Christopher Hitchens: From Abbottabad to Worse--OS

- OPEN SOURCE  US/1

Politics - July 2011

From Abbottabad to Worse

Hating the United States—which funds Islamabad’s army and nuclear program to the humiliating tune of $3 billion a year—Pakistan takes its twisted, cowardly revenge by harboring the likes of the late Osama bin Laden. But the hypocrisy is mutual, and the shame should be shared.

By Christopher Hitchens

Salman Rushdie’s upsettingly brilliant psycho-profile of Pakistan, in his 1983 novel, Shame, rightly laid emphasis on the crucial part played by sexual repression in the Islamic republic. And that was before the Talibanization of Afghanistan, and of much of Pakistan, too. Let me try to summarize and update the situation like this: Here is a society where rape is not a crime. It is a punishment. Women can be sentenced to be raped, by tribal and religious kangaroo courts, if even a rumor of their immodesty brings shame on their menfolk.

In such an obscenely distorted context, the counterpart term to shame—which is the noble word “honor”—becomes most commonly associated with the word “killing.” Moral courage consists of the willingness to butcher your own daughter.

If the most elemental of human instincts becomes warped in this bizarre manner, other morbid symptoms will disclose themselves as well. Thus, President Asif Ali Zardari cringes daily in front of the forces who openly murdered his wife, Benazir Bhutto, and who then contemptuously ordered the crime scene cleansed with fire hoses, as if to spit even on the pretense of an investigation. A man so lacking in pride—indeed lacking in manliness—will seek desperately to compensate in other ways.

Swelling his puny chest even more, he promises to resist the mighty United States, and to defend Pakistan’s holy “sovereignty.” This puffery and posing might perhaps possess a rag of credibility if he and his fellow middlemen were not avidly ingesting $3 billion worth of American subsidies every year.

There’s absolutely no mystery to the “Why do they hate us?” question, at least as it arises in Pakistan. They hate us because they owe us, and are dependent upon us. The two main symbols of Pakistan’s pride—its army and its nuclear program—are wholly parasitic on American indulgence and patronage. But, as I wrote for Vanity Fair in late 2001, in a long report from this degraded country, that army and those nukes are intended to be reserved for war against the neighboring democracy of India. Our bought-and-paid-for pretense that they have any other true purpose has led to a rancid, resentful official hypocrisy, and to a state policy of revenge, large and petty, on the big, rich, dumb Americans who foot the bill. If Pakistan were a character, it would resemble the one described by Alexander Pope in his Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot:

             FROM the VanityFAIR Archives:

• “Terrorism’s Dark Master” (Peter Bergen, November 2001)

• The Oral History of Osama bin Laden (Peter Bergen, January 2006)

• Osama bin Laden versus the world (Peter Bergen, January 2011)

• Pakistan: “On the Frontiers of Apocalypse” (Christopher Hitchens, January 2002)

• David Rose sifts through “The Osama Files” (January 2002)

Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike.
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike:
Alike reserved to blame, or to commend,
A timorous foe, and a suspicious friend …
So well-bred Spaniels civilly delight
In mumbling of the game they dare not bite.

There’s an old cliché in client-state relations, about the tail wagging the dog, but have we really considered what it means when we actually are the tail, and the dog is our goddam lapdog? The lapdog’s surreptitious revenge has consisted in the provision of kennels for attack dogs. Everybody knew that the Taliban was originally an instrument for Pakistani colonization of Afghanistan.

Everybody knew that al-Qaeda forces were being sheltered in the Pakistani frontier town of Quetta, and that Khalid Sheikh Muhammed was found hiding in Rawalpindi, the headquarters of the Pakistani Army. 

