Monthly Archives: May 2015

The Other Version of Killing of Osama Bin Laden” By Seymour Hersch shared by S. Rizvi

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We usually don’t post articles related to current headline news; this is an exception because of its importance. You decide if it is “hogwash” or not.

“The Other Version of Killing of
Osama Bin Laden” By Seymour Hersch
Seymour Hirsch is a Pulitzer Prize
winner investigative journalist.
(Shared By Sohail Rizvi)
It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals
assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in
Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and
a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the
mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s
army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in
advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama
administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by
Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt,
really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest
place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So
America said.

The most
blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General
Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha,
director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This
remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised
questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as
the Times correspondent
in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha
had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was
denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the
Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that
he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely
held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge
of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired
general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an
al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of
the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable
that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location
would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the
necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not
going to simply hand him over to the United States.’

This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the
bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of
the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of
the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the
Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any
alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers,
as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior
Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of
the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the
raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the
administration’s account were false.

‘When your version comes out – if you do it – people in Pakistan will be tremendously
grateful,’ Durrani told me. ‘For a long time people have stopped trusting what
comes out about bin Laden from the official mouths. There will be some negative
political comment and some anger, but people like to be told the truth, and
what you’ve told me is essentially what I have heard from former colleagues who
have been on a fact-finding mission since this episode.’ As a former ISI head,
he said, he had been told shortly after the raid by ‘people in the “strategic
community” who would know’ that there had been an informant who had alerted the
US to bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad, and that after his killing the US’s
betrayed promises left Kayani and Pasha exposed.

The major US source for the account that follows is a retired senior intelligence
official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s
presence in Abbottabad. He also was privy to many aspects of the Seals’
training for the raid, and to the various after-action reports. Two other US
sources, who had access to corroborating information, have been longtime
consultants to the Special Operations Command. I also received information from
inside Pakistan about widespread dismay among the senior ISI and military
leadership – echoed later by Durrani – over Obama’s decision to go public
immediately with news of bin Laden’s death. The White House did not respond to
requests for comment.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden

Venice Biennale, Former Catholic Church, Makes Space For Mosque

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( I wish in Pakistan or other Muslim countries where churches has been burnt, someone should have offered such a goodwill gesture. f. sheikh)

““It’s important for us to do this,” Mr. Mahamed said, “to show people what Islam is about, and not what people see in the media.” He added that the mosque’s incarnation inside a Christian church did not trouble him — he cited traditional stories of the Prophet Muhammad allowing Christian travelers to worship in his mosque in Medina — and he hoped it would not trouble others.”

VENICE — The 18th-century novelist William Beckford wrote that he couldn’t help thinking of this city’s most beloved sight, St. Mark’s Basilica, as a mosque, with its “pinnacles and semicircular arches” all “so oriental in appearance.” But despite the profound stamp that Islamic culture has left on Venice’s art and architecture over centuries, it remains one of the few prominent European cities without a mosque near its historic center, leaving Islamic residents who work there to pray in storerooms and shops amid the tourist crush.

For the next seven months, however, Venice will find itself in the middle of the roiling debate about Islam’s place in Europe. On Friday, as part of the Venice Biennale, a former Catholic church in the Cannaregio neighborhood will open its doors as a functioning mosque, its Baroque walls adorned with Arabic script, its floor covered with a prayer rug angled toward Mecca and its crucifix mosaics hidden behind a towering mihrab, or prayer niche.

The transformation is the work of a Swiss-Icelandic artist, Christoph Büchel, who has become known for politically barbed provocations. But the mosque, which will serve as Iceland’s national pavilion during the Biennale, is a cultural symbol and a kind of ready-made sculpture conceived with the active involvement of leaders of the area’s Islamic population, which has been growing for many years.

