“On the evening of Saturday 15th March, 2008, resistance forces, acting on firm intelligence that four known terrorists were meeting there, struck a compound in Islamabad. These terrorists were known to be frequent visitors to the compound. Resistance forces used precision guided munitions in response to an imminent threat from a well-known terrorist network. Reports confirm that the four terrorists, including the local commander Ray Biteski, were injured in the attack. The resistance forces regret the death of a Turkish civilian and the injuries suffered by others present in the compound but it is well known that members of this terrorist group often endanger civilian lives by using them as human shields”
Imagine the uproar such a statement would cause if one described in such terms the bombing of the popular Luna Caprese restaurant in Islamabad on the evening of Saturday 15th March. But this is precisely the kind of language that is used by the ISAF spokesman in Afghanistan after a Predator attack or a cross-border artillery bombardment on a compound in Waziristan, which usually leads to the death of civilians, including women and children. According to US news sources, four of the five Americans injured in the attack were FBI agents and one of them was Ray Biteski, the Islamabad US embassy’s FBI attaché. But in fact these FBI agents really are part of a terrorist network. They operate freely on Pakistani soil and are involved in the “intelligence” gathering that is used to guide UAVs (Predators) in launching rocket attacks regularly on houses and compounds in Waziristan. The excuse given is that terrorists belonging to Islamic fundamentalist groups are present in these compounds at the time of the attack and that the ISAF is justified in “taking them out”. Recently these bombings have been stepped up leading to the killing of hundreds of innocent civilians.
Since 2001 Musharraf has cooperated with these (FBI, CIA) agents in kidnapping hundreds of Pakistanis and spiriting them away to be tortured in Bagram Air Base, Diego Garcia and above all Guantanamo. Musharraf boasts in his autobiography that he has handed over more than 500 so-called “terrorists” to the USA. These have been clandestine operations violating the law of the land. People have been arrested and handed over to the Americans without due process and without evidence being presented before Pakistani courts.
One of the reasons that Musharraf tried to get rid of Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the Chief Justice of Pakistan, on March 9, 2007 was that the honourable judge had started to probe into the thousands of disappearances in Pakistan during the last few years. This first attempt was not entirely successful but he finally managed this by declaring a state of emergency on November 3, 2007 and by dismissing the Supreme Court and putting its judges under house arrest.
Apart from those handed over to the US there are other thousands who have been picked up by Pakistani intelligence agencies and nobody knows where they are being kept and under what conditions. They have just vanished. Their families appealed to the Supreme Court for redress. To his credit Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry took up these appeals undeterred by the military or the all-powerful intelligence agencies. Last year he compelled the agencies to produce a couple of the disappeared ones in court. These actions were and are not popular either with Musharraf or with the USA. This is one of the reasons that the United States is happy that Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry is out of the way under house arrest. The US government, the great champion of democracy and justice, has not called for the release from house arrest of the superior court judges and for the reinstatement of the pre-November 3 Supreme Court. One of the many crimes for which Pakistanis hold Musharraf responsible is these disappearances and the handing over to the US of hundreds of innocents. Pakistanis consider Bush and his neo-conservative criminal gang and their local functionaries to be complicit in these crimes. Bush says that the people who have been imprisoned in Guantanamo are terrorists and bad guys. But for five years these people have been held and tortured in that hell hole called Guantanamo, and God knows where else, without trial and without charges being laid against them. I deliberately call them innocent because that is the basis of Anglo-Saxon law, that everybody is innocent until proved guilty of a crime in a court of law.
For many in Pakistan the free movement granted to FBI and CIA agents by the Musharraf government is not only an affront to the sovereignty and dignity of the country but is also a treasonous crime. These agents help to bring down death and destruction in the Frontier Province. Those who have lost loved ones in Predator attacks consider them to be terrorists and thus legitimate targets. If you live by the sword you die by the sword.
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