The Dynamics Of Outrage And Silence In Pakistan

Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty March 2, 2011

By Shaheen Buneri

Activists from some Pakistani religious parties have been organizing demonstrations to demand that Raymond Davis — an American citizen who was assigned as a CIA agent to the U.S. Consulate in Lahore and who was allegedly involved in the killings of two Pakistani citizens there — be hanged. Although the case is still the subject of diplomatic and legal scrutiny, Pakistan’s religious groups and conservative political parties are working hard to stir up passions around the issue.

At the same time, some journalists and commentators in the media have joined this chorus, playing on the public’s deep-seated sense of insecurity and uncertainty to push the notion that the West — particularly the United States — is responsible for all Pakistan’s ills. You only have to spend a little time watching television talk shows and news programs to see how these forces are trying to pressure the courts and the parliament.

And some figures within Pakistan’s military and security establishments have backed these conservative forces in order to promote their own geostrategic agenda in the region and deflect public attention from pressing issues like poverty and insecurity. Please read this entire commentary here

Pakistan’s intelligence ready to split with CIA

by Adam Goldman Associated Press at the Washington Examiner

Pakistan’s ISI spy agency is ready to split with the CIA because of its frustration over what it calls heavy-handed pressure and its anger over what it believes is a covert U.S. operation involving hundreds of contract spies, according to an internal document obtained by The Associated Press and interviews with U.S. and Pakistani officials.

Such a move could seriously damage the U.S war effort in Afghanistan, limit a program targeting al-Qaida insurgents along the Pakistan frontier, and restrict Washington’s access to information in the nuclear-armed country.

According to a statement drafted by the ISI, supported by interviews with officials, an already-fragile relationship between the two agencies collapsed following the shooting death of two Pakistanis by Raymond Davis, a U.S. contracted spy who is in jail in Pakistan facing possible multiple murder charges.

“Post-incident conduct of the CIA has virtually put the partnership into question,” said a media statement prepared by the ISI but never released. A copy was obtained this week by the AP.

Please read the entire article here

“CIA spy” Davis was giving nuclear bomb material to Al-Qaeda, says report

Veterans Today ANI

London, Feb 20(ANI): Double murder-accused US official Raymond Davis has been found in possession of top-secret CIA documents, which point to him or the feared American Task Force 373 (TF373) operating in the region, providing Al-Qaeda terrorists with “nuclear fissile material” and “biological agents,” according to a report.

Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) is warning that the situation on the sub-continent has turned “grave” as it appears that open warfare is about to break out between Pakistan and the United States, The European Union Times reports.

The SVR warned in its report that the apprehension of 36-year-old Davis, who shot dead two Pakistani men in Lahore last month, had fuelled this crisis.

According to the report, the combat skills exhibited by Davis, along with documentation taken from him after his arrest, prove that he is a member of US’ TF373 black operations unit currently operating in the Afghan War Theatre and Pakistan’s tribal areas, the paper said.

While the US insists that Davis is one of their diplomats, and the two men he killed were robbers, Pakistan says that the duo were ISI agents sent to follow him after it was discovered that he had been making contact with al Qaeda, after his cell phone was tracked to the Waziristan tribal area bordering Afghanistan, the paper said.

The most ominous point in this SVR report is “Pakistan’s ISI stating that top-secret CIA documents found in Davis’s possession point to his, and/or TF373, providing to al Qaeda terrorists “nuclear fissile material” and “biological agents”, which they claim are to be used against the United States itself in order to ignite an all-out war in order to re-establish the West’s hegemony over a Global economy that is warned is just months away from collapse,” the paper added. (ANI)

Veterans Today: “IF RAYMOND DAVIS IS RELEASED, PAKISTAN’S GOVERNMENT WILL FALL

Posted by Gordon Duff at Veterans Today

VTTV February 20, 2011 with Gordon Duff and Raja Mujtaba

The diplomatic standoff between the United States and Pakistan over the arrest of State Department security contractor Raymond Davis for murder continues while the courts in the state of Punjab consider their options.

