Recall the New York Times - April 10, 2008:
Obama Says Real-Life Experience Trumps Rivals’ Foreign Policy Credits
... Mr. Obama has argued that his rivals’ longer official record is no substitute for his real-life grass-roots experience. “Foreign policy is the area where I am probably most confident that I know more and understand the world better than Senator Clinton and Senator McCain,” he said in his remarks in San Francisco.
“Experience in Washington is not knowledge of the world,” he continued, provoking laughter among those present.
“This I know. When Senator Clinton brags, ‘I’ve met leaders from 80 countries,’ I know what those trips are like. I’ve been on them. You go from the airport to the embassy. There’s a group of children who do a native dance. You meet with the C.I.A. station chief and the embassy and they give you a briefing. You go take a tour of plant that” with “the assistance of Usaid has started something. And then, you go.”
During the speech, Mr. Obama also spoke about having traveled to Pakistan in the early 1980s. Because of that trip, which he did not mention in either of his autobiographical books, “I knew what Sunni and Shia was before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” he said.
[....]
According to his campaign staff, Mr. Obama visited Pakistan in 1981, on the way back from Indonesia, where his mother and half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, were living. He spent “about three weeks” there, Mr. Obama’s press secretary, Bill Burton, said, staying in Karachi with the family of a college friend, Mohammed Hasan Chandoo, but also traveling to Hyderabad, in India.
Mr. Obama appears not to have previously cited his travel in Pakistan in speeches during the campaign. In “Dreams from My Father,” he talks of having a Pakistani roommate when he moved to New York, a man he calls Sadik who “had overstayed his tourist visa and now made a living in New York’s high-turnover, illegal immigrant work force, waiting on tables.”
Mr. Obama, the campaign and his publisher have not provided any details about the identity of Sadik.
During his years at Occidental College, Mr. Obama also befriended Wahid Hamid, a fellow student who was an immigrant from Pakistan and traveled with Mr. Obama there, the Obama campaign said. Mr. Hamid is now a vice president at Pepsico in New York, and according to public records, has donated the maximum $2,300 to the Obama campaign and is listed as a fund-raiser for it.
Mr. Chandoo is now a self-employed financial consultant, living in Armonk, N.Y. He has also donated the maximum, $2,300, to Mr. Obama’s primary campaign and an additional $309 for the general election, campaign finance records show.
Only Barack knows if "Sadik" is/was actually Mohammed, Wahid or someone else altogether. Gd forbid the media should investigate anything. (More about that later, but in the meantime see Barack Obama's Pakistan Connections at All Things Pakistan, Sept. 1, 2008 and The Fourth Estate Has Joined the Fifth Column at BtB, Sept. 3, 2008.)
Not to be a conspiracy monger, but I do want you to keep this background sketch (or sketchy background) in mind as you read on. I'd also like for you to keep in mind that "apartheid" is an Afrikaans word for "apartness."
Now back to Pahkistahn, via Wikipedia.
Pakistan came into being with two non-contiguous enclaves, East Pakistan (today Bangladesh) and West Pakistan, separated geographically by India.
India was formed out of the majority Hindu regions of the colony, and Pakistan from the majority Muslim areas.
Massive population exchanges occurred between the two newly-formed states in the months immediately following Partition. Once the lines were established, about 14.5 million people crossed the borders to what they hoped was the relative safety of religious majority.
Based on 1951 Census of displaced persons, 7,226,000 Muslims went to Pakistan from India while 7,249,000 Hindus and Sikhs moved to India from Pakistan immediately after partition.
It all sounds vaguely familiar, does it not? If anyone wants to know what a Jew-free "palestinian" nation state would look like, IMHO you need look no further than present-day Pahkistahn.
Karachi mosque, where some might say that the Islamic call to prayer is "one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset."
.... In a recent letter to Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, Obama offered Pakistan an expanded strategic partnership, including the carrot of additional military and economic cooperation, along with the stick of a warning with unusual bluntness that Pakistan's use of insurgent groups to pursue its policy goals would not be tolerated....
Now then...
