encounter as a result of the killing. Already there are calls for photos of the body, of which Obama said the U.S. has custody, to be released, an act that would likely serve as an incitement to extremists. Those who think the killing of Bin Laden signals an end to the U.S. war in Afghanistan may want to think again, for it's quite possible that Pakistan will be further destabilized by Bin Laden's death at the hands of U.S. forces on a compound so close to the capital. At this point, the Afghan war is no longer about Afghanistan, which many believe to be a lost cause; it's about the nuclear-armed Pakistan, and maintaining a U.S. presence in a tinderbox region that could blow up a good part of the world.

It's difficult to believe that U.S. could have gone in to the compound in Abbottabad, where Bin Laden was found, without the acquiescence of Pakistan's President Zardari, already a weak figure whose reputation is unlikely to be enhanced by any role he may have had in allowing the U.S. to conduct a military operation on his nation's soil.* The U.S. was unpopular in Pakistan long before it began launching drone attacks on villages in the hinterlands of Waziristan, but repeated operations that yielded civilian deaths have soured even moderate Pakistanis on their government's rather tortured alliance with the Western superpower.

Yet while U.S. intelligence operatives likely located Bin Laden's location via government insiders, the location of Bin Laden's hideout suggests that the late al Qaeda leader had more than a little help from inside the Pakistani intelligence community, where he had always found a significant measure of support. On a reporting assignment in 1998, I arrived in Peshawar, Pakistan, where Bin Laden had set up headquarters. Already in the sights of he Clinton administration for bombings in Saudi Arabia and threats against the U.S., the al Qaeda leader had just issued a de facto fatwa against all Americans and their property. The local paper, the Frontier Post, was rife with breathless stories of CIA operatives darting through the local bazaar. The operatives, it was said, knew where Bin Laden was, but he was untouchable because of the support he had in the Pakistani intelligence community.

There was a time, of course, when Bin Laden also had the support of the American intelligence community -- back when the U.S. was arming Afghan warlords and jihadis to take on the Soviet Union after it invaded Afghanistan. Bin Laden used his fortune as the scion of a Saudi construction magnate to gather a force of foreign, mostly Arab, fighters to fight alongside the Afghans, and the CIA was only too happy to help Bin Laden's fighters get the arms they needed.

Pakistan was the conduit for the supply chain of rocket launchers and Kalashnikovs supplied by the U.S., and through its madrassahs, sustained by both the CIA and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence operation, young men were turned into fighters. However noble the cause of Afghans reclaiming their nation from the Soviet invaders, the U.S. was not in it for the nobility of the cause; America was fighting its own proxy war against the Soviets, and the devastation America's Cold War foe endured at the hands of the Afghans surely facilitated the Soviet Union's demise as a nation.

But after the Afghans all but won the Cold War for America, the U.S. turned tail and left, leaving stockpiles of arms in the hands of unscrupulous warlords. The Taliban was initially born as an antidote to rapaciousness of the warlords, only to become its own brand of oppression, aided and abetted by Osama Bin Laden, who, until yesterday, was more than a living, breathing symbol of extremism; he was a living, breathing creature of the blowback to America's first intervention in the region.

Now that he is gone, the question of blowback re-opens. While Bin Laden's death by U.S. bullets may not operationally change the function of al Qaeda, it changes dynamics around the world. Barack Obama will forever be the guy who got Bin Laden, surely a triumph for him at home. But in a part of the world where U.S. arms have killed children, and where U.S. history is too often the story of alliances with dictators, the outcome is far less certain.

*This sentence was updated. U.S. officials say that Pakistan was not notified before the raid on Bin Laden's compound.

Muslims Rally to Burn Church on Rumor Quran Burned

The only thing sicker and deadlier than this Islamic fervor is our response to such savagery -- We seek to impose the sharia and call for restrictions on the freedom of expression, instead of restricting and banning jihad and the ideology that inspires killing, gender apartheid, ethnic cleansing, etc., in the name of whomever or whatever.

Pakistan: Police break up Muslim rally threatening to burn church over rumors of Qur'an-burning Jihad Watch

And the Western response to this madness is to call for restrictions on the freedom of expression, instead of calling these people out for their violent irrationality. "Police break up Muslim rally threatening to burn church in eastern Pakistan, say officials," from The Associated Press, April 30:
LAHORE, Pakistan — Officials say police have broken up an angry mob threatening to burn a church after the alleged burning of a Qur’an in eastern Pakistan.

