Some Fishin' Accomplished: Life Sentences For Three Convicted "Liquid Bombers"

Tanvir Hussain

Tanvir Hussain, Assad Sarwar and Abdulla Ahmed Ali, the three so-called "liquid bombers" whom the British criminal justice system managed to convict on September 7, 2009, were sentenced to life a week later, with no chance of parole for 32, 36 and 40 years, respectively.

Only the least skeptical among us could fail to note the coincidence by which the convictions and sentences were both handed down within a few days of the eighth anniversary of the "terror attacks" that the "transatlantic airline bombing plot" was said to rival.

Immediately after the convictions were announced, the tone of the story shifted in an entirely predictable and globally uniform manner. Which is to say that the convictions and sentences have moved the story of the "liquid bombers" from the realm of bizarre terrorist fiction to the nearby realm of bizarre officially sanctioned government propaganda terrorist fiction.

A cynical observer could be forgiven for assuming that this long-awaited transition would be sufficient to bring this astonishingly odd story to a close. But such does not appear to be the case.

What Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri Do All Day, or Why I Cannot Talk About Politics With My Father

I have finally come to understand why I cannot talk about politics, terrorism or international relations with my father, not that it matters much, except as a glimpse of a much larger phenomenon.

It's not just my father. I can't talk about politics or terrorism or world affairs with anyone who has lived his or her entire life under the great umbrella of American propaganda.

They have insulated themselves under an enormous web of lies, and hidden themselves away from actual knowledge of their nation and its role in the world, both of which they see dimly, if at all: the world as a dark, dangerous, mysterious place, and their nation as the best of all nations -- nay, the best of all possible nations.

They have been content to collect the scraps tossed their way by the American War Machine, although they would never call it that. Nor would they ever consider themselves in any way complicit in America's endless war on the rest of the world, a war they never even acknowledge.

It's a war waged on multiple planes, of which the military, being the bloodiest, is easily the most visible. And it didn't start last week, or last year, or even eight years ago.

It's been going on all their lives -- or since they were little kids. For an ever-increasing percentage of America's population, it's always been there.

Like the land, the sea and the sky, it's the backdrop against which their lives take place.

Only a fool would question the sea and sky.

... or the notion that the American War Machine should be what it is, and is what it should be.

Except that it's not true. None of it is true. And even worse -- they know it's not true.

As long as every little lie stays in place, the umbrella stands, so to speak: the big lies remain sacred, so to speak. But once you start to pull and tug, and separate one lie from another, and expose them to the light of knowledge and reason ... well, that's where it gets intolerable.

And I guess I just love to pull and tug.

I came to this moderately interesting conclusion in the hospital room where I've been spending most of my weekends lately, sitting there with my father and reading the newspaper he read before I arrived.

He's so far from where I grew up that I have no connection with any of the local stories: I read them as if they were field reports from places I may never hear of again, much less visit.

One week there was a story about a guy who took some construction equipment and started blazing a trail through a state park. One week there was a story about a new McDonald's opening in one of the suburbs. This weekend there was a story about a schoolteacher who was sitting alone in her classroom doing paperwork when a buck burst through the window.

You just never know what you'll find in the local news, but all the stories share a common feature: they're verifiable. I could go see the damage to the park. I could eat at the new fast food restaurant. And I could visit the school, admire the new window, and meet the teacher who hid under her desk.

I haven't actually done any of these things, and it's not likely that I ever would. But I could. You could. Anyone could. And the same is true of virtually all the local news: you can't predict what you'll find, but you can certainly check it out.

On the other hand, with world news, and often with national politics, it's just the opposite. What there is to read -- what my father reads every day, what he's been reading for his entire adult life -- is utterly predictable, and completely unverifiable. And therefore, he doesn't have any reason not to believe it -- unless I start talking.

I've just had dental surgery and I wasn't doing much talking this weekend. But that's another story -- and one I'll spare you.

I've read a lot of predictable, unverifiable, manure over the years, but I have never seen it more concentrated and hilarious than in Sebastian Rotella's most recent piece in the Los Angeles Times.

Entitled "Setbacks weaken Al Qaeda's ability to mount attacks, terrorism officials say", it had me laughing so hard that I've preserved it for posterity at my "other blog".

I happened to read Sebastian Rotella's newest masterpiece, not because it was in the paper in my dad's room, but because it set off my Google News Alert with its mention of Rashid Rauf. As long-time readers will remember, I wrote extensively about Rashid Rauf and the so-called Liquid Bombers, beginning in August of 2006 when they were arrested, and continuing until I became unable to blog much (or at all). But even when I haven't been writing, I've still been reading, and collecting.

Over the past three years I have preserved more than 330 articles mentioning Rashid Rauf, and it has been fascinating (in an entirely predictable way) to watch his legend develop. (And you can read the word "legend" in either of two ways: it can mean either "a fable" or "an intelligence agent's cover story".)

In 2006, Rashid Rauf was merely a "key figure" in the so-called Liquid Bombing plot -- possibly a messenger of some kind. Then he was the al Qaeda connection. Then he was the bomb-making expert. Then he was the mastermind. Then he was an al Qaeda commander.

The latter was an interesting step in the growing legend. Not everyone gets to be an al Qaeda commander.

I first read that Rashid Rauf was an al Qaeda commander from Bill Roggio, who writes the aptly named "Long War Journal". Upon reading that Rashid Rauf was an al Qaeda commander, I immediately felt a sense of inadequacy -- having read everything I could find about Rashid Rauf, how could I not have known he was an al Qaeda commander?

Then I got a bit indignant: Why should Bill Roggio know that Rashid Rauf is an al Qaeda commander when I don't know it myself? Later I simmered down a bit and became less emotional and more pragmatic. The question became: How does Bill Roggio know Rashid Rauf is an al Qaeda commander?

Much to my astonishment, Long War Journal takes comments from unknown visitors. So I left Bill Roggio a comment, saying: "How do you know Rashid Rauf is an al Qaeda commander?"

To my further astonishment, my comment appeared immediately. So I bookmarked the page and returned a day later, hoping for an explanation from Bill Roggio as to where and how he had learned that Rashid Rauf was an al Qaeda commander. Instead of such an explanation, I found -- to no astonishment at all -- that my comment had been deleted. "Aha!" I thought, "That's how we know Rashid Rauf is an al Qaeda commander." What a thing to have learned!

We also learned quite a bit about Bill Roggio and his "Long War Journal", none of which could have been news. (Long War Journal? Why do you think it's called that?)

Then Rashid Rauf was also named -- as always, by an unnamed source -- as the al Qaeda contact for the dozen Pakistani students arrested in the UK in April of 2009 under so-called "Operation Pathway". No criminal charges were filed against any of the students, who were released from police custody but nonetheless held pending "deportation hearings" which still haven't started -- and most of the students have now left the UK "voluntarily".

Shortly after the Operation Pathway arrests, Rashid Rauf's legend began to grow again. Soon he was was al Qaeda's Commander for European Operations. Then he was a facilitator for the London bombings of 7/7/2005.

How much more is there? I've been wondering: How long it will take before he was behind 9/11? Or the 1993 WTC bombing? Oklahoma City? Beirut? Who really killed JFK, anyway? Was it Rashid Rauf? Or to put it another way: How do we know it wasn't?

