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Fresh from Wikileaks: Secret CIA document
Special to The Tribune
A family carries its belongings on a truck in Sajawal (Sindh province). Pakistan ordered fresh evacuations from the province on Thursday as the country struggles to bring relief to millions. — AFP |
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Major Qaida plot busted in Canada; 2 arrested
Special to
The Tribune
No jail for HIV+ pop star
Diamond thieves to be handed over to India
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Fresh from Wikileaks: Secret CIA document
Washington, August 26 In the classified papers posted by the whistleblower website, the CIA concluded that foreign governments would be less likely to cooperate with the US on detention, intelligence-sharing, and other issues in the wake of increasing number of home grown terrorists. “Primarily, we have been concerned about the Al-Qaida infiltrating operatives into the United States to conduct terrorist attacks, but the Qaida may be increasingly looking for Americans to operate overseas,” said the document. Referring to Lashkar-e-Toiba operative Headley, the documents said, “The LeT induced him to change his name from Daood Gilani to David Headley to facilitate his movement between the US, Pakistan and India.” Headley had confessed to plotting the Mumbai attacks and LeT’s role in it. The leaked document notes that Pakistani-American Headley conducted surveillance in support of the LeT for the Mumbai attacks that killed 166 persons. Expressing concern over such home grown terrorists, the documents said: “If the US were seen as an exporter of terrorism, foreign partners may be less willing to cooperate with the United States on extra-judicial activities, including detention, transfer, and interrogation of suspects in third party countries.” The CIA termed it as a thought-provoking document. “These sorts of analytic products - clearly identified as coming from the Agency’s ‘Red Cell’ - are designed simply termed it to provoke thought and present different points of view,” CIA spokesperson Marie Harf told PTI. “As a recent victim of high-profile terrorism originating from abroad, the US Government has had significant leverage to press foreign regimes to acquiesce to requests for extraditing terrorist suspects from their soil,” the document said. “However, if the US were seen as an exporter of terrorism, foreign governments could request a reciprocal arrangement that would impact US sovereignty,” it added. —
PTI
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Special to The
Tribune Three weeks after Pakistan was hit by devastating floods, members of the British public have finally decided to dig into their pockets to help, albeit with some considerable prodding from government officials. Ten days after the first appeals for help were issued, the UK’s Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), the umbrella group for the country’s biggest aid organisations, reported that only £12 million (about US$ 18 million) had been raised from public donations. This compares unfavourably with the £101 million raised in just five days for victims of the Haiti earthquake earlier this year. Earlier this week, in other words another 10 days later, DEC said the sum raised for Pakistan had risen to £30 million, but the total is still comparatively feeble. Government-to-government aid is much more impressive. Bilateral aid from the UK amounts to some £60 million (approximately US $ 93 million), compared with $150 million from the US, $13 million from Japan, followed by India, Turkey, Kuwait and Malaysia. Saudi Arabia, which remained silent at first (apparently because President Zaradri is a Shia rather than a Sunni muslim) has pledged $100 million. British aid workers and officials are troubled by their public’s indifference to the tragedy, despite the sheer enormity of the disaster and the statistics which tell their own grim story: more than 2,500 persons dead, two million others displaced, two-and-a-half million acres of land inundated and some 25 million individuals affected overall. Last week a shocked government minister, International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell, made an unprecedented intervention by publicly suggesting that British workers who receive bonuses in their pay packages should donate some of the money to help Pakistani victims. “With Haiti we woke up one morning and saw the dramatic effect”, Mitchell said last week. “It was easy for the world to understand. In this emergency more rains fell in a week than in the past 10 years in Pakistan. “A wall of water has moved 1200 miles down the country. But its somehow difficult to encapsulate. Haiti directly affected 2m people, whereas this disaster directly affects 8m. It is four times the size.” Just why the British public has been so slow off the mark may be explained by a recent poll carried out on behalf of the Sunday Times which revealed that only 7 per cent of people had made donations to Pakistan, compared to 29 per cent who contributed to the tsunami appeal in 2004.
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Major Qaida plot busted in Canada; 2 arrested
Toronto, August 26 The arrests were made by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) after carrying out searches of two residences on the Ottawa’s west side and officers said they were executing more searches and would carry out more arrests. The arrest of Misbahuddin and Ehsan Ahmed came after police had kept them under surveillance for over two years in a project codenamed “Operation Samosa”. Though the RCMP released no names or identities of the suspects, but sources confirmed their names as Misbahuddin and Ehsan. They said Misbahuddin Ahmed, who was categorised as ringleader, is believed to have been trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan and investigations involved a “bomb plot”. “These guys were doing more than just talking about terrorism. They were planning it,” a police source was quoted as saying by the Vancouver Sun newspaper. Of peculiar significance to police seems to be a Mazda car that Ahmed used to commute to work. “When it was in the driveway, they went over it with a fine tooth comb. They just swarmed over it,” said Mary Surtees, a resident of the townhouse complex who saw it towed away.
