city:abbottabad

#Pakistan, #Polio and the #CIA « LRB blog
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2017/09/08/jonathan-kennedy/pakistan-polio-and-the-cia

https://cdn.lrb.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/drone-strikes-against-polio-cases.png

Between 2004 and 2012, the numbers of #drone strikes and polio cases corresponded closely. Until mid-2008, the US carried out a small number of drone strikes to assist Pakistani military operations and there were relatively few polio cases. From mid-2008, the number of drones strikes increased rapidly, peaking in 2010 at 128. The number of polio cases also rose markedly, reaching 198 cases the following year. Drone strikes were reduced after 2012 because of concerns they were destabilising Pakistan and generating anti-American sentiment. Polio also decreased rapidly between 2011 and 2012.

But it increased sharply from 2012, hitting 306 cases in 2014. Before the assassination of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, the CIA organised a fake hepatitis B vaccination campaign in Abbottabad in a failed attempt to obtain his relatives’ DNA. When the story broke a few months later, it seemed to vindicate people’s suspicions of the polio programmes in the FATA. ‘As long as drone strikes are not stopped in Waziristan,’ one militant leader declared, ‘there will be a ban on administering polio jabs’ because immunisation campaigns are ‘used to spy for America against the Mujahideen’. More than 3.5 million children went unvaccinated as a result of the boycott and associated disruption, in which several health workers were killed. Polio increased in Pakistan and further afield, as the virus spread to Afghanistan and the Middle East.

The CIA have conducted only a handful of drone strikes in Pakistan in recent years and polio is now at an all-time low. But the plan to eradicate the disease may face further setbacks. ‘We can no longer be silent,’ President Trump said last month, ‘about Pakistan’s safe havens for terrorist organisations, the Taliban and other groups that pose a threat to the region and beyond.’

#Poliomyélite #Etats-Unis

Le brouillard de la guerre, par Dirk Laabs
Source : Die Welt : The Fog of War par Dirk Laabs, 25/06/2017 | Traduit par les lecteurs du site www.les-crises.fr
▻http://www.les-crises.fr/le-brouillard-de-la-guerre-par-von-dirk-laabs

http://www.les-crises.fr/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/pp-12-1.jpg

Maintenant âgé de 80 ans, Seymour Hersh s’est montré un journaliste quasi obsessionnel au cours de sa carrière, prouvant sa volonté de s’investir à fond pour dépasser les obstacles. Et il n’a guère fait preuve d’une propension à accepter les compromis – particularité qui ne lui a pas valu que des amis au sein des publications pour lesquelles il a travaillé, parmi lesquelles le New Yorker et le New York Times. Il a poussé plus d’un directeur de publication à bout. Ses articles sur le président Barack Obama sont tout aussi critiques que ceux qu’il écrivit sur Nixon, les Bush ou Clinton. Dans un article qu’il a publié il y a deux ans, il a mentionné que des membres de l’administration Obama étaient au courant du fait qu’Oussama ben Laden vivait sous la protection des services de renseignement pakistanais à Abbottābād, bien avant que ce dernier ne fût éliminé par un raid.

Cet article mena à une querelle entre Hersh et le rédacteur en chef du New Yorker et il fut finalement publié dans le réputé London Review of Books. Dans un autre article pour la même revue, il cita des extraits d’un rapport secret du Congrès, stipulant que la CIA, sous l’administration Obama, avait développé une filière secrète de contrebande, qui passait des armes de la Libye vers la Syrie, au bénéfice des milices opposées au régime de Bachar el-Assad. Hersh écrit que les entreprises couvertures qui faisaient tourner ce réseau de contrebande furent réutilisées par les services secrets turcs pour armer des milices islamistes en Syrie.

Islamic State v. al-Qaida
Owen Bennett-Jones
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n21/owen-bennett-jones/islamic-state-v-al-qaida

For Paul Rogers, violent jihadism is a symptom first and foremost of global inequality, a revolt from the margins by people who see no evidence that increases in total global wealth are a benefit to them. On the contrary, improvements in education and mass communication only mean that they can appreciate more clearly the extent of their disadvantage and marginalisation. In that sense they are not all that different from the Naxalites in India, the Maoists in Nepal and Peru and the Zapatistas in Mexico.