I may have been kidding about that last part but the rest is serious, and Rashid Rauf's legend continues to grow backwards. The most recent additions to the legend have proceeded despite (or because of) the death (or not) of Rashid Rauf in a drone-launched missile attack in Pakistan in November of 2008.

Sebastian Rotella's LAT piece hints -- for the first time of which I am aware -- at a connection between Rashid Rauf and a failed attempt to bomb London in 2004. This is a year earlier than the previous publicly hinted connection: the backward legend-building is only three years short of 9/11 now, and it won't be long ...

It's a sick laugh, and one I can't share with my father, but laughs are scarce in these days of bogus terror everywhere, and unspoken dangers everywhere else. And the people who make me laugh have an impossible job.

The task -- for somebody like Bill Roggio or Sebastian Rotella -- is to make the threat of terrorism appear to be diminishing and increasing at the same time. It has to be serious enough to justify spending hundreds of billions every year, and throwing your civil rights down the drain at the same time, and the results of such an enormous sacrifice must be tangible. And yet, despite the tangible success, the threat must never go away, or even be significantly diminished, because then the hundreds of billions of dollars per year would have to stop -- or at least stop growing. And we can't have that.

You might start clamoring for the return of your civil rights. We can't have that, either.

For all these reasons -- not to mention the oil -- we simply can't have an end to the War on Terror (by whatever name the president wants us to call it these days), and that means no president can ever declare it won and no president can ever declare it un-winnable.

Victory, while always getting closer, has to remain as far away as ever.

Very few writers manage it well, and Sebastian Rotella is a master of the art. But he exceeds even himself in his most recent piece. You have to read the whole thing to get the full sick belly laugh from it, but a few fragments may entice you to read more (at the LAT or at my home away from home).

Rotella leads with this give-and-take combination:

As Al Qaeda is weakened by the loss of leaders, fighters, funds and ideological appeal, the extremist network's ability to attack targets in the United States and Western Europe has diminished, anti-terrorism officials say.

Nonetheless, Al Qaeda and allied groups based primarily in Pakistan remain a threat, particularly because of an increasing ability to attract recruits from Central Asia and Turkey to offset the decline in the number of militants from the Arab world and the West.

Rotella even uses the words "diminished" and "increasing" in his opening paragraphs. The man is a wizard!

And he follows with another combination:

Al Qaeda's relative strength these days is of crucial importance in the complex debate in Washington over future U.S. troop levels and tactics in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Although factions within the Obama administration differ on how best to deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan, all agree that the paramount priority is defeating Al Qaeda. Unlike the Afghan Taliban, the terrorist network Al Qaeda remains committed to a holy war against the West with a goal of matching or surpassing its devastating attacks in 2001.

Matching or surpassing whose devastating attacks in 2001? There's the rub, isn't it?

All chroniclers of the Terror War, from hacks like Bill Roggio to masters like Sebastian Rotella, must write as if 9/11 had been fully and impartially investigated and that the conclusions of said investigation had been accepted as final by all thinking people. The fact that only non-thinking people believe any of the 9/11 manure is routinely glossed over, by wizard and hack alike.

Rotella is not only a wizard himself but he also has some wizardly sources:

"Some pretty experienced individuals have been taken out of the equation," a senior British anti-terrorism official said in a recent interview.

"There is fear, insecurity and paranoia about individuals arriving from outside, worries about spies and infiltration," said the official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive topic. "There is a sense that it has become a less romantic experience. Which is important because of the impact on Al Qaeda the brand, the myth, the idea of the glorious jihadist."

"Taken out of the equation" is British math-talk for "killed along with hundreds of civilians in a series of drone attacks".

But "Al Qaeda the brand"?? And "the myth"?? This senior British anti-terrorism official has one foot in the grave and the other on the truth, does he not? Outrageous!!

But it gets better! Enter the president:

President Obama cited the debilitated condition of the terrorist network last week during a visit with U.S. counter-terrorism officials.

"Because of our efforts, Al Qaeda and its allies have not only lost operational capacity, they've lost legitimacy and credibility," he said.

I almost stopped laughing long enough to ask myself: How could this fiction lose "legitimacy and credibility"? Is Obama pulling our leg, too?

Next in line for Rotella: an "ex"-CIA man working for the NYPD (whom Rotella calls a "scholar") virtually confirms the long-simmering notion that the entire al Qaeda legend is built on entrapment:

The number of failed plots in the West, whether directed or inspired by Al Qaeda, also shows that the quality of operatives has declined, scholar Marc Sageman testified at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week.

"Counter-terrorism is working," said Sageman, a former CIA officer and New York Police Department expert. "Terrorist organizations can no longer cherry-pick the best candidates as they did in the 1990s. There is no Al Qaeda recruitment program: Al Qaeda and its allies are totally dependent on self-selected volunteers."

Self-selected volunteers, indeed. Knuckleheads of the world unite!

I won't make you wait any longer. Here's the bit you've been waiting for, and once again it's from the unnamed senior British official:

In several recent cases, Western trainees in Pakistan allegedly had contact with Mustafa Abu Yazid, also known as Said Sheik, a longtime Egyptian financial boss. Abu Yazid acts as the day-to-day chief of the network while Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, spend their time eluding capture, said the British official.

It's a thing of beauty, is it not?

Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, spend their time eluding capture.

As I was saying, it's a sick laugh. But it's a laugh all the same.

The pity is that my father (who reads three newspapers a day and has done so for the past 40 years) and millions of other mainstream media Americans believe every word of it. It doesn't matter to them if Osama bin Laden is obviously dead, or Ayman al-Zawahri (whose name is always misspelled as "Zawahiri" in the Western press) is obviously an agent of Israeli propaganda -- just the same as it doesn't matter whether Rashid Rauf is alive or dead: if he's dead, his death is a victory for the forces of good (the US military, of course) and if he's alive, then he's a threat that must be eliminated by the forces of good (ditto, ditto).

It's no wonder we can't catch bin Laden or al-Zawarhi.

And only a fool would question the sea and sky.

So I rubbed my jaw and tried to smile. Dental surgery is such a bitch!

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Obama's Pakistan Campaign: Brilliant President Plus Smart Bombs Equal Humanitarian Success

I note with proud amazement a new article from Dubai's Gulfnews dot com, describing the ongoing campaign of bombing attacks by unmanned planes against Pakistan (which the American government and media will not usually talk about -- officially -- but which are widely understood to be undertaken by the CIA at the direction of the president).

Unofficial government sources have been weighing in lately, all unequivocally in favor of continuing the attacks. For instance, a July 14 editorial in the Wall Street Journal says that

Far from being "beyond the pale," drones have made war-fighting more humane.

This point of view may seem a bit strange, given that the "success" claimed on behalf of the drones has been rather spotty. In fact, according to Pakistani government sources, as of April 8 of this year, US attacks on Pakistan had killed 14 al Q'aeda terrorists and 687 civilians.

