Jailbreak Wednesday- 248 Inmates Freed in Pakistani Taliban Prison Raid

At least 13 people were killed on Tuesday after Taliban fighters attacked a prison in the north-central Pakistani town of Dera Ismail Khan in what officials are calling a well-coordinated assault. The assailants used mortars and RPGs to overwhelm guards and local police before freeing inmates from the century-old, including senior Taliban commanders.

Up to 100 attackers, some wearing police uniforms, bombarded the prison with rockets and mortars before going inside.

An ensuing gun battle raged for three or four hours.

Katherine Houreld, a correspondent for Reuters news agency, told the BBC it had been a "very sophisticated attack - they blew the electricity line, they breached the walls and they set ambushes for reinforcements".

"When the shooting started, we immediately got into an armed police vehicle and parked on the road in front of the main gate," injured policeman Hidayat Ullah told AP news agency from his hospital bed.

"After this, we heard an explosion and the main gate exploded. After this, we started shooting towards the main gate from our armed vehicle.

"During this time, maybe either a rocket launcher or a mortar shell hit the vehicle. Two of our policemen were killed on the spot, and three of us were injured. We got down from the armed vehicle, and after that I don't know what happened."

Once inside the prison, the attackers used loudspeakers to call out the names of specific inmates before rigging up booby traps around the prison to cover their escape.

The jailbreak is the third major attack in Pakistan in the span of a week- two bombs at a marketplace in the border town of Parachinar reportedly killed 57 people and 9 people were killed in an attack targeting the offices of Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency on July 24th. This is also the third major jailbreak in an Islamic majority nation in a week following a brazen prison raid in Iraq and more than 1000 prisoners being freed in Benghazi, Libya over the weekend. In May 2012, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistani freed more than 400 inmates from a prison compound in Bannu- about two hours from Dera Ismail Khan- after blowing up the front gate of the prison with anti-tank weaponry and spiriting away inmates on waiting motorcoaches.

Officials say they had received intelligence about a possible jailbreak several weeks ago and moved certain high-value inmates to more secure facilities. However, the jailbreaks have led some to question whether or not the Taliban could count on a certain amount of complicity or collusion from prison officials.

Pakistani Doctor Who Helped USA Confirm Bin Laden's Location Recieves 30+ Year Prison Sentence For Treason Against Pakistan

A Pakistani doctor who helped the CIA and US Navy SEAL commandos pinpoint the whereabouts of Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden recieved a 33 year prison sentence for treason against the state of Pakistan on Wednesday.

Dr Shakil Afridi ran a vaccination program in which he was able to collect DNA from the fugitive Al Qaeda leader and confirm that he was hiding at a compound in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbotabad. Bin Laden, his son and an al Qaeda courier were killed and three of his wives were captured along with a treasure trove of intelligence after President Obama authorized the Navy SEAL raid on Bin Laden's Abbotabad compound in May 2011.

The unilateral raid was considered an international embarrassment for Pakistan, since Bin Laden's compound was located less than a kilometer from the front enterance to Pakistan's military academy. While senior Pakistani officials claimed to not know of Bin Laden's whereabouts, many analyists speculate that the Pakistani Interservices Intelligence Directorate (ISI) aided in harboring the fugitive Al Qaeda leader.

Afridi's conviction comes at a sensitive time because the U.S. is already frustrated by Pakistan's refusal to reopen NATO supply routes to Afghanistan. The supply routes were closed six months ago in retaliation for American air strikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.

Afridi was detained sometime after the May 2, 2011, raid, but the start of his trial was never publicized.

He was tried under the Frontier Crimes Regulations, or FCR, the set of laws that govern Pakistan's semiautonomous tribal region. Human rights organizations have criticized the FCR for not providing suspects due process of law. There is no right to legal representation, to present material evidence or cross-examine witnesses.

The verdict was handed down by a Khyber government official in consultation with a council of elders, according to Nasir Khan, a government official in the Khyber tribal area, where the doctor was arrested and tried.

A senior U.S. official with knowledge of counter-terrorism operations against al-Qaeda in Pakistan said the doctor was never asked to spy on Pakistan.

In addition to the lengthy prison term, Afridi was also fined the equivalent of $3500 and may get an additional three years added to his sentence if he is unable to pay his fine.

