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  • What Pakistan Knew About Bin Laden

    Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, I went to live and report for The New York Times in Afghanistan. I would spend most of the next 12 years there, following the overthrow of the Taliban, feeling the excitement of the freedom and prosperity that was promised in its wake and then watching the gradual dissolution of that hope. A new Constitution and two rounds of elections did not improve the lives of ordinary Afghans; the Taliban regrouped and found increasing numbers of supporters for their guerrilla actions; by 2006, as they mounted an ambitious offensive to retake southern Afghanistan and unleashed more than a hundred suicide bombers, it was clear that a deadly and determined opponent was growing in strength, not losing it.

    As I toured the bomb sites and battlegrounds of the Taliban resurgence, Afghans kept telling me the same thing: The organizers of the insurgency were in Pakistan, specifically in the western district of Quetta. Police investigators were finding that many of the bombers, too, were coming from Pakistan.

    In December 2006, I flew to Quetta, where I met with several Pakistani reporters and a photographer. Together we found families who were grappling with the realization that their sons had blown themselves up in Afghanistan. Some were not even sure whether to believe the news, relayed in anonymous phone calls or secondhand through someone in the community. All of them were scared to say how their sons died and who recruited them, fearing trouble from members of the ISI, Pakistan’s main intelligence service.

    After our first day of reporting in Quetta, we noticed that an intelligence agent on a motorbike was following us, and everyone we interviewed was visited afterward by ISI agents. We visited a neighborhood called Pashtunabad, “town of the Pashtuns,” a close-knit community of narrow alleys inhabited largely by Afghan refugees who over the years spread up the hillside, building one-story houses from mud and straw. The people are working class: laborers, bus drivers and shopkeepers. The neighborhood is also home to several members of the Taliban, who live in larger houses behind high walls, often next to the mosques and madrasas they run.

    The small, untidy entrance on the street to one of those madrasas, the Jamiya Islamiya, conceals the size of the establishment. Inside, a brick-and-concrete building three stories high surrounds a courtyard, and classrooms can accommodate 280 students. At least three of the suicide bombers we were tracing had been students here, and there were reports of more. Senior figures from Pakistani religious parties and provincial-government officials were frequent visitors, and Taliban members would often visit under the cover of darkness in fleets of S.U.V.s.

    We requested an interview and were told that a female journalist would not be permitted inside, so I passed some questions to the Pakistani reporter with me, and he and the photographer went in. The deputy head of the madrasa denied that there was any militant training there or any forced recruitment for jihad. “We are educating the students in the Quran, and in the Quran it is written that it is every Muslim’s obligation to wage jihad,” he said. “All we are telling them is what is in the Quran. Then it is up to them to go to jihad.” He ended the conversation. Classes were breaking up, and I could hear a clamor rising as students burst out of their classrooms. Boys poured out of the gates onto the street. They looked spindly, in flapping clothes and prayer caps, as they darted off on their bikes and on foot, chasing one another down the street.

    The reporter and the photographer joined me outside. They told me that words of praise were painted across the wall of the inner courtyard for the madrasa’s political patron, a Pakistani religious-party leader, and the Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar. This madrasa, like so many in Pakistan, was a source of the Taliban resurgence that President Hamid Karzai and other Afghan leaders had long been warning about. In this nondescript madrasa in a poor neighborhood of Quetta, one of hundreds throughout the border region, the Taliban and Pakistan’s religious parties were working together to raise an army of militants.

    “The madrasas are a cover, a camouflage,” a Pashtun legislator from the area told me. Behind the curtain, hidden in the shadows, lurked the ISI.

