U.S. Super-Hypocrites In High Dudgeon Over Imprisonment of CIA Spy

A Pakistani CIA operative who ran a fake vaccination program in Abbottabad, Pakistan, to try and obtain DNA samples via needle pricks from the residents of Osama bin Laden’s compound there in order to confirm their identities prior to the SEAL assassination mission, has been sentenced to 33 years in prison by a Pakistani Tribal Court for treason for working for the CIA and not notifying Paki authorities.

This case bears comparison to three cases in which the shoe was on the other foot- Jonathan Pollard, the Cuban Five, and Bradley Manning. But first, let us review:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned the verdict: “Lastly, on the conviction of Dr. Shakil Afridi in Pakistan, as I’ve said before, the United States does not believe there is any basis for holding Dr. Afridi. We regret both the fact that he was convicted and the severity of his sentence. His help, after all, was instrumental in taking down one of the world’s most notorious murderers. That was clearly in Pakistan’s interests as well as ours and the rest of the world. This action by Dr. Afridi to help bring about the end of the reign of terror designed and executed by bin Ladin was not in any way a betrayal of Pakistan. And we have made that very well known and we will continue to press it with the Government of Pakistan.” “"We are raising it, and we will continue to do so, because we think that his treatment is unjust and unwarranted. As I have said before, the United States does not believe there is any basis for holding Dr. Afridi. We regret both the fact that he was convicted and the severity of his sentence." [May 24^th.][My emphases.]¹

Actually every country on earth outlaws espionage and treason, including the U.S. That’s a “basis” right there.  It’s the basis on which Jonathan Pollard, the former U.S. civilian Naval analyst, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987 for passing classified information to Israel. His supporters argue, just as Clinton does in the Afridi case, that no harm was done to the country imprisoning him, and that it was a Good Deed, helping Israel “defend” itself. And Israel is a very close ally (supposedly- more like a doted on and spoiled brat dependent) to the U.S., very different from the U.S.-Paki relationship. To this day the Israelis and their U.S. fifth columnists have been unable to spring Pollard from prison, despite their strenuous efforts. And was it not in both the U.S.’s and Israel’s “interests” that U.S. information of a military nature be shared with Israel? (If you believe in Israeli regional hegemony, which the U.S. obviously does, the answer would seem to be yes.) And Pollard was not “betraying” the U.S. That is, he did not aid a U.S. enemy.

Clinton was reiterating what the U.S. position was all along since Afridi’s arrest. A day earlier State Dept. spokeswoman Victoria Nuland repeated the “no basis” line during the “Daily Press Briefing” (that’s the title on the State Dept. website): “Well, I think you know that Secretary Clinton spoke to this issue back in February when she was testifying. Secretary Panetta has spoken to our concerns with regard to this matter. Our views on it haven’t changed. We will – we continue to see no basis for Dr. Afridi to be held.” [My emphasis.]

Senator John McCain pronounced himself “outraged.”² Senator Carl Levin, chair of the Armed Services Committee, joined McCain in his high dudgeon. (McCain is the ranking Republican on the committee.) And Congress cut $33 million off Pakistan’s annual bribe money- one million for each year of Dr. Afridi ‘s sentence, they made sure to point out. (Oooh, pointed message, politicians!) This on top of earlier cuts. (Not that I think the U.S. should have given all those billions to build up the Paki military against India in the first place.) Meanwhile, on the same day Clinton spoke, “an American drone struck militant hide-outs, killing 7 to 10 people BELIEVED to have been militants,” according to the NY Times. [Emphasis mine, obviously.] For good measure, McCain and Levin threatened further cuts in “aid” to the Pak military if Afridi wasn’t sprung forthwith. [Levin-McCain statement at bottom of essay.]

The U.S. regards Dr. Afridi as a hero for doing what they deem to be a good deed. On the other hand, Private Bradley Manning is treated as a despicable traitor for doing the good deed of revealing to the public information everyone on earth is entitled to be aware of, including U.S. atrocities like the helicopter assassination of a Reuters crew in Iraq and the war crime shooting of a civilian who tried to put the victims in his van, in the process of which children in his van were wounded. Having the information that WikiLeaks obtains was clearly “in the interest of the rest of the world.” So who gets prosecuted for that? The chuckling war criminals in the helicopter? (The onboard video is on the Internet, so you can hear their chuckling for yourself.) No, Bradley Manning is prosecuted. That’s a LOT, LOT more “outrageous” than Pakistan prosecuting Dr. Afridi.