Saeed Wahla, administrator of Gujranwala city, said the police on Saturday charged 300 protesters that were marching toward a church, infuriated over rumours that Qurans had been burned by Christians.

Nabil Awan, another local official, said a burned copy of Qur’an was found Saturday, while two weeks earler a couple burned pages from the holy book had turned up....

Under Sharia Law Gang Rape Legitimate

This is unimaginable; and consider that the sharia is enshrined in the United Nations Cairo Declaration of [in]Human Rights.

'My life is in danger': Fears of Pakistani woman gang-raped on orders of village elders as 13 out of 14 men are cleared Daily Mail (hat tip David)

* Punishment attack ordered because her 12-year-old brother was judged to have offended a clan's honour (Photo right: Mukhtaran Mai's courage in defying centuries-old rural customs of repressing women has made her a role model for many Mukhtaran mai
women in Pakistan)

A Pakistani victim of a village council-sanctioned gang rape, who became a symbol of the country's oppressed women, says her life is in danger after the Supreme Court acquitted 13 men accused of the crime.

The ruling leaves just one of the initial 14 suspects in prison.

Mukhtaran Mai was attacked on the orders of a village council in Punjab province nine years ago as a punishment because her brother - who was 12 at the time - was judged to have offended the honour of a powerful clan by allegedly having an affair with one of its women.

Mai, aged 30, was an illiterate villager at the time but the seamstress defied taboos and shot to global fame by speaking out about her ordeal and taking her attackers to court.

Mai had accused 14 men of being involved in raping her in a stable and in 2002, a court sentenced six of them to death while acquitting the others citing a lack of evidence.

But in an appeal, the Lahore High Court not only upheld the eight acquittals but also overturned five of the six convictions. The death penalty for the sixth man, Abdul Khaliq, was commuted to life in prison.

Mai appealed to the Supreme Court in 2005 but a three-judge bench rejected her appeal on Thursday, said Gohar Ali Shah, a lawyer for Mai.

'I'm disappointed. Why was I made to wait for five years if this decision was to be given?' said a sobbing Mai in a telephone interview from her village in the eastern province of Punjab shortly after the court announced the decision.

'The accused can kill me and my family when they return home,' she added.

'I have lost faith in the courts, and now I am leaving my case to the court of God. I am sure God will punish those who molested me.'

In a further development, the Pakistan Interior Ministry today announced it would provide Mai with security.
The Lahore High Court upheld eight acquittals and overturned five of the six convictions. The death penalty for the sixth man, Abdul Khaliq (second from right) was commuted to life in prison

The Lahore High Court upheld eight acquittals and overturned five of the six convictions. The death penalty for the sixth man, Abdul Khaliq (second from right) was commuted to life in prison

Ahmad Ali Khalid - Reviving Pakistani Liberalism

In his work, Islam, Secularism and Liberal Democracy, Nader Hashemi writes about Eqbal Ahmed, the late Pakistani liberal intellectual: “The late Eqbal Ahmad once observed, a primary lesson to be learned from the European experience of political modernisation that is relevant to a Muslim context is that ‘no significant political change occurs unless the new form is congruent with the old. It is only when a transplant is congenial to a soil that it works’.”

Put simply, liberals need to speak the language of faith and take seriously concepts of national honour, virtue, dignity and anti-imperialism to appeal to their audience in order to spread their esteemed ideas. Liberalism in Pakistan has to become Pakistani and indigenous rather than an awkward western import as it is currently perceived to be.
Daily Times
Tip of the cap to parveenswami

Christian Tied to Tree and Gang Raped

A tale of two Pakistanis: The Muslim woman on the left was welcomed as an immigrant to America 10 years ago, but is complaining of emotional trauma from having been bumped from an airline flight. The Christian on the right still lives as a minority in Pakistan and is just happy to be home after having been chained to a tree, gang-raped, and ordered to embrace Islam by her kidnappers. (hat tip Religion of Peace)

Jesse Bender Says She Fled to Avoid Forced Marriage

HESPERIA, Calif. -- Investigators who spent more than a week searching for a 13-year-old girl her family feared had run away with someone she met online found her unharmed in a hotel Wednesday, where she said she had been hiding to avoid being forced into an arranged marriage in Pakistan.

Jesse Bender was taken into child protective custody as authorities decide whether to recommend filing charges against her family, San Bernardino County sheriff's spokeswoman Cindy Bachman said.

No arrests have been made. A call to the Bender family home in the desert city of Hesperia went unanswered late Wednesday.

