Islamists within ISI may have aided Benazir assassination, analysts fear

A Minister had warned of an ISI within the ISI

The Hindu | Dec 29, 2007

by Praveen Swami

Elements of Pakistan’s intelligence services are believed to have been involved in a string of bombings

High ISI officials are believed to have aided a bombing

NEW DELHI: Islamists within Pakistan’s feared Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate may have helped facilitate the assassination of the former Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, by blocking the flow of information on imminent terror threats, intelligence experts here believe.

Elements of Pakistan’s intelligence services are believed to have been involved in a string of recent bombings. A November 24, 2007 suicide bombing outside the ISI’s headquarters, for example, is thought to have been facilitated by an insider who passed on secret hand-signals that allowed officers of the rank of Brigadier and above to drive through entry checkpoints.

High officials within the ISI are also believed to have aided the September 4, 2007, bombing of an unmarked bus carrying ISI employees to work.

Pakistan has admitted that at least four junior Army officers, the pool from which the ISI draws its cadre, and six Air Force personnel were involved in a December 2003 attempt to assassinate President Pervez Musharraf himself.

Pakistani officials have long acknowledged that drives to cleanse the military of Islamists have had only limited success. In May 2005, Minister of State for Religious Affairs Amir Liaquat Husain publicly warned of the existence of “an ISI within the ISI, far more powerful than the original.”

He added: “There exists an internal threat, far greater than the outer one. Well, internal includes the Army.”

Much of the attention has focussed on the Hizb ut-Tehrir (Party of Liberation). Founded by the Jordanian cleric Taqiuddin an-Nabhani in 1953, the organisation flowered in the United Kingdom and France. Educated young people formed much of its following. Bangalore engineer-turned Glasgow suicide-bomber Kafeel Ahmed is among those believed to have passed through its mill.

Since 2000, both Pakistani and Indian intelligence analysts have repeatedly warned of growing Hizb ut-Tehrir penetration of Islamabad’s security services, spearheaded by United Kingdom-based activists of Pakistani origin. Hizb ut-Tehrir activists have also been suspected, but never established, to have helped facilitate al-Qaeda operations in Pakistan outside of the violence-torn North-West Frontier Province.
Islamist threats

Perhaps significantly, the Hizb ut-Tehrir issued calls opposing the elections just days before Ms. Bhutto’s assassination. On Eid day, December 21, Hizb ut-Tehrir pamphlets distributed outside the Jamia Masjid Quba in Islamabad’s G-9 neighbourhood called on Pakistan’s people to “reject elections in this colonialist system and establish the Khilafah [caliphate].” “How long,” it went on, “will you participate in elections within a system that produces traitor after traitor? Changing faces in the current kufr [infidel] system in January 2008 is no more than opening the door for even more years of misery.”

“Therefore,” the pamphlet went on, “it is not allowed for any Muslim to vote for candidates in the current kufr system.”

The Hizb ut-Tehrir pamphlet ended with a blunt warning: voting would be a “haraam [forbidden] action and will be an act of direct assistance in supporting the kufr system, which Islam has forbidden. Hizb ut-Tehrir calls you, O Muslims, to reject any support for the present corrupt system and establish our Khilafah in its place, apply our law, Shariah, and elect a Khaleefah [caliph].”

Mexican government to use “biochips” to curb immigration

Mexico to Microchip Central American Migrants

Truth News | Dec 29, 2007

by Kurt Nimmo

As an omen of things to come, in March the National Immigration Institute of Mexico will demand Central Americans workers and visitors carry ID cards with electronic chips. The ID cards “will record every arrival and departure of so-called temporary workers and visitors, mostly from Guatemala,” reports KGBT 4 out of Harlingen, Texas. “Officials say the purpose is to guarantee security for workers and visitors.”

Of course, the real purpose has nothing to do with the well-being or security of workers and visitors, but is part and parcel of the emerging control grid to be implemented by the NAU at the behest of world government.

According to a news story posted at NewKerala, however, the ID will transcend a mere RFID card and will be an implantable microchip. “In a communiqué, the INM Thursday said Biochip implants would be used to control the entry of workers and visitors from Belize and Guatemala from March 2008,” an assertion apparently vouched by the Spanish news agency EFE. In addition, the story was carried by IANS, a news agency in India.

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Pope’s exorcist squads will wage war on Satan

  

Satanism on the rise: Pope Benedict has unveiled plans to set up specialist exorcism squads

Daily Mail | Dec 29, 2007

By NICK PISA

The Pope has ordered his bishops to set up exorcism squads to tackle the rise of Satanism.

Vatican chiefs are concerned at what they see as an increased interest in the occult.

