Musharraf to be arrested over assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto

Pervez Musharraf, who resigned as Pakistan’s president in 2008, will be arrested on arrival in the country later this month, the Press Trust of India reported, citing a prosecutor.



Musharraf is a “proclaimed offender” and there’s no need for a warrant for this arrest, PTI reported today, citing Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali, prosecutor at the Federal Investigation Agency. Musharraf lives in Dubai and London and plans to return to Pakistan on Jan. 25 or Jan. 27, according to the report.



A Pakistani court issued an arrest warrant for Musharraf in February over allegations he played a role in the 2007 assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, the AP reported at the time, citing prosecutors. He hadn’t been charged in the case, AP said.

Pakistan Failed Nuclear State!!! Looking for WMDs = look no farther.

Pakistan's motive for pursuing a nuclear weapons development program is never to allow another invasion of Pakistan. President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq summed it up in 1987 when he stated to Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi: "If your forces cross our borders by an inch, we are going to annihilate your cities".



Pakistan has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). According to the U.S. Defense Department report cited above, "Pakistan remains steadfast in its refusal to sign the NPT.

Consequently, not all of Pakistan's nuclear facilities are under IAEA safeguards. Pakistani officials have stated that signature of the CTBT is in Pakistan's best interest, but that Pakistan will do so only after developing a domestic consensus on the issue."


The organization authorized to make decisions about Pakistan's nuclear posturing is the NCA. It was established in February 2000. The NCA is composed of two committees that advise the present President of Pakistan, on the development and deployment of nuclear weapons; it is also responsible for war-time command and control. In 2001, Pakistan further consolidated its nuclear weapons infrastructure by placing the Khan Research Laboratories and the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission under the control of one Nuclear Defense Complex. In November 2009, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari announced that he will be replaced by Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani as the chairman of NCA.

Saudi Terrorist Group funds hackers to attack AT&T customers!!!

Philippine police and the FBI have arrested four people over a hacking operation that targeted customers of U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T to funnel money to a Saudi-based terrorist group.



Those arrested on Wednesday in Manila were paid by the same group the Federal Bureau of Investigation accuses of having funded the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai, the Philippines' Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) said.


The hacking activity resulted in almost $2 million in losses incurred by AT&T, the CIDG said in a statement.


Police in the Philippines said money from the scams was diverted to accounts of a Saudi-based group that was not identified. India blames Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba for carrying out the attacks in Mumbai that killed 166 people.


FBI spokeswoman Jenny Shearer said hackers targeted customers of AT&T, not the carrier itself. She declined to give details, saying the agency does not discuss investigations.


Hackers broke into the phone systems of some AT&T customers and made calls to expensive international premium-rate services, according to a person familiar with the situation who was not authorized to discuss it publicly.


Such scams are relatively common, often involving bogus premium-service phone lines set up across Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia.


Fraudsters make calls to the numbers from hacked business phone systems or mobile phones then collect their cash and move on before the activity is identified. Telecommunications carriers often end up footing the bill for the charges.


Jan Rasmussen, a spokeswoman for AT&T, said it wrote off some fraudulent charges that appeared on customer bills. She declined to elaborate or comment on the $2 million figure.


Earlier this week, AT&T said it was investigating an attempt to access customer information but did not believe any accounts had been breached.

The CIDG said the FBI sought the help of its Anti-Transnational and Cyber Crime Division (ATCCD) in March after it found the Saudi-based group had targeted AT&T using the hackers.


Among the four people arrested was Paul Michael Kwan, 29, who ATCCD chief Police Senior Superintendent Gilbert Sosa said had been arrested in 2007 after the FBI began an international crackdown on groups suspected of financing militant activities.


Sosa said the Filipinos were being paid by a group originally run by Muhammad Zamir, a Pakistani arrested in Italy in 2007. He said Zamir was a member of Jemaah Islamiah, a Southeast Asian militant network with links to al Qaeda.


"Zamir's group, later tagged by the FBI to be the financial source of the terrorist attack in Mumbai, India, on November 26, 2008, is also the same group that paid Kwan's group of hackers in Manila," Sosa said in the statement.