Jesse's mother reported her missing on Feb. 22, telling authorities that her daughter was upset about having to go on a two-month vacation to her father's native Pakistan, Bachman said.

Several days later, Melissa Bender told investigators she was worried her daughter ran off with someone she had been communicating with on Facebook. Her statement launched a nationwide kidnapping investigation by the FBI, U.S. Marshals Service, and multiple law enforcement agencies fearful that the girl was with an Internet predator.

Detectives served several search warrants and the investigation reached as far as Chicago because the mother believed the person who befriended her daughter on Facebook lived there.

"All that information was misleading," Bachman said. "Whoever she was communicating with online was not a threat to her."

As detectives began to focus on the Bender family, they learned that a relative was hiding Jessie in the nearby town of Apple Valley out of fear that she would be taken to Pakistan. That relative led detectives to the hotel early Wednesday.

Jesse's three siblings were also taken into child protective custody pending the completion of the investigation, Bachman said.

Children Playing Suicide Bomber Game..

The "civilized" world thinks that by partnering with these soulless savage soldiers for Allah, they will become more human and less Islamic.

Think again. This is the next generation of misunderstanders, same as the previous 56 generations of misunderstanders of Islam. Is it just me or is the music in the background of this video like raggedy nails on a chalkboard?

These are Mullah Obama's would-be peace partners -- but no matter how much he grovels and accedes key negotiating points, they mock and taunt our national-embarassment-in-chief.

Obama say, Respect it! Daisy the Khan say, "the era of extremism is over." Geller say, "Duck!"

Playing dead: The sickening video that shows children recreating suicide bomber attacks as a playground game Daily Mail

A shocking video has emerged from Pakistan depicting children role-playing a Taliban suicide bombing.

The 84-second clip shows Pashtun children recreating a terrorist attack, with one boy dressed in black - the 'bomber' - being embraced and wished well by his friends before setting off on his deadly mission.

In the single-take video, the 'bomber' then approaches another boy, dressed in white, who appears to be mimicking a member of the security forces and tries to stop him.

Infanticide on Rise in Pakistan

Why isn't Imam Rauf, the hater, taking his 'love' tour to Muslim countries? As if we need this silver-tongued snake schooling us in tolerance, women's rights, and respect, solely for the purpose of propagandizing the most extreme, radical ideology on the planet. And the clueless schmucks at Yale, Harvard, etc., are only too happy to lick his boots.

Thousands of babies are being found murdered (no word on how many in the rural areas, as huge swathes of the largely rural nation are left out of the count). Nine out of ten dead babies found are female.

Another note on the reportage and the media collusion in advancing Islam -- do you notice that when the horror of Islamic law (sharia) is exposed, the media calls it "conservative" Muslims? Get it?

These slaves are diabolical. It's not enough that they have sold out and submitted; they insist that you submit as well. "Conservative," my eye. Devout is the correct word. Pious Muslims.

Killings of newborn babies on the rise in Pakistan Yahoo

KARACHI (AFP) – The lifeless bodies of two tiny babies are being given their final bath before burial in Karachi, after they were left to die in the southern Pakistani city's garbage dumps.

"They can only have been one or two days old," says volunteer worker Mohammad Saleem, pointing at the two small corpses being gently washed by his colleagues at a charity's morgue.

In the conservative Muslim nation, where the birth of children outside of marriage is condemned and adultery is a crime punishable by death under strict interpretations of Islamic law, infanticide is a crime on the rise.

More than 1,000 infants -- most of them girls -- were killed or abandoned to die in Pakistan last year according to conservative estimates by the Edhi Foundation, a charity working to reverse the grim trend.

The infanticide figures are collected only from Pakistan's main cities, leaving out huge swathes of the largely rural nation, and the charity says that in December alone it found 40 dead babies left in garbage dumps and sewers.

The number of dead infants found last year -- 1,210 -- was up from 890 in 2008 and 999 in 2009, says the Edhi Foundation manager in Karachi, Anwar Kazmi.

Tragic tales abound.

Kazmi recounts the discovery of the burnt body of a six-day-old infant who had been strangled. Another child was found on the steps of a mosque having been stoned to death on the orders of an extremist imam who has since disappeared, he says.

"Do not murder, lay them here," reads a sign hanging outside the charity's Karachi base where it has left cradles in the hope that parents will abandon their unwanted children there, instead of leaving them to die.