The success ratio -- with alleged terrorists accounting for nearly one-fiftieth of the people killed -- may have been slightly over-estimated in this government report, since one of the "high-value targets" allegedly killed in these attacks (and included among the 14) is Rashid Rauf, the alleged leader of (or at least an alleged key figure in) the supposedly dangerous transatlantic-airline liquid-bombing plot (which I have discussed at great length in the past: for a technical overview of the plot, see "Ludicrouser And Ludicrouser: The Alleged Liquid Bombing Plot, Revisited Again"; for an explanation of what this means, see "Inadequate Deception: The Impossible Plots Of The Terror War").

Rashid Rauf was reportedly killed in a drone attack in November of 2008, but his body has never been produced and his family's plea for the return of his remains was ignored by the Pakistani government; Rauf's family and his attorney say he may be dead, but they dispute the claim that he was killed then and in that manner.

You don't have to be a lunatic moonbat conspiracy theorist or a Pakistani terrorist-sympathizer to claim that Rashid Rauf probably wasn't killed in a drone attack. Long War Journal proprietor Bill Roggio, who usually gets inside information before the marginally-less-complicit-but-still-criminal mainstream press, declared back in April that Rashid Rauf is still alive and dangerous and plotting against us all.

If that's true, then the numbers would be more like: 13 terrorist leaders dead, and 688 innocent people. And that's giving the official statistician the benefit of every doubt. As Bill Roggio wrote just a few days ago,

Reports of senior al Qaeda and Taliban leaders killed in Pakistan have been highly unreliable. In the past, al Qaeda leaders Ayman al Zawahiri, Abd al Hadi al Iraqi, Abu Obaidullah Al Masri, Adam Gadahn, Ibn Amin, and Rashid Rauf have been reported killed in strikes, but these men later resurfaced. Similarly, Sa'ad bin Laden was recently reported killed, but he is now thought to be alive. And Abu Khabab al Masri was reported dead several times before he actually was killed in a July 2008 strike.

Given all the billions we spend on intelligence gathering, and all the billions we spend on developing smart weapons, you might think we should be doing a better job of killing terrorists and sparing innocents. But that's a shallow criticism, because after a shaky start we did start doing a better job, as you can see when I break the statistics down chronologically.

According to the report from Pakistan which I mentioned above,

Two strikes carried out in 2006 had killed 98 civilians while three attacks conducted in 2007 had slain 66 Pakistanis

for a total of 164 civilian deaths -- and no terrorists were among the dead in either 2006 or 2007!

By contrast, according to the same report,

385 people lost their lives in 2008 and 152 people were slain in the first 99 days of 2009 (between January 1 and April 8)

for a total of 537 innocent civilians killed, along with the "14 wanted al-Qaeda operatives".

It may not seem like much, but considering the opening phase of this campaign, these reports reveal a double-dose of success. The total of "wanted al-Qaeda operatives" allegedly killed has ballooned from 0 in 2006-7 all the way to 14 in 2008-9, and at the same time the number of innocents killed per terrorist has dropped from 164:0 (an infinite ratio) to only 537:14 (about 38:1) -- provided of course that Rashid Rauf and all the other terrorists described as dead are actually dead, and were actually terrorists.

Some people may have felt these improvements were good enough, but clearly Barack Obama was not among them. As we know, anything is possible for can-do Americans, and as the newest report from Dubai indicates, we have enhanced our performance significantly since the Pakistani report was compiled in April.

Here's the most amazing part: According to Gulfnews, the number of Pakistani civilians killed since the beginning of 2008 is now only 480! That's down by 57 since the total was 537 in April!

So think about this: In the last four months, we have continued bombing Pakistan, killing (or at least claiming to have killed) more and more "high-value targets", such as Osama bin Laden's son Sa'ad (who in addition to probably surviving the attack in which he was "killed", may not have had anything to do with terrorism at all, other than being sired by an undercover CIA operative), and Baitullah Mehsud (who in addition to probably surviving the attack in which he was "killed", has likely been the CIA's most powerful weapon in South Asia since Osama bin Laden died in 2001).

We have been able to do all this without killing any additional civilians, and -- even more amazingly -- we have managed to revive 57 innocent people who were dead back in April but who are not dead anymore!

This is the sort of "humanitarian intervention" we were always hoping for but could never achieve -- not under Republican scoundrels such as Bush, Bush and Reagan; not under Democratic scoundrels such as Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.

Of all the presidents in the history of our great nation, only Obama The Wonderful has managed to turn America's awesome firepower into a healing force.

Clearly, none of this would be possible without Obama's brilliance. He's the first President we've ever had who has been smart enough to use our wonderful smart bombs to their maximum humanitarian potential.

Similarly, none of it would be possible without our fantastic remote-controlled planes and the computerized bombs they carry. The Wall Street Journal was right! Drones have made war-fighting more humane!

What? You doubt me? Oh, please!! You'd have to be awfully naive to think we could raise scores of people from the dead with conventional weapons!

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please help to put this article on Scoop's front page!

Double Cover [4]: Beyond Ridiculous

Despite the apparent confusion and the obvious media spin, the picture that emerged from the early reporting of the Mumbai attacks was a fairly comprehensible one: a picture of a false flag commando raid.

It was a commando raid, as opposed to a suicide bombing or other forms of terrorist attack; surely that much was clear to everybody. There were multiple commandos and multiple targets, and it was obvious that a great deal of knowledge and skill must have gone into the planning.

But it was also clearly a false flag attack, as the multiple simultaneous attempts to pin the blame (or take the responsibility) made no sense, singly or in combination. Even as the shooting was going on, the Indian government was saying the attackers (whoever they were) had come from outside the country. A "terrorist group" calling itself the "Deccan Mujahideen" had claimed responsibility, but no terror expert had ever heard of such a group.

In reality-based situations (of which this is not one!), the analysis of such a horrible crime would begin with the known facts, and it would proceed in a systematic fashion, from the knowns to the unknowns.

For instance, one might start with the observation that the Mumbai assault was a highly-coordinated commando raid, and then raise the questions: "Who does this sort of thing?" and "Among those who do this sort of thing, who had something to gain by doing this?"

These are questions we never saw asked, let alone answered, in the mainstream media. It seems quite clear to me, and one of the reasons for the title of this series, that they don't ask these questions because they're afraid of the answers. So instead of intelligent, penetrating, appropriate analysis, we got nonsense.

To begin with the official account, let's just say the official account of the attacks makes very little sense. Supposedly there were only ten attackers, and supposedly they attacked in 13 locations more or less simultaneously. Nobody in the mainstream seems prepared to ask how something like this could have happened without inside help. Some analysts pointed out that a high degree of local knowledge must have been required for such an attack, but they went on to conclude that therefore the attackers must have been foreigners. It was difficult to imagine a more counter-intuitive conclusion; but not for long.

Nobody asked: "Who could do this?" or "Who would do this?" Instead they asked: "How did al Qaeda do this?" and "Why did al Qaeda do this?" After a while it became more or less obvious that the Mumbai attacks didn't involve hijacked airplanes crashing into buildings (like al Qaeda in North America) or suicide bombers and car bombs (like al Qaeda in the Middle East). And connecting al Qaeda to these attacks directly became a bit of a problem. So then instead of asking "Who else could have done this?", they began to ask: "How are the perpetrators of this attack connected to al Qaeda?"