There was a fascinating, serendipitous confluence in my Inbox this morning, which will make this post - No.12,000 (not including earlier efforts at the original site) - quite worthy of marking such a grim milestone.
First, an outstanding take by Mark Steyn - thanks to dg: We're Culturally Sensitive and Tote Really Big Guns.
.... [The Islamic Republic of] Pakistan, our "ally," hides and protects not only Osama but also Mullah Omar and Zawahiri, and does so secure in the knowledge that it will pay no price for its treachery — indeed, confident that its duplicitous military will continue to be funded by U.S. taxpayers.
If this were a movie, the crowds cheering "USA! USA!" outside the White House would be right: The bad guy is dead! We win! The End. But the big picture is bigger than Hollywood convention. In the great sweeping narrative, the death of Osama bin Laden is barely a ripple, while the courtesies afforded to him by the Pakistani establishment tell us something profound about the superpower's weakness and inability to shift the story line....
You'll want to read it all, but lest you think yourself thereby fully informed, the real "great sweeping narrative" is found elsewhere, starting with this article from TPM's LiveWire, sent to me by my friend Mary in Boulder:
Pakistan and the Mumbai Attacks: The Untold Story
To assert that this is a "Must Read" would be to vastly misunderestimate its importance. Written by Sebastian Rotella of ProPublica, it's quite lengthy - pages and pages, especially if you copy it out in a more elderly-friendly-size font - but absolutely captivating. It reads like thriller fiction but is, I'm afraid, Real Life.
Chilling... Real Life.
On a November night two years ago, a young American rabbi and his pregnant wife finished dinner at their home in the mega-city of Mumbai.
Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg had come to India on a religious mission. They had established India's first outpost of Chabad Lubavitch, the Orthodox Jewish organization, in a six-story tower overlooking a shantytown. The Chabad House offered a synagogue, a cyber-cafe, two floors of guest rooms, India's biggest Hebrew library and a dining room that could seat 50 for festive meals. The Holtzbergs' guests that evening were two American rabbis, an Israeli grandmother and a Mexican tourist.
Hundreds of miles away in Pakistan, a youthful terrorist chief named Sajid Mir was preparing a different sort of religious mission. With the support of Pakistan's intelligence service, Mir had spent two years using a Pakistani-American businessman named David Coleman Headley to conduct meticulous reconnaissance on Mumbai, according to investigators and court documents. He had selected iconic targets and the Chabad House, a seemingly obscure choice, but one that ensured that Jews and Americans would be casualties.
On Nov. 26, 2008, Mir sat among half-a-dozen militant chiefs in a safe house in Karachi tracking an attack team as its dinghy approached the Mumbai waterfront. The Lashkar-i-Taiba terrorist group had made Mir the project manager of its biggest strike ever, the crowning achievement of his career as a holy warrior....
If you're like me and can't remember hearing of Sajid Mir, David Coleman Headley or Lashkar ever before, then you're in for quite a healthy dose of education. Kudos to Mr. Rotella, and to ProPublica (of which I'd never heard, either).
".... In the best traditions of American journalism in the public service, we seek to stimulate positive change. We uncover unsavory practices in order to stimulate reform. We do this in an entirely non-partisan and non-ideological manner, adhering to the strictest standards of journalistic impartiality. We won’t lobby. We won’t ally with politicians or advocacy groups. We look hard at the critical functions of business and of government, the two biggest centers of power, in areas ranging from product safety to securities fraud, from flaws in our system of criminal justice to practices that undermine fair elections. But we also focus on such institutions as unions, universities, hospitals, foundations and on the media when they constitute the strong exploiting or oppressing the weak, or when they are abusing the public trust.
We address one of the occasional past failings of investigative journalism by being persistent, by shining a light on inappropriate practices, by holding them up to public opprobrium and by continuing to do so until change comes about. In short, we stay with issues so long as there is more to be told, or there are more people to reach...."
Rotella has written an entire SERIES of investigative reports on the Mumbai Terror Attacks -- for ProPublica. Where have we been, and why oh why didn't we know? I guess there are always "more people to reach."
As we have quite a bit of homework to do, I'll let you get to it.
Pakistan’s Terror Ties at Center of Upcoming Chicago Trial
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