And speaking of assassinations, a number of members of the U.S. nomenklatura have publicly called for Julian Assange’s murder. We should not shy away from comparing the political culture of the U.S. to that of the Third Reich. It is similarly openly violent and murderous.

But I suppose Manning “harmed” the U.S. in that by revealing some of its crimes, he tarnishes the undeservedly favorable image the U.S. projects of itself via propaganda. (See, for example, the U.S. media on any day of the week.) That’s the same kind of “harm” that refugees reporting on Nazi atrocities did to Germany during World War II, or the “harm” that dissidents in places like China and in U.S. allies such as Egypt and Bahrain are imprisoned for. (“Insulting the reputation of the army” in Egypt, for example.)

Dr. Afridi, by the way, did great harm to legitimate vaccination programs and aid agencies in Pakistan. But the U.S. never gives a shit about anything except its power aims. (Except rhetorically. There’s that fabulous propaganda machine again.)

What about the case of the Cuban Five? These are five Cuban intelligence agents who infiltrated Cuban exile terrorist organizations in Florida so that Cuba could try and defend itself against further attacks. The U.S. snookered the Cubans into handing over intel they had gathered by pretending to be interested in better relations and in stopping the decades-long campaign of U.S.-sponsored terrorism against Cuba, which has included blowing a civilian airliner out of the sky in 1976 (by longtime CIA operatives Luis Posada Carriles, and Orlando Bosch, who live freely in the U.S.) bombing hotels (during which an Italian tourist was murdered in 1997, again by Posada, who boasted openly to a NY Times journalist about it) and thousands of other violent attacks. Under U.S. law, espionage consists of spying on the government, not on private organizations or individuals. But law doesn’t matter when a political lynching is in process. And given that the men were tried in Miami, a hotbed of Castro hatred, the verdict was a foregone conclusion. (You might think this cried out for a change of venue. That’s if you don’t understand how railroading defendants works. In political cases in the U.S., the courts and judges are every bit agents of the Government as in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or “Communist” China. See for example how hopeless it’s been to challenge indefinite imprisonment without trial for anyone branded a “terrorist,” for example. Or even to get the U.S. to release its Uighur prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, whom the government itself says aren’t really “terrorists.”

The U.S. pretends to be fighting “terrorism.” So if this were true, than Cuba fighting terrorism would be in the U.S.’s “interests” too, just as Clinton claims what the U.S. did in Pakistan was in Pakistan’s interests. (The U.S. just couldn’t trust the Pakis enough to let them know what was going down. And the U.S. is probably right about that.)

So Cuba was fighting terrorism and trying to defend itself. And not by assassinations or kidnappings or imprisonment without trial either. The U.S. response was to round up its operatives- Cuban citizens- and sentence them harshly- up to life “plus” 18 years. And since they’re political prisoners, the U.S. does its usual thing of treating them with gratuitous cruelty, denying them visitation rights. (It did this by denying their wives and relatives visas to enter the U.S., on the grounds that they’d be a “security risk.” Right, U.S. Sounds reasonable.

The Cuban Five certainly did no harm to the U.S., either. So by Clinton’s criteria, they should never have been prosecuted or imprisoned. But the U.S. is okay with terrorism against regimes it doesn’t like. (See also Nicaragua in the 1980s, for another of many examples.)³

In all of these cases, at least some of the defendants were sentenced more harshly than Dr. Afridi. (Manning of course hasn’t been sentenced or convicted yet, but he faces the death penalty and I expect he will get life. One of the Cuban Five has been released and is being held in effect prisoner in Miami “on parole,” giving the exile fanatics a chance to murder him. Nice touch, U.S.! And then you’ll pretend you aren’t responsible!)

Yes yes, Cuba is an oppressive country. So’s the U.S. And I don’t agree that blowing civilian airplanes out of the sky somehow strikes a blow for “freedom.” And guess what? The U.S. is about as repressive towards dissidents as Cuba. It’s just less honest about it. In Cuba they charge dissidents with political crimes. In the U.S. they frame up dissidents for “non-political” crimes. The U.S. Way of political persecution is much craftier, in that they reduce principled political opponents to common criminals.