    The Pakistani government, under President Pervez Musharraf and his intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, was maintaining and protecting the Taliban, both to control the many groups of militants now lodged in the country and to use them as a proxy force to gain leverage over and eventually dominate Afghanistan. The dynamic has played out in ways that can be hard to grasp from the outside, but the strategy that has evolved in Pakistan has been to make a show of cooperation with the American fight against terrorism while covertly abetting and even coordinating Taliban, Kashmiri and foreign Qaeda-linked militants. The linchpin in this two-pronged and at times apparently oppositional strategy is the ISI. It’s through that agency that Pakistan’s true relationship to militant extremism can be discerned — a fact that the United States was slow to appreciate, and later refused to face directly, for fear of setting off a greater confrontation with a powerful Muslim nation.

    On our fifth and last day in Quetta, four plainclothes agents detained my photographer colleague at his hotel. They seized his computer and photo equipment and brought him to the parking lot of the hotel where I was staying. There they made him call and ask me to come down to talk to them. “I’m in trouble here,” he told me. It was after dark. I did not want to go down to the parking lot, but I told my colleague I would get help. I alerted my editor in New York and then tried to call Pakistani officials.

    Before I could reach them, the agents broke through the door of my hotel room. The lintel splintered, and they burst in in a rush, snatching my laptop from my hands. There was an English-speaking officer wearing a smart new khaki-colored fleece. The other three, one of whom had the photographer in tow, were the muscle.

    They went through my clothes and seized my notebooks and a cellphone. When one of the men grabbed my handbag, I protested. He punched me twice, hard, in the face and temple, and I fell back onto the coffee table, grabbing at the officer’s fleece to break my fall and smashing some cups when I landed. For a moment it was funny. I remember thinking it was just like a hotel-room bust-up in the movies.

    Then I flew into a rage, berating them for barging into a woman’s bedroom and using physical violence. The officer told me that I was not permitted to visit the neighborhood of Pashtunabad and that it was forbidden to interview members of the Taliban. As they were leaving, I said the photographer had to stay with me. “He is Pakistani,” the officer said. “We can do with him whatever we want.” I knew they were capable of torture and murder, especially in Quetta, where the security services were a law unto themselves. The story they didn’t want out in the open was the government’s covert support for the militant groups that were propagating terrorism in Afghanistan and beyond.

    Six months later, Pakistan blew up. In the spring of 2007 in Islamabad, female students from a madrasa attached to the Red Mosque were staging a sit-in to protest the demolition of several illegal mosques in the city. The Red Mosque stood at the center of Pakistan’s support for jihad in Afghanistan and throughout the Muslim world. It was founded by a famed jihadi preacher, Maulana Muhammad Abdullah, who was assassinated in 1998, not long after he visited Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda blamed the killing on the Pakistani government at the time.

    Abdullah’s sons inherited the mosque and continued its extremist teachings. The eldest, Maulana Abdul Aziz, delivered fiery Friday sermons excoriating Musharraf for his public stance on the fight against terrorism and his dealings with the American government. Despite an earlier reputation as a nonreligious bureaucrat, the younger brother, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, spoke of undergoing a conversion after his father’s death and a meeting with Bin Laden, and by 2007 he would not leave the Red Mosque compound for fear of arrest. He warned that ranks of suicide bombers would retaliate if the government moved against the student protesters.

    With such leaders behind them, the students began staging vigilante actions in the streets. They were radical and obsessive, vowing to die rather than give up their protest. The government’s inaction only encouraged them. Several months after the protest began, a group of students made a midnight raid on a massage parlor and abducted several Chinese women.

    Remonstrations from China, Pakistan’s most important regional ally, pushed Musharraf to take action. Pakistani Army rangers occupied a school across the street, and police officers and soldiers moved in to surround the mosque on July 3. Armed fighters appeared from the mosque, carrying rockets and assault rifles and taking up sandbagged positions on the mosque walls. Loudspeakers told the students that this was the time for bravery. A female student took over the microphone. “Allah, where is your help?” she asked in a quavering voice. “Destroy the enemies. Tear their hearts apart. Throw fireballs on them.”