There are other, on the face of it more surprising, non-religious sources of jihadi violence. The jihadists may have severely disrupted the international system of nation states, but they have had support in doing so from ‘enemy’ governments. The story of the United States and Saudi Arabia helping Osama bin Laden fight the Soviets in Afghanistan is now familiar. Iran supported Zarqawi in Iraq, tolerating his slaughter of Shias because he offered the most effective opposition to the US occupation of Iraq. Syria took the same view, allowing al-Qaida in Iraq’s fighters to slip across the border. One of Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails reveals that as recently as 2014 she believed Qatar and Saudi Arabia were providing ‘clandestine financial and logistic support’ to IS. Turkey also helped both organisations in Syria in the hope that they would oust Assad. Even Assad himself helped them. Calculating that the jihadists would not have the strength to oust him, he released them from jail, bought oil from IS and bombed the Free Syrian Army while leaving IS positions alone. Assad’s idea was to scare either the Americans or the Russians into defending his regime. Putin took the bait.

These policies generally turn sour. A direct line can be drawn from American support for the Afghan Mujahidin to 9/11. Iran’s backing of Zarqawi may have helped Tehran gain influence in the power vacuum left by America’s withdrawal from Iraq, but the Iranians now find themselves having to raise militias to confront IS. Assad and Erdoğan both believed that, having used the violent jihadis to further their purposes in Syria, they could dispose of them when they were no longer needed. Whether that will be as easy as Ankara and Damascus hope remains an open question.

There is another aspect to these machinations. Governments of all types reckon it is better to export violent jihadism than to experience it at home. The Saudis have been the most brazen advocates of this policy but before 9/11 many Middle Eastern governments complained that the UK offered sanctuary to Islamists in the hope that London would not be attacked. And papers captured in Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad hideout revealed that the chief minister of Punjab, Shahbaz Sharif, offered al-Qaida a restoration of good relations with the Pakistan government in return for no attacks in his province.

#apprentis_sorciers #mėdiocrité_meurtrière

Oussama Ben Laden voulait faire exécuter des otages français avant la présidentielle 2012
▻http://www.20minutes.fr/monde/1797719-20160302-oussama-ben-laden-voulait-faire-executer-otages-francais-

Cinq ans après la mort d’Oussama Ben Laden, on commence à en savoir plus sur les derniers plans du terroriste. Et la France était dans son viseur. Dans un document publié ce mardi par la Direction du renseignement américain (DNI) sur son site internet, on apprend que le chef d’Al-Qaida, tué à Abbottabad au Pakistan en mai 2011, avait souhaité faire tuer un otage français en Afrique « une semaine avant l’élection présidentielle » de 2012.

Toi aussi, chaque mois, invente ta menace apocalyptique contre la Fraâââânce !

« Oussama projetait d’étouffer un chaton dans un sac poubelle avant la présidentielle de 2012 ».

« Daesh projetait d’écraser un lapin nain avec un hummer américain avant les législatives de 2015 ».

« Assad projetait de sodomiser un hamster sans chatterton avant le feu d’artifice du 14 juillet ».

#néant

Des documents déclassifiés montrent Ben Laden centré sur l’Amérique
▻http://www.romandie.com/news/Des-documents-declassifies-montrent-Ben-Laden-centre-sur-lAmerique/595194.rom

Des documents déclassifiés montrent Ben Laden centré sur l’Amérique

Reclus dans son complexe d’Abbottabad, Oussama Ben Laden adjurait ses partisans de rester centrés sur des attaques contre l’Amérique, selon des documents déclassifiés mercredi. Ils jettent un regard unique sur l’ancien dirigeant d’Al-Qaïda.

Ces documents par l’administration américaine montrent l’état d’esprit du dirigeant d’Al-Qaïda, ses réflexions, son anxiété face aux services de renseignements occidentaux ou sa grande attention à l’image publique du réseau.

« La priorité doit être de tuer et de combattre les Américains et leurs représentants », souligne Oussama Ben Laden dans l’un des documents trouvés à Abbottabad au Pakistan, où il vivait terré lors de l’assaut des forces spéciales américaines, le 2 mai 2011.

