The Davis Debacle: A Lesson in Justice Subversion

As soon as I think the Raymond Davis wellspring of filth has been drained dry, there's still abundantly more gurgling up from amongst the bottom slurry. By now we all know that the poster-boy for state-sponsored  terror operations has been officially declared an operative in the employ of the CIA. It also appears that even his name is suspect now, and may be one of many field aliases he uses. At least that's what's being circulated by the US State Department, and could in itself be an intelligence deception to protect his true identity. There has been much concerted subterfuge deployed through all channels in order to affect his release. In one very bold and absurd lie, President Obama stated that Pakistan was violating the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations by holding ‘our diplomat’, whom he insisted had only been defending himself, and should in any case be entitled to absolute immunity. This was fast exposed as a shallow ploy, as former Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi reported that foreign office documents proved that Davis was not immune from criminal prosecution and in fact did not have diplomatic immunity.

Many means both covert and overt have been used to engineer Davis' release during this whole episode. Shortly after Davis' arrest by Pakistani police, The United States government demanded Davis’ immediate release. In one scheme, the US also went as far as attempting to exchange Davis' regular passport for a diplomatic one a day after his arrest, again retroactively trying to get him immunity from prosecution for his murderous acts. Then they provided a patently false document to the Pakistani Foreign Office claiming Davis to be an employee of the US Embassy in Islamabad (which would have meant he’d have immunity from arrest and detention), when he was actually working out of the Lahore Consulate, where he would not be entitled to any immunity for his actions). They asserted that he was a member of the US Embassy’s technical and administrative staff, and as such, was entitled to diplomatic immunity from felony prosecution. It likewise claimed that the occupants of the Toyota Land Cruiser Prado who ran down and killed Ibad-ur-Rehman, were immune from prosecution. In another scheme, the US also went as far as attempting to exchange Davis' regular passport for a diplomatic one a day after his arrest, again retroactively trying to get him immunity from prosecution for his murderous acts.

When this failed, the US government then began consolidating Pakistani government officials willing to capitulate to their demands. They began pressuring Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi who resisted, knowing  that his office had never issued Raymond Davis diplomatic status. In due course, he received a call from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who said that Davis was being held illegally in violation of the 1961 Vienna Convention. This Qureshi knew was not true, due in fact that The Diplomatic and Consular Privileges Act of 1972, actually supersedes the Vienna Convention in Pakistani law. The Act of 1972 gives the government of Pakistan the final authority over who and who is not granted diplomatic immunity. He explained the situation to Clinton and said that he felt it was an issue to be determined by the courts. Clinton then responded with threats to withhold monetary and resource aid to Pakistan. Qureshi didn't capitulate and was next contacted by US Ambassador Cameron Munter who told Qureshi expressly that he’d been instructed to tell him that unless he signed a paper giving Davis diplomatic immunity (ex post facto), Clinton would not meet with him in Munich. Qureshi refused and promptly cancelled his trip to Munich as it didn’t matter to him how many other people in the Pakistani government wanted to appease Washington by giving Davis a free pass. As far as he was concerned, this was clearly a matter of right and wrong. The threats of aid severance were then escalated to the Pakistani government, and Qureshi was called to a meeting by President Zardari. When this occurred it quickly became clear that other ministers wanted Qureshi to grant Raymond Davis diplomatic immunity. Once again, he refused to sign, and in the ensuing cabinet reshuffle, Qureshi was quietly ousted as foreign minister. To compound the political ostracisation Qureshi then found himself receiving base slander from his own party members.

Understand one thing, Raymond Davis is not some anomaly nor is he the exception to the rule; men like Davis are the rule full-stop. In an account by Robert Anderson in Counterpunch, Anderson asserts that, "In the Vietnam War the country of Laos held a geo-strategic position, as does Pakistan does to Afghanistan today. As in Pakistan, in Laos our country conducted covert military operations against a sovereign people, using the CIA." Anderson has special insight on Raymond Davis, because he served in a similar capacity in the Southeast theatre of black ops. 

Anderson continues, "I was a demolitions technician with the Air Force who was reassigned to work with the CIA’s Air America operation in Laos. We turned in our military IDs cards and uniforms and were issued a State Department ID card and dressed in blue jeans.  We were told if captured we were to ask for diplomatic immunity, if alive. We carried out military missions on a daily basis all across the countries of Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam.

We also knew that if killed or captured that we would probably not be searched for and our families back home in the U.S. would be told we had been killed in an auto accident of some kind back in Thailand and our bodies not recovered.
 
Our team knew when the UN inspectors and international media were scheduled to arrive - we controlled the airfields. We would disappear to our safe houses so we could not be asked questions. It was all a very well planned operation, 60 years ago, involving the military and diplomats out of the US Embassy. It had been going on a long time when I was there during the 1968 Tet Offensive. This continued for a long time, until we were routed and had to abandon the whole war as a failure.