    Islamabad is a green, tranquil home for civil servants and diplomats, but for several days it resounded with gunfire and explosions. Crowds of worried parents arrived from all over the country to try to retrieve their children. The Red Mosque leaders tried to make the students stay. “They said if the women and others die, the people will take their side,” one father told me, and I realized then how premeditated this all was, how the girls were pawns in their plan to spark a revolution.

    A week after the siege began, there was a ferocious battle. Elite Pakistani commandos rappelled from helicopters into the mosque and were raked with machine-gun fire. Perched in the mosque’s minarets and throughout its 75 rooms, the militants fought for 10 hours. They hurled grenades from bunkers and basements, and suicide bombers threw themselves at their attackers. The commandos found female students hiding in a bricked-up space beneath the stairs and led 50 women and girls to safety. Ghazi retreated to a basement in the compound. He died there as the last surviving fighters battled around him.

    More than 100 people were killed in the siege, including 10 commandos. The ISI — despite having a long relationship with the mosque and its leaders, as well as two informers inside providing intelligence — played a strangely ineffective role. In a cabinet meeting after the siege, ministers questioned a senior ISI official about the intelligence service’s failure to prevent the militant action. “Who I meet in the evening and what I discuss is on your desk the next morning,” one minister told the official. “How come you did not know what was happening a hundred meters from the ISI headquarters?” The official sat in silence as ministers thumped their desks in a gesture of agreement.

    “One hundred percent they knew what was happening,” a former cabinet minister who attended the meeting told me. The ISI allowed the militants to do what they wanted out of sympathy, he said. “The state is not as incompetent as people believe.”

    The Pakistani military faced an immediate and vicious backlash. In the months that followed, there were strikes against convoys of soldiers in the northwest and a wave of suicide bombings against government, military and civilian targets throughout the country, including the army’s headquarters and the main ISI compound in Rawalpindi. After years of nurturing jihadists to fight its proxy wars, Pakistan was now experiencing the repercussions. “We could not control them,” a former senior intelligence official told a colleague and me six months after the Red Mosque siege.

    Yet even as the militants were turning against their masters, Pakistan’s generals still sought to use them for their own purpose, most notoriously targeting Pakistan’s first female prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, who was preparing to fly home from nearly a decade in exile in the fall of 2007. Bhutto had forged a deal with Musharraf that would allow him to resign as army chief but run for another term as president, while clearing the way for her to serve as prime minister. Elections were scheduled for early 2008.

    Bhutto had spoken out more than any other Pakistani politician about the dangers of militant extremism. She blamed foreign militants for annexing part of Pakistan’s territory and called for military operations into Waziristan. She declared suicide bombing un-Islamic and seemed to be challenging those who might target her. “I do not believe that any true Muslim will make an attack on me because Islam forbids attacks on women, and Muslims know that if they attack a woman, they will burn in hell,” she said on the eve of her return.

    She also promised greater cooperation with Afghanistan and the United States in combating terrorism and even suggested in an interview that she would give Western officials access to the man behind Pakistan’s program of nuclear proliferation, A. Q. Khan.

    President Karzai of Afghanistan warned Bhutto that his intelligence service had learned of threats against her life. Informers had told the Afghans of a meeting of army commanders — Musharraf and his 10 most-powerful generals — in which they discussed a militant plot to have Bhutto killed.

    On Oct. 18, 2007, Bhutto flew into Karachi. I was one of a crowd of journalists traveling with her. She wore religious amulets and offered prayers as she stepped onto Pakistani soil. Hours later, as she rode in an open-top bus through streets of chanting supporters, two huge bombs exploded, tearing police vans, bodyguards and party followers into shreds. Bhutto survived the blast, but some 150 people died, and 400 were injured.

    Bhutto claimed that Musharraf had threatened her directly, and Karzai again urged her to take more precautions, asking his intelligence service to arrange an armored vehicle for her equipped with jammers to block the signals of cellphones, which are often used to detonate bombs. In the meantime, Bhutto pressed on with her campaign, insisting on greeting crowds of supporters from the open top of her vehicle.