They have introduced courses for priests to combat what they call the most extreme form of “Godlessness.”

Each bishop is to be told to have in his diocese a number of priests trained to fight demonic possession.

The initiative was revealed by 82-year-old Father Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican “exorcistinchief,” to the online Catholic news service Petrus.

“Thanks be to God, we have a Pope who has decided to fight the Devil head-on,” he said.

“Too many bishops are not taking this seriously and are not delegating their priests in the fight against the Devil. You have to hunt high and low for a properly trained exorcist.

“Thankfully, Benedict XVI believes in the existence and danger of evil – going back to the time he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.” The CDF is the oldest Vatican department and was headed by Benedict from 1982, when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, until he became Pope in 2005.

Father Amorth said that during his time at the department Benedict had not lost the chance to warn humanity of the risk from the Devil.

He said the Pope wants to restore a prayer seen as protection against evil that was traditionally recited at the end of Catholic Masses. The prayer, to St Michael the Archangel, was dropped in the 1960s by Pope John XXIII.

“The prayer is useful not only for priests but also for lay people in helping to fight demons,” he said.

Father Paolo Scarafoni, who lectures on the Vatican’s exorcism course, said interest in Satanism and the occult has grown as people lost faith with the church.

He added: “People suffer and think that turning to the Devil can help solve their problems. We are being bombarded by requests for exorcisms.”

The Vatican is particularly concerned that young people are being exposed to the influence of Satanic sects through rock music and the Internet.

In theory, under the Catholic Church’s Canon Law 1172, all priests can perform exorcisms. But in reality only a select few are assigned the task.

Under the law, practitioners must have “piety, knowledge, prudence, and integrity of life.”

The rite of exorcism involves a series of gestures and prayers to invoke the power of God and stop the “demon” influencing its victim.

New super-cameras mean no hiding for drivers who smoke, eat or use a phone

 

This driver was pictured with a mobile phone clamped to his ear

Daily Mail | Dec 29, 2007

By RAY MASSEY

Digital speed cameras which capture drivers smoking or eating at the wheel are being introduced nationwide in a new move to hammer motorists.

Drivers will also face fines, bans and even jail for infringements such as driving without a seatbelt, using a hand-held mobile phone or overtaking across double white lines.

The hi-tech DVD cameras, which have instant playback, will also be used to provide photographic evidence against those eating sandwiches or rolling-up cigarettes at the wheel.

These are now considered serious offences under new guidelines drawn up for prosecutors.

The development will massively increase the number of fines and prosecutions against normally law-abiding drivers for relatively minor offences.

As well as being fined £60 and given three points on their licences, motorists now face two years in jail if their actions are considered to have been a factor in dangerous driving.

Virtually every police force in England, Wales and Scotland is now equipped with the new digital cameras. They were given Home Office approval in April but are quietly being rolled out nationwide.

More than 100 have been sold. The manufacturers have said their order book is full until next April.

The DVD cameras can operate as conventional speed traps. But thanks to the instant playback, they also double up to photograph motorists flouting laws other than speeding.

Set up by a police officer on sites such as motorway bridges, they constantly scan the cars and can digitally record drivers behind the wheel committing a vast array of minor traffic offences.

Crucially the new technology, called Concept, allows officers to play back the footage to locate, view and capture the offence instantly.

Photographs taken using the device show how effective it is, capturing pictures such as a man apparently steering his Renault with his bare feet and the driver of an Alfa Romeo with a mobile phone clamped to his ear.

The device is made and sold by Tele-Traffic UK whose chief executive, Jon Bond, is a former police chief superintendent in charge of speed cameras in Warwickshire.

He said: “It is the first camera to record offences other than speeding and give an instant playback.

“If the camera is being used for speed enforcement, but the police officer spots another driving offence being committed – or even thinks he saw something – he can play it back in a second. The offences are easily and quickly detectable.”

Mr Bond, whose Warwick-based company employs 20, added: “At present, officers can record an offence such as driving with a mobile phone clamped to their ear or without a seatbelt but would then have to look through perhaps two hours of tape in order to find it again.

“Concept means that those operating the camera can digitally log everything. They are linked to the team in the back office who can instantly find the offence, see the proof and send out a penalty charge notice to the car’s registeredowner.

“This will cut down massively on the amount of time police officers have to spend on paperwork and so speed up prosecutions. The days of the police having to chase after people who are infringing the law in these ways are gone. That will make the roads a safer place.”

The Concept digital DVD technology costs £17,750. But police forces who already use Tele-Traffic’s existing analogue (non-digital) system, can upgrade for a fraction of that price.

Smoking at the wheel was recently included in the Highway Code as something which courts can consider as a factor when police accuse drivers of failing to have proper control of their vehicle.