Anyway, here’s another question: given that the CIA is responsible for the murder of millions of people in its history, has committed ghoulish atrocities, and is generally a force for evil and oppression, is it ever justified to cooperate with it? It’s hard to see how it could be. Certainly in this case the good from assassinating bin Laden was minimal. But the harm is legitimizing government assassinations of official enemies, openly, brazenly, and celebrating it! This is a lot worse than the Russians murdering  Alexander Litvinenko in London with polonium, or the endlessly harped upon Bulgarian KGB poisoned umbrella murder. (They stabbed someone in the leg with an umbrella that injected a poison pellet, also in London.) At least other governments assassinating people try to be sneaky about it and deny it. To commit state murders openly, and going a step further, boast of it and celebrate, is obviously a big step farther down into barbarism. The SEALs could have easily taken bin Laden alive (had that been their instructions), since contrary to the first lies from the mouths of Obama regime officials, he was unarmed, and they took his corpse with them to dump into the ocean. The idea that we shouldn’t care if the government murders people we don’t like is brain dead and immoral. The government doesn’t like LOTS of people. And the U.S. government has killed many, many non- “terrorists” in its “War On Terror.”®*And political dissidents too, inside and outside the U.S. The FBI already brands environmental activists “terrorists.” They and other U.S. police departments have a bad habit of branding “left wing” dissidents and activists as “terrorists.” “Terrorist” in fact started replacing “communist” as the preferred epithet and justification for persecuting dissidents back in the 1970s, because the fiasco of the Vietnam war greatly weakened the ability of invoking “communism” to stir up hatred.

So if imprisoning “terrorists” on the whim of faceless police state bureaucrats is OK, and if allowing them to murder “terrorists” is also kosher, then obviously what‘s next up on the agenda is murdering more protesters than has already been usual in the U.S.

Even the U.S. media admits that bin Laden was operationally neutered by the time the U.S., got around to slaughtering him. The gain in assassinating bin Laden was a symbolic political victory for the U.S. and especially for Obama personally, who planned to use it to help reelect his sorry blood-soaked ass.

Obama just okayed drone murders of strangers spotted on the ground whose identities aren’t known. So now they’re explicitly killing people without even knowing who they’re killing, if they “look like terrorists” to the CIA secret police cutthroats. These are called “signature drone strikes” in U.S. Imperialist- aka “national security”- jargon. This is after they’ve killed hundreds of civilians, which they lie through their teeth about and deny.

Killing civilians and lying about it is now an established  U.S. and NATO pattern. In Afghanistan, to mention one example, French helicopters murdered some shepherd boys and insisted they were Taliban fighters. In Libya, NATO adamantly denies, against overwhelming evidence, even after an extensive NY Times report, that they bombed and killed any innocent civilians. It’s scummy, stupid, and immoral, and self-defeating to not apologize and pay reparations. But like I said, stupid. Or maybe they’re just cheapskates who don’t want to pay compensation. Meanwhile, they squeezed close to 2.7 BILLION dollars out of Qaddafi for blowing up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. (That’s a cool ten million dollars per victim. And the U.S. media likes to squeal about “exorbitant” jury awards in the U.S.! Oh well, the examples of hypocrisy are endless once you start deconstructing American bullshit.) That’s $2.64 billion more than the U.S. paid for deliberately shooting down an Iranian civilian airliner taking pilgrims to Mecca, in 1988. [Iran Air Flight 655.] If you feel like having your blood boil over U.S. criminality and lying, read the article in the Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute by a retired USMC Lt. Colonel, about this “incident.” As of this writing it’s still at http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1993-08/vincennes-case-study.  Download a copy in case it disappears.⁴

By the way, dead Afghans are worth a few hundred bucks a pop to the U.S., when it’s willing to admit women and children it killed were NOT “Taliban militants.”

At a billion dollars a head, the rate charged the Qaddafi regime for blowing up Pam Am 103, the U.S. couldn’t pay the tab for the millions it’s killed starting from its unholy birth in genocide if it lasted a thousand years. Which, like the Thousand Year Reich, it won’t.

11)      To be sure, the “trial” of Afridi was a travesty. But so are political trials in the U.S. And military “tribunals” in Guantanamo Bay. And the persecution of Private Bradley Manning. A Paki pooh-bah on BBC May 2^th defended the tribal “court” sham by saying the territory is under British law from the 19^th century. Inexplicably, the BBC woman interviewing him didn’t point out that Pakistan is an independent nation not bound to keep British law. (Israel keeps some British colonial law too- law from when Britain controlled Palestine. This law is used to imprison Palestinians without charges or trial under “administrative detention.” The Jewish Israelis figured that this tool previously used to suppress them would come in handy for oppressing Palestinians.)