    In late December, a group of militants, including two teenage boys trained and primed to commit suicide bombings, arrived at the Haqqania madrasa in the northwestern town of Akora Khattak. The madrasa is a notorious establishment, housing 3,000 students in large, whitewashed residence blocks. Ninety-five percent of the Taliban fighting in Afghanistan have passed through its classrooms, a spokesman for the madrasa proudly told me. Its most famous graduate is Jalaluddin Haqqani, a veteran Afghan mujahedeen commander whose network has become the main instrument for ISI-directed attacks in Kabul and eastern Afghanistan.

    The two young visitors who stopped for a night at the madrasa were escorted the next day to Rawalpindi, where Bhutto would be speaking at a rally on Dec. 27. As her motorcade left the rally, it slowed so she could greet supporters in the street. One of the two teenagers fired a pistol at her and then detonated his vest of explosives. Bhutto was standing in the roof opening of an armored S.U.V. She ducked into the vehicle at the sound of the gunfire, but the explosion threw the S.U.V. forward, slamming the edge of the roof hatch into the back of her head with lethal force. Bhutto slumped down into the vehicle, mortally wounded, and fell into the lap of her confidante and constant chaperone, Naheed Khan.

    As Bhutto had long warned, a conglomeration of opponents wanted her dead and were all linked in some way. They were the same forces behind the insurgency in Afghanistan: Taliban and Pakistani militant groups and Al Qaeda, as well as the Pakistani military establishment, which included the top generals, Musharraf and Kayani. A United Nations Commission of Inquiry into the circumstances of Bhutto’s death found that each group had a motive and merited investigation.

    Pakistani prosecutors later indicted Musharraf on charges of being part of a wider conspiracy to remove Bhutto from the political scene. There was “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” that he did not provide her with adequate security because he wanted to ensure her death in an inevitable assassination attempt, the chief state prosecutor in her murder trial, Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali, told me. (Musharraf denied the accusations.) A hard-working, hard-charging man, Ali succeeded in having Musharraf arrested and was pushing to speed up the trial when he was shot to death on his way to work in May 2013.

    Ali had no doubts that the mastermind of the plot to kill Bhutto was Al Qaeda. “It was because she was pro-American, because she was a strong leader and a nationalist,” he told me. A Pakistani security official who interviewed some of the suspects in the Bhutto case and other militants detained in Pakistan’s prisons came to the same conclusion. The decision to assassinate Bhutto was made at a meeting of the top council of Al Qaeda, the official said.

    The rest of the article @ The New York Times
    Politicians are elected to serve...far too many don't see it that way - Albany Rifles! || Loyalty to country always. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it - Mark Twain! || I am a far left millennial!

  • #2
    Apparently things were 'a little too quiet' in the Western media in terms of the usual Pakistan bashing, so in steps Carlotta Gall, with little more than a rehash of the oft-regurgitated conspiracy theories and speculation about the 'Pakistani State's complicity and collusion in hiding OBL'. It reflects rather poorly on Carlotta Gall that someone of her reputation and experience would stoop to leveraging said attributes to push the equivalent of 'someone told me that someone told them that they heard that in someone's OPINION the ISI/PA was complicit in hiding OBL', in order to sell more copies of her book.

    Peter Bergen does a decent job of demolishing Gall's speculative and unsubstantiated claims in this CNN piece:

    Pakistan sheltered Bin Laden? Prove it

    The New York Times magazine is running a bombshell story alleging that the Pakistanis knew all along that Osama bin Laden was living for years in his longtime hiding place in the northern Pakistan city of Abbottabad, where he was killed by a U.S. Navy SEAL team on May 2, 2011.