More than 300,000 drivers a day are still illegally using hand-held phones at the wheel, recent government figures revealed.

The penalties for using a handheld phone while driving, which was outlawed in 2003, were increased in February this year from a £30 fine to £60, plus three penalty points.

Under new sentencing rules, motorists using hand-held mobile phones could be jailed for two years and be disqualified if this was an aggravating factor in dangerous driving.

Those who kill while using a mobile face 14 years behind bars, under a charge of causing death by dangerous driving.

Last October, Mr Bond and his Tele-Traffic team were under fire after admitting to undercover reporters posing as customers that speed cameras were a “scam” and that setting up cameras in new areas was the equivalent of having “a blank chequebook” that would result in “bucketfuls” of cash.

Self-styled Captain Gatso of the campaign group Motorists Against Detection said: “This is yet another example of the Big Brother surveillance society where there’s no escape from the cameras.”

Police abandoned security posts before Bhutto assassination

No autopsy performed on body; docs say bullet wounds not found

RawStory | Dec 28, 2007

Police abandoned their security posts shortly before Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto’s assassination Thursday, according to a journalist present at the time, and unanswerable questions remain about the cause of her death, because an autopsy was never performed.

Pakistan’s Interior Minister on Friday said that Bhutto was not killed by gunshots, as had been widely reported, and doctors at Rawalpindi General Hospital, where she died, say there were no bullet marks on the former prime minister’s body, according to India’s IBNLive.com. Furthermore, according to the news agency, there was no formal autopsy performed on Bhutto’s body before she was buried Friday.

CNN is now reporting that it wasn’t gunshots or shrapnel that killed Bhutto, but that she died from hitting the sunroof of the car she was riding in. The network said sources in Pakistan’s Interior Ministry said nothing entered her skull, no bullets or shrapnel.

Apparently there was some kind of lever on the sunroof she was standing through, and she hit her head on that CNN reported Friday morning.

Earlier in the day Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz told a Pakistani news channel, “The report says she had head injuries – an irregular patch – and the X-ray doesn’t show any bullet in the head. So it was probably the shrapnel or any other thing has struck her in her said. That damaged her brain, causing it to ooze and her death. The report categorically says there’s no wound other than that,” according to IBNLive.

Perhaps more shockingly, an attendee at the rally where Bhutto was killed says police charged with protecting her “abandoned their posts,” leaving just a handful of Bhutto’s own bodyguards protecting her.

AMBUSH! – How the Secret Service set up JFK

“Police officers had frisked the 3,000 to 4,000 people attending Thursday’s rally when they entered the park, but as the speakers from Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party droned on, the police abandoned many of their posts,” wrote Saeed Shah in an essay published by McClatchy News Service. “As she drove out through the gate, her main protection appeared to be her own bodyguards, who wore their usual white T-shirts inscribed: ‘Willing to die for Benazir.'”

JFK secret service stand down

While some intelligence officials, especially within the US, were quick to finger al Qaeda militants as responsible for Bhutto’s death, it remains unclear precisely who was responsible and some speculation has centered on Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, its military or even forces loyal to the current president Pervez Musharraf. Rawalpindi, where Bhutto was killed, is the garrison city that houses the Pakistani military’s headquarters.

“GHQ (general headquarters of the army) killed her,” Sardar Saleem, a former member of parliament, told Shah at the hospital.

Whatever the case, Bhutto’s precise cause of death may never be known because of the failure to administer an autopsy. The procedure was not carried out because police and local authorities in Rawalpindi did not request one, according to IBNLive, but the government plans a formal investigation why this was the case.

Musharraf initially blamed her death on unnamed Islamic militants, but Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz told The Associated Press on Friday that “we have the evidence that al-Qaida and the Taliban were behind the suicide attack on Benazir Bhutto.”

He said investigators had resolved the “whole mystery” behind the opposition leader’s killing and would give details at press conference later Friday.

. . .

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Bhutto killing blamed on al-Qaeda

 

Pakistani security forces patrol the area around Lahore airport. A Pakistani interior ministry spokesman said that Benazir Bhutto died from hitting her vehicle’s sunroof and there was no bullet or shrapnel found in her.

BBC | Dec 28, 2007

Pakistan says it has intelligence that al-Qaeda assassinated opposition politician Benazir Bhutto at an election rally on Thursday.

Citing what it said was an intercepted phone call, the interior ministry said the killing had been ordered by “al-Qaeda leader” Baitullah Mehsud.

The BBC’s security correspondent, Frank Gardner, says it is too early to establish the truth of what happened.

Ms Bhutto has been buried in her family tomb amid scenes of mass grieving.