The American government has, since the incident, listed Davis as a diplomat and is demanding his release.  Please read the entire story at Veterans Today.

US gives fresh details of CIA agent who killed two men in Pakistan shootout

US reveals that CIA agent Raymond Davis worked for private security firm Xe, formerly known as Blackwater

The Guardian UK

US officials have provided fresh details about at the centre of a diplomatic stand-off in Pakistan, including confirmation that he had worked for the private security contractor Xe, formerly known as Blackwater. They also disclosed for the first time that he had been providing security for a CIA team tracking militants.

Davis was attached to the CIA’s Global Response Staff, whose duties include protecting case officers when they meet with sources. He was familiarising himself with a sensitive area of Lahore on the day he shot dead two Pakistanis.

The New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press and other media outlets reported for the first time that Davis is a CIA employee. They said they had been aware of his status but kept it under wraps at the request of US officials who said they feared for his safety if involvement with the spy agency was to come out. The officials claimed that he is at risk in the prison in Lahore. The officials released them from their obligation after the Guardian on Sunday reported that Davis was a CIA agent.

Davis shot dead two Pakistanis in Lahore last month who he says he been trying to rob him. A third Pakistani man was killed by a car driven by Americans apparently on their way to rescue Davis.

Confirmation that he worked for Xe could prove even more problematic than working for the CIA, given the extent of hatred towards Blackwater, whose staff have gained a reputation in Pakistan as trigger-happy. For Pakistanis the word “Blackwater” has become a byword for covert American operations targeting the country’s nuclear capability. Newspaper reports have been filled with lurid reports of lawless operatives roaming the country.

The Deepening Mystery of Raymond Davis and Two Slain Pakistani Motorcyclists

By Dave Lindorff Special to Counter Punch

The mystery of American Raymond A. Davis, currently imprisoned in the custody of local police in Lahore, Pakistan and charged with the Jan. 27 murder of two young men, whom he allegedly shot eight times with pinpoint accuracy through his car windshield, is growing increasingly murky.

Also growing is the anger among Pakistanis that the US is trying to spring him from a Punjab jail by claiming diplomatic immunity. On Feb. 4, there were massive demonstrations, especially in Lahore, demanding that Davis be held for trial, an indication of the level of public anger at talk of granting him immunity.

Davis (whose identity was first denied and later confirmed by the US Embassy in Islamabad), and the embassy have claimed that he was hired as an employee of a US security company called Hyperion Protective Consultants, LLC, which was said to be located at 5100 North Lane in Orlando, Florida. Business cards for Hyperion were found on Davis by arresting officers.

However CounterPunch has investigated and discovered the following information:

First, there is not and never has been any such company located at the 5100 North Lane address. It is only an empty storefront, with empty shelves along one wall and an empty counter on the opposite wall, with just a lone used Coke cup sitting on it. A leasing agency sign is on the window.  A receptionist at the IB Green & Associates rental agency located in Leesburg, Florida, said that her agency, which handles the property, part of a desolate-looking strip mall of mostly empty storefronts, has never leased to a Hyperion Protective Consultants. She added, “In fact, until recently, we had for several years occupied that address ourselves.”

The Florida Secretary of State’s office, meanwhile, which requires all Florida companies, including LLSs  (limited liability partnerships), to register, has no record, current or lapsed, of a Hyperion Protective Consultants, LLC, and there is only one company with the name Hyperion registered at all in the state. It is Hyperion Communications, a company based in W. Palm Beach, that has no connection with Davis or with security-related activities.

The non-existent Hyperion Protective Consultants does have a website (www.hyperion-protective.com),

(this website was taken down but you can see the text from it here) but one of the phone numbers listed doesn’t work, an 800 number produces a recorded answer offering information about how to deal with or fend off bank foreclosures, and a third number with an Orlando exchange goes to a recording giving Hyperion’s corporate name and asking the caller to leave a message. Efforts to contact anyone on that line were unsuccessful. The local phone company says there is no public listing for Hyperion Protective Consultants–a rather unusual situation for a legitimate business operation.