    The Times story, titled "What Pakistan Knew About bin Laden," will carry weight: It was written by Carlotta Gall, the dean of the correspondents who have covered Afghanistan and Pakistan since that fateful day in 2001, when al Qaeda's four hijacked planes crashed through America's comfortable sense that vast oceans insulated it from its enemies.

    At great personal risk Gall has authoritatively covered the war in Afghanistan for the past 12 years. Indeed, I first met her during the civil war in Afghanistan during the mid-1990s when she was an aid worker, and I have met her many times since. I encouraged her (along with, I'm sure, many others) to write a book about her reporting in Afghanistan, as no Western reporter has more to say about what has transpired there since the fall of the Taliban.

    The bin Laden story in the New York Times magazine is an extract from Gall's forthcoming book, "The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014."
    Gall makes two astonishing claims in her Times magazine piece.

    The first claim:
    An unnamed Pakistani official told her, based on what he had in turn heard from an unnamed senior U.S. official that "the United States had direct evidence that the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, knew of bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad." ISI is Pakistan's powerful military intelligence agency.

    The second claim:
    "The ISI actually ran a special desk assigned to handle bin Laden. It was operated independently, led by an officer who made his own decisions and did not report to a superior. He handled only one person: bin Laden...the top military bosses knew about it, I was told."

    It is, of course, hard to prove negatives, but having spent around a year reporting intensively on the hunt for al Qaeda's leader for my 2012 book "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden From 9/11 to Abbottabad," I am convinced that there is no evidence that anyone in the Pakistani government, military or intelligence agencies knowingly sheltered bin Laden.

    How did I arrive at this conclusion?

    On three reporting trips to Pakistan I spoke to senior officials in Pakistan's military and intelligence service. They all denied that they had secretly harbored bin Laden. OK, you are thinking: "But they would say that, wouldn't they?"

    Well, what about the dozens of officials I spoke to in the U.S. intelligence community, Pentagon, State Department and the White House who also told me versions of "the Pakistanis had no idea that bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad"?

    During the course of reporting for my book I spoke on the record to, among others, John Brennan, now the CIA director and then President Obama's top counterterrorism adviser; then CIA Director Leon Panetta and his chief of staff, Jeremy Bash; then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen; then Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. James Cartwright; then director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter; then senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, Nick Rasmussen; then head of policy at the Pentagon, Michele Flournoy; Michael Vickers, who was then the civilian overseer of Special Operations at the Pentagon; Tony Blinken, who is now the deputy national security adviser; and Denis McDonough, who held that position before Blinken.

    These officials have collectively spent many decades working to destroy al Qaeda, and many are deeply suspicious of Pakistan for its continuing support for elements of the Taliban. But all of them told me in one form or another that Pakistani officials had no clue that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad.


    Indeed, an early debate between senior national security officials at the White House, once CIA intelligence established that bin Laden could be hiding in Abbottabad, was whether to mount a joint U.S.-Pakistani raid on bin Laden's suspected hideout.

    This plan was rejected because the officials were concerned that such a joint operation carried the risk that word would leak out about the bin Laden intelligence. This debate would have been moot if the Pakistanis already knew bin Laden was living in Abbottabad.

    And, by the way, if the U.S. government had any evidence that the Pakistanis were knowingly sheltering bin Laden, as Gall claims, why cover this up?

    In 2011, the relationship between the United States and Pakistan was at its lowest point ever. Early that year a CIA contractor killed two Pakistanis in broad daylight in the city of Lahore, and both countries were trading accusations about each other's perfidy. The tension was compounded by the fact that the CIA drone program in Pakistan was then at its height, which was deeply unpopular among Pakistanis. What did U.S. officials have to lose by saying that bin Laden was being protected by the Pakistanis if it were true?

    The fact is that the senior Pakistani officials Gall alleges were harboring bin Laden were utterly surprised that Al Qaeda's leader was living in Abbottabad. Based on the bewildered reactions of top Pakistani officials to the events on the night that bin Laden was killed, it was obvious to U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter and to U.S. officials monitoring communications in Pakistan that the Pakistanis had not had a clue about bin Laden's presence there.