Still jubilant over the alleged death of Rashid Rauf, the alleged leader of the so-called Liquid Bombers, who was (or wasn't) killed in Pakistan just four days before the Mumbai attacks began, some terror warriors sought to connect the attacks to the death of the alleged terrorist mastermind and provide a motive at the same time. Thus we were privileged to read that the attacks may have been carried out in revenge for the killing of Rashid Rauf.

Perhaps we could forget -- if only for a moment -- that more than 400 people were killed or wounded in Mumbai, and not one of them had ever harmed Rashid Rauf. Perhaps we could imagine a bizarre terrorist mind in which somehow ordinary Indian citizens were held responsible for American drones dropping Hellfire missiles on alleged terrorists in Pakistan.

But we couldn't bring ourselves to believe that these brazen, coordinated attacks were carried out in revenge for something that had happened only four days earlier. So the terror warriors needed another, slightly plausible, al Qaeda connection.

It didn't take them long to find one. And now British terror warriors are going to India to investigate the possibility that Rashid Rauf may have planned the Mumbai attacks.

As Ben Goldby reported for the Birmingham Mercury News:

Sources have now revealed that [Rashid Rauf] was planning a major attack at the time of his death, and that the Mumbai murders show all the hallmarks of one of Rauf’s “terror spectacular” plots.

Except, of course, for Rashid Rauf's trademark hallmark -- the mission has to be impossible!

The Indian Mujahidin, which carried out a blast in Delhi in September and warned that they would strike next in Mumbai, is understood to have been behind this week’s terror outrage.

Not exactly. But the media are on that theme, and it works well for them, as we will see.

The group is made up of several different militant organisations, the most dangerous of which are the Pakistani-based Kashmiri “freedom” movements Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM).

Rauf was known to have strong links to both organisations.

He married a relative of JEM’s founder and worked with LET to train British jihadis who travelled to Pakistan. London 7/7 bombers Shehzad Tanweer and Mohammed Siddique Khan both studied at an LET madrassa near Lahore in 2004.

Here again, Goldby gets ahead of the facts. There has never been any public proof that the alleged London 7/7 bombers were anything but patsies. There has never been any public proof of any aspect of the London 7/7 story. But the alleged 7/7 bombers aren't even called "alleged" anymore; they're just "the 7/7 bombers". Of course, being dead, they can't do much about it.

Last night, a terror expert told the Sunday Mercury: “It is understood that this attack in Mumbai is the work of the Indian Mujahidin, based on plans and support from Kashmiri groups based in Pakistan.

“The planning seems to have been done by an Islamist militant group called Lashkar-e-Toiba and they have close links to other Kashmiri fighters including Jaish-e-Mohammed.

“In Rashid Rauf we have a man who dreamed up an alleged plot to blow up 10 transatlantic planes. We know he plotted spectacular attacks and we know that we was planning a terror operation when he was killed.

“This attack in Mumbai, with the synchronised terror strikes in multiple locations, is certainly consistent with his approach to militant tactics.”

It's not consistent with anything we know about the so-called Liquid Bomb plot, but our anonymous sources aren't letting facts get in the way of a good story -- except in one important respect.

The source says Rashid Rauf dreamed up "an alleged plot", and the reason for this particular qualifier is clear -- because the alleged plotters have already been tried and the jury refused to convict them. The jury didn't believe that the alleged plotters were plotting to blow up 10 transatlantic planes. The jury didn't believe they were plotting to blow up even one transatlantic plane. In other words, the jury believed the allegations were false. But those allegations are still treated as if they were untested. How utterly unremarkable!

But it would be remarkable if Rashid Rauf had planned the assault on Mumbai. For the terror warriors, it would be remarkably fortunate, because then they could claim to have scored a major victory in the war on terror, and they could more confidently ignore their critics, who say that dropping Hellfire on anybody -- especially somebody who has never been convicted of a crime -- is more like terrorism than justice.

But it would be even more remarkable in another sense. Last week at this time we were reading about how Rashid Rauf was killed along with a couple of the other top-level al Qaeda masterminds, who drew attention to the mud bungalow in which they were meeting, by using a mobile phone.