Bernard-Henri Lévy once even produced a damning time line showing that every Pakistani “capture” of a wanted jihadist had occurred the week immediately preceding a vote in Congress on subventions to the government in Islamabad. But not even I was cynical enough to believe that Osama bin Laden himself would be given a villa in a Pakistani garrison town on Islamabad’s periphery. I quote below from a letter written by my Pakistani friend Irfan Khawaja, a teacher of philosophy at Felician College, in New Jersey. He sent it to me in anguish just after bin Laden, who claimed to love death more than life, had met his presumably desired rendezvous:

I find, however, that I can’t quite share in the sense of jubilation. I never believed that bin Laden was living in some hideaway “in the tribal areas.” But to learn that he was living in Abbottabad, after Khalid Sheikh Muhammed was discovered in Rawalpindi, is really too much for me. I don’t feel jubilation. I feel a personal, ineradicable sense of betrayal. For ten years, I’ve watched members of my own family taking to the streets, protesting the US military presence in northern Pakistan and the drone strikes etc. They stood there and prattled on and on about “Pakistan’s sovereignty,” and the supposed invasion of it by US forces.

Well, what fucking sovereignty? What fucking sovereignty were these people “protecting”? It’s bad enough that the Pakistani army lacks sovereignty over the tribal area and can’t control it when the country’s own life depends upon it. But that bin Laden was living in the Pakistani equivalent of Annapolis, MD …

You will notice that Irfan is here registering genuine shame, in the sense of proper outrage and personal embarrassment, and not some vicarious parody of emotion where it is always others—usually powerless women—who are supposedly bringing the shame on you.

If the Pakistani authorities had admitted what they were doing, and claimed the right to offer safe haven to al-Qaeda and the Taliban on their own soil, then the boast of “sovereignty” might at least have had some grotesque validity to it. But they were too cowardly and duplicitous for that. And they also wanted to be paid, lavishly and regularly, for pretending to fight against those very forces. Has any state ever been, in the strict sense of the term, more shameless?

Over the years, I have written many pages about the sick relationship between the United States and various Third World client regimes, many of which turned out to be false friends as well as highly discreditable ones. General Pinochet, of Chile, had the unbelievable nerve to explode a car bomb in rush-hour traffic in Washington, D.C., in 1976, murdering a political rival and his American colleague. The South Vietnamese military junta made a private deal to sabotage the Paris peace talks in 1968, in order to benefit the electoral chances of Richard Nixon. Dirty money from the Shah of Iran and the Greek dictatorship made its way at different times into our electoral process.

[PLUS: Ferdinand Marcos, various Saudis, the Sultan of Brunei, the Indonesian Riady family, and the PEOPLES’ REPUBLIC of CHINA--to name but a few more.] 

Israeli religious extremists demand American protection and then denounce us for “interference” if we demur politely about colonization of the West Bank. But our blatant manipulation by Pakistan is the most diseased and rotten thing in which the United States has ever involved itself. And it is also, in the grossest way, a violation of our sovereignty. Pakistan routinely—by the dispatch of barely deniable death squads across its borders, to such locations as the Taj Hotel in Mumbai—injures the sovereignty of India as well as Afghanistan. But you might call that a traditional form of violation.

In our case, Pakistan ingratiatingly and silkily invites young Americans to one of the vilest and most dangerous regions on earth, there to fight and die as its allies, all the while sharpening a blade for their backs. “The smiler with the knife under the cloak,” as Chaucer phrased it so frigidly. (At our feet, and at our throat: Perfectly symbolic of the underhanded duality between the mercenary and the sycophant was the decision of the Pakistani intelligence services, in revenge for the Abbottabad raid, to disclose the name of the C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad.)


This is well beyond humiliation. It makes us a prisoner of the shame, and co-responsible for it. The United States was shamed when it became the Cold War armorer of the Ayub Khan dictatorship in the 1950s and 1960s. It was shamed even more when it supported General Yahya Khan’s mass murder in Bangladesh in 1971: a Muslim-on-Muslim genocide that crashingly demonstrated the utter failure of a state based on a single religion. We were then played for suckers by yet another military boss in the form of General Zia-ul-Haq, who leveraged anti-Communism in Afghanistan into a free pass for the acquisition of nuclear weapons and the open mockery of the nonproliferation treaty. 

