Battleland

Our Good Friends in Pakistan are Implicated in the Murder of a Journalist

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“We believe that Pakistanis pursue the same goals and share the same hopes,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said at a press conference last week after a high-level meeting with the head of Pakistan’s intelligence service, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Suja Pasha, and other top Pakistani leaders. She noted success hunting down terrorists, thanks to close cooperation between “our governments, our militaries, and our intelligence agencies.”

The Pakistani Intelligence Service, called the ISI, is a good friend, Clinton said. The ISI also appears to have brazenly kidnapped, tortured, and murdered a journalist this week.

Syed Saleem Shahzad, a writer for the Hong King-based Asia Times Online and the Italian news service Adnkronos International, disappeared Sunday in Islamabad while on his way to do a television interview. Two days before he disappeared, Shahzad had written a scathing article about a May 22 attack by militants at the Pakistani’s main naval base at Karachi. The attack was highly embarrassing for the Pakistani military.

The ISI had been threatening Shahzad about his critical coverage for years. In October, Shahzad wrote that one of the death threats came from Rear Adm. Adnan Nazir, the director general of the media wing of the ISI.

Soon after he disappeared on Sunday, a Human Rights Watch official there, Dayan Hasan, was “able to establish that Mr. Shahzad was being held by the ISI through senior government officials and unofficial channels,” according to an account in the New York Times.

On Monday, Shahzad’s body, showing signs of torture, was found 100 miles from his car.

That article in the Times also notes the following:

An award-winning investigative reporter, Umar Cheema, was kidnapped and beaten over six hours on the outskirts of Islamabad last September. Mr. Cheema had written several articles for The News, a prominent daily, that were critical of the army. He blames the ISI, which is an integral part of the military, for his abduction.

Presumably these are not the kinds of hopes and goals we share with the ISI.