I don’t have the foggiest idea about what I think about international, foreign policy,” said George W Pakistan Daily

The Haqqani militant network is a "veritable arm" of Pakistan's powerful ISI intelligence service, which supported the group as it launched a startling attack last week on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, the top U.S. military officer said on Thursday.

Admiral Mike Mullen , who steps down this month as chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, made his accusation before a U.S. Senate panel, underscoring the fragility of the strained U.S.-Pakistan alliance.

Mullen, CIA director David Petraeus and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton all have met with their Pakistani counterparts in recent days to demand Islamabad take action against the Haqqani network.

"The Haqqani network ... acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency," Mullen told the Senate panel.

UAE Human Trafficking; Sexual Exploitation of Women

Human Rights Watch has praised a decision by the Philippines government that could ban domestic workers to three Gulf countries (UAE, Kuwait, & Qatar) and urged other labour exporting countries to follow suit.


The US-based watchdog said it remained concerned about the treatment of domestic workers in the GCC states and called for other governments to step up measures to better protect their nationals working abroad.

“Treatment of migrant domestic workers is a problem throughout the Gulf… It’s very encouraging that the Philippines would be considering such a move, it is steps like this that are essential in order to improve the situation for domestic workers generally,” Joe Stork, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division, told Arabian Business.

“Other labour sending countries should be taking the same kinds of measures or certainly conducting the same kinds of investigations, and having the same kind of vigilance on the ground through the embassies and consulates as the Philippines does,” he added.

The United Arab Emirates [UAE] is one of the biggest destinations for men and women, predominantly from South and Southeast Asia, trafficked for the purposes of labor and commercial-sexual exploitation. Migrant workers, who comprise more than 90 percent of the UAE's private sector workforce, are recruited from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, China, and the Philippines. Women from some of these countries travel willingly to work as domestic servants or administrative staff, but most are subjected to conditions indicative of forced labor, including unlawful withholding of passports, restrictions on movement, non-payment of wages, threats, or physical or sexual abuse.

Legally, once a foreign female domestic worker enters her employer's house, she is totally under his/her control, since the employer is usually her visa sponsor. Even today, United Arab Emirates labour laws do not recognize domestics as part of the labour force. The employer bears total responsibility for his/her domestic workers and has total control over them.

The immigration regulations governing the status of domestic workers and the social practices towards foreign female domestic worker in the United Arab Emirates enslave them to their employers until the duration of their contract ends.

A significant portion of the foreign female workers in UAE as well as in other Arab countries are forced to offer sex to the employer, as well as many of them are even sold to the private brothels or sex rackets by the recruiting agents or pimps.

Pakistan: Musharraf to be tried for assassination of Bhutto

A Pakistani court has ordered former president Pervez Musharraf's financial assets to be frozen and confiscated, a prosecutor said.

A hearing in Adiyala prison in the garrison town of Rawalpindi on Saturday ruled for his property to be confiscated and his Pakistani bank accounts to be frozen, Chaudhry Azhar, a public prosecutor, told the AFP news agency.


The hearing is adjourned until September 10, Azhar said.


Musharraf, the former military ruler, has been living in self-imposed exile in London and Dubai since leaving office in 2008.

He is alleged to have been part of a "broad conspiracy" to have Benazir Bhutto, ex-premier and his political rival, killed in 2007 before presidential elections.


Prosecutors issued an arrest warrant in February over what they said was his failure to provide her with enough security.

The exact nature of the charges against him, however, has not so far been made clear.

"This is a criminal case and it’s most ridiculous that my name has been added because I’m supposed to have been in charge or that I failed to provide security," Musharraf told Al Jazeera on Saturday.


"In this, I have to appear personally in court [as] it can not be done through any lawyer appearing in the court."


"Because of many other reasons I am outside the country and I don’t want to appear in the court but when I go on the 23rd of March, when I go back to Pakistan I certainly will go in and appear in the court and answer questions," he said.