So now we're supposed to forget that, too, and we're supposed to believe that a tightly coordinated commando raid, an assault on 13 targets in a foreign country, was planned by a mastermind who couldn't even use a cell phone without being monitored -- and murdered.

~~~

to be continued ...

previously:
Double Cover [1]: Nothing Can Ever Be The Same
Double Cover [2]: What Is A Commando Raid?
Double Cover [3]: What Is A False Flag Attack?

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Rashid Rauf's Family Says Reports Of His Death By US Air Strike Are False

Family members of Rashid Rauf are disputing the widely-reported claim that he was killed in a US missile strike in Pakistan on Saturday, and it would be altogether fitting and proper if they were correct. None of the other news that has been widely reported about Rashid Rauf and the so-called "Liquid Bombers" has stood up to serious scrutiny, either. Rarely if ever in human history has more been done with less.

Airports still enforce restrictions which were put in place in August 2006, after twenty-five people were arrested in Britain, supposedly because they had been plotting to create explosives from hydrogen peroxide and other common household liquids while aboard transatlantic flights, destroying multiple airliners more or less simultaneously in a spectacular attack which would rival or exceed 9/11.

Depending on what report you were reading at the moment, Rashid Rauf was described as the messenger or the mastermind, or the bomb-making expert, or perhaps only the messenger's friend: in any event it was clear that Rashid Rauf was the al Qaeda connection in the Liquid Bomb plot, so-called.

Rauf's arrest in Pakistan had precipitated all the police action in the UK, we were told, although the date and place and means of that arrest were all sketchy, and reports on all of the above tended to differ. Somehow -- the mechanism was never clear -- Rashid Rauf had managed to send a message to his alleged co-conspirators in Britain, telling them to go ahead with their plot immediately, or so we were told.

The police in the UK had intercepted the message and tracked down the would-be recipients, according to the tale. How Rauf had sent a message like that from captivity remained a mystery to some.

Others wondered how the alleged plotters could possibly go ahead with their plan, considering that they had not yet made any bombs or bought any tickets, and that most of them hadn't even applied for passports yet. Surely, if he were the mastermind, Rashid Rauf would have known all this. Wouldn't he?

And then the details of the alleged plot were leaked to the British newspapers, and they didn't make any sense. The process the alleged plotters were supposedly going to use to create their so-called bomb would have taken far longer than the flight would be in the air, and would have required far more space and equipment than they possibly could have had.

So a second round of conflicting details was leaked, to the New York Times this time, and the NYT published an article that was so hot that the NYT itself refused to distribute it in Britain. British readers were also barred from reading the piece online, unless they knew where else they could find such a thing. The technical details of the alleged plot were different than they had originally been reported. And once again, the plot as described was impossible.

Of the twenty-five British suspects originally arrested, one was released immediately, and twelve more were released without any charges having been laid. Eight of the others were charged with conspiracy to commit murder by detonating explosives on aircraft. After a very lengthy trial, in which yet another impossible plot was described as evidence, a British jury refused to convict any of them of that charge. Even though the judge told the jury he would accept a 10-2 or 11-1 decision, the jury could not reach a verdict on seven of the defendants -- but they did aquit the other one.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, Rashid Rauf was charged with terrorism and brought to court but the police hadn't prepared a case against him, so his case was delayed -- several times. Finally they got to court and it turned out that Rashid Rauf had been charged with possession of hydrogen peroxide for the purposes of terrorism. Apparently the peroxide in Rashid Rauf's possession was allegedly intended to be used in the creation of the liquid bombs that were supposedly going to knock down all those airplanes. But once again the story didn't make any sense. How could hydrogen peroxide in Pakistan blow up planes headed from Heathrow to the USA? And why wouldn't British terrorists in Britian buy their bomb-making ingredients from British sources? Would they really need to obtain hydrogen peroxide from an al Qaeda mastermind? The Pakistani judge dismissed the charges.

The government moved quietly and the charges were reinstated. And another round of delays began. Finally -- after nearly another year -- the charges were dropped again. But Rashid Rauf remained in prison, pending resolution of an extradition request from the British.

Officially, Pakistan and the UK do not have an extradition treaty. But exceptions can always be made, especially if a quid pro quo is available. Officially, the British never requested Rashid Rauf's extradition on the Liquid Bomb case; they wanted him in connection with the stabbing murder of Rauf's uncle in Birmingham. Immediately after his uncle was killed, Rashid Rauf fled to Pakistan, so the story goes; and never since then has he been seen in Britain.

The British arrested a pair of human rights activists from Balochistan, where Pakistan is currently waging an unpublicized war of aggression. The Pakistani government would love to keep this story quiet; they wanted the two activists in exchange for Rashid Rauf. And the British allegedly wanted Rauf for questioning in connection with the plot he supposedly masterminded. So the deal was set ... but it didn't happen.

Not that it matters much, but I never thought it would. The British had been very lukewarm in their extradition requests, and rightly so, in my opinion. The so-called plot, including the purported al Qaeda connection, smelled bad even before the first arrests were announced, with politicians on both sides of the Atlantic delivering unprecedented loads of manure in the hours immediately before the story broke.

Rashid Rauf, it seemed to me, might be an agent provocateur, and I thought he would be a very dangerous witness to question in a court of law. So I thought it was easy to understand the reluctance of the British authorities to press too hard for his extradition.

And then he escaped from -- or was deliberately released by -- the policemen who were detailed to escort him to and from a court date, and who were utterly negligent about trying to recapture their man. Or else, depending on your sources, he may have been captured by Pakistani intelligence to keep him out of the normal justice system. The original reports indicated that Rashid Rauf had overpowered his guards; later it was reported that he had been allowed to go into a mosque to pray -- without supervision. The policemen who sat waiting for him to reappear didn't notify headquarters that they'd lost their man until six hours later. Five Pakistani policemen were arrested, and nine were sacked; but where was Rashid Rauf?

All the uncertainty, and all the obvious lying, came to a head on the weekend, when an unmanned US spy plane dropped a bomb on a mud house in North Waziristan, killing Rashid Rauf and four others, and injuring six more, according to reports in all the big media. But according to Rashid Rauf's family, the big media have it wrong again.

Rashid Rauf's wife, Umat-ul-Warood, has appealed to the Pakistani government for the return of her dead husband's body, in accordance with the Muslim tradition of burying the dead immediately. But the government says it doesn't know anything about it, as Pakistan's Online News reported:

Rashid Rauf's wife Umat-ul-Warood has urged Government to hand over dead body of her husband for burial, who died during a American drone attack on Saturday.

Sources informed here on Sunday, that the kin of Rashid Rauf (a Proclaimed Offender of London plane conspiracy case) arrived in Peshawar from Bahawalpur to receive the dead body.

On the other hand, Government sources has expressed their ignorance relating to the arrival of Rashid Rauf's relative to collect his dead body.

Now, according to the Guardian,

The family of Rashid Rauf, the British terror suspect who reportedly died last week in a US missile strike in Pakistan, have claimed he was not killed in the attack.

Speaking through Rauf's lawyer, Hashmat Malik, the family of Rauf's wife in Pakistan said that the body had not been handed over to them and the authorities were not responding to their questions.

Rauf's death had been revealed by unnamed Pakistani intelligence agents, the usual source of information on the casualties of American strikes in the country's wild tribal area.

"It's all a concocted story," said Malik. "We're sure that it is not Rashid Rauf."

The family says that prior to hearing that he was killed in a missile strike, they hadn't heard anything from Rashid since he "escaped from prison". And now, with the government refusing to hand over the body, they suspect that there is no body. The Guardian continues:

"There was no reason for him to be in North Waziristan, he has no link with al-Qaida or the Taliban," said Malik. "The entire family is hopeful that he is still alive. He might have met his death, but not through this strike."

The lawyer said that the family believed that if Rauf is dead, the Pakistani security agencies had killed him after his "escape".

But according to an AFP report, Rauf's lawyer doesn't believe Rashid Rauf is dead.

"We don't believe that this story is true... It is a fake story," lawyer Hashmat Ali Habib told BBC radio, adding: "We still believe that my client, Rashid, is alive."

He noted that requests for Rauf's body to be returned to his family had not been answered. "This is a new technique of the government to dispose of the cases like Rashid or other missing people," he said.

Hashmat Ali Habib is saying the government can remove the trail of the people it disappears by claiming they were killed by an American missile strike in the mountainous wild-lands. The Americans routinely refuse to confirm or deny reports that they are attacking inside Pakistan. So who's to know?

As the Guardian noted,

Rauf's death had been revealed by unnamed Pakistani intelligence agents, the usual source of information ...

Unnamed Pakistani intelligence agents are the usual source of information? Yes, indeed. How fortunate we are to have such a responsible and independent press!

For an overview of what I think is going on in this case, please see my piece from January, 2008: "Inadequate Deception: The Impossible Plots Of The Terror War".

~~~

thirty-eighth in a series

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Reports From Pakistan Say Rashid Rauf Has Been Killed In A US Airstrike

Pakistan's The News reports:

PESHAWAR: Al-Qaeda’s operatives Rashid Rauf and Abu Al-Asr Al Misri have been reportedly killed in suspected U.S. missiles strikes in North Waziristan on Saturday.

A U.S. spy plane fired two missiles early Saturday at the house of one Khaliq Noor in Alikhel area of North Waziristan, killing five people, including three foreigners, and injuring six others.

The attack came just two days after Pakistan lodged a strong protest with the U.S. ambassador over missile attacks on its territory.

The BBC reports it this way:

A fugitive British militant seen as a key link between al-Qaeda and a UK plot to blow up transatlantic airliners has been killed in Pakistan, reports say.

Pakistani media said Rashid Rauf, born in Birmingham, was killed in the strike in North-West Frontier Province.

Mr Rauf, on the run after escaping from a Pakistani jail, was considered a key planner in the 2006 liquid bomb plot.

Three men were convicted in the UK in September 2008 of conspiracy to murder, although several others were acquitted.

Crucially, no one was convicted of plotting to blow up airplanes.

That was the core charge; that was the crux of the case; that was the reason for all the airport security. British authorities, unwilling to allow their massive lies about this "plot" to remain exposed as such, plan to re-try the suspects, in a second bid to obtain their preferred verdict: "guilty as charged".

