American who killed two in Pakistan was CIA spy

In Karachi, scores of demonstrators call for the execution of Raymond Davis, the US consulate employee who has been jailed in Lahore for killing two Pakistanis Link to this video

The American who shot dead two men in Lahore, triggering a diplomatic crisis between Pakistan and the US, is a CIA agent who was on assignment at the time.

Raymond Davis has been the subject of widespread speculation since he opened fire with a semi-automatic Glock pistol on the two men who had pulled up in front of his car at a red light on 25 January.

Pakistani authorities charged him with murder, but the Obama administration has insisted he is an "administrative and technical official" attached to its Lahore consulate and has diplomatic immunity.

Based on interviews in the US and Pakistan, the Guardian can confirm that the 36-year-old former special forces soldier is employed by the CIA. "It's beyond a shadow of a doubt," said a senior Pakistani intelligence official. The revelation may complicate American efforts to free Davis, who insists he was acting in self-defence against a pair of suspected robbers, who were both carrying guns.

Pakistani prosecutors accuse the spy of excessive force, saying he fired 10 shots and got out of his car to shoot one man twice in the back as he fled. The man's body was found 30 feet from his motorbike.

"It went way beyond what we define as self-defence. It was not commensurate with the threat," a senior police official involved in the case told the Guardian.

The Pakistani government is aware of Davis's CIA status yet has kept quiet in the face of immense American pressure to free him under the Vienna convention. Last week President Barack Obama described Davis as "our diplomat" and dispatched his chief diplomatic troubleshooter, Senator John Kerry, to Islamabad. Kerry returned home empty-handed.

Many Pakistanis are outraged at the idea of an armed American rampaging through their second-largest city. Analysts have warned of Egyptian-style protests if Davis is released. The government, fearful of a backlash, says it needs until 14 March to decide whether Davis enjoys immunity.

A third man was crushed by an American vehicle as it rushed to Davis's aid. Pakistani officials believe its occupants were CIA because they came from the house where Davis lived and were armed.

The US refused Pakistani demands to interrogate the two men and on Sunday a senior Pakistani intelligence official said they had left the country. "They have flown the coop, they are already in America," he said.

ABC News reported that the men had the same diplomatic visas as Davis. It is not unusual for US intelligence officers, like their counterparts round the world, to carry diplomatic passports.

The US has accused Pakistan of illegally detaining him and riding roughshod over international treaties. Angry politicians have proposed slashing Islamabad's $1.5bn (£900m) annual aid.

But Washington's case is hobbled by its resounding silence on Davis's role. He served in the US special forces for 10 years before leaving in 2003 to become a security contractor. A senior Pakistani official said he believed Davis had worked with Xe, the firm formerly known as Blackwater.

Pakistani suspicions about Davis's role were stoked by the equipment police confiscated from his car: an unlicensed pistol, a long-range radio, a GPS device, an infrared torch and a camera with pictures of buildings around Lahore.

"This is not the work of a diplomat. He was doing espionage and surveillance activities," said the Punjab law minister, Rana Sanaullah, adding he had "confirmation" that Davis was a CIA employee.

A number of US media outlets learned about Davis's CIA role but have kept it under wraps at the request of the Obama administration. A Colorado television station, 9NEWS, made a connection after speaking to Davis's wife. She referred its inquiries to a number in Washington which turned out to be the CIA. The station removed the CIA reference from its website at the request of the US government.

Some reports, quoting Pakistani intelligence officials, have suggested that the men Davis killed, Faizan Haider, 21, and Muhammad Faheem, 19, were agents of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency (ISI) and had orders to shadow Davis because he crossed a "red line".

A senior police official confirmed US claims that the men were petty thieves – investigators found stolen mobiles, foreign currency and weapons on them – but did not rule out an intelligence link.

A senior ISI official denied the dead men worked for the spy agency but admitted the CIA relationship had been damaged. "We are a sovereign country and if they want to work with us, they need to develop a trusting relationship on the basis of equality. Being arrogant and demanding is not the way to do it," he said.