Bhutto was shot dead on December 27, 2007 as she was leaving an election campaign rally in Rawalpindi, near Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.

At the time, Musharraf's government blamed Baitullah Mehsud, the chief of the Pakistani Taliban, for Bhutto's assassination.

Mehsud, who denied any involvement, was killed in a US drone attack in August 2009, one of the most high-profile casualties of the covert American campaign targeting al-Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan's lawless tribal belt on the Afghan border.


Bhutto, who served two terms as prime minister, had returned from exile two months before she was killed to stand for election.


Her widower Asif Ali Zardari led her Pakistan People's Party to election victory in February 2008 and is now president.

A Mercader: not really state of the art.

Pakistan Spies on Its Diaspora, Spreading Fear
They all do it…spy on the USA. Some of them; ok most of them try to recruit former nationals gone American. This alone is why I think all new immigrants to the USA should serve in the military or a US Public Service Corps. First, it would allow better indoctrination into American values and second, it would allow better observation for the clandestine gene.

So before beating up on Pakistan the safe haven for the USA’s greatest enemy (Osama bin Laden) since Emperor Hirohito; let’s check out some relevant Russian and Chinese cases:

Russia

The United States Treasury Department was successfully penetrated by nearly a dozen Soviet agents or information sources, including Harold Glasser and his superior, Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the treasury and the second most influential official in the department.

China

According to federal investigators, four people recently arrested in Los Angeles are part of an extensive network of Chinese military intelligence agents operating here in the United States. The alleged spies have been working in the U.S. since 1990 and, according to documents obtained from the suspects; they may have compromised some of America's most important weapon systems.

All four were arrested and charged with theft of government property. The charges are expected to be upgraded to espionage or espionage-related, according to law enforcement officials.

According to investigators, the ring consisted of Chi Mak and his wife, Rebecca Laiwah Chiu, along with Chi's brother, Tai Wang Mak, and his wife, Fuk Heung Li. Documents found at the search of Chi's home in Downey, California, showed that sensitive data on Aegis battle management systems have been passed to communist China.

Chi reportedly holds a secret-level security clearance and worked on more than 200 U.S. defense and military contracts as an electrical engineer with the defense contractor Power Paragon, a subsidiary of L3/SPD Technologies/Power Systems Group in Anaheim, Calif. In addition, Chi had access to details on U.S. aircraft carriers and once was aboard the USS Stennis.

Pakistan

F.B.I. agents hunting for Pakistani spies in the United States last year began tracking Mohammed Tasleem, an attaché in the Pakistani Consulate in New York and a clandestine operative of Pakistan’s military spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence.

Mr. Tasleem, they discovered, had been posing as an F.B.I. agent to extract information from Pakistanis living in the United States and was issuing threats to keep them from speaking openly about Pakistan’s government. His activities were part of what government officials in Washington, along with a range of Pakistani journalists and scholars; say is a systematic ISI campaign to keep tabs on the Pakistani diaspora inside the United States.

The F.B.I. brought Mr. Tasleem’s activities to Leon E. Panetta, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and last April, Mr. Panetta had a tense conversation with Pakistan’s spymaster, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha.

Within days, Mr. Tasleem was spirited out of the United States — a quiet resolution typical of the spy games among the world’s powers.

But some of the secrets of that hidden world became public last week when two Pakistani-Americans working for a charity that the F.B.I. believes is a front for Pakistan’s spy service were indicted. Only one was arrested; the other is still in Pakistan.

The investigation exposed one part of what American officials say is a broader campaign by the Pakistani spy agency, known as the ISI, to exert influence over lawmakers, stifle public dialogue critical of Pakistan’s military and blunt the influence of India, Pakistan’s longtime adversary.

ISI’s campaign extends to issuing both tacit and overt threats against those who speak critically about the military.

The ISI is widely feared inside Pakistan because of these very tactics. For example, American intelligence officials believe that some ISI operatives ordered the recent killing of a Pakistani journalist, Saleem Shahzad.

According to one American law enforcement official, the F.B.I. had originally hoped to arrest the two men working for the charity, the Kashmiri American Council, several times earlier this year but was told each time by the State Department or the C.I.A. that the arrests would only aggravate the frayed relations between the United States and Pakistan.