    Finally, in the course of reporting my book I discovered that bin Laden was even hiding from some of the people living in his own compound; forget about letting officials in the Pakistani government in on the secret. One of the wives of the bodyguards protecting bin Laden didn't know that the tall stranger hiding on the compound was al Qaeda's leader.

    In fairness to Gall, I have heard from four current and former U.S. intelligence and military officials that some of the thousands of documents that U.S. Navy SEALs picked up at bin Laden's Abbottabad compound that haven't been publicly released could point to some kind of official Pakistani collusion.

    If that is the case, the Obama White House should release any documents that are relevant so that the American public can be the judge if one of our allies was knowingly harboring bin Laden all along. So far there is no evidence that that is the case.

    Opinion: Pakistan sheltered Bin Laden? Prove it - CNN.com
    The WH has also, yet again, denied the claims that it has any evidence of Pakistani complicity in sheltering OBL:

    "The White House has said it has no reason to believe that the senior Pakistani officials had knowledge about the location of Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, who was killed in a Navy Seals operation in Abbottabad in May 2011.

    “As US officials have said, we have no reason to believe that anyone in the highest levels of the government knew about the location of Osama bin Laden. That continues to be true,” Laura Lucas Magnuson, a spokesperson for the National Security Council said.

    Pak leadership didn
    Last edited by Agnostic Muslim; 22 Mar 14,, 18:24.
    Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic state to be ruled by priests with a divine mission - Jinnah
    https://twitter.com/AgnosticMuslim

    Comment


    • #3
      The News has a piece from journalist Amir Mir in which he questions Gen (R) Ziauddin Butt about the claims attributed to him by Carlotta Gall and others regarding 'Musharraf's knowledge of OBL's location':
      ...
      In her upcoming book “The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014,” Gall has further claimed that Musharraf and his top commanders were aware of al-Qaeda’s plan to assassinate Ms Benazir Bhutto. She writes in her book: “In trying to prove that the ISI knew of Bin Laden’s whereabouts and protected him, I struggled for more than two years to piece together something other than circumstantial evidence and suppositions from sources with no direct knowledge. Only one man, a former ISI chief and retired general, Ziauddin Butt, told me that he thought Pervez Musharraf had arranged to hide Osama in Abbottabad. But he had no proof and, under pressure, claimed in the Pakistani press that he’d been misunderstood”.

      However, when approached by this reporter to get his point of view, General Ziauddin said the British journalist Carlotta Gall did see him and talk to him but misquoted him.“To a query, I told her that Musharraf should have known that Osama was hiding in Abbottabad. But in a bid to give credence to her thesis, the lady journalist misquoted me as saying that Musharraf knew about Osama’s presence. She probably did this while trying to give credibility to her contention”.

      As this scribe reminded the General that he has not been quoted by Western media for the first time accusing Pervez Musharraf and Ijaz Shah of sheltering Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Ziauddin said: “I am misquoted every time the Western media talks to me to advance their own agenda”. General Ziauddin described the NYT news as a vicious attack on the ISI, which, he said was reprehensible.
      ...
      Why is only one ex-ISI chief always quoted by Western media? - thenews.com.pk
      Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic state to be ruled by priests with a divine mission - Jinnah
      https://twitter.com/AgnosticMuslim

      Comment


      • #4
        AM:

        You are too quick to judge Gall's piece, and your manner of doing so is rather distasteful and biased.

        Bergen did not refute her, but merely pointed out that all of the high US officials he interviewed said otherwise.

        And the 'scribe' in the last excerpt you posted pointed out that General Ziaudden, former head of ISI, was several times quoted as saying Musharraf knew where OBL living.