Tensions between the spy agencies have been growing. The CIA Islamabad station chief was forced to leave in December after being named in a civil lawsuit. The ISI was angered when its chief, General Shuja Pasha, was named in a New York lawsuit related to the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

Although the two spy services co-operate in the CIA's drone campaign along the Afghan border, there has not been a drone strike since 23 January – the longest lull since June 2009. Experts are unsure whether both events are linked.

Davis awaits his fate in Kot Lakhpat jail in Lahore. Pakistani officials say they have taken exceptional measures to ensure his safety, including ringing the prison with paramilitary Punjab Rangers. The law minister, Sanaullah, said Davis was in a "high security zone" and was receiving food from visitors from the US consulate.

Sanaullah said 140 foreigners were in the facility, many on drug charges. Press reports have speculated that the authorities worry the US could try to spring Davis in a "Hollywood-style sting". "All measures for his security have been taken," said the ISI official. "He's as safe as can be." By Guardian

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Cultural plunder

By Peter Thonemann


ARE you keen to help finance the activities of warlords and insurgents across Afghanistan?
As I write, eBay is inviting bids on no fewer than 128 ancient Bactrian and Indo-Greek silver and bronze coins, from sellers in Pakistan, Singapore, Thailand and the United States.
Probably every one of them is the product of looting over the past 20 years. With luck, you might even pick up one of the tens of thousands of items plundered from the collections of the old National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul between 1992 and 2001.
For those with deep pockets, I can particularly recommend the eBay seller “The Precious Art from Past”, who is currently offering 289 looted AfPak objects for sale, including an extraordinary ancient Gandharan sculpture of a seated Heracles in near-perfect condition, yours for GBP18,950 plus postage and packing.
Such are the hazards of liv ing at a “crossroads of civilisations”. It must be said that this kind of briskly utilitarian attitude towards Afghanistan’s pre-Islamic heritage is nothing new. In 1999, the leader of the Taliban government, Mullah Omar, issued a decree forbidding any damage to the monumental Buddhas of Bamiyan, on the grounds that the Taliban considered the Bamiyan statues “as an example of a potential major source of income for Afghanistan from international visitors”.
Aside from their potential economic value, no obvious benefits derived from the existence of the Bamiyan Buddhas: as Omar rightly noted “In Afghanistan there are no Buddhists to worship the statues.” Why should a Pashtun Muslim feel any sense of responsibility for the culture of Gandharan Buddhists? Dozens of times over the past 3,000 years, the plains and valleys around the foothills of the Hindu Kush have changed hands between Iranians, Greeks, Chinese, Scythians, Turks and Indians. An oft-photographed plaque outside the National Museum in Kabul reads: “A Nation Stays Alive When Its Culture Stays Alive”. No one should be taken in by the bland phrasing — this is as provocative as it gets. Which culture? Whose nation?
In March 2001, Omar gave one answer, by revoking his decision of two years earlier and ordering the dynamiting of the Bamiyan Buddhas. Simultaneously, most of the few remaining pre-Islamic objects in the Kabul museum were also smashed or sold off. It would be quite wrong to see the events of March 2001 as merely an act of barbarous vandalism (though they certainly were that too).
They also represented a particular claim about which bits of Afghanistan’s history were worth preserving: for the Taliban, the only “national culture” that mattered was the one that began in AD622.
For an alternative account of Afghanistan’s bloody history — one, as it were, with the Buddhists left in — we can look to a spectacular exhibition which opens at the British Museum next month. Neil MacGregor, director of the museum, hopes to show that “We are at a historically anomalous moment when the country is seen as remote and isolated . . . Afghanistan’s relationships are long and deep.” At the heart of the exhibition is the miracle of Tillya Tepe, the “hill of gold”, a huge earthen barrow 80 miles west of Mazar-i-Sharif, between the Hindu Kush mountains and the streams of the Amu Darya. Some time in the mid-first century AD, this mound was chosen by a nomadic prince as his burial kurghan.
The prince himself was interred at the peak of the hill, and a horse was sacrificed and buried alongside him. In a ring around the prince’s tomb were the graves of five women, probably his five wives, all of them clad in gorgeous textiles and jewellery of extraordinary splendour. ¦ — The Guardian, London

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The speech he needs to make-Pakistan

Mr Qureshi has not spoken about the alternative to dependence on the US.

