The Rolleiflex 2.8D
18 hours ago
Partly collected thoughts.
Pakistan's powerful intelligence service has been accused for years of playing a "double game:" acting as a front-line U.S. ally in the fight against terror while supporting selected terrorist groups which serve Pakistani interests.
Now, for the first time, there is a detailed inside account of how that game is played. The U.S. investigation of the 2008 Mumbai attacks [1] has built a strong case that officers in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) collaborated with the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group in the plot that killed 166 people, six of them Americans. U.S. and Indian investigators say their understanding of the ISI-Lashkar alliance is drawn from the confessions of David Coleman Headley, an American convicted of participating in the Mumbai plot, as well as documents, phone records and electronic eavesdropping.
When discussing the alleged huge expansion of government under Mr. Obama, I’ve repeatedly found that people just won’t believe me when I try to point out that it never happened. They assume that I’m lying, or somehow cherry-picking the data. After all, they’ve heard over and over again about that surge in government spending and employment, and they don’t realize that everything they’ve heard was a special delivery from the Humbug Express.The Humbug Express, as Krugman terms it, turned a temporary increase in government employment because of the Census, into a huge increase in government, when the government payrolls are actually shrinking.
Women unveiling their eyes in public in Saudi Arabia will be forced to fully cover up their faces if their eyes are found to be seditious, according to the Gulf Kingdom’s most feared Islamic law-enforcement group.
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“The Commission members have orders to tell any women in public to cover up her face if they find that her eyes are seditious,” the paper said, quoting Sheikh Mutlaq Al Nabit, a Commission spokesman in Hael.
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Nabit did not explain how the Commission members determine that a woman’s eyes are seditious.
New Delhi, Dec 14 (IANS) A Pakistani patient, owned up as a "suicide" attacker and an operative of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) by his country's army, was indeed treated in Delhi's Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, where he died three years ago, enquiries by IANS have revealed.
According to hospital sources, a Pakistani patient named Zulfiqar Ahmed was admitted in the multi-speciality private medical facility in November 2007.
"He died of renal failure," an official at the hospital told IANS, requesting anonymity because "our legal section is digging deeper into the case before coming on record".
The sources said that the hospital was looking into the records to find more about the patient, who according to the Pakistan Army website was on a "suicide attack" operation.
"It is a three-year-old record and it will take time to examine," another official said, as the hospital administration refused to say another more.
The Pakistani Army's website - www.pakistanarmy.gov.pk - claimed that an ISI operative who was on a "suicide attack" operation died in a New Delhi hospital Nov 16, 2007.
The posting was in the "Shuhada's (martyrs') corner" of the website, which had previously revealed the list of Pakistan's dead in the 1999 Kargil operation.
It named the operative as Zulfiqar Ahmed, his army number as 1726016 and his rank as naik.
The operative, the website claims, died of kidney failure and acute respiratory infection at New Delhi's Ganga Ram Hospital.
The website however doesn't mention where the operation was to be conducted as there was no suicide attack in Delhi or in nearby areas in or around November 2007.
The major terror attack in India before November 2007 were the Lumbini Park and Gokul Chat bombings in Hyderabad Aug 25 that year, in which 42 people were killed.
The martyr's section lists 25 ISI operatives, with varying causes of death. Besides Ahmed, one more ISI agent who died in India in May 1973 is identified as Lance Naik Abdul Ghani.
Indian Army chief General V.K. Singh, reacting to the postings, said it has exposed the Pakistan Army's "intentions".
"I have nothing to say on what they (the Pakistan Army) have put up on its website. But if it has, then it clearly show what their intentions and ways are and what their next move will be," Singh told reporters here when asked about the Pakistan Army's website posting.
The army chief also said that India needed to be "more alert".
"All I can say is we have to be more alert and only then we can protect the people and our troops," he said.