One can't help but come to the conclusion that the plight of Dr. Afridi serves as a powerful disincentive for foreign nationals to provide the CIA with critical intelligence now that he has been identified and imprisoned by his home country. I'm also wondering why the Obama Administration and the State Department weren't prepared to whisk Afridi and his family out of Pakistan at a moment's notice.

STRATFOR: Osama Bin Laden Routinely in Contact With Top Pakistani Intelligence Officials

According to e-mails leaked by online whistleblower site Wikileaks, Osama bin Laden maintained contact with top officials from Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency while at his compound in the eastern garrison town of Abbotabad.

The fugitive Saudi millionaire and al Qadea leader and his associates were killed in a surprise nighttime raid by US Navy SEALS in May 2011.

According to one of the e-mails, the firm was shown the information papers collected from bin Laden's Abbotabad compound after the US special forces attack last May that resulted in his death.

The e-mail, from a Stratfor analyst, suggested that up to 12 officials in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency knew of the al-Qaeda leader's safe house.

The internal email did not name the Pakistani officials involved but said the US could use the information as a bargaining chip in post raid negotiations with Islamabad.

"Mid to senior level ISI and Pak Mil with one retired Pak Mil General that had knowledge of the OBL arrangements and safehouse," the email said of the officers involved. "I get a very clear sense we (US intel) know names and ranks."

Although many military and intelligence analysts expressed doubt that Bin Laden could be hiding less than a kilometer away from the front gate of the Pakistani Military Academy without the government, military or ISI knowing about it, Pakistan has denied knowing of Bin Laden's whereabouts prior to the American raid.

Founded in 1996, STRATFOR- short for Strategic Forecasting, Inc- is a San Antonio, TX based think tank and security firm that provides detailed threat assessment and frequent intelligence briefings to individual and corporate subscribers [full disclosure- while not a subscriber myself, STRATFOR provided some of the details regarding Mexican organized crime and the ATF's Operation Fast & Furious in earlier Borderline Psychosis updates on this blog- NANESB!].

The STRATFOR correspondence was obtained from by hackers known as Anonymous in late 2011 and posted on WikiLeaks earlier this week. WikiLeaks founder and Kremlin mouthpiece Julian Assange has accused STRATFOR of being involved in a number of legally and ethically questionable intelligence gathering activities on behalf of corporations.

Playing With Fire- Pakistani Firecracker Veena Malik in Hot Water (Again) Over Provacative Magazine Cover

Lollywood actress Veena Malik was once again in the eye of a firestorm of controversy after a racy photo shoot for the cover of the December 2011 issue of FHM India magazine. The pictures show a nude or semi-nude Malik with her arms strategically crossed and the initials 'ISI' stenciled on one of them. The ISI- or Interservices Intelligence Directorate- is Pakistan's national intelligence agency. The text adjacent to the stencil says 'Hand in the end of the world, too?'

Indian newsstand displaying one version of the FHM magazine cover featuring Malik

Granted it doesn't take much to provoke outrage in Pakistan these days, but Malik's photo shoot and the FHM cover have done just that.

For her part, Malik has filed a £3m million defamation suit against the publisher, Maxposure Media Group, claiming the final images used by FHM on the cover were doctored [not sure if she means the nudity, the ISI stencil or both- NANESB!]. FHM and the publisher are reportedly filing a counter suit.

Another version of the FHM India cover features a semi-nude Malik clad only in an ammo belt and clenching the pin of a grenade in her teeth. Both version feature an ISI tattoo on Malik's arm, provoking outrage in her native Pakistan

I think this is the part where I tell you that Malik is no stranger to controversy.

In 2010, the actress testified before cricket's international governing body against her ex-boyfriend- Mohammed Asif from the Pakistani national team- in a match-fixing scandal.

Later that year, she appeared on the Indian version of Big Brother- called Bigg Boss- and raised hackles in her native Pakistan after she was filmed cuddling with one of her housemates on the reality show.


What really put the Pakistani bombshell on the map was her January 2011 on-air confrontation with an Islamic mufti critical her conduct while on the reality show and preforming in Bollywood.