By Syed Talat Hussain LAST week, former foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi displayed a fine response to the call of his conscience. Speaking one’s mind is a rarity in a system that thrives on secrecy and subservience.Since then Mr Qureshi has reaped a rich harvest of public praise of the sort he was denied when he was in charge of the country’s foreign affairs. Then, despite having a massive PR machinery at his disposal and the ability to command the direction of the cameras, he was a marginal man in terms of public popularity on a national scale. Now parallels are being drawn between Mr Qureshi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the country’s late charismatic prime minister, whose sizzling rhetoric on foreign affairs was as popular as the commanding heights of his understanding of world politics. Mr Qureshi should find such comparisons flattering. But this is where the matter should end. One press conference, no matter how passionate and energising, does not make a national leader. Without taking anything away from Mr Qureshi, who so far has stayed clear of the pond of corruption that some of his colleagues have been happily diving in, he has not articulated a new vision for the country’s foreign policy, much less shown how to redefine Pakistan’s strategic ties with the US. The fantastic talk of national honour and walking with one’s head held high is heartwarming, but falls hopelessly short of a new world view. Let alone that, it does not even constitute an honest answer to the fundamental question as to where Pakistan has gone wrong in its engagement with Washington. The Raymond Davis case, on which Mr Qureshi has struck a politically suicidal but personally redeeming note, is symbolic of the broader context in which Pakistan has chosen to ally itself with Washington. Davis is not the problem, but a gross symptom of the problem that can be called harsh TORs (terms of reference) within which Islamabad finds itself in dealing with the US. These TORs, restrictive of the country’s sovereignty and debilitating for its dignity, are wrapped in secrecy and sealed with silence. No one dares to open up on them. They have spawned an underground of operators like Davis who have unfettered territory for murderous operations in Pakistan until such time, of course, when they blow their own cover and get caught, literally in his case, with a smoking gun. How exactly has this underworld come about and how vast and widespread it is are queries on which the out-ofcabinet, out-in-the-cold former foreign minister could have informed the people of Pakistan, but chose not to. In fact, all bets are that he would never do that. Haloed pirs never rock the boat. Unassuming fakirs do. Mr Qureshi is not going to upstage his goodwill with Washington’s powerbrokers by crossing the fine line that divides US friends from foes, which, these days, includes ev eryone who dares ask an even remotely probing question about the US role in Pakistan. Moreover, he himself has been an indefatigable defender of deepening the very type of ties with the US, whose one manifestation he now finds unbearable. (It is amazing that the procedural matter of disclosing Davis’s real status has become one that can both shape and destroy political careers. This can only happen in Pakistan.) Many of the challenges facing Pakistan in its relations with the US are mentioned in a detailed fashion in the Kerry Lugar Bill whose most energetic advocate was Mr Qureshi himself. When almost everyone expressed deep worries over the growing drone strikes and the unlimited access that US officials, from lowly counsellor to intelligence operatives, had to Pakistan’s entire leadership, Mr Qureshi did not raise the red flag. In fact on his watch Ms Hillary Clinton held a school headmistress-like briefing in the Foreign Office, complete with charts, chalk and coloured pencils on the great things that the US was doing for Pakistan. The visitor was allowed any number of opportunities to have dialogue with ‘the people of Pakistan’ — which comprised people the US embassy here handpicked — in what really was a brazen attempt at bypassing official channels to conduct US public diplomacy. These — there are many more — are concessions that Islamabad has made on every step of its way forward with the US in the last many years, and whose grimmest consequence is the present gridlock over Raymond Davis. Of course, in Mr Qureshi’s defence it can said that he was reflecting on a consensus that the Pakistani government had crafted on its dealings with the US and the policy that he endorsed was not reflective of his personal preferences. This would be largely true. However, in the absence of any re al information on what Mr Qureshi’s actual preferences are, one can be forgiven for believing that the margin of difference is rather slim in his personal and private choice of the type of relations Pakistan should have with the US. Mr Qureshi has spoken well, and with exquisite timing, which is ninth-tenth of politics. He has raised his profile and has added to his political stock. Now he needs to fill the gaping hole of information not about the status of Davis, but what in his view is the alternative to the present relationship of dependency Pakistan has developed with the US. Until we hear Mr Qureshi speak on that subject, his coronation as a possible king of hope in Pakistan must be held back. In a land of false messiahs and pretenders, such caution is called for. ¦ The writer is senior anchor at DawnNews.