Au total, une centaine de documents, dont l’AFP a pu avoir connaissance en exclusivité, ont été déclassifiés par le renseignement américain.

Et bien sûr cela n’a rien à voir avec l’article de #Seymour_Hersh , c’est l’envoyé « spécial » de Radio-France qui le dit.

Seymour M. Hersh : The Killing of Osama bin Laden · LRB 21 May 2015
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden

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.

(pas encore lu)

Pakistan Battles Polio, and Its People’s Mistrust - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/health/pakistan-fights-for-ground-in-war-on-polio.html

Pourquoi l’UNICEF et l’OMS n’ont pas réagi au scandale de l’utilisation par le régime étasunien de la campagne de vaccination pour traquer OBL.

In the middle of last year, it became known that in 2011, the C.I.A. had paid a local doctor to try to get DNA samples from children inside an Abbottabad compound to prove they were related to Bin Laden. Even though the doctor, Shakil Afridi, who is now serving a 33-year sentence for treason, was offering a hepatitis vaccine, anger turned against polio drops. Leaders of the polio eradication effort could not have been more frustrated. They were already fighting new rumors that vaccinators were helping set drone targets because they have practices like marking homes with chalk so that follow-up teams can find them. Now, after years of reassuring nervous families that the teams were not part of a C.I.A. plot, here was proof that one was. “It was a huge, stupid mistake,” Dr. Bhutta said. Anger deepened when American lawmakers called Dr. Afridi a hero and threatened to cut off aid if he was not released.

The W.H.O. and the Unicef, afraid of offending the United States, did not protest publicly. Unicef’s executive director, Anthony Lake, is a former White House national security adviser, which put the agency in an awkward position, an agency official said on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue."

Arrêt sur images - les talibans, la polio, et la CIA
►http://www.arretsurimages.net/vite.php?id=14905

Je sais que vous n’avez en tête que Tapie et Depardieu, mais parlons d’autre chose. "Polio : le Pakistan victime du poison taliban", titre Libé sur une double page. Je ne connaissais rien de la question, je lis. "Neuf vaccinateurs ont été tués par les insurgés à Karachi et dans le nord-ouest du pays, régions où cette maladie demeure endémique", sous-titre Libé. Mais qui donc, quels monstres humains pourraient avoir l’idée de tuer des vaccinateurs antipolio ? L’article donne la réponse : parce que les vaccins seraient soupçonnés par les talibans extrémistes de faire partie d’un complot visant à diminuer la virilité des occidentaux. Et pas seulement. Il paraît qu’ils contiendraient aussi du gras de porc. Voilà pourquoi ils tuent. Haro sur les obscurantistes.

Il faut arriver au huitième (et antépénultième) paragraphe de l’article, pour apprendre qu’il pourrait exister une autre motivation. "Ce qui a aussi décuplé l’hostilité des talibans à l’égard de la campagne, écrit Libé, c’est « l’affaire Shakil Afridi », le médecin pakistanais condamné à trente-trois ans de prison sous l’accusation d’avoir participé à une fausse campagne de vaccination contre l’hépatite organisée par la CIA en 2011 afin de s’assurer de la présence d’Oussama Ben Laden à Abbottabad (nord-ouest du Pakistan)". Ah tiens ? La CIA aurait participé à une fausse campagne de vaccination ? Mais oui. À la recherche de Ben Laden, les Américains avaient imaginé ce subterfuge, pour parvenir à prélever l’ADN des enfants du fondateur d’Al Quaida. Au grand désespoir de Médecins Sans Frontières, d’ailleurs, qui avait condamné cette ruse, prévoyant (à raison) qu’elle risquait de fortement compromettre les futures campagnes de vaccination.

