Pakistan - Nuclear dictatorship in meltdown

[TonyGosling]

Musharraf sacks chief justice, suspends Pakistan constitution
By Matthew Pennington - The Associated Press
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003992925_pakistan0 4.html

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — President Gen. Pervez Musharraf suspended Pakistan's constitution and deployed troops in the capital Saturday, declaring that rising Islamic extremism had forced him to take emergency measures. He also replaced the nation's chief justice and blacked out the independent media that refused to support him.

Authorities began rounding up opposition politicians despite calls from the United States and other Western allies not to take authoritarian measures.


Soldiers stand guard in front of Islamabad's administrative center Saturday after Pakistan President Gen. Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency.

The U.S. called for Musharraf to restore democracy. However, the Pentagon said the emergency declaration does not affect U.S. military support for Pakistan and its efforts in the war on terrorism. Britain said it was deeply concerned.

at this point the article begins to paint the dictator as a victim of the courts at which point the writer loses the plot......


Khan, opposition figures arrested in Pakistan
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/khan-arrested-in-pakistan/2007/11/04/ 1194117864806.html
Pakistani cricket legend Imran Khan, senior lawyers and key opposition figures were among at least a dozen people arrested overnight under a state of emergency, police said today.
Their arrests came as President Pervez Musharraf suspended the constitution citing what he said were threats posed to the nuclear-armed nation by Islamic extremism and judicial interference.
Khan, who captained Pakistan to cricket World Cup success in 1992 and then turned to politics, said he was placed under house arrest.
"Police entered my house in Lahore and told me that I am placed under house arrest, they did not show me any detention order at all," Khan said....

[spiv]

Of course, let it not be forgotten that, despite the US Government's protestations about this, they have already put the legal mechanisms in place to do this very same thing if there were ever another so called "terrorist" attack in America.

[GazeboflossUK]

Exactly.

I was telling my friends this very same thing.

Top US administration always speak out against any movement away from "democracy" while all the time they are working against it in their own country and actually seem to quite like dictatorships.

Thing is The US can't say anything else....they must publicly condemn Musharraf because any other stance would really show their true colours.

Smoke and Mirrors

[TonyGosling]

Top court orders suspension of emergency
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=29670&sectionid=351020401
Pakistan's top court has ordered the suspension of the emergency imposed by the military ruler President General Pervez Musharraf.
A government spokesman told AFP that the Supreme Court order would not come into effect because the emergency order has a clause stating that it cannot be challenged in any court of law.
The government opposed the suspension of emergency declared by Musharraf on Saturday, amid rising violence and political tensions in Pakistan.
"The emergency rule has been set aside by a seven-member bench declaring it illegal and all judges of the Supreme Court and high court barred from taking an oath under the new provisional constitutional order," private Geo television reported.


Pakistani police storm television station
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/11/03/pakistan.media/
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (CNN) -- Less than a day after Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency and scolded the country's media for being too "negative," police stormed the offices of a television station early Sunday, AAJ-TV's director of news and current affairs said.
Armed with guns, the two dozen police said they had orders to take the station's equipment, including a van that the station uses to broadcast live coverage, Talat Hussain said.
"We resisted," Hussain said. "We said show us the papers."
The police didn't have proof their demands were legitimate, he said, adding the officers said only that they had orders "from the highest authority."
"They said, 'We'll do it the nice way or the other way,' " Hussain said.................

[TonyGosling]

Police Battle Lawyers in Pakistan
By JANE PERLEZ and DAVID ROHDE
Published: November 6, 2007
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 5 — Police armed with tear gas and clubs attacked thousands of protesting lawyers in the city of Lahore today, and rounded up lawyers in other cities as the government of the Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, faced the first signs of concerted resistance to the imposition of emergency rule.



An estimated 150 lawyers were arrested in Lahore after a pitched battle between police and lawyers who stood on the roof of the High Court throwing stones at the police below. Some of the lawyers had bleeding heads as they were shoved into police vans, and some fainted in the clouds of tear gas.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/06/world/asia/06pakistan.html?hp

[spiv]

Looks a little scarily like Pol Pot's regime, when he carted off and executed the intelligentsia, and what remained were the subdued masses, and the brainwashed kids.

As I made the point earlier on this thread, Bush and his fellow war criminals in the USA could now themselves declare martial law. I assume this is what the Haliburton camps were constructed for, not the hoards of "terrorists" lurking in every corner, under every bed and in every cupboard.

Why is there complete silence from the masses? Why no outcry of discord?

It shows just how brainwashed many of us are, doesn't it?

[karlos]

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004658.php

U.S. Aid to Musharraf is Largely Untraceable Cash Transfers
By Spencer Ackerman - November 7, 2007, 5:05PM

After Pervez Musharraf declared martial law this weekend, Condoleezza Rice vowed to review U.S. assistance to Pakistan, one of the largest foreign recipients of American aid. Musharraf, of course, has been a crucial American ally since the start of the Afghanistan war in 2001, and the U.S. has rewarded him ever since with over $10 billion in civilian and (mostly) military largesse. But, perhaps unsure whether Musharraf's days might in fact be numbered, Rice contended that the explosion of money to Islamabad over the past seven years was "not to Musharraf, but to a Pakistan you could argue was making significant strides on a number of fronts."