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Anti-Americanism-Pakistan

“SHOCKING, unjustified anti-Americanism will not resolve [Pakistan’s] prob- lems,” said US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in New York on Friday. The fact is, however, that antiAmericanism in Pakistan is not at all shocking, and much of it is not unjustified. Ms Clinton’s remarks came as two Pakistanis were gunned down in broad daylight in Lahore traffic by an American whose work here remains a mystery. A third man was run over in the ensuing chaos when he was caught in the path of a speeding American consulate vehicle. That driver has disappeared, and the US has insisted on blanket diplomatic immunity for the gunman. This has not gone down well in Pakistan for obvious reasons. Questions linger about Raymond Davis’s work here, exacerbated by suspicions about the presence of American security contractors in Pakistan and the reputation such individuals developed in Iraq. Even his exact diplomatic or consular status remains unclear. In this context, the US stance has come across as an arrogant defence of a suspected murderer simply because he is American, and although a US congressional delegation’s visit here after her speech has helped ease tension on the issue, Ms Clinton would have done well to take that into account.
But this incident is simply one example of the dou ble standards that inflame anti-American sentiment among liberals and the right wing alike. Drone strikes arguably violate America’s concern for human rights. Support for the Zia and Musharraf regimes and the blind eye turned to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s hanging violated its constant call for democracy. And while American officials have expressed regret over abandoning the region after the war against the Soviets in the 1980s, memories of the variable American policy here over the last three decades will not go away easily. While it may be justified for America to safeguard its own interests, it should not be surprised at the anger of those who bear the brunt of the fallout.
This is not to say that Pakistan has had no role to play in fuelling anti-American views. Some elements of the state have promoted these for their own benefit, and arguably are doing so today by delaying a verdict on the question of Mr Davis’s immunity. Politicians, too, have exploited the sentiment for popularity, with little concern for the fact that by doing so they are feeding extremist views and squeezing the space for moderate voices in Pakistan. But what would take the teeth out of such efforts is a consistent, long-term American policy towards the region, one in line with the values the US upholds for itself.

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For greater transparency-Pakistan

In the old days, one could have expected a quiet behind-the-scenes deal between Islamabad and Washington to secure Davis’s release. Today, the context is altogether different.