Earlier this year, she was unscathed after her car was totalled in a hit and run collision on an expressway between Lahore and Islamabad, leading some to speculate the accident was an attempt on her life.

Of the uproar in her homeland, Malik said in an interview with the UK's Guardian "This attitude, I'm sorry, is in the society. When they say they have become modern, grown up, that's wrong. They still live in the stone age."

However, shortly after the FHM India magazine hit the newsstands her father disowned her, saying her actions on Indian soil was "the height of humiliation for Pakistan" [Really? The most wanted terrorist leader in the world getting shot dead by US Navy SEALS a few hundred yards from the front gate of Pakistan's equivalent of West Point doesn't rate? NANESB!].


I actually first heard of the FHM cover flap from Weasel Zippers earlier this month, but took my own sweet time updating it despite older articles about Malik drawing increased traffic.

When I finally got around to doing some online searches earlier tonight, Google's auto-suggest hinted at an ominous development when I began typing in 'Veena Malik' and it suggested 'Veena Malik missing'.

Sure enough, the Times of India is reporting that Ms. Malik has gone missing after wrapping up work on her latest film Mumbai 125 Km in Gorageon. The film's director said he received a text message where she apologized for seeming distracted on the set. Her manager has also been unable to get in contact with her.

Mumbai Rocked By Trio of Deadly Blasts

Three separate blasts tore through a commercial district in India's largest city of Mumbai earlier Wednesday, killing at least 17 and injuring 141.

Although no group claimed responsibility, the explosions hit locations where a terror siege nearly three years ago killed 166 people. Wednesday also coincided with the birthday of the lone surviving gunman of the 2008 attack.

Arup Patnaik, a top police officer, said the attackers used improvised explosive devices in the attack, hidden in an umbrella in the Jhaveri Bazaar jewelry market and kept in a car in the business district of Opera House.

Indian officials say they believe the responsibility of Wednesday's attack rests with the Indian Mujahideen, a group that works closely with Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Lashkar-e-Taiba is the group suspected to be behind the 2008 attack.

All three blasts happened from 6:50 p.m. to 7 p.m., when all the neighborhoods would have been packed with office workers and commuters.

The blasts hit the crowded Dadar neighborhood at rush hour, the famed jewelry market Jhaveri Bazaar and the busy business district of Opera House, an official at the city's Police Control Room said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of office policy.

The explosions happened around 7 p.m., when all the neighborhoods would have been packed with office workers and commuters.

Authorities say an early indicator of a terror strike was the close timing of the string of explosions.

The November 2008 attacks targeted a pair of landmark luxury hotels, a train station, a hospital and a Chabad house. According to diplomatic cables released via wikileaks, and testimony from a Chicago trial of a US citizen accused of scouting locations for the Mumbai attack, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) provided training and support to Lashkar-e-Taiba members prior to the Mumbai attacks.

Indian authorities have not yet identified any suspects, although the locations of the targets and the timing of the blasts to coincide with the lone surviving Mumbai gunman's birthday hardly seem coincidental.

India's Home Affairs Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram confirmed that the explosive devices were made from ammonium nitrate and investigators believe that the devices weren't set off remotely.

Pakistan Announces Cuts in US Military Presence After Bin Laden Raid

I can't be the only one thinking that America would be better served by cutting back on the estimated $18 billion in aid money we send to Pakistan.

Apparently, SEAL Team 6 notwithstanding, The US Military presence in Pakistan is currently limited to about 300 advisers and liaison officers. Not surprisingly, Pakistan's military and Inter-services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) are unhappy with a unilateral US special ops raid.

However, given that the Navy SEALs were able to swoop in undetected on a compound housing the world's most wanted man that was 70 miles from the Pakistani capital and a few hundred yards from the Pakistani equivalent of West Point, this also gives both the Pakistani military and ISI black eyes and bloody lips.

If the Pakistani Army or ISI were searching for Bin Laden like they has assured many Western nations, then they had failed miserably. If they were seeking to protect Bin Laden from the US Military, then they had failed spectacularly.

Pakistan is calling for cuts in the U.S. military personnel inside the country after U.S. Navy SEALs killed Usama bin Laden in his Pakistan compound -- without Pakistan's help or prior knowledge.