Personne n’est dans la tête des assassins de vaccinateurs. Personne (ni vous, ni moi, ni sans doute Jean-Pierre Perrin, l’auteur de l’article de Libé, grand reporter chevronné du journal), ne sait si c’est la peur de l’impuissance sexuelle, la phobie du gras de porc, ou le souvenir des ruses de la CIA, qui arment leurs mains. Et bien entendu (ceci précisé afin de prévenir tout débat inutile dans le forum) c’est très mal de tuer des gens qui vaccinent contre la polio. Comme d’habitude, il n’est question ici que des informations que donnent les journaux, et dans quel ordre, et à quelle place ils les donnent. Et donc, dans un article sur le sujet, sans doute le rappel de cette ruse de la CIA pourrait-il être effectué à une place un peu plus voyante que le huitième (et antépénultième) paragraphe.

Bin Laden sought to rename al-Qaeda to counter negative perceptions
►http://centralasiaonline.com/cocoon/caii/xhtml/en_GB/features/caii/features/main/2011/07/01/feature-02

That is the conclusion U.S. officials drew from a letter they said bin Laden prepared on his computer, which was confiscated along with several other documents from his home in Abbottabad. The letter reveals that bin Laden was cognizant of the need to “re-brand” al-Qaeda to include changing the organisation’s name so the new name would not carry the stigma attached to the old one.

Après le porno, le rebranding. Je sens que les « révélations » des ordinateurs de Ben Laden vont nous amuser pendant des années. Le service de comm chargé d’inventer ces foutaises doit bien rigoler à sortir les trucs les plus improbables possibles puis à les voir repris et analysés le plus sérieusement du monde par des journalistes.

Bin Laden’s Compound : Marijuana in the Yard and Militant Landlords — Daily Intel
►http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/05/bin_ladens_compound_marjuana_i.html

Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound may have appeared no different from any other nondescript house in the middle-class neighborhood of Bilal Town, except for the high cement walls topped with barbed wire — and a few other distinguishing factors. Along with rows of cabbages and potatoes on the border wall of the compound, for instance, CNN’s Nic Robertson discovered rows of marijuana plants.

Ça ne s’arrête jamais, c’est une vraie fête, ces « révélations » dans les médias américains ! L’expression consacrée est : « to pull it out of your ass ».

Du porno et de la drogue ! En fait, ce Ben Laden aurait fait une excellente carriière de politicien, en Europe !

Who’s the Dog Hero of the Raid on Bin Laden ? - NYTimes.com
►http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/science/05dog.html?_r=1&hp

The identities of all 80 members of the American commando team who thundered into Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed Osama bin Laden are the subject of intense speculation, but perhaps none more so than the only member with four legs.

Little is known about what may be the nation’s most courageous dog.

Allez, le New York Times nous livre un de ces articles poilants sur la génialissime armée des États-Unis. L’article, laudatif, est dépourvu de toute forme de recul.

De fait, on n’échappe pas à une saloperie de considération culturaliste au rabais (qui semble la marque de fabrique officielle du bidasse ricain), qu’il ne viendrait pas une seconde au NY Times de mettre en doute :

Finally, dogs can be used to pacify an unruly group of people — particularly in the Middle East. “There is a cultural aversion to dogs in some of these countries, where few of them are used as pets,” Major Roberts said. “Dogs can be very intimidating in that situation.”

L’homme Occidental, à l’opposé du méchant Narabe, lorsqu’il est attaqué par un berger allemand entraîné à tuer, c’est bien connu, garde son calme, lui propose un susucre et finit par lui gratter le ventre. La peur du berger allemand, c’est un atavisme moyenoriental, en fait.

Alors évidemment, rien de choquant à ce grand moment de n’importe quoi :

A Silver Star, one of the Navy’s highest awards, was awarded posthumously in 2009 to a dog named Remco after he charged an insurgent’s hide-out in Afghanistan.

Le NY Times devrait donc prochainement faire la promotion des procès d’animaux :
►http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procès_d'animaux

Pas étonnant que l’article se termine par un témoignage d’enthousiasme béat, digne de la propagande irakienne sous Saddam Hussein.

Suzanne Belger, president of the American Belgian Malinois Club, said she was hoping the dog was one of her breed “and that it did its job and came home safe.” But Laura Gilbert, corresponding secretary for the German Shepherd Dog Club of America, said she was sure the dog was her breed “because we’re the best!”

« Ma vie, mon sang, pour toi, ô Rintintin ! ».

http://bouteillealamer.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/rintintin001.jpg