"People leave these children mostly because they think they are illegitimate, but they are as innocent and loveable as all human beings," says the charity's founder, well-known humanitarian Abdul Sattar Edhi.

Most children found are less than a week old.

Khair Mohammad, 65, works as a watchman in the charity's vast graveyard in the city outskirts. It is dotted with tiny unnamed graves.

"We acquired this land to bury children after another plot was filled with hundreds of bodies," he says.

The death toll is far worse among girls, says manager Kazmi, with nine out of ten dead babies the charity finds being female.

"The number of infanticides of girls has substantially increased," Kazmi says, a rise attributed to increased poverty across the country.

Girls are seen by many Pakistanis as a greater economic burden as most women are not permitted to work and are considered to be the financial responsibilty of their fathers, and later their husbands.

A Pakistani family can be forced to raise more than one million rupees (11,700 dollars) to marry their daughter off.

Edhi says that up to 200 babies are left in its 400 cradles nationwide each year and that it handles thousands of requests for adoption by childless couples.

Abortion is prohibited in Pakistan, except when the mother's life is at risk from her pregnancy, but advocates say that legalisation would reduce infanticide and save mothers from potentially fatal back-street terminations.

According to Pakistani law, anyone found to have abandoned an infant can be jailed for seven years, while anyone guilty of secretly burying a child can be imprisoned for two years. Murder is punishable with life imprisonment.

But crimes of infanticide are rarely prosecuted.

"The majority of police stations do not register cases of infanticide, let alone launch investigations into them," said lawyer Abdul Rasheed.

MUMTAZ QADRI

More than 500 Ulema and scholars from the group Jamat Ahle Sunnat said no one should pray or express regret for the killing of the governor. The group representing Pakistan's majority Barelvi sect, which follows a brand of Islam considered moderate, also issued a veiled threat to other opponents of the blasphemy laws.

Assassin Honored in Pakistan

Ghazi Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, centre, the accused killer of Punjab province Gov. Salman Taseer, arrives at court in Islamabad on Wednesday.

LAWYERS showered the suspected killer of a prominent Pakistani governor with rose petals when he arrived Wednesday for his first court appearance.

Ghazi Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, 26, was remanded in custody in Islamabad court a day after he allegedly sprayed automatic gunfire at Salman Taseer while he was on duty as a bodyguard for the Punjab province governor.

The lawyers who tossed handfuls of rose petals over him were not involved in the case. Several government officials and Police personnel also joined and greeted Mumtaz Qadri.

Majority of Ulema (Islamic scholars) and Islamic groups praised the assassination of the outspoken opponent of laws that order death for those who insult Islam. A rowdy crowd slapped the accused on the back and kissed his cheek as he was escorted inside.

As Qadri left the court, a crowd of about 200 sympathizers chanted "death is acceptable for Muhammad's slave." The suspect stood at the back door of an armoured police van with a flower necklace given to him by an admirer and repeatedly yelled "God is great."

Will the World End? Part 5 of 9

Every time Washington is threatened with annihilation, the authorities sponsor new peace initiatives. Who can forget the Cuban missile crisis?
For years we fiddled with various Cold War ruses to end the Red Menace. The Soviets collapsed under their own accord. The Chinese converted to capitalism eliminating them as a gross threat to our way of life. In fact, they are better at capitalist expansionism than we are.
To continue tension in Asia, we sided with Afghanistan against Russia by selling our nuclear secrets to Pakistan. They needed a decade to develop a meaningful nuclear capability. Since they consider India as the major threat, war between them could destroy the planet without American participation.
[As few as fifty detonations during the war between them could punch holes in the ionosphere. This would end planetary food production for ten years.]

Pakistani Man Seeks $millions for Drone Deaths

It seems the Taliban, the hardcore jihadis in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and plain old Pakistanis are taking a page from Hamas group CAIR. Near and far, the playbook is all the same.


"A Pakistani man seeks $500 million in compensation for a drone attack he says killed his brother and son." Video courtesy of Reuters.

The Muslim complainant says "you have not been able to kill a single person your who law refers to as terrorists"

A rose by any other name..........

Pakistan: Man Shot Dead After Jail Release

Man accused of blasphemy shot dead after being released from jail in Pakistan

More peace, tolerance and interfaith dialogue from our superiors:

Pakistan: Man accused of blasphemy shot dead after being released from jail Jihad Watch

"No Muslim tolerates a man who commits blasphemous acts." "Man accused of blasphemy killed in Pakistan," from Indian Express, November 18 (thanks to Weasel Zippers): A man accused of blasphemy was shot and killed near his home in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore shortly after being granted bail...

