Does GeoTV's Hamid Mir Have Links With Taliban and Intelligence Agencies?

[Riaz Haq]

Attempt on Hamid Mir's life has rightly drawn widespread outrage in Pakistan and around the world. It has to be condemned without reservations. Hamid Mir is reported have suspected that he was on Pakistani intelligence agency ISI's "hit list".

Pakistani Journalist Hamid Mir

In addition to raising serious questions about the role of the media and the ISI, the assassination attempt has also refreshed memories of journalist Saleem Shahzad's murder in 2011 for which ISI was blamed. Here are some of the questions that I would like to explore:

Questions:

1. What is the relationship between Pakistani journalists and the various spy agencies, including the ISI, operating in Pakistan?

2. How do Pakistani journalists work with militants to cover multiple ongoing insurgencies in Pakistan?

3. Has Pakistani media played a responsible journalistic role in covering national security issues?

Saleem Shahzad's Murder:

To answer the above questions, let us look at the media coverage of Saleem Shahzad's murder in 2011.

World media widely reported the allegations made against the ISI by former US Chairman of Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen in a Senate committee hearing in Washington. Adm Mullen alleged that Pakistani government "sanctioned" Shahzad's murder.

What the media left out of their coverage of Shahzad's murder were internal emails of Stratfor analysts leaked by Wikileaks. Stratfor bills itself as a "global intelligence" company. It is widely believed to be a leading intelligence contractor for US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The leaked emails talked about the "Fine line between an investigative journalist and spy" and added that "The poor bastard went down the rabbit hole and was neutralized".


In another secret email, Stratfor Vice President Fred Burton wrote as follows:

"I'm sure the ISI extracted a confession of his CIA work before
he died. There will be a leaked story about his double agent
work and the Pakis rub the CIA's nose in it. Its what intel
agencies do. Tit for tat. The world will soon forget him.
Price one pays for playing the game."

Hamid Mir with TTP terrorist Ilyas Kashmiri. Mir said he also met TTP leaders Hakimullah Mehsud and Mullah Fazlullah.

Attempt on Hamid Mir:

Hamid Mir has built a successful career in journalism on close contacts with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. He is known to have had unusual access to Al Qaeda, Taliban and Baloch militants not granted to others. Mir is the only journalist with the distinction to have interviewed Osama Bin Laden three times, including the last interview that took place after Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. It has raised questions about his interlocutors, including the ISI and the Taliban.

A 13 minute taped audio conversation between Hamid Mir and a TTP militant (believed to be Usman Punjabi alias Mohammad Omar) was released in 2010 just after the double murder of former ISI agents Colonel Imam and Squadron Leader Khawaja Khalid by the Taliban.

Here are a few excerpts of Hamid Mir's alleged statements from the audio tape:

"... he (Khalid Khwaja) had done all this. After that Maulana Abdul Aziz was arrested and Mr Abdul Rashid Ghazi telephoned me and said, “Now, I don’t have any option. Now, my family and ulema have been defamed as my brother was arrested in a burqa and presented on Pakistan Television. This is a large stain which can only be removed with my blood.” So, he lived up to his words and sacrificed. So, Khalid Khawaja and his wife, anyone may know or not, they will have to answer before Allah Almighty."


"He (Khawaja) himself has confessed in front me that he had links with William Casey. Ok! Leave William, ask him about the Qadiyanis, because I personally believe that Qadiyanis are worse than infidels, what kind of links does he have with Qadiyanis? What relationship does he have with Mansoor Ijaz? Why does he use his money? Why does he go everywhere with him when he comes to Pakistan? Why does he bring him to the mujahideen?"