        At best, we have competing contentions here. I don't see how you are in any position to choose which is right, unless you have sources deep in ISI yourself. If I were to agree with you, it would be tantamount to believing Pakistan's intelligence services and army are incompetent. They may be many things, but incompetence on that level is not one of them. For now, the issue remains a mystery. I hope you will at least acknowledge that, and not bad-mouth every journalist who disagrees with your POV.
        To be Truly ignorant, Man requires an Education - Plato

        Comment


        • #5
          JAD,

          Pointing out that what the journalist wrote is "skewing" the reality is not bad-mouthing. I think.

          The western journalism as we praise it is a dying specie.
          No such thing as a good tax - Churchill

          To make mistakes is human. To blame someone else for your mistake, is strategic.

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by Doktor View Post
            JAD,

            Pointing out that what the journalist wrote is "skewing" the reality is not bad-mouthing. I think.

            Not if AM had provided a substantive counter-argument. If the following verbiage qualifies along those lines, someone expects us to roll over to lazy thinking.


            "Apparently things were 'a little too quiet' ...Pakistan bashing...little more than a rehash...oft-regurgitated conspiracy theories...speculation about the 'Pakistani State's complicity and collusion in hiding OBL'. ...reflects rather poorly on Carlotta Gall...would stoop to leveraging...in order to sell more copies of her book."

            To be Truly ignorant, Man requires an Education - Plato

            Comment


            • #7
              I guess being a mod prevents you from filtering the message.
              No such thing as a good tax - Churchill

              To make mistakes is human. To blame someone else for your mistake, is strategic.

              Comment


              • #8
                Originally posted by Doktor View Post
                I guess being a mod prevents you from filtering the message.
                I'm stumped. What do you mean?
                To be Truly ignorant, Man requires an Education - Plato

                Comment


                • #9
                  Well I read this:

                  To a query, I told her that Musharraf should have known that Osama was hiding in Abbottabad. But in a bid to give credence to her thesis, the lady journalist misquoted me as saying that Musharraf knew about Osama’s presence. She probably did this while trying to give credibility to her contention”.
                  The rest is just TMI. Especially, the bolded part in your previous message.

                  Could be the quality of news in recent decades, but those parts don't access my brain cells.
                  No such thing as a good tax - Churchill

                  To make mistakes is human. To blame someone else for your mistake, is strategic.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Doktor View Post
                    Well I read this:



                    The rest is just TMI. Especially, the bolded part in your previous message.

                    Could be the quality of news in recent decades, but those parts don't access my brain cells.

                    Quality depends on the reporter and the news outlet.

                    In any case, read it again. The English is a bit awkward:

                    As this scribe reminded the General that he has not been quoted by Western media for the first time accusing Pervez Musharraf and Ijaz Shah of sheltering Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Ziauddin said: “I am misquoted every time the Western media talks to me to advance their own agenda”. General Ziauddin described the NYT news as a vicious attack on the ISI, which, he said was reprehensible.

                    Untangle the english. The 'scribe'--the writer and I presume reporter--reminds the general that it's not the first time the general has been quoted saying what he said about Musharraf and the general replies that he was misquoted each time. Do you see the irony in that? The reporter does.
                    To be Truly ignorant, Man requires an Education - Plato

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      I see the irony of media outlet not being able to prove that General said what he says he didn't.

                      Back in the days, I can't recall someone saying they were misquoted, today it is something very normal.
                      No such thing as a good tax - Churchill

                      To make mistakes is human. To blame someone else for your mistake, is strategic.

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        1. People are misquoted all the time by the media. The exact accuracy of stories in any media is questionable.

                        2. One does not need the NY times to suspect with high confidence that Pakistan was sheltering bin Laden. All one needs is a map and a brain. The circumstances are so damning that the onus is on Pakistan to disprove the case, and im not holding my breath.

                        It's one of those inconvenient facts that we let slip between nations because we got our man and further friction would be counterproductive to our interests. It also makes me throw up a little, inside, every time i think about the Pakistani "authorities".