The indictments came as the C.I.A. was trying to negotiate the release of a Pakistani doctor who was jailed by the ISI on accusations that he had helped the Americans track down Osama bin Laden before his killing.

Several Pakistani journalists and scholars in the United States interviewed over the past week said that they were approached regularly by Pakistani officials, some of whom openly identified themselves as ISI officials. The journalists and scholars said the officials caution them against speaking out on politically delicate subjects like the indigenous insurgency in Baluchistan or accusations of human rights abuses by Pakistani soldiers. The verbal pressure is often accompanied by veiled warnings about the welfare of family members in Pakistan, they said.

One Pakistani journalist, who like the others asked to be quoted anonymously because of concerns about his safety, recalled an episode in December 2006 in which a Pakistani man filmed a public discussion about Pakistan’s tribal areas at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. The event’s organizers later learned the man was from the ISI, the journalist said.

A second Pakistani author said that at several conferences and seminars in recent years, representatives from the spy agency made their presence known by asking threatening questions.

“The ISI guys will look into your eyes and will indirectly threaten you by introducing themselves,” the author said. “The ISI makes sure that they are present in every occasion relating to Pakistan, and in some cases they pay ordinary Pakistanis for attending events and pass them information.”

The indictments last week were part of a broader F.B.I. investigation into how Pakistan’s government, including the ISI, has secretly funneled money into the United States to influence American policy about Kashmir, a region claimed both by India and Pakistan. The effort, American officials said, included lobbying and publicity activities by the Kashmiri American Council (also called the Kashmiri Center) and by donations to lawmakers.

In recent years, the Justice Department has brought several cases against defendants charged with supporting terror groups that have historically had ties to the ISI, including Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group that carried out the 2008 attacks in Mumbai.

Abbas, author of "Pakistan's Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army and America's War on Terror," said there is an alarming trend that includes Pakistani pilots refusing to bomb militant strongholds, and units surrendering to militant groups rather than fire on them.

Last month, Pakistani Taliban insurgents stormed the Naval Air Station in Karachi, apparently armed with inside information on its layout and security. They destroyed two U.S. supplied surveillance aircraft.

Days before he was abducted and murdered, Pakistani journalist Syed Shahzad described that attack as "the violent beginning of an internal ideological struggle between Islamist elements in the Pakistani armed forces and their secular and liberal top brass."

He went on to quote unnamed sources in the ISI, Pakistan's military intelligence service, as saying: "It was shown several months ago that the Pakistan navy is vulnerable to Islamists when a marine commando unit official was arrested.....Now, they (intelligence) realize how the organization (navy) is riddled and vulnerable to the influence of militant organizations."

Brigadier General Ali Khan was close to retiring at the end of a distinguished career in the Pakistani Army when he was detained early in May - and accused of links with an outlawed Islamist group.

His arrest, which became public Tuesday, shocked fellow officers at army headquarters and again raises the specter that senior ranks of the Pakistani officer corps may be infiltrated by Islamist militants.

Army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas said Khan was believed linked to Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation). He said efforts were underway to arrest members of the group who had been in contact with Khan.

New American intelligence assessments have concluded that Pakistan has steadily expanded its nuclear arsenal since President Obama came to office, and that it is building the capability to surge ahead in the production of nuclear-weapons material, putting it on a path to overtake Britain as the world’s fifth largest nuclear weapons power.

There is a good reason to let people spy on your soil. You can always turn them or at least watch what they are spying on. If you know, what they know, and they don’t know it; then you’re ahead. Unless of course they know that you know, and you don’t know it. All very confusing in the spy game, isn’t it?

But what of militant Islam in Pakistan and WMD? We all went to war over Iraq’s alleged program and have bombed and will bomb Iran as it heads in that direction. But what of Pakistan the safe house of Osama bin Laden?  Can it be allowed to be a nuclear threat? The Washington Post, citing nongovernment analysts, said Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal now numbered more than 100 deployed weapons.