The siege has only increased the strain on relations between the two countries, as some U.S. lawmakers are calling for cuts to the $1.3 billion in U.S. aid to Pakistan for its failure to locate bin Laden. The Al Qaeda leader was found and killed in a large $1 million compound in an army town not far from the capital of Islamabad. Lawmakers have suggested Pakistan was either too incompetent to catch bin Laden or was complicit in protecting him.

In a statement Thursday, Pakistan's army fired back, saying U.S. military personnel inside the country would be reduced to the "minimum essential" levels to protest the American commando raid that killed bin Laden early Monday local time. The army also threatened to cut cooperation with Washington if it stages more unilateral raids on its territory.

The statement from Pakistan's army was issued after a meeting of top generals. The statement gave no details on the numbers, and a spokesman declined to elaborate.

The statement said the Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency, or ISI, had given initial information to the CIA about bin Laden, but claimed the "CIA did not share further development of intelligence on the case with the ISI, contrary to the existing practice between the two services."

The raid on bin Laden has sharpened tensions between the two countries. Despite the calls from some U.S. lawmakers for cuts in aid to the country, the Obama administration and British Prime Minister David Cameron have indicated they would continue with their policy of engaging with the country.

So when all is said and done, this is basically an empty gesture on Pakistan's part meant either for domestic consumption or to raise sovereignty issues as a means of deflecting questions about Osama Bin Laden living unmolested only a few hundred yards from the front gate of Pakistan's national military academy.

Pentagon Says Nothing New in Afghanistan Documents Leaked Online

Pentagon and Administration officials are downplaying the online leak of more than 90,000 documents regarding the military effort in Afghanistan. However, senior Pentagon officials say that they still need to sort through at least 75,000 of the documents.

Some of the revelations contained in the Wikileaks document dump were already widely known or suspected by those in military, diplomatic and intelligence community, such as Pakistan's Interservices Intelligence Directorate playing a double-game with the USA and the Afghan Taliban. Documents from Afghan officials included in the leaks also allege that Iran has been arming and financing Taliban commanders as far back as 2005.

Earlier this month, the US Army pressed charges against PFC Bradley Manning, an intelligence analyst stationed in Iraq who leaked classified video of two Reuters journalists killed by a helicopter gunship along with Iraqi insurgents back in 2007. While Manning was stationed in Iraq and the Wikileaks document dump deals mostly with Afghanistan, Army officials have not ruled out the possibility that Manning could also be the source of the latest leaks and are attempting to backtrack what information he had access to.

"WikiLeaks does not have an opinion whether the war in Afghanistan should continue or not continue. ... It should continue in a just way if its to continue at all,"

Wikileaks creator Julia Assange claimed in a CNN interview. However, in an inteview with Germany's Der Spiegel the other day, Assange said:

"I enjoy crushing bastards. So it is enjoyable work."

Note that the Wikileaks benefits nobody but the Taliban in the short-term, so it's pretty clear who Assange thinks the 'bastards' are in this instance.

Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said the information should be put "in context" and that journalists should avoid publishing anything that could harm U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Assange, he said, "is an anti-war activist who has repeatedly cast a very unfair light on the American military and on the American population in general."

"There are American troops in harm's way getting shot and killed," Rieckhoff said. "If WikiLeaks is endangering them, we need to push back, and the American public needs to push back."

As others much more in the know than myself have described it, the leaks are more or less "old news that comes at a bad time".

Steve Schippert of threatswatch.org goes into more detail about some of the familiar-sounding memes that seem to be a common theme of the latest offering from WikiLeaks.

Curious how Assange and the others haven't gone to such lengths to undermine the regimes of Hugo Chavez, Hu Jintao or Mahmoud Ahmedinejhad. I guess they're part of the 'vulnerable' that he seeks to protect.

Times Square Bombing Attempt Update- "What? He's From Pakistan!? LA LA LA! Nothing to See Here! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!! Edition

Well....he's from Pakistan, and they DO drink tea over in Pakistan. What the hell? Might as well say he's involved in the tea party movement.

