Monday, August 02, 2004
That "Pakistan will hand over Bin Laden before the US elections"
Reports from Washington Times and UPI editor Arnaud de Borchgrave are often breathtakingly sensational. Digestion may require mouthfuls of salt.
One wonders whether his apparently see-sawing slants and views are consistent and defensible, or else a balancing act designed to straddle the perimeters of credibility.
Here is a man who avidly sources from the Arab press and from within the Islamic world, while regularly chatting happily on air with Fox News Channel presenters. His offerings at various times appease or insense boffins at polar extremes of the political spectrum and in between.
Reading him one is reminded variously of the famous CNN admission that it failed to report on certain news about Saddam's Iraq so as to keep in the good books of the former dictator, or else of the old adage about "playing both sides against the middle", or else of the other old warning about the trap of actually believing one's own propaganda.
But this is just a superficial and personal impression.
In his latest item de Borchgrave expands on detail of a "confidential report" from an anonymous but "unimpeachable" source in Pakistan that came to the 9/11 commission's attention "as the commission's own report was coming off the presses."
The report claims that:
- "bin Laden, who suffers from renal deficiency, has been periodically undergoing dialysis in a Peshawar military hospital with the knowledge and approval of ISI (Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence) if not of Gen. Pervez Musharraf himself ... Mr. Musharraf may plan to turn over bin Laden to President Bush in time to clinch Mr. Bush's re-election in November.
- "The imprints of every major act of international Islamist terrorism - as well as major networks of terror that have been discovered in Europe - invariably passes through Pakistan ... virtually all September 11 participants had trained, resided or met in, coordinated with, or received funding from or through Pakistan .. And that is why people like (powerful former Pakistani intelligence chief) Hamid Gul and others very quickly stated the propaganda that CIA and Mossad did it. ..." The outspoken Gul and his many supporters "regard the fight against Americans and Jews and Indians in different parts of the world as legitimate jihad."
- "Pakistan has harvested an enormous price for its apparent 'cooperation' with the U.S., and in this it has combined deception and blackmail - including nuclear blackmail - to secure a continuous stream of concessions."
- "Pakistan has projected the electoral victory of the fundamentalist and pro-Taliban, pro-al Qaeda Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) in November elections as 'proof' the military is the only 'barrier' against the country passing into the hands of the extremists ... in fact, (this has been) substantially engineered by the Musharraf regime, as are the various anti-U.S. 'mass demonstrations' around the country."
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See also WSJ article regarding the: Pakistan-Afghanistan border situation (August 4)
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Today (August 13), further light is thrown on the background to the de Borchgrave report by George Will of The Washington Post :
"(T)he New Republic ... reported that the Bush administration was pressuring Pakistan to deliver a "high-value target" (HVT) in time for the November election. A Pakistani intelligence official says a colleague was told during a spring visit to the White House that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven or twenty-eight July" -- during the Democratic convention.
" ... (T)he Bush administration must take seriously a fact it deplores: Regarding the war on terrorism, a sizable minority believes that the government's words and deeds merit deep skepticism.
"The hard core of this minority is the Michael Moore-Howard Dean cohort of fanatics."
