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

Now It's Official... Raymond A. Davis is CIA and Ex-Blackwater/Xe

In case you haven't read or heard about it by now, Raymond A. Davis has just been exposed officially as a security contractor for the CIA. According to senior U.S. intelligence officials, Davis was part of a covert team operating for the past two years out of a safe house in Lahore. At the time of his arrest, Davis was based at a house with five other CIA contractors as well as a 'Blue Badger' (referring to coloured badges worn by CIA personnel) a US official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. It was members of this team that were driving the Toyota Land Cruiser Prado that ran over and killed motorcyclist Ibad-ur-Rehman. When they were unable to extract Davis before he was arrested by police, they left the scene and retreated back to their safehouse. There, within hours, they had destroyed all sensitive documents, abandoned it, and retreated to the US consulate for safety.

Davis' team were closely affiliated with JSOC, which is the US military's Joint Special Operations Command. The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) also commands and controls the Special Mission Units (SMU) of United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). These units perform highly classified activities. JSOC has an excellent relationship with the CIA's elite Special Activities Division and the two forces often operate together. The CIA's Special Activities Division's Special Operations Group often selects their recruits from JSOC. According to a recent report in The Nation, JSOC, in tandem with Blackwater/Xe, has an ongoing drone program, along with snatch/grab/assassination operations, based in Karachi and conducted both in and outside of Pakistan.

Ever the collusive gatekeepers, The Washington Post actually learned of Davis's CIA affiliation after his arrest but agreed not to publish the information at the request of senior US intelligence officials, who cited concern for Davis's safety if his true employment status were disclosed. Those officials withdrew the request Monday after other news organisations identified Davis as a CIA employee and after US officials made a final attempt to prevail upon Pakistan's government to release Davis or move him to a safer facility. Other news agencies such as ABC News were approached by representatives of the Obama Administration and told to keep quiet on Davis' CIA background.

A former member of the US Army Special Forces, Davis was hired as a contract employee of the CIA's Global Response Staff (GRS), a unit that is responsible for providing security for agency employees and facilities in other countries. Members of the GRS most often accompany CIA case officers, who meet with clandestine sources. Until last August, Davis was stationed in Pakistan as an employee of the company once known as Blackwater, now called Xe Services, and contracted to the CIA. According to a former Blackwater executive, the CIA terminated the company's GRS contract in Pakistan, accusing the security company of failing to provide adequate services. The agency then moved to hire all the former Xe/Blackwater security personnel directly as independent contractors. As a GRS officer, Davis made $780 per day working as a security guard for the agency's clandestine case officers.

Intel Operative Raymond Davis Update

Intel Operative Raymond Davis Arrested by Pakistan Authorities

This is a follow-up to an original post by Penny, of Penny for your Thoughts. She is already running an investigation on the case which you can read here for context: US/Pakistan relations strained over so called "diplomatic" gun for hire Raymond Davis 

It appears that the Pakistani police have issued a five-page report that finds Davis guilty of cold-blooded murder. The report cites investigators' findings that the official shot each victim five times, including in their backs, and lied to police about how he arrived at the scene of the incident. It is also pertinent to mention that US officials till to-date could not produce any certificate which is granted to diplomats upon arrival in Pakistan by Foreign Office under Diplomatic and Counsellors Act of 1972.

Davis' Passport

Quoting autopsy results, the report says each man was shot twice in the back, and one was struck in the head. The report later contradicts that, saying each man was shot in the back three times. The shots to the back are cited in a list of reasons investigators rejected Davis's self-defence claim. The list also notes a lack of witness testimony attesting to a robbery; two empty bullet casings found outside Davis's car, indicating he shot offensively; and that the bullets in the victims' pistols were not in the chambers, ready to fire. "If it was an act in self-defence by the accused, he could have fired a shot or two on the lower parts of their bodies, such legs, as he was an expert in using arms," the report says. "The accused fired 10 shots, which negate his claim of acting in self-defence."

The report documents that Davis, a 'former' Army Special Forces soldier, first shot at the two men from inside his sedan, then got out and shot twice more at one, Faizan Haider, as he ran. Davis then took photos and called the US consulate before fleeing in his car and being apprehended by two traffic wardens. The consular motorcar that came to Davis' rescue, struck and killed an uninvolved motorcyclist Ibad-ur-Rehman, on the way to the scene police say. The vehicle, a Toyota Land Cruiser Prado with four occupants, jumped the median on Jail Road while traveling against the oncoming traffic. Also in the report, Davis reportedly told police that he arrived on the scene from the US consulate, but a GPS tracker in his car indicated he came from his residence. Previous to that, Davis told the police that he came directly from a bank.