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Jihad Watch

Getting Away with Terrorist Atrocities

Getting Away with Muslims Mass Murdering in Mumbai? “It’s a balancing act”

“Stand her up on this side of your door,” he said. “Shoot her such that the bullet goes right through her head and out the other side . . . Do it. I’m listening. . . . Do it, in God’s name.” Mumbai Muslim mastermind to Muslim soldier executing Jews at the Chabad House

Pro-Publica has further details in the investigation of "India's 911" -- the heinous and unspeakable Islamic attacks on Mumbai two years ago. And while the writer of the piece, Sebastian Rotella, exhibits a lack of understanding of the mandated religious motivation behind Mumbai (and all Islamic terror), there is much to ingest here. The very idea that the Muslim terrorists that committed such barbarity and bloodthirsty murder might get off in the interest of good relations with Pakistan points to the grave disorder of our lack of morality. Have we now placed the same worthlessness on the sanctity of human life as our enemy has? Then they have achieved an unthinkable, catastrophic goal.

I always thought India showed suicidal restraint in not retaliating. Especially because the Pakistani government was involved. The FBI investigation has focused on a half-dozen accused masterminds, including "a major in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI)."

“Lashkar is not just a tool of the ISI, but an ally of al-Qaeda that participates in its global jihad,” said Jean-Louis Bruguiere, a French judge who investigated Mir. “Today Pakistan is the heart of the terrorist threat. And it may be too late to do anything about it.”

As in, we let the situation get out of hand, so now we can't do anything because it's out of hand.

Mumbai was international jihad. Their primary target (according to the surviving Muslim terrorist) was the Jewish House, once again the acting upon the imperative of Jewish genocide as mandated by the Koran and Westerners (infidels), targeting the best hotels to ensure that Westerners would be slaughtered. Muslim hostages were released. It's no accident that the Muslim (moderate) hostages in the attack knew to say they were Muslims to insure their safe release.

A key Muslim soldier in the attack was an American Muslim, Daood Gilani (born David Coleman Headley), who conducted "meticulous reconnaissance on Mumbai, according to investigators and court documents," and posed as a Jew in order to select iconic targets and the case the Chabad House undetected.

And not so inconsequentially, the mastermind behind the Mumbai attacks and Osama Bin Laden shared the same mentor. So the idea that al qaeda and Lashkar (or for that matter Al Quds, Hezb'Allah, Hamas, Al Mujaroon, Al-Muhajiroun, MILF, Islamic jihad, MAS, ICNA, CAIR, Fatah, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, Islamic Jihad, Armed Islamic Group, Sayyaf Group, Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Caucasus Caliphate Jihad, Chen Chen rebels, Uighurs, Turkish Hezbollah, Abu Musab, Al-Faruq Brigades,Al-Harakah al-Islamiyyah fi al-arak); Jamaat Ansar al-Sunna; the Mujahideen of the Victorious Sect (Mujahideen al ta’ifa al-Mansoura); the Mujahideen Battalions of the Salafi Group of Iraq (Kata’ib al mujahideen fi al-jama’ah al-salafiyah fi al-‘arak); the Jihad Brigades/Cell; "White Flags, Muslim Youth and Army of Mohammed", Ansar al-Islam, Fatah al-Islam, Fatah al-Intifada, et al ....) do not share the same goal and playbook (the qur'an) defies logic and flies in the face of concrete reality.

Unleashing the network. Mumbai is one in a long list of acts of war by this Islamic group against the West. The jihadists have not been captured or killed. So their work is ongoing.......

The Man Behind Mumbai

The FBI investigation into the killings of the Americans has focused on a half-dozen accused masterminds who are still at large: Mir, top Lashkar chiefs and a man thought to be a major in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI). U.S. officials say Washington has urged Islamabad to arrest the suspects.

“We put consistent pressure on the Pakistanis to deal with Lashkar and do so at the highest levels,” said the senior U.S. counterterrorism official. “There has been no lack of clarity in our message.”

But U.S. officials acknowledge that the response has been insufficient. The effort to bring to justice the masterminds — under a U.S. law that makes terrorist attacks against Americans overseas a crime — faces obstacles. A U.S. prosecution could implicate Pakistani military chiefs who, at minimum, have allowed Lashkar to operate freely. U.S. pressure on Pakistan to confront both the military and Lashkar could damage counterterrorism efforts.

