Of Family Jewels and Scapegoats

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A missive to Mr. Richard Boucher, US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs

By Anwaar Hussain

danger-sign.jpgMr. Boucher,

Judging by your call to ‘reform the ISI’, you, sir, seem to be in dire need of some advice.

We understand that you are stung by your abject failure in Iraq and the looming near total disaster in Afghanistan, what with the empire now teetering at its outer most edge and your imperial carpetbaggers out in a frenzied search for a scapegoat. It is perhaps on their urging that you now think in ISI you have a scapegoat and in Pakistan an escapegoat. You, sir, are as far from reality as the Mars from planet Earth. Neither will prove to be a goat of any kind for you.

There are reasons that I say this.

First, with a 3-million strong tribal population, with every Pathan armed to the gills and caring not a fig for even his own life and an honor code as primitive and rigid as the Hindukush, and a million strong nuclear armed Pakistan army at their back, you want to tread very softly in this region. The dispute with these Pathans is an internal one and the Pakistanis know how to deal with each other. While between them this dispute may take years to resolve, resolve it will in the end. However, your entering into the fray will instantly evaporate any ill will that the warring parties have for each other, uniting them in an unreserved hate for your country. Despite the well established facts of your limitless ruthlessness as was witnessed against the Iraqis and your ability to lay waste to the entire region, they will go for your collective throat with a ferocity that will make you forget what you have seen thus far. Please be careful in taking Pakistan for an escapegoat or the FATA for an escape route.

Next, your memory cannot be that short Mr. Boucher. Let me refresh it for you, however. It was only last year that the CIA was forced to release hundreds of documents, long known within the agency as “the family jewels”, after struggling to keep the dirty secrets under wraps for upward of three decades.

Those documents, Mr. Boucher, proved to be an elaborate record of some of the most outrageous intelligence abuses of the Cold War, including assassination plots against foreign leaders and illegal efforts to spy on Americans including student anti-war activists, Black Power group leaders, Castro sympathizers and Soviet dissidents. The documents revealed that CIA operatives worked closely with local police to gather intelligence against groups planning protests at the presidential conventions in 1972 and that anti-war activists were followed.

So embarrassing were those revelations that the CIA’s own serving director Michael Hayden is on record for having called them as “reminders of some things the CIA should not have done”. He was being mild, of course.

Many of the ventures detailed in those 693 pages, like the intricate attempts by the CIA to enlist Mafia operatives to poison a head of state, should make even you blush Mr. Boucher. Even decades before 9/11, that blank check watershed in whose name now every thing is moral and legal, the documents described secret CIA holding cells, plans to eavesdrop on international phone calls of U.S. residents and shady efforts to root out leaks of classified information to reporters.

Perhaps the most extraordinary operation detailed was a plot to enlist known organized-crime figures to assassinate Castro in the early 1960s. The CIA realized it was dealing with Giancana, an underworld Mafia Don, only after seeing his photo in a most-wanted listing in Parade magazine. Talk of ineptitude Mr. Boucher.

That much is now a widely known fact. What is not known to many is the fact that so hideous were some of the other secrets that the released records had dozens of pages blacked out by CIA censors. One memo that listed the most hurtful secrets contained in “the family jewels” was missing the first paragraph. A separate memo that was supposed to sum up the “unusual activities” of the CIA’s domestic branch included just three intact paragraphs followed by 17 blank pages. Talk of ‘the need for reform’ Mr. Boucher.

We do understand that perhaps the ISI does need a reform but not for the reasons that you think. Perhaps it is more for the reason that the ISI miserably failed in predicting for Pakistan the deadly consequences of an alliance with your country during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. It also failed to predict the rise of fundamentalism as a direct result of that policy. It failed to tell us that one day Pakistan would be caught between the hammer and the anvil of an unethical American military might from the skies and a bloody radical insurgency on the ground. The ISI should have raised a Mamba alarm when Pakistan was going to bed with your country. What is more, the ISI actually helped you create, nurture and sustain the very monsters who are slaughtering Pakistanis at will and who everyone is now finding impossible to exterminate. For those reasons, yes, the ISI does need a reform.

But what YOU need to understand, sir, is that it is for Pakistan to decide the when, how and how-much of this reform. And further, it is not the ISI that needs such an urgent reform, its shadowy activities more rumored than factual, but the CIA whose dark past is an out and indisputable fact.

