Vital Concerns for the World: Mullah Omar 'Hiding in Pakistan'

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Mullah Omar 'Hiding in Pakistan'

Interesting news. Some of us have suspected that Pakistan officials have been dodging the truth when they have insisted that Mullah Muhammad Omar, Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri are not really in Pakistan. It turns out that a former spokesman for Mullah Muhammad Omar has claimed that the Taliban leader is in Pakistan, in fact living pretty much openly in Quetta. BBC News reports that he is being protected by Pakistan's intelligence directorate, the ISI, in particular by its former director, Hamed Gul. In the face of this, however, Pakistan's Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao continues to assert that "We have no information on the whereabouts of Mullah Omar. He is not living in Pakistan."
Misrepresentation of the truth is not limited to Pakistan officials, however, as we well know. This is the way of governments: They have to distort the truth in order to maintain the fiction of rectitude, to retain their legitimacy. The Bush administration has misrepresented the truth many times ("Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attack"; "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction"; "The CIA does not "remand" prisoners to other countries to be tortured"; "We do not torture prisoners", etc. [See my note on December 17.]).
RLC

No comments:

A major source of the American debt problem

Notable Concerns

"Not one has taken responsibility for the biggest foreign policy disaster in U.S. history." Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condolezza Rica, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith.
The crash of September 2008 brought the largest bankruptcies in world history, pushing more than 30 million people into unemployment and bringing many countries to the edge of insolvency. AlJazeera 10/15/11
GE, America's largest corporation, paid no taxes last year even though it made 5.1 billion dollars profit in the country [and even more outside the country] [source: same as below]
In 2009 the richest 5% held 63.5% of American wealth; the bottom 80% controlled 12.8%. [source: same as below]
Between 2000 and 2007 the richest 10% in America benefited from all of the average growth in the period. In the post WW II period the top 10% benefited from only one third of the growth, the bottom 90% benefiting from the rest of the growth. [Economic Policy Institute, cited by Bob Herbert, NYT 3/26/11]
In 2010 a "premier" investment bank paid each of its 26,000 employees an average of $370,000. [Bill Gross Pimco Investment Outlook Feb, 2011.]
In 2005, one-quarter of the corporations in America making a trillion dolars in revenue paid no taxes.
The 833% Medical Insurance Ripoff: Medicare charges 3% for service; the health insurance companies in Missouri charge 25% for services
The richest 1 percent of Americans have more net worth than the bottom 90 percent.
The richest 1 percent of Americans receive more income than the bottom 50%. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/dec/10/bernie-s/bernie-sanders-viral-speech-says-top-1$ >