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Originally posted by citanon View Post
                          1. People are misquoted all the time by the media. The exact accuracy of stories in any media is questionable.
                          Today? Sure. Remember Watergate?

                          Even here, there was an anecdote: Police raids a man's house and brings him into the van with cuffs. The son comes home and tells the father that the neighbor got arrested for XYZ reason. The father's response "I will believe when I read it in the papers". You don't have that today.

                          2. One does not need the NY times to suspect with high confidence that Pakistan was sheltering bin Laden. All one needs is a map and a brain. The circumstances are so damning that the onus is on Pakistan to disprove the case, and im not holding my breath.
                          Pakistan doesn't have a case to defend. US said they are not complicit. So, you got it wrong, the onus is on those making the allegations.

                          It's one of those inconvenient facts that we let slip between nations because we got our man and further friction would be counterproductive to our interests. It also makes me throw up a little, inside, every time i think about the Pakistani "authorities".
                          You let it slip, yet someone, somewhere brings it up on the table. Again and again and again. But never someone with authority, those guys always go with the Pakistan was not guilty story. Why? If you feel that Pakistan is complicit, you should be pissed on your guys.
                          No such thing as a good tax - Churchill

                          To make mistakes is human. To blame someone else for your mistake, is strategic.

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Originally posted by Doktor View Post
                            I see the irony of media outlet not being able to prove that General said what he says he didn't.
                            The irony is that he was quoted saying the same thing to different reporters and claims he was misquoted every time.


                            Back in the days, I can't recall someone saying they were misquoted, today it is something very normal.
                            It was more normal before recording equipment. I escorted reporters to interviews and put a recorder on the table and sat there during the interview. Very rarely did I have to correct a reporter after his story was filed. Once an AP reporter asked me to check his copy. I told him that he misquoted the official he just interviewed, and played him the recording. Fortunately, he managed to file a correction before the story went out over the wires. If I hadn't had the recording he might have gone with the original story.

                            In my experience, US journalists are very sensitive about their reputations, especially among their peers. Accuracy matters to them. Certain reporters are gospel to me. Some are lazy, don't check their facts, and make up shit. You learn after awhile.
                            To be Truly ignorant, Man requires an Education - Plato

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                            • #15
                              Originally posted by Doktor View Post
                              Pakistan doesn't have a case to defend. US said they are not complicit.
                              If any US official actually said that, which I doubt, they are being deliberately disingenuous to accomplish the purpose of moving on in our national interest.

                              So, you got it wrong, the onus is on those making the allegations.
                              A. this is not a court case. We know what's going on. That's enough.
                              B. If this was civil court, we'd have more than enough to prevail. If this was criminal court, Pakistan would still be in trouble. If Pakistan were a defendant in criminal court, one would follow the legal practice of presumption of innocence, but the given the circumstances you'd bet your ass tat her defense lawyers are going to be sweating bullets and trying to dig up exculpatory evidence.

                              You let it slip,
                              You bet we let it slip. Abbottabad is still there on the map. Pakistan still gets some US military aid.


                              yet someone, somewhere brings it up on the table.
                              So as to be clear we will not forget.

                              Again and again and again. But never someone with authority, those guys always go with the Pakistan was not guilty story.
                              Wrong. Those in charge let their suspicions be known and they let their decisions speak for themselves. On the night of the raid US forces were ready to shoot to kill Pakistani forces:

                              http://thediplomat.com/2014/01/rober...o-ally-at-all/

                              Why?
                              So that we can continue giving them some aid in the interest of keeping their country from going further to shit.

                              If you feel that Pakistan is complicit, you should be pissed on your guys.
                              Why should I be pissed at our guys for pursuing wise policy? I'm only disgusted at the Pakistani "authorities".
                              Last edited by citanon; 24 Mar 14,, 00:35.

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