Pakistani journalists have been speculating that Davis is either a CIA agent or is working as a contractor for some private mercenary firm–possibly Xe, the reincarnation of Blackwater. They are not alone in their suspicions. Jeff Stein, writing in the Washington Post on January 27, suggested after interviewing Fred Burton, a veteran of the State Department’s counter-terrorism Security Service, that Davis may have been involved in intelligence activity, either as a CIA employee under embassy cover or as a contract worker at the time of the shootings. Burton, who currently works with Stratfor, an Austin, TX-based “global intelligence” firm,  even speculates that the shootings may have been a “spy meeting gone awry,”  and not, as US Embassy and State Department officials are claiming, a case of an attempted robbery or car-jacking.

Even the information about what actually transpired is sketchy at this point. American media reports have Davis driving in Mozang, a busy commercial section of Lahore, and being approached by two threatening men on motorcycles. The US says he fired in self-defense, through his windshield with his Beretta pistol, remarkably hitting both men four times and killing both. He then exited his car and photographed both victims with his cell phone, before being arrested by local Lahore police. Davis, 36, reportedly a former Special Forces officer, was promptly jailed on two counts of murder, and despite protests by the US Embassy and the State Department that he  is a “consular official” responsible for “security,” he continues to be held pending trial.

What has not been reported in the US media, but which reporter Shaukat Qadir of the Pakistani Express Tribune, says has been stated by Lahore police authorities, is that the two dead motorcyclists were each shot two times, “probably the fatal shots,” in the back by Davis. They were also both shot twice from the front. Such ballistics don’t mesh nicely with a protestation of self-defense.

Also left unmentioned in the US media is what else was found in Davis’ possession. Lahore police say that in addition to the Beretta he was still holding, and three cell phones retrieved from his pockets, they found a loaded Glock pistol in his car, along with three full magazines, and a “small telescope.”  Again, heavy arms for a consular security officer not even in the act of guarding any embassy personnel, and what’s with the telescope?  Also unmentioned in US accounts: his car was not an embassy vehicle, but was a local rental car.

American news reports say that a “consular vehicle” sped to Davis’ aid after the shooting incident and killed another motorcyclist enroute, before speeding away. The driver of that car is being sought by Lahore prosecutors but has not been identified or produced by US Embassy officials. According to Lahore police, however, the car in question, rather than coming to Davis’s aid, actually had been accompanying Davis’s sedan, and when the shooting happened, it “sped away,” killing the third motorcyclist as it raced off. Again a substantially different story that raises more questions about what this drive into the Mozang district was all about.

Davis has so far not said why he was driving, heavily armed, without anyone else in his vehicle, in a private rental car in a business section of Lahore where foreign embassy staff would not normally be seen. He is reportedly remaining silent and is leaving all statements to the US Embassy.

The US claim that Davis has diplomatic immunity hinges first and foremost on whether he is actually a “functionary” of the consulate.  According to Lahore police investigators, he was arrested carrying a regular US passport, which had a business visa, not a diplomatic visa. The US reportedly only later supplied a diplomatic passport carrying a diplomatic visa that had been obtained not in the US before his departure, but in Islamabad, the country’s capital.

(Note: It is not unusual, though it is not publicly advertised, for the US State Department to issue duplicate passports to certain Americans. When I was working for Business Week magazine in Hong Kong in the early 1990s, and was dispatched often into China on reporting assignments, my bureau chief advised me that I could take a letter signed by her to the US Consulate in Hong Kong and request a second passport. One would be used exclusively to enter China posing as a tourist. The other would be used for going in officially as a journalist. The reason for this subterfuge, which was supported by the State Department, was that  once Chinese visa officials have spotted a Chinese “journalist” visa stamped in a passport, they would never again allow that person to enter the country without first obtaining such a visa. The problem is that a journalist visa places strict limits on a reporter’s independent travel and access to sources. As a tourist, however, the same reporter could – illegally — travel freely and report without being accompanied by meddling foreign affairs office “handlers.”)