“It’s a balancing act,” a high-ranking U.S. law enforcement official said. “We can only push so far. It’s very political. Sajid Mir is too powerful for them to go after. Too well-connected. We need the Pakistanis to go after the Taliban and al-Qaeda.”

Pakistani officials said they had no information on Mir. They denied allegations that the powerful ISI supports Lashkar.

“Allegations of ISI’s cadres operating in connivance with the militants . . . are based on malicious intent,” said a senior Pakistani official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. ISI “remains top-to-bottom transparent and rests under the complete control of the civilian government . . . There is no question that the government thinks that all militants are enemies of the state.”

A year ago, Pakistan charged Lashkar’s military chief and six less-influential suspects in the Mumbai attacks. But the trial soon stalled over legal complications and conflict with India, raising fears among U.S. and Indian officials that the prosecution will collapse in a court system that rarely convicts accused extremists.

The U.S. investigation turned up 320 potential targets abroad — only 20 of them in India — including U.S., British and Indian embassies, government buildings, tourist sites and global financial centers, officials say.

“There should have been a recognition that Lashkar had the desire and the potential to attack the West and that we needed to get up to speed on this group,” said Charles Faddis, a retired CIA chief of counterterrorist operations in South Asia and other hot spots. “It was a mistake to dismiss it as just a threat to India.”

Pakistan's Army of the Pure

Lashkar’s beginnings

For more than a decade, Sajid Mir has operated in a blurred underworld of spies, soldiers and terrorists.

An Interpol notice last month seeking his arrest illustrates confusion about basic facts of his life. The Indian warrant identifies him as Sajid Majid, not Mir, with a birthdate of Jan. 1, 1978, which would make him 32. But most investigators think he is older — in his mid- to late 30s. They still call him Sajid Mir, saying Majid may be his true name or one of several aliases.

Mir was born in Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city and cultural capital. His family may have owned a manufacturing business, according to court testimony.

Mir was a teenager when a professor named Hafiz Saeed created Lashkar-i-Taiba (the Army of the Pure) in the late 1980s with Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian Islamist. Azzam had another claim to fame: He was an ideological mentor of Osama bin Laden and helped him found the organization that was the forerunner of al-Qaeda.

Mosque Built Atop Christian Graveyard

SARGODHA, Pakistan, September 1 (CDN) — Muslims led by a hard-line cleric on Friday (Aug. 27) resumed building on a Christian cemetery in Mandi Bhawaldin, desecrating more graves in spite of a local government order to halt construction, according to the All Pakistan Minorities Alliance (APMA).

[..]Muslim cleric Mirza Abdul Ghani had built a mosque on the Christian graveyard off New Rasool Road in Mandi Bhawaldin after allegedly occupying the land 16 years ago, when area Christians were too intimidated to object, said Salamat Zia of APMA.

“No one could object to the construction of the mosque, as it is in the constitution of Pakistan that no religious worship place could be demolished,” said Zia. “Therefore all the Christians remained silent then.”

The cleric’s alleged desecration of more of the graveyard land around the Masjid Ahle-Sunnat-Wal-Jamaat mosque began three months ago, Zia said.

“This Christian graveyard was earmarked before the Indo-Pakistan partition on Aug. 14, 1947,” Zia added, “and their forefathers were buried there.”

Zia, a local journalist and resident of the Muhalla Ghorra area in Mandi Bhawaldin, said it initially appeared that Ghani’s workers were building an addition to the mosque, as only pillars had been erected. Now Ghani’s builders have completed a basement as well as possibly some shops, with cement plaster now being applied to the new units.

On Aug. 6 Zia led a seven-member Christian delegation intending to meet with District Coordination Officer (DCO) Muhammad Amin Chaudhary, another district officer named Syed Shahbaz Hussain Naqvi and District Police Officer Dar Ali Khatak of Mandi Bhawaldin about the encroachments on the Christian graveyard and to discuss how the graves of their loved ones were being demolished and desecrated.

As DCO Chaudhary was on leave, Acting DCO Shahid Rana took their application and forwarded it to the District Officer of Revenue and Tehsil Officer of Regulations with directives to visit the site and demolish all encroachments except the Masjid Ahle-Sunnat-Wal-Jamaat mosque, Zia said.

After inspecting the site, the administrative officers issued directives to stop the illegal encroachments, and for a few days the construction was halted, he said.

“But despite the stay orders of stopping construction, the Muslim men restarted construction over the Christian graves on Aug. 27,” Zia said.