By Moeed Yusuf-Dawn News


IN previous columns on Pakistan-US relations, I have often stressed the need for greater transparency in the partnership. Since 9/11, ties have been characterised by an active government-to-government relationship; very little of what happens behind closed doors is willingly brought out in the public domain.
The Raymond Davis episode is an interesting case study. It challenges the efficacy of how the two sides have chosen to conduct business.
The basis for the Pakistani and American governments choosing to keep this relationship opaque — the formulation, a deliberate one, lingers from the Musharraf-Bush era — was the belief that as long as the two governments continued to cooperate as agreed, they could achieve their objectives irrespective of the sentiment on the street. Taking the people on board was deemed unnecessary.
The Davis episode drives home the point that the formulation has outlived its utility. The framework has been upended by two developments: (i) the enhanced capacity and boldness of the Pakistani media to debate controversial issues, especially since their successful role in the lawyers’ movement; and (ii) the fact that Pakistan is now in a phase of messy coalitional politics.
In the old formulation, one could have expected a quiet behind-the-scenes deal between Islamabad and Washington to secure Davis’s release. Today, the context is altogether different. Within minutes of the shooting episode involving Davis, the media had picked up the story. All sorts of rumours about what had happened were being flashed. And before we knew it, the whole nature of the bilateral relationship had gotten tangled in the debate. The absence of credible information meant that even the most nefarious conclusions went unchallenged. Bottom line: within hours of the development, the opportunity for a quiet, tactical government-to-government deal had gone.
What has followed since is even more interesting.
The Pakistani media and street put forth a number of compelling questions. Given that officialdom is so used to opacity and providing piecemeal, inconse quential information, it continued to selfcontradict, without producing too many credible answers. The primary public conclusions are: Davis is a spook; if he is not a diplomat, he does not enjoy immunity and should be taken to task; and if he is a diplomat, this proves the already pervasive sense that many Americans in Pakistan are clandestine operatives. A disaster all round from the perspective of a sustained partnership! How does transparency fit in?
At the tactical level, if Davis has immunity, the paperwork should be produced in the open and the matter laid to rest. And if he does not, then in the interest of sustaining credible ties, both sides should answer the many questions floating around in Pakistan about why Davis was there, who authorised it, who did he actually shoot? And even more important would be transparency at the policy level: is Davis representative of American presence in Pakistan (as conspiracy theo ries claim); how many American diplomats are in Pakistan; what are the facts about private contractor presence; what other concessions have been accorded (e.g. drones); what is the rationale for all decisions/concessions?
Only by coming clean on these broad policy questions can the two governments hope to begin challenging popular misconceptions. And yes, this may mean some embarrassment in the short run but that would be a function of their past attempts at holding back information. Going ahead, as long as the two governments can explain the rationale of their decisions to their people and show how, in their view, it is in the national interest, over time, citizens will begin to realise the compulsions of the two governments and the need for them to continue working together. Lack of information produces the opposite result; everything becomes a conspiracy theory.
The second dimension to the episode is political. As soon as the news broke, coalitional politics was in play — to Davis’s detriment. The PML-N sensed an opportunity to create a hype about the issue and got the street to amplify its populist stance, i.e. Davis’ fate should be decided by the courts in Pakistan. The right-wing parties soon chimed in. Left on its own, between a rock and a hard place, was the PPP government. Otherwise probably happy to let Raymond Davis go to appease the US, it quickly realised that doing so would be politically suicidal. This, and not Musharraf’s arbitrary decisions, however bold and efficient, is what the two sides will have to deal with in the times ahead.
Finally, the episode suggests just how ill-prepared the two governments are in conducting diplomacy if behind-thescenes dealing fails on an issue.
Diplomacy around Raymond Davis has descended into an open arm-twisting exercise. Washington upped the ante by demanding Davis’s immediate release and suggested that Pakistan was violating its international obligations. Important dialogues/meetings were cancelled.
The approach reflects a fundamental lack of understanding on how to work the Pakistani street — rule number one is that you never want to be seen as a bully by Pakistanis; the more the pressure, the less likely a favourable outcome.
The PPP government, on the other hand, is guilty of its customary mismanagement. Contradictory signals have emanated throughout, both for the Pakistani people and the US. To the people, the government wanted to test the waters by hinting that Davis may be granted immunity. The media never took the bait to begin with and then the strategy died a natural death when deposed foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi spilled the beans. To Washington, some ministers communicated that the job will be done while others requested that the government be given time. There was no answer to the counter-question from Washington: time for what?
To be sure, the Obama-Zardari context is fundamentally different than the BushMusharraf one. For this relationship to have any chance of long-term sustainability, policy decisions and mutually agreed choices will have to be much more transparent and better explained. Else, both sides would be better off giving up the pretence of trying to sustain ties over the long run — it simply won’t work. ¦ The writer is South Asia adviser at the US Institute of Peace, Washington, D.C.

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Obama Administration Supports Israeli Crimes in Occupied Territories

Obama’s First UN Veto: US to Stop Security Council Calling Israeli Settlements ‘Illegal’

Jason Ditz,
February 16, 2011
Antiwar Forum 

The Obama Administration is threatening to use its first ever UN Security Council veto this week when the Palestinian Authority moves forward with a non-binding resolution referring to the settlement construction in the Occupied Territories as “illegal.” 

The case for the illegality of conquering territory, depopulating it, and building government subsidized, religiously exclusive cities over the ruins does not appear to be in serious doubt over much of the world, but of course it is a topic of debate in Israel, and like any good topic of debate in Israel the most ignorant and hawkish position has become law of the land in the US, to the point that suggestions to the contrary are considered outrageous. 