Considerable US pressure is currently being brought to bear on the Pakistani national government to hand over Davis to the US, and the country’s Interior Minister yesterday issued a statement accepting that Davis was a consular official as claimed by the US.  But Punjab state authorities are not cooperating, and so far the national government is saying it is up to local authorities and the courts to decide whether his alleged crime of murder would, even if he is a legitimate consular employee, override a claim of diplomatic immunity.

Under Pakistani law, only actual consular functionaries, not service workers at embassy and consulate, have diplomatic status. Furthermore, no immunity would apply in the case of “serious” crimes–and certainly murder is as serious as it gets.

The US media have been uncritically quoting the State Department as saying that Pakistan is “violating” the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations of 1963 by holding Davis in jail on murder charges. Those reporters should check the actual document.

Section II, Article 41 of the treaty, in its first paragraph regarding the “Personal inviolability of consular officers,” states:

“Consular officers shall not be liable to arrest or detention pending trial, except in the case of a grave crime and pursuant to a decision by the competent judicial authority.”

In other words, the prosecutorial, police and judicial authorities in Lahore and the state of Punjab are doing exactly what they are supposed to do in holding Davis on murder charges, pending a judicial determination concerning whether or not he can properly claim diplomatic immunity.

The US claim that Pakistan is violating the convention is simply nonsense.

There is also the matter of double standards. The US routinely violates the Vienna Diplomatic Accord that governs international diplomatic rights. For example, the same convention requires countries that arrest, jail and prosecute foreigners for crimes to promptly notify the person’s home country embassy, and to grant that embassy the right to provide legal counsel. Yet the US has arrested, charged with murder, and executed many foreign nationals without ever notifying their embassies of their legal jeopardy, and has, on a number of occasions, even gone ahead with executions after a convict’s home country has learned of the situation and requested a stay and a retrial with an embassy-provided defense attorney.  The US, in 1997, also prosecuted, over the objections of the government of Georgia, a Georgian embassy diplomat charged with the murder of a 16-year-old girl.

Apparently diplomatic immunity has more to do with the relative power of the government in question and of the embassy in question than with the simple words in a treaty.

It remains to be seen whether Davis will ever actually stand trial in Pakistan. The US is pushing hard in Islamabad for his release. On the other hand, his arrest and detention, and the pressure by the US Embassy to spring him, are leading to an outpouring of rage among Pakistanis at a very volatile time, with the Middle East facing a wave of popular uprisings against US-backed autocracies, and with Pakistan itself, increasingly a powder keg, being bombed by US rocket-firing pilotless drone aircraft.

Some Pakistani publications, meanwhile, are speculating that Davis, beyond simple spying, may have been involved in subversive activities in the country, possibly linked to the wave of terror bombings that have been destabilizing the central government. They note that both of the slain motorcyclists (the third dead man appears to have been an innocent victim of the incident) were themselves armed with pistols, though neither had apparently drawn his weapon.

A State Department official, contacted by Counterpunch, refused to provide any details about the nature of Davis’ employment, or to offer an explanation for Hyperion Protective Consultants LLC’s fictitious address, and its lack of registration with the Florida Secretary of State’s office.

Davis is currently scheduled for a court date on Feb. 11 to consider the issue of whether or not he has immunity from prosecution.  Please see the original here

Darrell Issa in Pakistan Asking President, PM for Release of Raymond Davis

From FireDogLake

We learn from Dawn.com Tuesday that Raymond Davis, a US “consular employee” who killed two men on Thursday in Lahore, has been placed on the exit control list, barring his exit from Pakistan. Remarkably, Representative Darrell Issa led a small Congressional delegation that met on Tuesday with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zadari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, seeking release of Davis, according to Pakistan’s Online International News Network. Those meetings came a day after State Department spokesman Philip Crowley declared that as a consular employee, Davis has full diplomatic immunity.  Read more here