"Whoever, with deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of any class of 2[citizens of India], 3[by words, either spoken or written, or by signs or by visible representations or otherwise], insults or attempts to insult the religion or the religious beliefs of that class, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to 4[three years], or with fine, or with both.]"The reason for the introduction of this law was the Rajpal case or (Rangila Rasul case). Rajpal was the publisher, (not the author) of a pamphlet in an ongoing war of pamphlets between Hindus and Muslims in the Punjab of the 1920s, in which they attacked each other and also other sects within their own camps. This particular pamphlet (the title would roughly translate to "Playboy Prophet"), which made many sarcastic comments about the Prophet of Islam particularly raised the ire of the Muslims, and there was the threat of not just Punjab-wide but supposedly nationwide violence. {Aside, it is funny, isn't it, that to a certain mentality, India is not and never was a nation except when it is time to protest?}
Mr Gaya Prasad Singh (non-Muhammadan member representing Muzaffarpur and Champaran), on Sept 19, 1927, read in the (British Indian) Legislative Assembly
“Sir, I should also like to refer to the statement which was made by Rajpal when he came to know that the feelings of our Muhammadan friends had been greatly outraged by his pamphlet. This is what he said:
“If any words of mine can soothe the feelings of my Moslem brethren, I assure them that I respect their sentiments no less than I do mine. I have no idea of bringing out another edition of Rangila Rasul, even though the law does not stand in the way of my doing so. In fact I stopped selling it as soon as I was told that some Moslems felt offended by its publication. This was done before any action was taken or even contemplated by the Government.”
PS: The Rajpal pamphlet is available on the Internet. In my opinion, it is available precisely because Rajpal was murdered, and because the whole thing became such a big issue. Otherwise, it would have vanished like most of the other pamphlets from that war of words in the 1920s. The action of the "prosecute blasphemy" crowd have made this trash immortal.
KARACHI — A doctor has been arrested for insulting the Prophet Mohammed in Pakistan, police said on Sunday, in a second high profile case throwing the spotlight on the country's controversial anti-blasphemy laws.
Naushad Valiyani was detained on Friday following a complaint by a medical representative who visited the doctor in the city of Hyderabad.
"The arrest was made after the complainant told the police that Valiyani threw his business card, which had his full name, Muhammad Faizan, in a dustbin during a visit to his clinic," regional police chief Mushtaq Shah told AFP.
"Faizan accused Valiyani of committing blasphemy and asked police to register a case against the doctor."
Shah said the issue had been resolved after Valiyani, a member of Pakistan's Ismaili community, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, apologised but local religious leaders intervened and pressed for action.
"Valiyani had assured Faizan that he did not mean to insult the Prophet Mohammed by throwing the visiting card in the dustbin," Shah said, adding that the police had registered a case under the Blasphemy Act.
PS: I just can't understand why Americans are persecuting Wikileaks' Assange; they should give him a hero's medal. Wikileaks prove what some of us suspected but no one could confirm - that American diplomats are clear, concise, cogent and informed. Only the stupid and the prejudiced accuse them of being dumb. They know precisely what is going on in the world even if their government's policy is built within a maze of spiderwebs hung across Chinese walls. Their analysis of Pakistan is perfect; it has an unintelligent government run by the intelligence service. Why on earth don't they do anything about a nation which is going to obliterate itself and us as well? One of these days I must leak our tapes of American diplomats in Delhi to the Wall Street Journal.
They read like the most extraordinary revelations. Citing the WikiLeaks cables, major Pakistani newspapers this morning carried stories that purported to detail eye-popping American assessments of India's military and civilian leaders.Update: Pakistani newspapers apologize.
According to the reports, US diplomats described senior Indian generals as vain, egotistical and genocidal; they said India's government is secretly allied with Hindu fundamentalists; and they claimed Indian spies are covertly supporting Islamist militants in Pakistan's tribal belt and Balochistan.
"Enough evidence of Indian involvement in Waziristan, Balochistan," read the front-page story in the News; an almost identical story appeared in the Urdu-language Jang, Pakistan's bestselling daily.
If accurate, the disclosures would confirm the worst fears of Pakistani nationalist hawks and threaten relations between Washington and New Delhi. But they are not accurate.
An extensive search of the WikiLeaks database by the Guardian by date, name and keyword failed to locate any of the incendiary allegations. It suggests this is the first case of WikiLeaks being exploited for propaganda purposes.
The controversial claims, published in four Pakistani national papers, were credited to the Online Agency, an Islamabad-based news service that has frequently run pro-army stories in the past. No journalist is bylined.
“One of the things that most Christians and most people don’t get is that yoga is not a religion,” Ms. Russell said.
“It does not belong to Hinduism any more than it belongs to Christianity,” she said, adding that it “transcends religion.”a. This "transcending of religion" is one of the goals of Hinduism, as I understand it.