Shortly after I reported that a suspect was in custody in the failed Times Square car bombing attempt, he was identified as 30-year old Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized US citizen originally from Pakistan and residing in Bridgeport, Ct. Faisal had a degree and reportedly worked as a budget analyst before being laid off. And for those of you who argue that terrorism is the last-resort weapon of the poor, oppressed, downtrodden and disenfranchised, Faisal Shahzad came from a well-to-do and influential family. The father was a high-ranking officer in Pakistan's Air Force and founder of the Sherdils, the country's military aerobatics team and the family lived on a compound outside of Peshawar in an upscale suburb. Not exactly some dirt-poor goat herder who's spent his whole life in rags and grinding poverty.

Faisal was arrested by law-enforcement on an Emirates Airlines flight as it was getting ready to take off at JFK this week. How he managed to get past the security checkpoints and onto the flight raises all sorts of questions about Homeland Security and the TSA.

This apparently hasn't been a good week for media 'personalities' like MSNBC's Contessa Brewer, either. Never mind that a mass casualty terrorist attack was narrowly averted in the heart of New York City thanks in large part to alert T-shirt vendors and the attempted bombers own ineptitude. According to Contessa, the real tragedy of Faisal Shahzad's unsuccessful attempt to detonate an explosives-packed Nissan Pathfinder in Times Square last weekend was that he wasn't one of those evil, white, backwards, scary, gun-wielding, angry tea party bigots that the mainstream media, Southern Poverty Law Center and Janet Napolitano have been hyperventilating over for the last year or so. In a radio interview, Brewer has this to say:

"I get frustrated...There was part of me that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country."

Brewer continued, "...There are a lot of people who want to use this terrorist intent to justify writing off people who believe in a certain way or come from certain countries or whose skin color is a certain way. I mean they use it as justification for really outdated bigotry."

So would she have been willing to 'discuss the root causes' with the perpetrator and his sympathizers if it was a lilly-white Timothy McVeigh clone at the wheel of the Pathfinder?

Turns out Mayor Bloomberg's guesswork is just about as good as Contessa's, which is pretty sad when you stop and think about it.

"If I had to guess 25 cents, this would be exactly that. Homegrown, or maybe a mentally deranged person, or somebody with a political agenda that doesn't like the health care bill or something. It could be anything,"

Except for the really REALLY obvious scenario, Mayor McCheese.

Pakistan: In Position to be The World's First Failed Nuclear State?

(AP Photo/Anjum Naveed)

The Taliban and their cohorts have been busy this week:

A suspected suicide car bomb ripped through a police building in an army garrison of Pakistan's northwest city of Peshawar on Friday, killing up to 11 people, police said.

This would be the third or fourth brazen, high profile attack on a Pakistani police or military installation in 24 hours. But there's more:

• Oct. 15, 2009: Teams of gunmen attack three security facilities in the eastern city of Lahore, leaving at 27 people dead including several militants, while a suicide car bombing at a police station kills 11 people in northwestern Kohat district and another bomb kills a 6-year-old boy in Peshawar in the northwest.

• Oct. 12, 2009: A suicide car bomb explodes near an army vehicle in a market in the northwestern Shangla district, killing 41, including six security officers.

• Oct. 10, 2009: A 22-hour long raid and standoff at the army headquarters in Rawalpindi leaves nine militants and 14 others dead.

• Oct. 9, 2009: A suicide car bomb in the northwestern city of Peshawar kills 53 people.

• Oct. 5, 2009: A bomber dressed as a security official kills five staffers at the U.N. food agency's headquarters in the capital, Islamabad.

Granted it's a little early to panic, but one has to wonder exactly how secure Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is in the midst of all this chaos.

Keep in mind this is idle early-morning speculation on my part, but I also have to wonder what role Pakistan's Intersrvices Intelligence Directorate (ISI) plays in all of this [also keep in mind I'm relatively unfamiliar with the military and intelligence hierarchy in Pakistan]. However, it's an undisputed fact that the ISI was a very early benefactor of the Taliban, and it's likely they still have the means to ship heroin out of Afghanistan and Pakistan and weapons and fighters into the region....perhaps using the Taliban as a proxy against their own government if they feel this pipeline of drugs, money and fighters is endangered? Although the Pakistani government distanced themselves from the Taliban in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, it's doubtful the ISI ever bothered severing ties.