In fact, however, a considerable amount of the money the U.S. gives to Pakistan is administered not through U.S. agencies or joint U.S.-Pakistani programs. Instead, the U.S. gives Musharraf's government about $200 million annually and his military $100 million monthly in the form of direct cash transfers. Once that money leaves the U.S. Treasury, Musharraf can do with it whatever he wants. He needs only promise in a secret annual meeting that he'll use it to invest in the Pakistani people. And whatever happens as the result of Rice's review, few Pakistan watchers expect the cash transfers to end.

About $10.58 billion has gone to Pakistan since 9/11. That puts Pakistan in an elite category of U.S. foreign-aid recipients: only Israel, Egypt and Jordan get more or comparable U.S. funding. (That's only in the unclassified budget: the covert-operations budget surely includes millions more, according to knowledgeable observers.) While Israel and Egypt get more money, Pakistan and Jordan are the only countries that get U.S. cash from four major funding streams: development assistance, security assistance, "budget support" and Coalition Support Funds. Pakistan, however, gets most of its U.S. assistance from Coalition Support Funds and from budget support. And it's those two funding streams that have minimal accountability at best.

The "budget support" package is the lion's share of U.S. economic assistance to Pakistan -- and it's not spent in conjunction with any U.S. agency. "It's a cash transfer," says Lisa Curtis, a South Asia analyst at the Heritage Foundation who used to work on the South Asia desk at the State Department and for Sen. Richard Lugar (R-ID). "That goes directly to the Pakistani treasury." It totalled around $200 million each year until earlier this year, when Rep. John Tierney (D-MA) plucked $75 million of out of it and put it in an education fund for USAID to administer. In theory, budget support is supposed to free up the treasuries of the four countries that receive it for investing in their national infrastructure. But in practice, recipients can do with it whatever they like. "The notion is it gives them greater flexibility on how to use the money," explains Craig Cohen, vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The trade-off is accountability."

In Pakistan's case, the only oversight is an annual agreement, known as the Shared Objectives statement, whereby top State Department and Treasury Department officials receive from Musharraf deputies -- usually Prime Minister Shawkat Aziz -- an explanation of how Musharraf intends to spend the money. The agreement is reached entirely in secret. "A good question is what are the objectives we're basing this budget support on," Cohen says.

Accountability also suffers in the Coalition Support Funds. According to Rick Barton of CSIS, who spearheaded perhaps the most comprehensive report on the murky world of U.S.-Pakistan ties, Pakistan has gotten over $6 billion in Coalition Support Funds since 9/11, with disbursements rising to total about $100 million a month. This, too, is a direct cash transfer. "The Coalition Support funding is basically a sort of a handshake deal between militaries," Barton says. "We don’t have good sense where it goes. ... we don't ask a lot of questions, and we don't have a lot of record-keeping. "

Only about ten percent of the $10.58 billion since 9/11 has gone toward development aid and humanitarian assistance, according to the CSIS report -- even after Pakistan suffered a devastating earthquake in October 2005. "Close to 90 percent goes to the military-led government," Barton says. "Some of it is directly into the military, and the other pieces go into the Musharraf government."

In Pakistan, the military runs not just the government, but major sections of the economy as well. Joshua Hammer recently reported for The Atlantic that the Pakistani military owns large stakes in the country's "banks, cable-TV companies, insurance agencies, sugar refineries, private security firms, schools, airlines, cargo services, and textile factories." Mainlining largely untraceable money into the Pakistani treasury helps this system perpetuate itself -- even as widespread public discontent, from both moderates and radicals, boils over. It also sends the signal that the U.S. prefers to have relations with Pervez Musharraf rather than the Pakistani people.

"The whole orientation of policy and assistance provided since 9/11 is that he's the indispensable leader," says Cohen. "And the money runs through the central government and that leader."

[Disco_Destroyer]

My personal view is the public image is to cut Pakistani aid but silently the funds still move to back a stable subservient dictatorship as with Saddam Hussain previously. I hope the people can work out some kind of freedome but not the kind that sees war with India

[TonyGosling]

Pakistan - Lawyers released - Journalists Arrested

Pakistan releases activists, lawyers
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2007/11/21/2003388826



150 journalists detained in Pakistan
Tue, 20 Nov 2007 18:50:59

Security forces have detained about 150 journalists after clashing with them during a protest against Pakistan's state of emergency.

An Associated Press reporter was among the group of journalists surrounded by police at the Press Club in the southern city of Karachi.

Police used vans to take the journalists away in groups.

About 300 journalists had gathered to protest against a crackdown on media introduced as part of the state of emergency declared by President General Pervez Musharraf.

Trouble began when some of the demonstrators, chanting slogans including "We want freedom," tried to push past barriers blocking the way towards the provincial governor's house.

Television footage showed fighting breaking out between the protesters and police. One reporter was seen bleeding from head injuries.

Also in the eastern city of Lahore, protesters took to the streets to condemn the restrictions placed on Pakistan's media.

Police have also detained 23 journalists after they tried to hold a rally in the southern city of Hyderabad to protest the restrictions.

[Bongo]

Interesting to see all this happen in a Nuclear State... and no emergency council called by NATO or the G7 or whoever?

I guess there is time for it to spread across the thin border into Iran yet ?

Maybe a US lead peace keeping force into Pakistan to build the 'Allied' troop levels on the 'South-Eastern Front' to suppliment the US/UK forces on the 'North-Eastern front' and secure the Gulf of Oman (Particularly the Strait of Hormuz). Along with the massive forces already on the 'Western Front' in Iraq, prior to embarking on the final conflict in Iran via. the classic pincer movement ?

If you check a map, it is not so far fetched.

We will see