In Laos the program I was attached to carried out a systematic assassination of people who were identified as not loyal to U.S. goals. It was called the Phoenix program and eliminated an estimated 60,000 people across Indochina.  We did an amazing amount of damage to the civilian infrastructure of the country, and still lost the war. I saw one team of mercenaries I was training show us a bag of ears of dead civilians they had killed. This was how they verified their kills for us. The Green Berets that day were telling them to just take photos of the dead, leave the ears.

Mel Gibson made a movie about all this, called Air America. It included in the background the illegal drug operation the CIA ran to pay for their operations. Congress had not authorized funds for what we were doing.  I saw the drug operation first hand too. This was all detailed in The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred McCoy. I did not connect all this until the Iran-Contra hearings when Oliver North was testifying about it. Oliver North was a leader of the Laos operation I was assigned to work with.

Our country has a long history of these type programs going back to World War Two. We copied this from of warfare from the Nazis in WWII it seems. We justified it as necessary for the Cold War. One of the first operations was T.P. Ajax run by Kermit Roosevelt to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953 to take over their oil fields.

In that coup the CIA and the State Department under the Dulles Brothers first perfected these covert, illegal and immoral actions. Historians have suggested that Operation T.P. Ajax  was the single event that set in motion the political force of Islamic fundamentalism we are still dealing with today.

Chalmers Johnson also a former CIA employee wrote a series of books too on these blowbacks that happen when the truth is held from the American public.  
If we had taken a different approach to our problems in those days an approach that did not rely on lying to our own and the people of other countries and killing them indiscriminately our country would not be in the disaster it is abroad today.. 

I was young and foolish in those days of the Vietnam War, coveting my Top Secret security clearance, a big thing for an uneducated hillbilly from Appalachia.  We saw ourselves much like James Bond characters, but now I am much wiser. These kinds of actions have immense and long reaching consequences and should be shut down.

But I see from the Ray Davis fiasco in Pakistan that our government is still up to its old way of denying to the people of the world what everyone knows is true. When will this official hypocrisy end, when will our political 
class speak out about this and quit going along with the lies and tricks?  How many more of our people and others will die in these foolish programs?


Davis is in a bad situation now because most of the people of the world, as we see across the Middle East, are now aware of the lies and not going to turn their head anymore." Davis is doing his part as he was trained, appearing before a Pakistani judge Friday the 25th and refusing to sign a list of allegations against him, a lawyer in the court said. During the hearing, which was held in the jail where Davis is being detained due to security reasons, court officials read aloud the allegations of murder and then presented the charging documents in English to Davis, an attorney for the family of the victims, Asad Manzoor Butt, and a US official told ABC News. The handcuffed Davis, however, refused to sign the document and instead presented to the judge a written notice declaring diplomatic immunity, Butt said.

In other compelling and related news, US intel operatives in Pakistan appear to have either engineered or contracted out some thugs to attack, silence and threaten the family members of Shumaila & Mohammad Faheem. If you recall, Mohammad Faheem is one of the two murder victims killed by Davis, and Shumaila was his grieving widow who committed suicide by poison ingestion, Shumaila killed herself believing that justice for her husband would be ultimately subverted and Davis set free due to US intervention and Pakistani corruption. On the 24th of February, Shumila's uncle Muhammad Sarwar was attacked by three foreign assailants, beaten and forced to consume poison in the form of pesticide pills. According to eye witnesses, three unidentified men of foreign extraction jumped over the walls to Sarwar’s house and hit him on the head repeatedly with stones. The other family members, including women and children, coming out to his rescue, were taken hostage and beaten up. The three outlaws then took everyone hostage at gunpoint and forced poisonous pills down Sarwar’s throat. The family members said the gunmen were demanding a patch-up with Raymond Davis, but when “all the family refused, they started torturing us”.
Muhammad Afzal, the brother of Sarwar, said the people of the area, after hearing the screams of the family, gathered on the spot. The three armed men, who were inside the house by then, opened aerial fire and managed to escape. Police reached half an hour after the incident. The people of the area protested against the police’s late arrival. Muhammad Sarwar was admitted to the hospital in critical condition, where doctors said his condition was getting better but “it could not be said about his life as in such cases patients gain senses and sometimes they go back in coma and die”. Heavy police were deployed outside the hospital as Sawar reported that two of the armed foreigners threatened to bomb all of the village he resides in if Sawar and his family did not cooperate in getting Raymond Davis released.

Be sure to swing by http://thirteenthmonkey.blogspot.com/2011/03/curious-case-of-davis-dual-nationals-in.html and check out some great new leads on the Davis case there.

Sources:

A Washington View of Qureshi-Davis Fiasco

US Caught in Big Lie About Raymond Davis

Same Cover, Same Lies

Shumaila’s Uncle Forced to Take Poisonous Pills