Several Pakistani TV channels reported that Mr Rauf was among five people killed by a suspected US missile strike in the country's remote north-western region.

Taleban fighters and al-Qaeda militants use the mountainous tribal areas along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan as a safe haven for training and resupply.

The US regularly uses pilotless drones to attack militant targets in the region, a tactic that has caused growing resentment among Pakistan's leaders.

Killing a suspected terrorist with a drone is a lot sexier than seeing him get killed in a bus crash. Bravo!

When the alleged "liquid bombers" get their next "fair trial", their alleged al Qaeda contact still won't be there to testify.

The British authorities must be breathing a huge sigh of relief.

Another cutout has just been cut out; the trail just got a little bit colder; the perpetrators just got a little safer.

Oh well.

~~~

thirty-seventh in a series

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Double False Flags, Shifting Sands: Warrior Nominated For Peace Prize

If you dig into modern terrorism for a while, you will eventually begin to notice two different trends that are almost always happening simultaneously.

Often they are happening so subtly that if you keep digging for a while longer you can almost stop noticing them, as they become part of the background noise.

But you never quite get used to that noise, and sometimes it makes itself evident in jarring ways, as it has done recently for me.

Double False Flag Terror

One of these two subtle trends might be called "double false flagging". In a "single" false flag attack, the real perpetrators are disguised as somebody else. The object is to frame an enemy. This trick is as old as the hills.

The modern twist on the old trick calls for disguising both the perpetrators and victims. And we've seen quite a bit of it in our lifetimes -- almost enough to take it for granted.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, involved very specific and heavily symbolic targets: the World Trade Center and the Pentagon stood for American economic and military dominance over the world, and many Americans were proud to say so.

When they were attacked, it would have been easy to conclude that the attacks had targeted American global dominance and two very visible symbols thereof. But instead we were told incessantly that it was the civilized world itself that had been attacked. Did you believe that?

Whoever "gets to be the victim" of a terrorist attack can use the emotional power of the event for good (theoretically) or ill (as it always seems to happen). I've used quotes around the phrase "gets to be the victim" because, as we all know (or would know if we were thinking), the actual victims of actual terrorist attacks are already dead.

9/11 is a classic case of a double-lie about victims and perpetrators, as people who falsely call themselves the victims wage a seemingly endless war against other people whom they falsely call the perpetrators. How can this happen? When the "news" media are onside with the double-lie, the truth barely has a chance.

Last October 18th, a bomb blast (or two) ripped through a political procession in Karachi, Pakistan, killing more than 130 people. The leader of the procession, Benazir Bhutto, was not injured in the attack -- due to either a remarkable string of coincidences or (dare we say it?) foreknowledge.

I blogged extensively about this attack, and noted many very strange details. But one of the things that struck me most powerfully was the fact that within days, the uninjured Bhutto was referring to herself as the victim of the attack.

In fact, most of the victims had been members of her human shield, and they'd been paid (four pounds a day) to be there.

We saw another example of this cynical ploy last weekend after the Marriott Hotel bombing in Islamabad.

Barack Obama showed unsurpassed skill at "getting to be the victim" when he said:

"Today’s attack demonstrates the grave and urgent threat that al Qaeda and its affiliates pose to the United States, to Pakistan, and to the security of all nations."

A bomb goes off in front of a hotel and that demonstrates "a grave and urgent threat" to "the security of all nations"?

He's good, isn't he? Scary good.

In the "good old days" of 9/11, only the civilized world was under attack. Now it's all nations, civilized or not. In Obama's world, we all get to be the victims. He's a uniter, not a divider. Barack Obama wants to embroil everyone in the morass...

Well, it turned out that al Qaeda didn't claim responsibility for the Marriott bombing, and another -- totally unknown -- group did. That group didn't have any terrorist history or any obvious affiliation with al Qaeda, but Obama's statement still stands, doesn't it? We're all under grave and imminent threat from ... whoever did it ... aren't we?

The Shifting Sands Of Time

The other parallel and complementary trend, which I call "the shifting sands of time", concerns the way that changes are made to the official stories of major terror attacks. The original story is almost always found wanting and replaced with another one, which turns out to be ludicrous and is replaced, and so on ... but nobody ever seems to draw the logical conclusion from all these changes.

That's not quite true, of course, because some people do notice the shifting stories. But the people who notice the shifts and talk about them are all but barred from public discourse. I've been watching this trend all my life.

In 1963, when JFK was assassinated, we were told the assassin was behind the president and that Kennedy has been shot in the front of the neck. But then people started asking the logical question: How could the president have been shot in the front, from behind?

The New York Times came along with a ready-made explanation: He was turning to wave to someone behind him when he was shot. Fair enough -- or not really?

Not really. JFK had been injured in World War II and he wore a heavy back brace. He could never have turned around and waved to the rear while sitting in a car seat. Or could he?

No, he couldn't! And the Zapruder film showed him being shot while facing forward. Oops! Now the sands had to shift again. The entrance wound in the President's neck became an exit wound, and the NYT's explanation was revealed as a flat-out lie. So that lie was buried under the shifting sands, and the nation moved on... Or did it?

Most did, but not all. One of the people who didn't was a New York attorney named Mark Lane. He made a collection of news clippings, such as the NYT piece I've mentioned, which showed just how much the sands in this case had been shifting ever since the President was shot. And Lane started doing public presentations based on his research.

Eventually he published a book, "Rush To Judgment", which devastated the official story. And for his efforts, his research, his presentations, and his book, Mark Lane was called a kook, a crank, an egomaniac, and a madman. The national "news" media poured scorn on him for years, and even many so-called "JFK researchers" joined in the character abuse -- none of which changed the fact that Mark Lane was right. JFK wasn't shot in the front from behind. He was shot in the front from the front.

The case of Rashid Rauf, the alleged ringleader of the so-called Liquid Bombers, provides another fine example of shifting sands. In August of 2006, when the Liquid Bombers were arrested, we were told that Rauf's arrest in Pakistan had triggered all the arrests in England which followed. But we didn't know much about Rashid Rauf himself.

At the time, furious Googling turned up his home page, and not much else about him. I can recall being frustrated about the scarcity of information, and I started paying close attention, watching for his name to appear on the net. In the past two years I have mirrored more than 300 newspaper articles about Rashid Rauf at my "other" blog, Winter Parking, and I've read more blog posts mentioning his name than I can count.

I've also written more than 30 extensively detailed articles about the plot and the aftermath of the arrests.

"So what?" you may say. And maybe it doesn't matter. But I'm very rarely surprised by anything I read about this man, or about this case -- unless it's false.