[PLUS: Orchestrating the transfer of an advanced F-16 fighter and technology to CHINA.]

By the start of the millennium, Pakistan had become home to a Walmart of fissile material, traded as far away as Libya and North Korea by the state-subsidized nuclear entrepreneur A. Q. Khan, the country’s nearest approach (which in itself tells you something) to a national hero. Among the scientists working on the project were three named sympathizers of the Taliban. And that gigantic betrayal, too, was uncovered only by chance.

CONTINUE Reading FULL Article HERE...

....Why was the raid on Abbottabad so rightly called “daring”? Because it had to be conducted under the radar of the Pakistani Air Force, which “scrambled” its jets and would have brought the Black Hawks down if it could. That this is true is bad enough in all conscience. That we should still be submitting ourselves to lectures and admonitions from General Kayani is beyond shameful.

Read More http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/07/osama-bin-laden-201107?printable=true#ixzz1OT7iOMbV

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Former Haitian Dictator Taken Away by Police--OS
BlackNETIntelligence Channel- OPEN SOURCE

[ed.note: BlackVAULT - After tracking down Philippines Dictator Ferdinand MARCOS’ $2.1 Billion in stolen assets (including approximately $500 Million is stolen Central Bank gold) in 1986, FRONTLINE next sicked US/1 onto Baby Doc DUVALIER. Turned out the guy was piker compared to the master MARCOS. Yet BABY DOC probably caused more of his people, per capita, to be tortured or starved, than MARCOS (both pail, of course, in comparasion either overall or per capita, to Chairman MAO and Comrade STALIN).

US/1, your affiant, actually first took up the ‘cause’ of Haiti’s DUVALIER family and their legendary shadow henchmen, the always torturous TON TON MACOUTE--under both the father, PAPA DOC, and his successor/son—twenty years earlier, in the fall of 1966. His Arlington, VA fifth-grade elementary school class had formed-up a mock Organization of American States (OAS). The 10-year-old US/1 chose to become the mock-representive for Haiti—attracted, of course, to the fact that Haiti was said to still practice VOODOO, and was then (and still IS) the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

Chief educational benefit: US/1 gained an early mastery of the Machevellian ways of Roberts Rules of Order, and was able to usurp influence to Haiti’s benefit and to deny its deployment by the mock US-OAS Ambassador and the mock CUBAN Non-Member observer.

Now that’s how to learn international affairs—fast and furious.*

Members of Miss Nelson’s advanced-fifth-grade Mock-OAS class were rewarded for their efforts at the end of the school year--during the blossoming Spring of 1967--with a special road trip to the actual, ornate OAS Headquarters building, katty-conner across the Elipse from the White House. This rambunctious crew of 11-year-olds were the FIRST outsiders ever allowed into the chambers to actually occupy the council seats of their respective members states at the real OAS.

For one, brief, shinning moment--outside of their just and fear-inducing slave-revoltution of 1803--HAITI ruled…

_OAS+ *

And finally, by February 1986, the last of the Duvalier clan and WIFES had fled to FRANCE.

US/1 was dragged out of bed on this VOODOO deal only following the success (and soon-to-be Emmy Award-winning) 1987 FRONTLINE investigation of ‘In Search of the Marcos Millions’ ($2.1 Billion, actually). Only road trip, however, was upto NYC to uncover about $120 Million in cancelled checks paid to various secret overseas bank accounts. Some of the intial tracking had already been done by Nick PECK, then with security consulting giant, KROLL Associates, who had taken up the BABY DOC gauntlet on a pro-bono basis. US/1 also got to chat with Jonathan DEMME, the New York-based Hollywood director (Silence of the Lambs), who had just completed a rather artful documentary: ‘Haiti Dreams of Democracy.’

on Haiti.