"He (Canady) was martyred in North Waziristan. He (Khawaja) came to me with Canady’s wife and a daughter, saying Canady’s son, Karim, is at Rawalpindi’s CMH and is injured and the army had arrested him. He asked me to arrange a meeting between the injured and his mother. I said this is very difficult for me and I can’t do this because already they are all against me. But, he said all that you need to do is to arrange a meeting between a mother and her son. So, I arranged it with a lot of difficulties and sent the woman to Rawalpindi CMH, but when she reached there she took a camera out of her burqa and asked her son to record a message that he is innocent, has no links with anyone and has been kept here illegally. She was arrested there because a nurse saw her and seized the camera from her. But I was held responsible for all of it as they told me that I had sent this woman. It was revealed after her arrest that the woman had a Canadian passport and had visited Canada two months ago. After that I faced a lot of difficulties. The Canadian government released the woman and her daughter and then she went back to Canada. In Toronto, she held a press conference and admitted that she worked for the CIA. Now Khalid Khawaja has a long beard and his wife wears a full veil so people like us, who are involved in worldly affairs and have committed sins, believe that if we will help them, we might be forgotten for our sins. When these kinds of people betray us, we lose confidence on the religion itself."

The Daily Times newspaper, which first reported on the tape, said at the time that the information passed on by Mir to the Taliban "could have led to the execution" of former ISI official Khalid Khwaja. Mir denied it was his voice but others authenticated it. Jang Group said it would investigate but nothing came out of it.

Summary:

It appears from the above mixture of allegations and facts that Hamid Mir is not just a journalist but a player in the ongoing militancy in Pakistan. He seems to have worked closely with both the spies and the militants in the past. It also appears that he has managed to alienate both over time and made himself their target.

Any serious judicial commission investigation of what happened to Hamid Mir last week must take into account his dealings with the intelligence agencies and the militant outfits to reach any credible conclusion. It is necessary to protect journalists and restore Pakistanis' faith in the media.
Here's a video discussion on the subject:


GeoTV's Hamid Mir Survives Murder Attempt, Blames ISI & Trigger... from WBT TV on Vimeo.

 Here are the tapes of Hamid Mir's alleged conversation with Usman Punjabi:


Hamid Mir Geo. TV (Exposed Call with Asian Tigers) by xeest-us




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Pak Taliban Target Right-Wing Media, Politicians in Pakistan


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Pakistan Elections 2013 Predictions 

Why is Democracy Failing in Pakistan?

Viewpoint From Overseas-Vimeo 

Viewpoint From Overseas-Youtube 

[Riaz Haq]

Here's NY Times' Declan Walsh on the Hamid Mir Affair:

...The vituperative exchanges have exposed troubling aspects of Pakistan’s oft-lauded media revolution: Along with the military’s concerted campaign to muzzle the press is the heavy hand of querulous media barons who, driven by commercial concerns and personal grudges, may be endangering the sector they helped create.

“The way this has played out is extremely disturbing,” said Zaffar Abbas, editor of Dawn newspaper, one of the few media outlets that have stayed out of the dispute. “I’ve never seen the media like this, really going after one other. If better sense doesn’t prevail, whatever we have earned in press freedom will be lost.”

The stakes are high on all sides. Since 2007, when television coverage played a key role in fanning the street protests that led to the ouster of General Musharraf, the news media has grown into a powerful factor in Pakistani society. Television news has widened public debate and exposed abuses, but it has faced sharp criticism for shoddy reporting and for giving a platform to Islamist extremists.

The exploding market has also turned prime-time talk show hosts like Mr. Mir into powerful figures, and made fortunes for a handful of newly minted media tycoons.

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“It is supremely dangerous to be a reporter in Pakistan,” he said.

The military, in particular, has squirmed under the media’s relentless scrutiny. Tensions have been bubbling for some time between the Jang Group, the country’s largest media conglomerate, and the ISI. Jang is owned by Mir Shakil ur-Rehman, a reclusive editor who lives with his two wives in Dubai, where he keeps a tight grip on a media empire that includes Geo News, several sports and entertainment channels, and a stable of newspapers in Urdu and English.