And one day I found a post at Long War Journal which called Rashid Rauf an "al Qaeda commander". I had never seen him described as such, so I did some more Googling and found two articles in which it was hinted that perhaps Rashid Rauf had met an al Qaeda commander. But nothing more substantial -- and it's a far cry from allegedly perhaps meeting an al Qaeda commander to becoming one yourself, so I revisited that post and left a comment.

My comment said: "How do you know that Rashid Rauf is an al Qaeda commander?" And I was pleasantly surprised that it was published without any delay for moderation. I was even hoping to learn something from the response. So I stopped by again the next day, and found that my comment had been deleted.

In my opinion, this is how we know whether or not Rashid Rauf is really an al Qaeda commander. It's also a reminder: inquiring minds are very dangerous to the shifters of sand, especially if they're connected to functional memory banks.

All Together, Now

When you see the shifting sands and the double false flags together, you know something special's going on. And that brings us back to Islamabad, where one of the questions that's been in the air lately runs: "Why was the Marriott Hotel attacked?"

Immediately after the attack, Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik produced a fine combination of being the victim and shifting the sands, when he told the media the reason the terrorists had chosen the Marriott was because they were trying to kill the leaders of the government, who had planned to eat together at the hotel that evening.

But instead they'd decided to dine at the Prime Minister's residence, said Malik, in a manner which one scribe reported as sounding "as if they'd saved the entire country".

Given this background, it might have been embarrassing for Rehman Malik when the owner of the Marriott Hotel told the press he knew of no plans for the government leaders to visit his hotel on the fatal evening.

Can you imagine hundreds of the country's most important politicians planning to arrive together at a hotel for dinner, without giving the management advance notice? How could that happen? It wouldn't.

Instead, the sands needed to be shifted again. And on Wednesday the International Human Rights Commission nominated Rehman Malik for an International Peace Award for his role in the "War against Terrorism".

Rehman Malik is now in a magical realm, where he gets to be both "the victim" and "the hero".

According to Dawn,

The award is recognition of the services rendered by Rehman Malik in the area of fighting war against terrorism and extremism and for achieving the lasting peace in the country, strengthening the democratic institution after the establishment of newly elected government under the leadership of President Asif Ali Zardari.

Lasting peace? That's a bad joke. The war against militants in the mountains has already produced scores of thousands of refugees, and now "analysts" are saying they "fear" Pakistan may descend into civil war.

We shall soon see how much lasting peace Rehman Malik and his colleagues have brought to Pakistan. I will be surprised if there is any.

But what else can we expect, when warriors are getting nominated for peace prizes?

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British Papers Paid Hundreds Of Thousands To Families Of Alleged Liquid Bombers: Why?

[Updated below]

Mistakes were made when the so-called "Liquid Bombers" were arrested, and in two instances, British national dailies reported information which turned out to be false. These false reports led to claims of defamation which have cost the publishers hundreds of thousands to settle out of court.

In the first instance, it was reported that a British man had been arrested, held overnight, and released without charges. But later a consortium of newspapers published an apology saying he had never been arrested at all, and they paid £170,000 (about $330,000) to settle a claim filed on his behalf.

The second instance concerned a man about whom many different reports were published. Thus it was variously reported that he had been arrested or detained for questioning, in Britain or in Pakistan. But later a group of newspapers apologized, saying that he had not been arrested or detained or even questioned by any police, anywhere. Again a substantial settlement was paid, but in this instance the amount was not disclosed.

When these stories came out, we didn't know very much about the people involved in the settlements. But now, thanks to the trial of the British suspects, we know a bit more.

The £170,000 settlement was paid to Amjad Sarwar. His brother, Assad Sarwar [top photo], has been described as the gang's "quartermaster" and appears to have been the intended bomb-maker.

Assad Sarwar, according to the British prosecutors, bought the bomb-making chemicals and the glassware, was responsible for experimenting with hydrogen peroxide, and held the martyrdom videos made by the other alleged plotters, although he hadn't made one himself. According to the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, prosecutors told the court that "Assad did not intend to die himself." He had other, bigger, plans.

The undisclosed settlement was paid to Abdul Rauf. His son, Rashid Rauf [second photo], who was arrested in Pakistan, was the alleged al Qaeda connection to the alleged plot. But Rashid Rauf has played no role in the trial, because he's missing. He supposedly slipped away from a police escort last December while on his way to a court appearance. And he hasn't been seen since, although five policemen were arrested after his "escape" and nine have been sacked in its wake.

Where would the "Liquid Bomb" plot be without Rashid Rauf and Assad Sarwar? There would be no al Qaeda connection, no bomb-making expert, no bomb-making chemicals, nothing! So these are bad guys of the highest order: indispensable bad guys who allegedly meant us great harm. Therefore it makes some sense to ask a few impertinent questions, such as:

Why have the British press paid their families hundreds of thousands of pounds? We're told it's because they printed some erroneous information; but is this true?

If it is, where did the erroneous information come from? Nobody's saying; so I'm asking: Where do you think it came from?

Let's put it this way: If you were a reporter and the police told you they had arrested Jim Bim, would you believe them? If anyone else told you Jim Bim had been arrested, would you believe them? Or would you check it out first? And with whom would you check it out? You see what I mean?

Or to come at it another way: A few days ago in Pakistan, a police superintendent told a press conference that police had raided a residence where Rashid Rauf supposedly lives, but the suspect had fled before they arrived. He says they'll try again.

But meanwhile a Pakistani journalist has reported that Rashid Rauf's name doesn't even appear on the government's list of terrorists they're looking for. So it might be a while before the police pay another visit to Rashid Rauf's place.

On the other hand, his father can probably afford to visit him -- wherever he is.

As for Amjad Sarwar and his brother Assad, we'll just have to see what happens in the trial, won't we? The jury are nearing the end of their two-week holiday, and perhaps a verdict is imminent ... or perhaps not ... as the Terror War gets weirder and weirder ... but I digress.

What has gone on here with this bad reporting and these out-of-court settlements?

You don't suppose the sponsors are paying off the families of the cutouts, do you?

If that were the case, it would make perfect sense that they'd be doing it with somebody else's money, wouldn't it?

It would also make perfect sense to see these little episodes as messages from the sponsors of the plot to the big British media. Under such a scenario, the message would say, "We can cost you hundreds of thousands of pounds anytime we like." And the effect would be somewhat chilling, would it not?

These are difficult questions, aren't they? Because who else but the police could plant erroneous information of this sort on the media? And who else would the media protect, having been deceived not once but twice?

If this is an unsettling line of thought, then perhaps we should consider the alternative.

What if the originally published reports were correct, and the apologies and "corrections" were bogus?

That doesn't help much, does it?