And now with the CIA’s torture trails firmly established across the globe, the techniques of killing and tormenting further refined, you don’t even suggest a confessional ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,’ for CIA and for the ISI  you recommend  a ‘reform’? Where have you learned your sense of balance and standards of fairness Mr. Boucher? That the ISI helped you in the same is another reason it needs to be reformed.

What say Mr. Boucher?

Anwaar Hussain



Comments

9 Responses to “Of Family Jewels and Scapegoats”

  1. A Rahim Yousefzai on September 17th, 2008 3:39 pm

    An excellent write up, it couldn’t have been worded better. I am not aware of your distribution list. It merits being published in all our major dailies. I am forwarding this article to Mr Abbas Nasir Chief editor of Dawn.

  2. Kim Alphandary on September 17th, 2008 10:03 pm

    Why has the U.S. decided to destabilize Pakistan?

    Along with attacks on Pakistani soil, the U.S. grants India a unique waiver exempting them from the 30-year world embargo on civilian nuclear trade with India.

    Pakistan needs a Hugo Chavez type. Everything they have done and do for the U.S. is for naughtt. Pakistan has lost the U.S. as an ally, even though they’ve done everything in their power to maintain that relationship. Both Obama and McCain are planning on moving the war in Iraq over into Afghanistan/Pakistan in November.

    If Pakistan is going to avoid full-on-civil-war (one cannot underestimate the power of MONEY, persuasion and corruption that the U.S. can sow) –> the time to come out of the closet is NOW. Pakistan can establish/reestablish alliances, i.e. China, Russia, Venezuela, Brazil and Europe. All countries are rapidly changing alliances as U.S. power wanes.

  3. Tahir on September 18th, 2008 9:08 am

    Sir, Very aptly and boldly put; I wish that with all my sincerity, I could actually make Mr. Boucher read this. Dont these Americans ever take a clue from history? When are they going to get over their imperial arrogance and disdain for others? When are they going to learn to respect the sovereignty of smaller states? After Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq disasters, what other sign are they expecting from almighty?

  4. Highlander on September 18th, 2008 10:44 am

    A scathing, incisive, from the heart missive to a people whose hearts and minds are now dulled beyond revival. My salutes to the writer.

    The Amecrians, however, will not take heed. Remember they are the same people who, while having 150,000 troops in Iraq that had just killed their millionth Iraqi, were calling the discovery of two detonators of dubious origins as proof of Iranian meddling into Iraq.

    What sense of justice or fairplay?

  5. Huzaima & Ikram on September 18th, 2008 10:51 am

    Dear Anwaar,

    It is very well-written and timely. May God bless you.

    Regards,

  6. Albert Krauss on September 18th, 2008 10:53 am

    Ditto to the CIA and other related parties vis a vis Bolivia and Venezuela.

  7. dari on September 19th, 2008 2:20 am

    even I will have to agree with your hard hitting, keith oberman like article.

    anwaar you are very impressive.

    dari

  8. Jake on September 22nd, 2008 5:39 am

    People like you are going to have lots of fun the next four years since you rejoice in seeing America in pain. And yeah, the next four years will bring much of that.

    But all I have to say is that will be hardening us up and reminding us who we really are.

    As you have said in the past, we are some crazy sobs aren’t we. With what we did to the native Americans, etc. etc. Lately we have seemed to have abandoned our true nature.

    But the next four years we will be reminded of that. So laugh now as you probably laughed (if you were around back then) when the country of Iran held our people hostage. Yeah, but remember this, after Carter came Reagan and the hostage takers were so afraid of Reagan they released the hostages the moment he became president.

    Obama aside, do you think the American people are going to really in the end just fold up and let you win. We went up against the mighty forces of the Soviet Union and told them if the dropped a nuclear bomb on us or even one of our allies we would drop bombs on them knowing fully well that it would be the end of human civilization as we knew it. We called it MAD Mutually Assured Destruction, and we meant it, better dead then red.

    So, even with Obama in office (which is only going to be for four years which for you people who have a much longer perspective than us is merely an eye blink) we will not tolerate inaction for long. We will elect in 2012 a Reagan and all your laughing, all your mocking will be paid in full WITH INTEREST.

    Yeah, you think you know who you are dealing with because your view of us come from the liberal news media who themselves hate real Americans and call us names. WE ARE SARAH PALIN. We are the ones who stormed the beaches on D-Day and their children, and grandchildren. We are crazy sobs as much as the leftists in the news media want to make America something different. Attacked we will repay, we will repay 1000 fold.

    Yeah, the American haters were laughing it up on Dec 7th 1941 too. But by Aug 6th 1945 the laughing stopped. At least the American haters stopped laughing.