22) McCain said “All of us are outraged at the imprisonment and sentence of some 33 years, virtually a death sentence, to the doctor in Pakistan who was instrumental — not on purpose, but was instrumental and completely innocent of any wrongdoing.”

But of course McCain is perpetually outraged. Rage is his normal emotional state. This is well-known by other politicians and the media, which keep it secret. He has screamed vile sputtering abuse at his wife in front of “journalists” who refuse to report it. (Guess “character” is only important when they want it to be, like when they’re engaging in character assassination.) McCain bellowed words like “fucking cunt” at her in front of others, which I bet was deeply humiliating for her. What an ingrate the “war hero” is. He married her wealth. That greased the skids for his political career. He should at least be grateful, the rabid militarist dog. Why are women so attracted to beastly louts instead of to nice guys? It’s an enduring mystery. Is it biologically encoded, on the theory that the beastly ones have a survival advantage? Assuming their mates survive their violent dispositions. Maybe it’s time for women to become conscious human beings and transcend the dictates of DNA.

However, the non-perpetually outraged U.S. pols were outraged too. Like “liberal” Democratic Senator Carl Levin. With McCain, Levin called the sentence "shocking and outrageous" and called Afridi’s actions "courageous, heroic and patriotic." (The U.S. defines patriotism for all people on this planet as loyalty and service to the U.S. There’s no such thing as patriotism for other countries. That’s “nationalism.” Cf. the U.S. media.) "Afridi's actions were completely consistent with the multiple, legally-binding resolutions passed over many years by the United Nations Security Council, which required member states to assist in bringing Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network to justice," Levin and McCain indignantly sputtered in a joint statement. "Afridi set an example that we wish others in Pakistan had followed long ago. He should be praised and rewarded for his actions, not punished and slandered."

Well, what are UN resolutions for if not to be broken? Just ask Israel. And international law? You mean like against torture?  Or assassinations? Or war crimes? Or like the Geneva Conventions, explicitly abrogated since the Bush regime? (Don’t ask.)

You might recall (you should, at any rate, for there are certain crimes against humanity that must not be forgotten) that it was Levin who concocted and made part of the so-called “National Defense Authorization Bill” (“defense” is what the U.S. calls its aggression and intimidation all around the planet) a section that “legalizes” locking up “terrorists” indefinitely without the nitpicking nicety of having to charge them with a crime or put them on trial- the kind of “technicalities” by which the guilty routinely beat the rap, in the Dirty Harry fascist wetdream version of reality. And of course a “terrorist” is whoever they say is one, by their perfect Alice in Wonderland logic. And since the entire planet constitutes the “battlefield” in the “global war on terror,” doesn’t matter where they grab you. Could be from in front of your fireplace at home.

The fact that we have come to this pass was totally foreseeable at the beginning of this slippery slope, when the Bush regime seized the hapless Jose Padilla in Chicago and fraudulently claimed he was part of a “dirty bomb” plot to detonate radioactive material in a city. I could see at the time that it was pure bullshit. But they needed to put on a Big Show of “fighting terrorism,” for which they needed victims to play the part of the Evil Ones, and to distract attention from the fact that the secret police agencies permitted the 9/11 airliner kamikaze attacks to occur. (That’s another story.)

After years of being held incommunicado in the Marine brig/torture center at Quantico, he was finally charged with “terrorism” for – get this- trying to aid Muslims in Bosnia who were being murdered by Serbs and Croats. What business that is of the U.S., or how that constitutes a crime under U.S. law, or why that’s terrorism, the U.S. media didn’t bother to explain. They merely confirmed that Padilla was a “terrorist,” and threw the “dirty bomb” “plot” down the memory hole.

33)      Wikipedia has some pretty good basic information on the Cubana terror bombing at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubana_Flight_455 and elsewhere.

Other airliners shot down with very different consequences from the Lockerbie bombing include Israel’s (them again!) deliberate shootdown of a Libyan (irony! and did that goad Qaddafi to do the same?) airliner over the Sinai desert in 1973, and Korean Air 007 (not a coincidental flight number, but U.S. “intel” being cute) over highly sensitive Soviet military installations. [In brief, the plane of the U.S.-satrapy Korea was deliberately sent hundreds of miles off course in order to cause Soviet air defense radars to be switched on, enabling the U.S. to spy on those radar emissions and concoct countermeasures in order to perfect the ability to launch a nuclear attack against Soviet missiles. The Reagan regime pursued an aggressive policy of developing a first strike capability against the Soviet Union, which included placing nuclear armed missiles in Europe which could reach the Kremlin ten minutes after launch, decapitating the Soviet Command structure. Having the Soviet shoot down the hapless civilian jet was a propaganda bonus for the U.S. Richard Nixon had been booked on the flight but was warned off.]