~~~

[UPDATE] Here's a bit more detail on the papers involved, prompted by a great question from James at Winter Patriot dot com. James asked whether the Telegraph was one of the papers involved, and the answer is:

The papers that paid Amjad Sarwar £170,000 were:

the Guardian,
the Observer,
the News of the World,
the Mirror,
the Daily Mail,
the Mail on Sunday,
the Evening Standard,
the Independent,
the Times,
the Daily Express, and
the Daily Star.

And the papers that paid an undisclosed amount to Abdul Rauf were three national dailies:

the Guardian,
the Daily Mail,
the Times,

and three local papers (all owned by Trinity Mirror):

the Birmingham Mail,
the Birmingham Post, and
the Sunday Mercury.

Three papers were involved in both instances: the Guardian, the Times, and the Daily Mail. All three have been relatively critical of Bush and his war. The Telegraph has been embarrassingly supportive of Bush and his war ... and it wasn't involved either time.

What does this tell us?

~~~

thirty-fifth in a series

Why Pervez Musharraf Can't Tolerate Questions About Rashid Rauf

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, in Europe last week for a Schmooze Cruise on behalf of himself and the GWOT, was asked a very simple question about a very complex and dangerous subject -- and promptly blew a gasket!

From David Blair, Diplomatic Editor of The Telegraph : President Pervez Musharraf's many faces

Whatever you might think of President Pervez Musharraf, you have to admit he’s a good performer. Whenever I have seen him deliver a speech or stage a press conference, I have been struck by his self confidence and easy, jocular manner.

But very occasionally, the mask slips. I have just come from the Royal United Services Institute on Whitehall, where Musharraf was speaking earlier this afternoon. For almost the entire occasion, he was his usual charming self.

Then a Pakistani journalist, Mohammed Ziauddin, asked a perfectly reasonable question about how a prominent suspected terrorist, Rashid Rauf, had somehow escaped the custody of Musharraf’s security forces.

As soon as Ziauddin, the Islamabad editor of Dawn, a Pakistani daily, rose to ask his question, Musharraf visibly bristled.

Instantly, his demeanour changed from being relaxed and confident to tense and hostile.

Musharraf promptly accused Ziauddin of “casting aspersions” and “undermining our forces and your own country”. In a brief but furious tirade, he questioned Ziauddin’s patriotism and professionalism.

It doesn't seem like such an outrageous question, considering that it's been less than two weeks since nine Pakistani policemen were sacked for their alleged complicity in the "escape" of the supposed "mastermind" of the so-called "Liquid Bombers".

The Pakistani daily Dawn, still under heavy government restrictions, reported it this way: Foreign troops must not enter Pakistan, says Musharraf

He was seemingly rattled when Dawn asked for his comments on suggestions that Pakistan’s ability to safeguard its nuclear assets and conduct a competent inquiry into Benazir Bhutto’s assassination came under suspicion when suspected terrorists like Rashid Rauf give the slip to Pakistani police and escaped.

He said: “It is people like you that cast such aspersions and then such aspersions get around and are picked up by the foreign media.”

He said he believed in human rights and freedom of the press, but implied that he would not permit people to attack police or the press to promote violence.

Pakistan Politics noted the outburst this way: Musharraf Insults Journalist

Musharraf lost temper and bashed Dawn UK correspondent Ziauddin on the question of escaping of Rashid Rauf from the hands of law enforcement agencies.

Later while addressing Pakistani community in Hilton, Musharraf further expressed his anger on the Journalist.

Armed And Stupid has an audio clip: Musharraf Loses It

Listen to this audio from a Musharraf speech where he blasts Dawn News correspondent Ziauddin for questioning the official version of Rashid Rauf's escape from prison. He ends by asking the audience to confront such unpatriotic elements and "agar us ko do teen tika bhi dain to acha hai" (if you slap him around two or three times that would be good)

Sure, slap him around two or three times. That would be excellent!

Pak1stanfirst dot com has a different take on it: Will Pakistani Journalists Ever Learn, National Interest?

In a room full of international audience where international journalists where trying to undermine Pakistan’s interest and its capacities (being misinformed?), A Pakistani Journalist asked the most illogical and in efficient question he could ask bearing the responsibility of being the only Pakistani Journalist present on the occasion.

He connected the run away of Rashid Rauf a militant suspect of British Nationality from Rawalpindi police, with Pakistan Army and Intelligence agencies. In Ziaudin’s own (Listen here) words this question was already answered by President in Pakistan.

In some opinions, The President made him an example so that when ever any body asks what is National interest, he could refer to.

Ziaudin claims in an interview to BBCurdu that he has asked more tougher and difficult questions from President and President has never replied in such way and this answer was not anticipated at all. While giving this interview he claims that connecting Rawalpindi police with Pakistan Army and Intelligence and safe guard of Pakistan ’s nuclear assets is logical. Failing again to recognize what a 40 years experienced Pakistani journalists is suppose to do when foreign media is trying to undermine Pakistani Interest.

While understanding the intention of this gentleman expressed in the same interview to BBCurdu, it could be recommended that another question might have done the job, e.g. How Pakistani Police managed to Capture more than 684 (approx) international wanted terrorist. Out of these almost 16 are found connected with Benazir Bhutto assassination.

President on another occasion, in a lighter tone, talks about the journalist (Listen here).

Keeping National Interest First!

Yes, indeed! Let's keep the national interest first, second, and third, and the truth be damned!

Truth?

What's the truth?

It's nothing like what David Blair, Diplomatic Editor of The Telegraph, implies:

This disgraceful response to an entirely reasonable query spoke volumes about Musharraf. He will question the patriotism of any Pakistani critic – betraying his essential intolerance of dissent.

I wonder whether Musharraf would have responded with such rage had a British journalist asked precisely the same question?

I suspect he would have answered firmly but politely. Musharraf treats his fellow Pakistanis with contempt while oozing charm for the benefit of foreigners.

No, David. It wasn't the source. It was the question! Nobody in the mainstream media gets this. But it's not surprising, because the essential truth about Rashid Rauf and the alleged plot with which he was allegedly connected has been hidden by (and from) the very same media.

The plot was impossible. There was never any threat. The story bears all the signs of a Terror Game and if the truth about it ever comes out, it could ruin everything: not just Musharraf's government in Pakistan but the British and American governments as well as the entire bogus Global War On Terror.

Are you ready for some of that truth? It's all in plain sight:

Inadequate Deception: The Impossible Plots Of The Terror War

UPDATE: Now come the threats!

Journalists stage protest rally against threat calls given to Zia ud Din

ISLAMABAD: Hundreds of journalists and civil societies members of twin cities staged a protest rally outside the Islamabad Press Club against threats given to Senior Journalist Ziauddin by President Musharraf in London.

The participants of the rally were holding banners and placards inscribed with anti-government and anti Musharraf slogans.

They also chanted pitched slogans and strongly condemned the mistreatment of President with Zia ud Din in London.

On the occasion, renowned journalists and Anchor person of Geo TV’s programme "Capital Talk", Hamid Mir while addressing the rally said that today’s protest rally has been organized in connection with the threats calls given to the Zia ud Din.

Hamid Mir accused that President uttered the name of Zia ud Din twice in London and call him in bad words. Furthermore, during the press conference Zia ud Din raised question that how President Musharraf could talk about improving the image of Pakistan when a high profile convict Rashid Rauf escaped right from under the nose of law enforcing agencies. Upon this the president got infuriated and said that people like you want to destroy the country for their own vested interests.

The aides of President present on the occasion also demanded from the President to cancel the nationality of Zia ud Din.

Hamid Mir said President Musharraf by meeting out such treatment to a senior journalist proved how he wants to treat the media. This proves, he added, that President Musharraf is behind every atrocity that has been committed against Journalists.

He said that today we announce that if anything ever happens to any journalist than only President Musharraf would be responsible for that.

President RIUJ, Afzal Butt in his address also strongly condemned this act of President. He said that it is common practice that when a minister threatens senior journalist blatantly then intelligence agencies make the life of that journalists and his whole family miserable.

Senior Voice President RIUJ also strongly condemned the incident on behalf of the South Asian Free Media Association (SAFMA).

~~~

thirty-third in a series