Video of her last moments before the attack in Rawalpindi was shown at the news conference given in Islamabad by the interior ministry.

According to the ministry, the primary cause of Ms Bhutto’s death appears to have been a knock on her head as she tried to duck her attacker, and not bullets or shrapnel. Her party denies this.

Pakistani security forces are on high alert, with at least 31 people killed in protests by Bhutto supporters across the country since the assassination.

Conflicting versions

Baitullah Mehsud is a tribal leader in Pakistan’s South Waziristan region.

Pakistani intelligence services intercepted a call from him in which he allegedly congratulated another militant after Ms Bhutto’s death, interior ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema told reporters.

There was, he added, “irrefutable evidence that al-Qaeda, its networks and cohorts were trying to destabilise Pakistan”.

There have now been so many conflicting versions coming out of Pakistan of how Benazir Bhutto died and who sent the assassin that it is hard for anyone to build up an accurate picture, our security correspondent says.

Both al-Qaeda and the Taleban are perfectly plausible culprits since they hated everything the secular Ms Bhutto stood for, he adds.

But critics of President Pervez Musharraf are unlikely to be convinced by his government’s insistence that it has proof al-Qaeda ordered the murder.

‘Pack of lies’

Brig Cheema said Ms Bhutto had smashed her head against a lever of her car’s sun roof.

She was, he said, trying to shelter inside the car from the gunman, who set off a bomb after opening fire with a gun.

A surgeon who treated her, Dr Mussadiq Khan, said earlier she may have died from a shrapnel wound while Ms Bhutto’s security adviser, Rehman Malik, said she had been shot in the neck and chest.

Farooq Naik, a senior official in Ms Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party, said the government’s explanation of her death was a “pack of lies”.

“Two bullets hit her, one in the abdomen and one in the head,” he told AFP news agency.

Brig Cheema added that all possible security arrangements had been put in place for Ms Bhutto.

Her supporters say the government did not do enough to protect her.

After a previous attempt on her life in October that killed 130 people, Ms Bhutto accused rogue elements of the Pakistani intelligence services of involvement.

Full Story

. . .

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‘Surge’ Of US Special Forces Expected In Pakistan In Early 2008

 

Pakistani paramilitary troops patrol to ensure security in Hyderabad, Pakistan on Friday, Dec. 28, 2007. Army soldiers patrolled the streets of the southern cities of Hyderabad and Karachi in an effort to quell violence following the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, witnesses said.

Your New Reality | Dec 28, 2007

by Darryl Mason

In the wake of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, a ‘surge’ of US Special Forces for Pakistan’s remote tribal lands is unlikely to face heavy opposition from President Musharraf, who will be busy trying to stop his own name, and that of his political party, from being linked with Bhutto’s assassins.

The shock of Bhutto’s death, so close to the January 8 elections which were tipped to see her elected prime minister, is also likely to lessen public opposition to the increase of US troops inside Pakistan.

This report, published today in The Australian newspaper, appeared on the Murdoch media portal news.com.au within half an hour of the confirmation of the announcement of Bhutto’s death

Full Story

. . .

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Bhutto said she would hold Musharraf ‘responsible’ for her death

Raw Story | Dec 28, 2007

by David Edwards and Nick Juliano

In an e-mail sent to a confidant in the US two months ago, assassinated Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto said she would hold the country’s current leader Pervez Musharraf “responsible” because his government did not do enough to provide for her security.

“I wld [sic] hold Musharaf [sic] responsible,” Bhutto wrote to her US spokesman, Mark Siegel, in the October e-mail, which was reported Thursday afternoon by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “I have been made to feel insecure by his minions, and there is no way what is happening in terms of stopping me from taking private cars or using tinted windows or giving jammers or four police mobiles to cover all sides cld [sic] happen without him.”

Full Story

. . .

Related

Did Pakistan’s ISI Kill Benazir Bhutto?

Bhutto assassination ‘moves us closer’ to potential nuclear apocalypse, expert says

Raw Story | Dec 28, 2007

by Nick Juliano

The death of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto has left the US lacking in options for dealing with the tumultuous, nuclear-armed, militant-rich nation and has raised the possibility that the country’s weapons will fall into the wrong hands, leading to a possible apocalypse, a foreign policy expert tells RAW STORY.

“When people aren’t looking, you have a question of command and control of their nuclear warheads,” Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at The New America Foundation, said in an interview Thursday.

Clemons said Bhutto’s assassination could cause the “Doomsday Clock” to tick forward. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists maintains the clock, which depicts how close the world is to midnight, representing a nuclear catastrophe. At the beginning of this year, the clock was set at 11:55 p.m.

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