Video of Davis' Interrogation at Pakistan Police HQ in Lahore

Davis' victim's bodies were found with five cell phones, two pistols and currency from Pakistan, Japan, Oman and the Philippines, according to the report, which does not indicate where those items came from. Pakistan television stations had broadcast leaked photos, allegedly recovered from Davis's cellphone and camera, that include images of bridges, markets that have been bombed and the road leading to the border with India. Images additionally included Madrassas (Islamic seminaries) and Mosques, as well as Cantonment areas (military camps) captured in his mobile that indicate that he may have been on a mission against Sunnis in Pakistan. The satellite phone and Global Positioning System (GPS) recovered from  Davis, was allegedly used for passing grid references of sensitive locations at various locations to Islamabad, Afghanistan and India. It is important to mention that certain circles within the US have admitted that Davis, the 'former' US Special Forces personnel was working undercover. Reportedly, he was an employee of the Special Activities Division that is associated with US Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) National Clandestine Service (NCS) and was involved in assassinations of important leaders in Pakistan, which Washington DC considered high value targets. Bob Woodward, in his book ‘Obama’s Wars,’ had confirmed the presence of 3,000 US illegal operatives on specific assassination assignments within Pakistan.

Pakistani media also have fanned speculation about the evidence discovered in Davis' car. Of which the police report state that items included an unlicensed Glock pistol, 75 bullets, a "survival kit," an infrared headlight, US and Pakistani currency, a digital camera, computer memory cards, a passport, a satellite cellphone, a box cutter and a portable telescope. On his person, Davis was found with Davis also carried multiple ATM and military ID cards and what was described as a facial disguise or makeup.

Police have not located the Toyota Land Cruiser Prado that arrived on the scene, and US officials have declined to comment on it. According to the police report, several items "fell" from the car as it sped away, including 100 bullets, a pair of gloves, a compass, a black face mask and "a piece of fabric with an American flag drawn on it.

There has been some speculation regarding the backgrounds of Davis' victims, Faizan Haider, 22 and Mohammad Faheem, 26. It was reported and then denied as expected that these two men who were killed were really agents of some Pakistani secret agency and were following Davis around as he went about on an important spying mission for the US. Mozang, is known by Lahore citizens, and is reputedly a hotbed of international intrigue. Perhaps Davis had to get rid of two ‘assets’ to protect either his ‘sources’ or the nature of his mission. 

The US State Department is busy using threats, cajoling and other attempts to invoke diplomatic immunity for Davis under the Vienna Convention. However, it has been alleged that Raymond Davis himself has already confessed to the Pakistan police authorities. The confession has been video recorded (see above video), and in it he states that he is a technical consultant and that he is associated with US Consulate Lahore as general staff and is not a diplomat. One wonders that if they are unsuccessful towards securing his release if US intelligence would then move to terminate Davis whilst in police custody, as now he would become a serious liability for what he knows. In the custody of the Pakistani authorities who are well-versed in the use of torture guised as interrogation techniques, the CIA in particular would definitely not allow Raymond Davis open his mouth and reveal their damning secrets to other agencies.

  * NEW UPDATES! *  

Thanks to the ever-sharp eyes of the conscientiously diligent A13, for spotting this. The Times of India has reported that Faizan Haider and Mohammad Faheem, the two men murdered by Raymond Davis, were assets working for ISI Pakistan Intelligence. According to a media report obtained by the Times of India, the two were tasked to tail the American because he was spying and "encroaching on their turf". The ISI, believed that Davis had crossed "a red line", necessitating that he be followed, four unnamed Pakistani officials stated. The men Davis shot had been following him for at least two hours, and recorded some of his movements on their cell phone cameras, one of the Pakistani officials said. Police found pistols on both the dead men, who were riding a motorcycle. As a matter of course, Pakistani intelligence agencies often use operatives riding motorcycles to tail people. 

In late January, Davis was asked to leave an area of Lahore restricted by the military, the officials said. Davis' cell phone was tracked and some of his calls were made to the Waziristan tribal area, where the Pakistani Taliban and a dozen other militant groups have a safe haven, one official said.

That the ISI sent the equivalent of "hired guns" to trail Davis is a sign that the relationship between the US and Pakistani intelligence agencies is at a "low point," according to all four officials. As a matter of record, in October 2010, Pakistani intelligence uncovered and helped reveal the name of the CIA station chief in Islamabad, forcing him to leave the country.

2-15-11 Update - A13 has supplied yet another valuable link here: Evidence From the Raymond Davis Crime Scene, from the Therearenosunglasses's Weblog. It features some great photos of the items found on Davis' person and in his rented car. As I respect the investigative work of others, please go there and read the post for more cracking information.

Sources:

Pakistan police report deems American official 'guilty' in shootings

Is Raymond Davis’ life really in danger?

Two Men Killed by American in Lahore Worked for ISI: Report

Evidence From the Raymond Davis Crime Scene