Which has left the administration offering to support a watered-down draft calling the settlements “not legitimate” instead, but skirting the question of legality.

Of course neither resolution means much of anything in the long run,settlements will still be built and the US will still throw money at Israel as fast as the Federal Reserve can print it. The fact that the Obama Administration is willing to throw its “first veto” at something as frivolous as a dispute of the Geneva Conventions’ ban on settlements, however, seems troubling.

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Obama Warned Palestinians Of Repercussions if Abbas Goes to UN

By AFP

February 18, 2011 "AFP" -- RAMALLAH, Palestinian Territories --- US President Barack Obama warned the Palestinians of "repercussions" if they pushed for a UN Security Council vote against Jewish settlements, an official said on Friday.

"President Obama threatened on Thursday night to take measures against the Palestinian Authority if it insists on going to the Security Council to condemn Israeli settlement activity, and demand that it be stopped," a senior Palestinian official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Obama's remarks came during an hour-long telephone conversation between the two late on Thursday, in which the US leader tried to dissuade Abbas from supporting a UN Security Council vote due to take place later on Friday.

During the call, Obama told Abbas: "There will be repercussions for Palestinian-American relations if you continue your attempts to go to the Security Council and ignore our requests in this matter, especially as we suggested other alternatives."

He was referring to a package of incentives laid out earlier this week aimed at enticing the Palestinians to withdraw their support for the draft resolution on settlements which is being put before the Security Council.

After the Palestinians had rejected the initial offer, Obama rang Abbas late on Thursday to suggest that the Security Council issue a non-binding statement calling on Israel to implement a settlement freeze.

During the conversation, Abbas had rejected the offer, saying: "Stopping settlement activity is a Palestinian demand that will not be taken back because it was the reason the peace process fell apart," the official quoted him as saying.

"It was a decision taken by the Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian people are sticking to this demand."

It was not immediately clear at what stage in the phone call Obama had warned Abbas against rejecting the US overtures.

US-brokered peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians stalled in late 2010 after the expiry of a temporary freeze on Jewish settlement building in the West Bank.

Efforts by Washington to coax Israel into reimposing a freeze collapsed in December, and the Palestinians are refusing to continue negotiating while Israel builds on land they want for their promised state.

The United States, which regularly uses its Security Council veto power to stop anti-Israeli initiatives, is very keen to avoid the vote because it does not want to be forced to cast a veto.

Should it do so, it would be the first time the United States has used its veto power since Obama took office in January 2009.

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U.S. veto thwarts UN resolution condemning settlements 


Palestinian Authority leadership brought draft resolution against Israeli settlements to the UN security council, despite pressure from the U.S. to withdraw it.

By Shlomo Shamir, Natasha Mozgovaya, Barak Ravid

Haaretz 
Latest update 23:19 18.02.11

The United States on Friday voted against a United Nations Security Council draft resolution that would have condemned Israeli settlements as illegal. The veto by the U.S., a permanent council member, prevented the resolution from being adopted. (Editor: Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law and are patently immoral. It is outrageous that the United States stands alone in supporting Israel's crimes, a testiment to the power of the Zionist Lobby in America)

The other 14 Security Council members voted in favor of the draft resolution. But the U.S., as one of five permanent council members with the power to block any action by the Security Council, struck it down.

The resolution had nearly 120 co-sponsors, exclusively Arab and other non-aligned nations.

The Obama administration's veto is certain to anger Arab countries and Palestinian supporters around the world.

The U.S. opposes new Israeli settlements but says taking the issue to the UN will only complicate efforts to resume stalled negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians on a two-state solution.

Palestinians say continued settlement building flouts the internationally-backed peace plan that will permit them to create a viable, contiguous state on the land after a treaty with Israel to end its occupation and 62 years of conflict.

Israel says this is an excuse for avoiding peace talks and a precondition never demanded before during 17 years of negotiation, which has so far produced no agreement.

Hundreds of Palestinian protesters rallied in support of the UN vote on Friday near Ramallah displaying banners demanding: "Veto settlements. Vote justice".

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