Raymond Allen Davis put on Pakistan Exit Control List

Name of Davis put on ECL: NA informed Anwer Abbas at The Frontier Post Lahore Pakistan

ISLAMABAD: Federal Minister for Interior Rehman Malik Wednesday informed the National Assembly that name of US diplomat Raymond Allen Davis has been put on Exit Control List (ECL) following the directives from the court, also urging religious clerics to halt their protests in connection with Blasphemy Act, as government has clarified that no amendment was being introduced in the law. While replying to various points of orders and questions in the National Assembly Rehman Malik warned of great loss if the nation failed to unite against the terrorists and extremists. He said the government respected the sentiments of the nation against US national Ramond Allen Davis involved in shooting of two Pakistanis in Lahore, and federal and provincial governments having similar opinions. Making details of the issue public he said that US national arrived here on a diplomatic passport which was issued to him after clearance, however following the directives by the court his name was put on ECL.

Read the entire story here

UNREST IN PAKISTAN OVER “CONTRACTOR” SHOOTING

FAMILY OF SLAIN DEMANDS HANGING FOR PHONY AMERICAN “DIPLOMAT”

By Gordon Duff And Raja Mujtaba at Veterans Today

“Victims shot in the back repeatedly”

Protests throughout the city of Lahore, university students, various political parties, demanded stiff punishment for a group of Americans, one identified initially as “Raymond Allen Davis,” now “identity unknown,”  held on a variety of charges including 2 counts of murder along with four American security contractors  currently being sought after fleeing the scene of a vehicular homicide in a related incident.

“Davis” is accused of two counts of murder and terrorism related charges.  The other four, named to police but withheld from the media, are being sought for questioning in relation to a vehicular homicide while moving in traffic to assist “Davis.”  The four, though described by Davis and the American press to be “diplomats” are believed to be security contractors who entered Pakistan illegally under assumed identities.

The four not yet in custody, believed to be Americans, fled the scene after killing Ibadur Rehman, a local merchant, during a bizarre incident this week.  The Americans, mis-identified by the US Embassy as “diplomats” are believed involved in cover or “black ops” operations inside Pakistan, reportedly against the government of Pakistan, America’s primary ally in the region.

The victim of the vehicle homicide, Rehman, a bicyclist traveling on Jail Road in Lahore, was struck and killed by a four wheel drive vehicle that was part of what “Davis” describes as a “mission” in his statement to police.

According to the statement, the two vehicles, the Honda rental with “cloned” plates driven by “Davis”  and the “chase vehicle,”  a 4 wheel drive vehicle not registered to the American consulate, containing a 4 man armed security team, were heading toward the Mozang Chungi district.

Mozang Chungi is a densely populated are of small shops and street vendors typically only used by local residents.  Security sources in Pakistan state:

“No American tourist or diplomat would ever go there, certainly not two car loads of heavily armed private contractors equipped for a mission of some kind.  The only possible reason to be there would be terrorism.  The area has been attacked before by terrorists, taking advantage of the crowds and confusion.  We suspect we may have stumbled on the source of previous terror attacks and, in fact, broken up what may have become another ‘Mumbai.’

This is a classic terrorist cover, false identity, phony license plates, car filled with weapons, radios and surveillance gear.”

Please read the entire story here

“DAVIS” UNDER “SEMI-HOUSE ARREST” WITHDRAWN

Authorities in Lahore, Pakistan were allowing “Davis” to spend his nights at the American consulate and his days at a local police station.  But now due to mounting pressures this arrangement has been cancelled. The United States government continues to demand the release of “Davis” though it has also refused to identify him or his associates or state their actual mission in Pakistan.

“Davis” is believed to be a native of Las Vegas, 36 years old with a military background in Special Forces.  An internet search shows him to operate under a “one man” Florida based security company but there is, of yet, no known relationship between this entity and any State Department overseas mission.

A check of passport records show that “Davis” has traveled between Pakistan and Afghanistan 9 times during the past 18 months.