By Jeffrey Goldberg

Nov. 22 (Bloomberg) — The Pakistani military and its spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, have an expansive menu of options before them in their endless campaign to subvert democracy. And subverting democracy (as opposed to, say, winning wars against India, or helping the U.S. defeat the Haqqani terrorist network in Afghanistan) is the real specialty of Pakistan’s military. Read more »

Please read the following story published in Vanity Fair magazine in August 2002 and think?

THE JOURNALIST AND THE TERRORIST

by Robert Sam Anson

The reporter who comes to Karachi, Pakistan is given certain cautions.

Do not take a taxi from the airport; arrange for the hotel to send a car and confirm the driver’s identity before getting in.
Do not stay in a room that faces the street.
Do not interview sources over the phone.
Do not discuss subjects such as Islam or the Pakistani nuclear program in the presence of hotel staff. Read more »

It is hardly a surprise that a Kangroo court – otherwise known as Anti-terrorism Court (ATC) in Faisalabad handed jail sentences of 490 years in total to six labour leaders from on November 1, 2011. Read more »

by Paul Craig Roberts

(Dr. Paul Craig Roberts served as President Reagan’s Asst. Secretary of the U.S. Treasury)

From the Foreign Policy Journal

Now that the CIA’s proxy army has murdered Gadhafi, what next for Libya?

If Washington’s plans succeed, Libya will become another American puppet state. Most of the cities, towns, and infrastructure have been destroyed by air strikes by the air forces of the US and Washington’s NATO puppets. Read more »

The Telegraph
By Dean Nelson, South Asia Editor and Javed Siddiq in Islamabad

US forces are massing on the Pakistan border in eastern Afghanistan amid reports of an imminent drone missile offensive against fighters from the feared Haqqani Network, a Taliban faction which operates from safe havens in Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency, Pakistan Army sources have confirmed. Read more »

How the Kingdom is Wielding Influence Across the Middle East

John R. Bradley

JOHN R. BRADLEY is the author of Saudi Arabia Exposed. His most recent book, After the Arab Spring: How the Islamists Hijacked the Middle East Revolt, will be published in December. Read more »

The New Economic Club Will Produce Conflict, Not Cooperation

Ian Bremmer and Nouriel Roubini
From The Foreign Affairs, March/April 2011

IAN BREMMER is President of Eurasia Group, the political risk consulting firm, and the author of The End of the Free Market . NOURIEL ROUBINI is Professor of Economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Chair of Roubini Global Economics , and a co-author of Crisis Economics.

This is not a G-20 world. Read more »

By Peter Millership

LONDON (Reuters) – Tahrir Square in Cairo, Green Square in Tripoli, Syntagma Square in Athens and now Zuccotti Park in New York — popular anger against entrenching power elites is spreading around the world. Read more »

Published in the Business Recorder

Read/Download in PDF

While the 9/11 was a big tragedy and caused the loss of around 3000 human lives, it is an undeniable fact that hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, Afghans, and Pakistanis Read more »

When the CNN and other poodle media outlets carry unsubstantiated claims of discredited American establishments and liars like Donald Rumsfeld, it is NEWS. When bloggers like us diligently document the connections of Al Qaeda to the Western secret services, it is conspiracy theory. But we always quote mainstream or corporate media reports to raise difficult questions which Western reporters, US government paid think-tank analysts, or the likes of Fareed Zakaria would never be able to face. Read more »

Guardian
November 10, 2002

Startling revelations by French intelligence experts back David Shayler’s alleged ‘fantasy’about Gadaffi plot

British intelligence paid large sums of money to an al-Qaeda cell in Libya in a doomed attempt to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi in 1996 and thwarted early attempts to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. Read more »

By Bruce Riedel
Yale Global

Fiery discord: US embassy under attack by Pakistan-backed Haqqani network (top); US charge provokes Pakistani protest Read more »

From Huffington Post / La Temps (Aug.30, 2011)

By Jean-Pierre Perrin

Abdel Hakim Belhadj, who leads the rebel forces in Tripoli, was a founder of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and is believed to have been close to bloodthirsty head of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Belhadj spoke last week to Al Jazeera Read more »

By Ian Johnson

February 2011

 New York Review of Books

Muslim Brotherhood senior leaders Essam el-Erian (center right) and Saad el-Katatni (center left) taking part in a protest in Cairo, January 30, 2011

As US-backed strongmen around North Africa and the Middle East are being toppled or shaken by popular protests, Washington is grappling with a crucial foreign-policy issue: how to deal with the powerful but opaque Muslim Brotherhood. Read more »

By William Pesek

Sept. 28 (Bloomberg) — China and the U.S. finally found something to agree on: Europe is doomed and might take the world’s two biggest economies down with it. Neither officials in Beijing nor Washington are actually using the “D word.” They don’t need to, not with Zhou Xiaochuan, China’s central bank governor, talking matter-of-factly about emerging nations bailing out the euro region and U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner warning of “cascading default, bank runs and catastrophic risk” there. Read more »

By Jesse Richard
Centre for Research on Globalization, Canada

I don’t believe the official story of 9/11 because I know the official story of 9/11!

