The exasperation of CIA Director Porter Goss with Pakistan's role in the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other remnants of al-Qaida, is evident from his remarks on the terror network's chief during an interview with Time magazine this week. The interview comes after the arrest of Hamid Hayat, a U.S. citizen of Pakistani origin, his father and some others by the FBI earlier this month. They belonged to a 2,500-strong Pakistani community living in Lodi, Calif., near Sacramento. Hamid, along with his father, was charged with covering up the fact he attended a six-month jihadi training camp near Rawalpindi during a visit to Pakistan in 2003-04.
Hamid was reported to have told the FBI the camp was being run by al-Qaida, but indications are it was actually being run by the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (the group now calls itself the Jamiat-ul-Ansar), a virulently anti-U.S. Pakistani jihadi group, which is a member of bin Laden's International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Crusaders and Jews, formed in 1998. Its then chief, Maulana Fazlur Rahman Khalil, who was released by Pakistani authorities after having been detained for some months last year without being prosecuted, was a cosignatory of bin Laden's first fatwa of 1998 against the United States. Pakistani authorities have tried to ridicule the FBI's charge, noting it was inconceivable a jihadi training camp attended by hundreds of trainees, as claimed by him, could be located in or near Rawalpindi, where the Pakistan army's General Headquarters are located.
| "I dun' thin' that word means what you think it means!" |
Coincidentally, Yasin Malik, the head of the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front, a militant organization in Indian Kashmir, during a recent visit to Pakistan, revealed hundreds of members of his group were trained in the late 1980s in a camp at the same place, which was being run by Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, a Kashmiri, who was a member of the government of Nawaz Sharif and is now minister for Information in the Cabinet headed by Shaukat Aziz. He is considered close to President Pervez Musharraf and has had a long history of association with the HUM and Khalil and obtained for HUM a large plot of land near Rawalpindi for it to start a jihadi training camp. Embarrassed by Malik's disclosure, Rashid strongly denied running any such camp and maintained he was only running a humanitarian camp for the refugees from Indian Kashmir.
| At which point his lips fell off... |
Malik also subsequently retracted from his statement and accused the media of misreporting him.
| That was in immediate anticipation of those guys putting the pointy objects down and agreeing to let him out of the locked room at the Hospital for the Politically Unreliable™... |
He asserted what he had said was Rashid was looking after the refugees. He denied having said anything about jihadi training organized by Rashid.
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