Against a backdrop of rising Islamophobia in Italy and fears, like those at full throttle in France, of terrorism committed in the name of Islam, Muslim leaders in Venice said they saw the proposal to create a temporary mosque in the international spotlight of the Biennale as a perfect way to communicate their desire to more fully participate in the life of their city.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/07/arts/design/mosque-installed-at-venice-biennale-tests-citys-tolerance.html?_r=0

posted by f. sheikh

America’s Epidemic of Unnecessary Care – The New Yorker submitted by Nasik Elahi

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This is yet another aspect of the end of life issues we have been discussing. Necessity and quality of care are challenges we all confront.  It would beinteresting to hear from the physicians in our group what they think.

Nasik Elahi

It was lunchtime before my afternoon surgery clinic, which meant that I was at my desk, eating a ham-and-cheese sandwich and clicking through medical articles. Among those which caught my eye: a British case report on the first 3-D-printed hip implanted in a human being, a Canadian analysis of the rising volume of emergency-room visits by children who have ingested magnets, and a Colorado study finding that the percentage of fatal motor-vehicle accidents involving marijuana had doubled since its commercial distribution became legal. The one that got me thinking, however, was a study of more than a million Medicare patients. It suggested that a huge proportion had received care that was simply a waste.

For the rest of the article please click on the link.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/overkill-atul-gawande?mbid=nl_050515_Daily&CNDID=17878219&mbid=nl_050515_Daily&CNDID=17878219&spMailingID=7717036&spUserID=MjQ4NTYwMzU4NDkS1&spJobID=680489128&spReportId=NjgwNDg5MTI4S0

145 Writers Boycott PEN Courage Award To Charlie Hebdo

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PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award was given to Charlie Hebdo instead of Snowden and Greenberg on disclosing NASA activities. The protesting writers wrote the following letter. The boycott started with six writes but has reached to about 145 by end of April. ( F. Sheikh )

Dear colleague,

If you are in sympathy with the following statement from some of your fellow members of PEN, please reply, and your name will be added to the list of signatories.

Thank you.

—

April 26, 2015

In March it was announced that the PEN Literary Gala, to be held May 5th 2015, would honor the magazine Charlie Hebdo with the PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award in response to the January 7 attacks that claimed the lives of many members of its editorial staff.

It is clear and inarguable that the murder of a dozen people in the Charlie Hebdo offices is sickening and tragic. What is neither clear nor inarguable is the decision to confer an award for courageous freedom of expression on Charlie Hebdo, or what criteria, exactly, were used to make that decision.

We do not believe in censoring expression. An expression of views, however disagreeable, is certainly not to be answered by violence or murder.

However, there is a critical difference between staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable, and enthusiastically rewarding such expression.

In the aftermath of the attacks, Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons were characterized as satire and “equal opportunity offense,” and the magazine seems to be entirely sincere in its anarchic expressions of disdain toward organized religion. But in an unequal society, equal opportunity offense does not have an equal effect.

Power and prestige are elements that must be recognized in considering almost any form of discourse, including satire. The inequities between the person holding the pen and the subject fixed on paper by that pen cannot, and must not, be ignored.

To the section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled, and victimized, a population that is shaped by the legacy of France’s various colonial enterprises, and that contains a large percentage of devout Muslims, Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of the Prophet must be seen as being intended to cause further humiliation and suffering.

Our concern is that, by bestowing the Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award on Charlie Hebdo, PEN is not simply conveying support for freedom of expression, but also valorizing selectively offensive material: material that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world.

In our view, PEN America could have chosen to confer its PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award upon any of a number of journalists and whistleblowers who have risked, and sometimes lost, their freedom (and even their lives) in service of the greater good.

PEN is an essential organization in the global battle for freedom of expression. It is therefore disheartening to see that PEN America has chosen to honor the work and mission of Charlie Hebdo above those who not only exemplify the principles of free expression, but whose courage, even when provocative and discomfiting, has also been pointedly exercised for the good of humanity.

We the undersigned, as writers, thinkers, and members of PEN, therefore respectfully wish to disassociate ourselves from PEN America’s decision to give the 2015 Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo.

 Click link below to read interesting inside story.

http://www.vulture.com/2015/04/how-and-why-6-writers-denounced-pen.html