Edward Herman has a pretty good examination of the U.S. media’s glaring double standard when dealing with airliners shot out of the sky, which reveals its propagandistic nature. "The New York Times on the Libya-Pan Am 103 Case: A Study in Propaganda Service," Global Research, 9/22/07.

See also "GOP & KAL-007: 'The Key Is to Lie First'" by Robert Parry at Consortium News.

4) The U.S. eventually paid parsimonious compensation, grudgingly, to the victims it murdered when shooting down the Iranian Airbus- only after Iran sued in the International Court of Justice. The payment occurred eight years after the shootdown, in 1996.  The payment of compensation was explicitly characterized as being on an "ex gratia" basis, and the U.S. denied having any responsibility or liability for the crime. 

The U.S. agreed to a measly $300,000 per wage-earning victim, $150,000 per non-wage-earner, for a total of $61.8 million.

For the outrageous statements by Reagan, Bush, et al about the murders, see Shooting Down Iran Air Flight 655 [IR655]. By the way, the Captain of the USS VIncennes, who entered Iranian territorial waters to attack Iranian patrol boats and ordered the airliner shot down at the same time, was feted by the U.S. media and public upon his return and given a medal for his brave feat. A medal for an alleged "accident" or "mistake"? Sounds like premeditated murder by all involved.

*”War On Terror” is a registered trademark of U.S. Imperialism. Or should be.

A note on nomenclature. In CIA lingo, an agent is NOT a CIA employee. It’s a person outside the CIA that the CIA uses. An officer is an employee of the CIA, a secret policeman, who controls the agents. Agents can be foreign or U.S. citizens. Only U.S. citizens can join the CIA. The media ignorantly refers to CIA officers as “agents.” They are not.

On the other hand, FBI secret policemen are “agents,” formally “special agents” in the propaganda title Hoover came up with for his minions. He was a great branding and image manager, not just an architect of a secret police force with great media and political power. The people the FBI uses as tools are called “informants.” (I.e. informers and agents provocateur.)

The U.S. media deliberately hides the fact that these are secret police agencies by referring to the FBI as a “law enforcement” agency, and the CIA as an “intelligence” agency and its secret policemen as “spies.” An important euphemism for repression is “security.” This term is even used when referring to the repressive apparatus of, for example, the Assad regime in Syria.

Of course the FBI very selectively enforces laws (as well as framing up political dissidents under the guise of law enforcement) and the CIA (and FBI) spies- and conducts political surveillance. Yet the U.S. media has no trouble referring to the erstwhile East German secret police, Stasi, as “secret police,” while describing their former domestic surveillance (political spying) operations. What the Stasi did was no different from what the FBI and CIA do here. And the U.S. media has never reported any assassinations by the Stasi, whereas both the FBI and CIA have murdered Americans inside the U.S. (Including the President of the United States in 1963, his brother four and a half years later, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. after he refused the FBI blackmail order that he kill himself, among many other victims.)

Statement by Senators McCain and Levin on Sentencing of Pakistani Doctor who Assisted in Bin Laden Search

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Carl Levin (D-MI) today released the following statement on the news that Dr. Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani doctor who assisted the United States in the search for Osama bin Laden, has been sentenced to 33 years in prison for the crime of treason:

“It is shocking and outrageous that Dr. Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani doctor who assisted the United States in the search for Osama bin Laden, has been sentenced to 33 years in prison for the crime of treason. What Dr. Afridi did is the furthest thing from treason. It was a courageous, heroic, and patriotic act, which helped to locate the most wanted terrorist in the world – a mass murderer who had the blood of many innocent Pakistanis on his hands.

“Dr. Afridi’s actions were completely consistent with the multiple, legally-binding resolutions passed over many years by the United Nations Security Council, which required member-states to assist in bringing Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network to justice. Dr. Afridi set an example that we wish others in Pakistan had followed long ago. He should be praised and rewarded for his actions, not punished and slandered.

“We call upon the Pakistani government to pardon and release Dr. Afridi immediately. At a time when the United States and Pakistan need more than ever to work constructively together, Dr. Afridi’s continuing imprisonment and treatment as a criminal will only do further harm to U.S.-Pakistani relations, including diminishing Congress’s willingness to provide financial assistance to Pakistan.”

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