Last fall, Mr. Rehman came to believe that the ISI was sponsoring a new television station, Bol, to dilute his commercial and political clout. His newspapers ran hostile reports about Bol, prompting competing media organizations to hit back with stories that painted Geo as sympathetic to Pakistan’s old rival, India.
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Unlike in the Musharraf era, when journalists united against military attempts to muzzle them, virulent rivalries between the businessmen who own the major stations have pulled the news media apart.

Mr. Rehman of the Jang group has a rancorous relationship with Sultan Lakhani, who owns the smaller Express media group, which includes a television station and several newspapers. (One of those papers, the English-language Express Tribune, prints The International New York Times in Pakistan.) A third station, ARY, is owned by a family of gold dealers that has little love for Mr. Rehman.

“The control of the owners and their say in what happens has increased tremendously,” said one editor, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “No editor or journalist can take a stand against them.”

The turmoil has partly obscured the plight of Mr. Mir, who has an ambiguous history with the ISI. He shot to prominence after interviewing Osama bin Laden in 1998, and was initially seen as sympathetic to the pro-jihadi agenda of the Pakistani military and the ISI. But in recent years he has championed the cause of Baluch nationalists, angering the army, and highlighted human rights abuses during military operations.

He is now under close protection at a Karachi hospital, where flowers are piled outside his door and doctors report a steady recovery. In a statement issued through his brother, Mr. Mir vowed to “continue the fight for the rights of people till my last breath and last drop of blood.”....

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/world/asia/attack-on-journalist-s...

[Riaz Haq]

Here's NY Times on the rise of Lal Masjid cleric and fall of Musharraf:

..The chief cleric of the Red Mosque, Maulana Abdul Aziz, has inserted himself into the argument with a typically showy gesture: the inauguration of a new library named after the slain founder of Al Qaeda.

“If Pakistan truly has freedom of expression, then we should be able to express our love for our heroes,” said Mr. Aziz, a willowy, bespectacled man with a wiry gray beard, in a room with the sign “Martyr Osama bin Laden Library” on the door. “And we love Osama bin Laden.”

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Today, Mr. Aziz delivers thunderous Friday sermons from the lavishly refurbished Red Mosque, a stone’s throw from the Parliament building. And he oversees a network of madrasas that teach 5,000 students.

Only seven years ago, the mosque was in the throes of a pitched battle against the authorities. Mr. Aziz tried to escape the siege under the cover of a burqa, a purse clutched in his gloved hands, but was captured and paraded by the intelligence services on national television, still wearing the black cloak.

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Malik Riaz Hussain, a sympathetic property tycoon, provided a temporary home for hundreds of madrasa students and spent at least $150,000 on refurbishing the bullet-pocked mosque. He attributed his generosity to pragmatism rather than to religious conviction.

“I have huge interests in Islamabad and Rawalpindi,” the businessman, who has close ties to the military, told The New York Times in a 2010 interview. “Bad law and order is bad for my business.”

The city provided land worth millions of dollars in central Islamabad for the rebuilding of Jamia Hafsa, a women’s madrasa that was bulldozed after the 2007 siege. The madrasa, whose construction is not complete, is home to the Osama bin Laden library.

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But it is the courts that have been most indulgent toward Mr. Aziz and his followers. Over the past year, judges have dismissed all of the 27 criminal charges against Mr. Aziz, who at times has used the courtroom as a pulpit to call for the imposition of Shariah law.

Instead, the court’s attention has mostly focused on Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s former military ruler. A judicial inquest determined that General Musharraf, not Mr. Aziz, was responsible for the deaths during the siege of the Red Mosque, even though armed jihadis from banned militant groups had joined the students inside...
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At Jamia Hafsa, Mr. Aziz has named a dispensary after Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman who is serving an 86-year prison term in the United States on charges of attempting to kill an American soldier and an F.B.I. official in Afghanistan.

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The Red Mosque has also staged a comeback on the Internet: Its Facebook page is named after the 313 Brigade, a fearsome band of armed female students that conducted raids on suspected brothels and video stores in Islamabad in 2007, in the months before the siege.