— PTI
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Special to
The Tribune A wealthy Tibetan hotel proprietor who dared to make a generous donation to the Dalai Lama has been sentenced to life imprisonment by a Chinese court. The Chinese authorities remain silent about what happened to Dorje Tashi, the proprietor of the Yak Hotel in Lhasa, who disappeared without trace in 2008. But his sentencing earlier this year by the Lhasa Intermediate People’s Court was reported by Radio Free Asia, as well as by Tibetan exile groups in India and the West. The general manager of Tashi's hotel, Wang Jiu, has also confirmed the sentence. “He was charged with funding some outside Tibetan groups,” says Urgen Tenzin, director of the India-based Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy. A London-based non-government organisation, Free Tibet, says the Chinese authorities were infuriated when they discovered a letter from the Dalai Lama’s office thanking Tashi for a donation of 20 million yuan (nearly US$ 3 million). Free Tibet quotes sources inside Tibet as explaining that Tashi, thought to be in his mid thirties, kept the letter hidden in a vase or pot in his home, suggesting that it was of religious significance for him. “However, a donation of this kind is seen by the Chinese administration as ‘splittist’ or treasonous, and highly threatening, which would explain the harsh sentence that Dorje Tashi received,” says a Free Tibet spokesman. The four star, 458-room Yak hotel (starting price $45 per night), formerly the Holiday Inn, was built up by Tashi to become one of the most popular tourist haunts in Lhasa. “It is definitely the best place we stayed in among those we tried out during our weeks on the road in Tibet,” one satisfied European visitor wrote recently. “We were really pleasantly surprised when we got there. The best thing about Yak hotel is the location. It is hard to beat the 3-minute walk to the Jokhang Temple. You are close to everything and you can even walk to the Potala Palace (approx 15 minutes). Stay there!!!” Profits from the hotel enabled Tashi to make generous contributions to worthy causes, including for flood relief in 2001 and to victims of an earthquake in Drongba Country in 2004. “He has been active in social welfare undertakings and from 2002 until the present, he has given a generous allowance to the children of poor workers in Lhasa Chengguan district’s Tsomonling nursery school,” says an old and officially sanctioned profile. What has really stung the Chinese authorities is that Tashi was a supposedly “loyal” Tibetan who joined the Communist Party in 2003 and was considered sufficiently dependable to warrant meetings with President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiaobao in 2005. Further evidence of his previous high standing with the Chinese authorities was underlined by the Tibet Commerical Web, a Lhasa-based website, which earlier reported how Tashi had been named one of the “10 outstanding youth of Tibet” and a delegate to the national Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. Small wonder then that Tashi used to be described in glowing terms by the Chinese government-controlled media. Echoing the Communistspeak that used to prevail in the Soviet Union and is still used in North Korea, the state media in 2009 lavished praise on Tashi’s company, the Shenhu Group, for “upholding the unity of the motherland and opposing the ethnic separatists”.
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No jail for HIV+ pop star
Darmstadt (Germany), August 26 Will do service
Presiding judge Dennis Wacker also ordered her to do 300 hours of community service. The glamorous half-Moroccan star, wearing a black top and jeans, sighed deeply with relief when the verdict was read out and shortly afterwards began to sob. She cried for several minutes, hiding her eyes with her hands. The singer had confessed to having unprotected sex and keeping her virus secret but denied intending to infect anyone during a trial that has sparked a media frenzy in Germany. She had previously made an emotional apology during closing arguments, telling the court: “I am sorry from the bottom of my heart. I would love to turn back the clock, but I can’t.” The charges against Benaissa could have led to up to 10 years behind bars, but both the prosecutors and the defence argued for a suspended sentence. — PTI
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Diamond thieves to be handed over to India
Dubai, August 26 The police officials in Dubai are completing formalities to hand over the four suspects arrested for stealing diamond jewellery worth $1.76 million in Mumbai, they said. A Mumbai police team will soon escort the group back along with the gems, the sources said.
— PTI
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Three weeks after Pakistan was hit by devastating floods, members of the British public have finally decided to dig into their pockets to help, albeit with some considerable prodding from government officials.
The judge ordered Nadja
Benaissa, a member of girl group No Angels, to do 300 hours of community service. Nadja kept her virus secret and had unprotected sex with her partner, as a result of which the latter got infected.