Read more »

By Ezra Klein

 Sept. 8 (Bloomberg News) — You know how we know the terrorists didn’t win? It’s not because we killed Osama bin Laden. Read more »

Dr. Zulfiqar Mirza’s explosive and unprecedented press conference was the first of its kind in Pakistan’s history. As dumb-founded millions watched, it was the probably the first time a  senior provincial minister accused a federal interior minister Read more »

This is a very familiar pattern over the last twenty years. MQM quits government and Karachi is terrorised by a wave of killings, burning, and arson. For over two decades, MQM is the only constant in the violence in Karachi. MQM has not matured into a political party from a militant group… it has degenerated into a criminal mafia. Read more »

From New Yorker, By Ryan Lizza

How the Arab Spring remade Obama’s foreign policy.

Obama has said that his foreign-policy ideas defy traditional categories and ideologies. Read more »

Press TV

The chairman of Indonesia’s largest Muslim organization has censured Saudi Arabia for the execution of an Indonesian maid over killing her employer. Head of Nahdlatul Ulema Said Aqil Siradj condemned Saudi Arabia for beheading Ruyati binti Sapubi, Read more »

Legendary American journalist Seymour Hersh gave a CIRS (Centre for International and Regional Studies) Distinguished Lecture titled “The Obama/Bush Foreign Policies: Why Can’t America Change?” before an audience of 800 members of the community in Doha at an event Read more »

There was no indication of whether the earlier account of Sheikh Essa’s arrest in Faisalabad was wrong. If it was right, how did Sheikh Essa reach Syria in 2009? Unfortunate and absolutely condemnable as Saleem Shahzad’s death was, it would be a mistake to take his stories on face value. Read more »

The following is the full text of Sanam Bhutto’s statement released to The News: Sanam stays away from politics and rarely issues a statement.

“I refer to a news report in The News dated 16 May, 2011, entitled: Islamabad continues to hide the truth. Read more »

Paul Joseph Watson
Source: Infowars.com

May 4, 2011

Top US government insider Dr. Steve R. Pieczenik,  a man who held  numerous different influential positions under three different   Presidents and still works with the Defense Department, Read more »

A Chinese visitor walks past an artwork of U.S. President George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden,  in Beijing on May 6, 2007. (Teh Eng Koon/AFP/Getty Images)

By Antoaneta Becker

BEIJING, May 6, 2011 (IPS) – The United States’ most vilified terrorist foe has been dead only a week but China is already haunted by the phantom of the next big U.S. enemy. Read more »

Never before Pakistan has cut such a humiliated and sorry face before the whole world and its military leadership looked so incompetent and stupid.  The unilateral commando action of the US forces to kill Osama has exposed more than the incompetence or complicity of Pakistan’s military establishment. Read more »

Obama, Biden, Clinton in the Control Room

From Robert Fisk, Independent

A middle-aged nonentity, a political failure outstripped by history – by the millions of Arabs demanding freedom and democracy in the Middle East – died in Pakistan yesterday. Read more »

ISLAMABAD – Osama bin Laden was holed up in a sprawling house just 100 yards from a Pakistani military academy when helicopters carrying U.S. anti-terror forces swooped in the early morning hours of Monday and killed him. Read more »

First published October 2010, Updated April 2011

Admiral Mike Mullen (first from left), the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Pakistani Army Chief Gen. Pervez Kayani (third from left) and   next to him, the I.S.I. Chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha (then Major Gen. and Director General Military Operations) aboard the U.S. naval carrier Abraham Lincoln Read more »

Published by the Business Recorder

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has blasted the leadership in both Afghanistan and Pakistan for the poor economic growth, corruption, energy shortages and political instability that are plaguing their people. Read more »

 The following BBC report on the suicide bombing of 31 innocent young cadets of Pakistan Army is yet another proof of how out of control the Talibans are and their capacity to strike even high security targets. What also caught my attention in the BBC footage was a big board on the entrance gate: Read more »

Pakistan’s defiant prisoner of intolerance, vows to stay put

‘These death threats won’t make me flee’, says Rehman, who supports reform of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws

Declan Walsh in Karachi , The Observer, Sunday 23 January 2011

Sherry Rehman, a liberal parliamentarian with the ruling Pakistan People’s Party who proposed a bill to reform Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws, at her home home in Karachi. Photograph: Declan Walsh for the Observer Read more »

The cat is out of the bag. For months, I have suspected that the ISI is back to its old game of using the paid-mullahs to exploit the religious sentiments of the masses to destabilize the country and capture it again. They did it in 1977 using the PNA and nizam-mustafa movement.The ISI used the pretext of Salman Rushdie’s book Read more »

While we mourn the murder of Salmaan Taseer by a religious lunatic, let’s get this straight. In the recent history, no country in the Muslim world or the developing world has been able to counter the rise of right-wing radicals or extremism when the secular or liberal parties were led by discredited, corrupt, and incompetent politicians. That is lesson number one. Read more »

FROM THE FINANCIAL TIMES, Published: January 4 2011

Salman Taseer, the Pakistani politician assassinated on Tuesday, was deeply preoccupied with the consequences of his country’s support for radical Islamists in Kashmir and Afghanistan.

Just a few weeks before his death he warned a visitor: “Beware of the mullahs. They have to be confronted or they will take over our lives.”

An ally of Benazir Bhutto, the former premier assassinated in 2007, Taseer could talk for hours on his favourite subject: the price that Pakistan had paid for jihad and the need to turn back from this “deadly legacy”. Read more »

I have followed the VikiLeaks revelations relating to Pakistan with a yawn but was amused by how papers like the Jang, the News, the Express Tribune, the Nation, and some others rushed to print and splashed agencies’ planted material across their front pages even when the source was questionable and had dubious credentials to say the least. Some of these newspapers are so lazy Read more »