But the best thing that came out of this eventually frustrated Haitian documentary effort, US/1 got to meet the 'fabulous G,’

otherwise known as Her Gness, who--under US/1’s ‘exquisite hindsight’ concept (i.e. being an admitted moron on possibly more than one occasion)--was probably the love of his sorry life…

Go figure.

* - Also see 15-year-old US/1’s 1972 ‘White Paper’ on the Pakistan/Bangaladesh/Indian conflagration, ATTACHED.]

The New York Times - January 18, 2011

Former Haitian Dictator Taken Away by Police

By GINGER THOMPSON

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Haitian police officers on Tuesday took away Jean-Claude Duvalier, the former dictator who abruptly returned to this country nearly 25 years after being forced from power, leading him out of the high-end hotel where he has been huddled since his arrival.

Surrounded by heavily armed police officers, Mr. Duvalier emerged from his room at noon in a blue suit and walked down three flights of stairs, never letting go of his companion’s hand as he waved to supporters chanting his name and calling him “president.”

“We are with you,” some supporters shouted as police officers led Mr. Duvalier out of the back of the hotel. With United Nations peacekeepers standing by, police officers put him and several of his associates into a waiting vehicle and drove off. Small clusters of his supporters outside the hotel cried “revolution.” Hunks of concrete were thrown into the convoy’s path.

It remained unclear whether Mr. Duvalier would be arrested or simply questioned. He has faced threats of prosecution in the past for the many human rights abuses committed during his rule, and for the hundreds of millions of dollars government officials have said he looted from the country.

A Haitian justice official and one of Mr. Duvalier’s lawyers said that Mr. Duvalier was being brought to a meeting with prosecutors for questioning. Another Haitian official said separately that Mr. Duvalier could be released by the end of the day.

Still, in a country with a long history of impunity, where leaders rarely face prosecution, it was a striking scene, underscoring the political volatility that has gripped Haiti since a contested presidential election late last year.

One year after the nation was hit by a devastating earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people, the country has been grappling to absorb the potentially destabilizing blow of Mr. Duvalier’s surprise return this week, which drew condemnations from around the world and ignited new fears of conflict.

At a courthouse where Mr. Duvalier was taken on Tuesday, his companion, Veronique Roy, denied that Mr. Duvalier had been arrested. “Absolutely not,” she told The Associated Press by phone. “We are very relaxed, drinking coffee and water," she added. “They said they are making photocopies. We don’t know why.”

Mr. Duvalier, known as Baby Doc, returned to Haiti 24 years and 11 months after he was forced to flee the country by a tide of social upheaval driven by severe poverty and his regime’s brutal political repression. In a brief radio interview, Mr. Duvalier said he had returned only to help his country, not to get involved in politics. He spent the rest of his first day back in Haiti out of the public eye, huddled with his advisers and relatives at a high-end hotel in the mountains overlooking Port-au-Prince, the capital.

His silence left Haitians and the rest of the world to wonder what Mr. Duvalier was really up to.

Neither France, which had granted Mr. Duvalier asylum, nor the United States, Haiti’s largest benefactor, said they had anything to do with his return. In fact, both governments said they had been unaware that Mr. Duvalier had left Paris until his flight was close to landing in Port-au-Prince.

[ed.note: So much for pre-screened advance passenger flight manifests…]

The Haitian government — in disarray since the earthquake — seemed to respond in fits and starts, initially dismissing Mr. Duvalier’s arrival as well within his rights as a Haitian citizen, and later suggesting that the Justice Ministry had begun an investigation into his return.

Angry reactions poured in from around the world, with human rights groups demanding that the Haitian government charge Mr. Duvalier with crimes against humanity — including the kidnapping, torture and murder of thousands of his opponents — and with stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the nation, the poorest in the hemisphere...

...continue reading...

[Information contained in BKNT E-Posts is considered Attorney-Client and Attorney Work Product privileged, copyrighted and confidential. Views that may be expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of any government, agency, or news organization.]