    Do you think a Pakistani “first strike” would be able to make a dent in our ability to strike back, do you? Of course not. What it would do would totally destroy any resistance we would have to total genocide. We would totally wipe out every country with a ..stan in it just to be sure and then casually change the channel to see which “tribe” on “Survivor” was winning.

    Carlos Mencia said it best. You don’t really know us. You think you do, but you don’t. So shut the hell up.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVqFTNzNV04

  9. Doug on September 22nd, 2008 10:50 am

    Anwaar:

    I wonder why you waste your energy sending factual commentary to US diplomats.

    You need to remember, that these idiots claim that the US involvement with Iraq is a success! What a laugh.

    The claim of success is invoked by saying to the american public: “The surge worked”

    In reality after about 5 years of war, a poor country has given up. It is simple economics of survival. The “surge” was simply paying billions of dollars to hire Iraqi and British/US assassins to kill off everyone they disliked……… These people are listed on the US budget as “contractors.”

    The current contractors “surged” from around 60,000 to about 140,000 assassins. In manner, US soldiers didn’t have to do any fighting. We simply contracted it out. Thus, deaths of US soldiers……….. reached an all time low in Iraq. American politicians can claim success because US deaths have fallen.

    Of course, we could have reached the same result 4 years earlier. Rather than invading Iraq, the US should have hired locally-based Iraqi citizen-assassins………… say maybe 500,000 at $20,000 each = $1 billion x 5 years for $5 billion………… which would have saved the US many billions of dollars.

    But the US would not have enjoyed the senseless slaughter. Yes…. we enjoy the feeling of superiority as much as our Israeli friends! And US politicians would not be able to herd the US masses to financial slaughter in 2008 without binding these sheep together with the theme of creating an enemy larger than the one that actually existed.

    You see, what the world fails to understand……….. is that the average US citizen has given up their constitutional rights because they were scared into believing that AlQueda was the greatest threat to America. The world fails to understand that Americans actually love this slaughter as a proud accomplishment!

    So…… by plucking Reserve and National Guard units from around the US, it made every mother and father committed to the war in Iraq. “Support the troops” was the silly mantra to ensure that the murder of Iraqis……… women, child, old men……. was as justfiable as torturing anyone captured in the US dragnet.

    I suppose that a heavily armed 19 year old punk kid……….. heavily armed with the world’s finest combat weapons……. feels great when worshipped as a war hero upon his return. Yet, the returning hero knows full well……. that for every bad guy they killed……. that perhaps 100 innocents had to die. No wonder the suicide rate of returning US soldiers is HIGHER than our combat war dead!

    But back to my original point:
    If US politicians can call Iraq a success, then you can see how as our 2008 election approaches………. we are returning to our previous success in Afghanistand and Pakistan.

    The only way to reform this lunatic foreign policy…… and the war crimes perpetrated…… is through correct economic messages sent to the US most recently:

    The US has gone broke…….. spending $1 trillion for a senseless war in Iraq……… while NY investment bankers…. generally of Jewish faith, rip off another $1 trillion.

    The complete mismanagement of US resources…….. and the manipulation of the good nature (but incompetence) of the American people during the Bush Administration has finally outdone the ill-fated expansion of the Soviet empire into Afghanistan.

    The US believed that it could afford its stupidity…….. but now the bad debts of the US prove otherwise.

    “Reform ISI” shout US diplomats. It is so laughable that it is only made for domestic US consumption………… to those masses duped into believing that US military and CIA conduct can always be justified and rationalized.

    Just look at those soldiers who were disciplined for torture or murder of non-combatants in Iraq………….Prison and discipline only happened to those who took photographic proof of their crimes……. and embarrassed the Bush Administration.

    Without photographic proof…….. war crimes are easily justified by the “fog of war” excuse.

    If you think Americans have learned from their mistakes. You would be wrong. You can expect more stupidity like this when the US attacks Iran………. as long as our budget holds up.

    The US may not have any cash……….. but we have lots of bombs and bullets……. and people quite content to use them.

    The ISI seems like a morally strong organization when compared to US conduct abroad.

    If the ISI doesn’t “reform” in the manner that the US wants……. the US will just have to assist them as we have done in Iraq: spend more cash and hire more assassins.

    YOU and the world thought this bad movie was over. Get ready for the next act……. as long as our popcorn, bullets, bombs, and cash hold out!

    Doug

    USA

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Anwaar’s articles appear simultaneously here at Truth Spring and at Soul Vibes in The Pakistan Tribune.


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