A return to such vigilantism is unlikely, said Cyril Almeida, a columnist with Dawn, an English-language newspaper in Pakistan. But he warned that the mosque’s enhanced profile posed other dangers. “The more they gain visibility on the national stage, the more the myth of militants fighting the good fight against an illegitimate state gains in strength,” he said. “And that makes the narrative war more difficult for the state to win."...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/world/asia/paying-homage-to-bin-l...

[Riaz Haq]

#India among 3 most dangerous nations for #journalists. India more dangerous than #Pakistan & #Afghanistan @htTweets http://www.hindustantimes.com/india/110-journalists-killed-in-2015-... …
India was among the three most dangerous countries for journalists in 2015, with nine reporters losing their lives during the year, according to the annual report of Reporters Without Borders released on Tuesday.
The media watchdog said these deaths confirmed “India’s position as Asia’s deadliest country for media personnel, ahead of both Pakistan and Afghanistan”.
Only war-torn Iraq and Syria recorded the deaths of more journalists than India. Four of the nine Indian journalists murdered in the past year were killed “for still undetermined reasons”, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said.
Besides India, the eight other countries where the most journalists were killed are Iraq (11), Syria (10), France (eight), Yemen (eight), Mexico (eight), South Sudan (seven), the Philippines (seven) and Honduras (seven).
A total of 110 journalists were killed in connection with their work or for unclear reasons in 2015, and at least 67 were killed while reporting or because of their work.
“These 67 deaths bring to 787 the total number of journalists killed in connection with their work since 2005,” RSF said in its report.
Indian journalists “daring to cover organised crime and its links with politicians have been exposed to a surge in violence, especially violence of criminal origin, since the start of 2015”, the report said.

[Riaz Haq]

#India among deadliest for journalists last year, No journalists killed in #Pakistan 2016: Report http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-among-deadliest-countr... … via @IndianExpress



India was one of the 10 deadliest countries in the world for journalists last year, and also since 1992.
A report by New York-based non-profit organisation Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) ranked India 10th, with two confirmed killings of journalists for doing their jobs in 2016.

The report ranked India as the 9th deadliest country since 1992 with 40 journalists being killed since then.
Rajdev Ranjan of Hindustan Times and Karun Misra of Jansandesh Times were murdered in 2016 for which, the CPJ said, the motive was confirmed to have been a “direct reprisal” for their work. The report said three other journalists in India were killed this year and the motive is still unconfirmed, “but it is possible” that they were killed for their work.
Since 1992, 40 journalists have been confirmed to have been killed for their work in India, while another 27 were killed but the motive is not certain, the report said.
Half of those murdered since 1992 covered politics or corruption, sometimes both. Nearly a quarter of them were reporting on business.
About half of the murders were committed by “political groups” and a fifth were killed by “criminal groups”, the report said.
About 96 per cent of the perpetrators of these crimes have enjoyed “compete impunity” in India, while in the rest of the cases only “partial justice” has been served.
Globally, too, justice has been served in only 4 per cent cases of journalist killings.
The worst year of journalists in India was 1997, with seven killings, for which motives were confirmed to have been related to their work. Internationally, 2012 saw the highest number of killings—74 deaths—with confirmed motives.

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https://www.dawn.com/news/1303270/no-journalist-murdered-in-pakista...

No journalist was murdered in Pakistan “in retaliation for their work” in 2016, a first since 2001, a recent study reported.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an independent organisation working to promote press freedom worldwide, in its special report launched on Monday said that it “did not identify anyone singled out for murder in Pakistan because of journalist work” — for the first time in 15 years.

The organisation classifies murder as “the targeted killing of a journalist, whether premeditated or spontaneous, in direct relation to the journalist's work”.

At least 33 journalists have been targeted and killed “in retaliation for their work” since 1992, CPJ further said in its press statement.

However, many Pakistani journalists have resorted to self-censorship or have abandoned the profession altogether to avoid “grave risks”, CPJ added.