Misunderstanding mounts when resolution requires vengeance. Reuters reports Dr. Shakil Afridi, the doctor who assisted the CIA in the hunt for Osama bin Laden is in solitary confinement protecting him from hundreds of convicted militants eager to avenge their hero’s death and he may not be safe from even the guards as only two trusted officials are allowed to see him. Reuters alleges Afridi is as much a prisoner of Pakistan resentment of the United States as victim of his own dalliance toward high-stakes espionage.
Afridi, now 48, was an alleged small-time country physician long dogged by allegations of medical malpractice, who was recruited by the CIA some years ago, according to several U.S. and Pakistani officials. One Pakistani intelligence source said he was talent-spotted while working in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Peshawar in 2009. Later, he was asked to scout bin Laden’s compound in the garrison town of Abbottabad, near the capital Islamabad, under the cloak of an anti-hepatitis campaign. U.S. officials say Afridi provided important information on activity at the compound before Bin Laden was killed in a U.S. Navy SEAL raid in May of last year conducted without informing Pakistani authorities. Three weeks later, Afridi was picked up and interrogated for months and in May of this year sentenced to 33 years in jail.
After a recent visit Dr. Afridi’s brother, Jamil Afridi, noticed the prisoner had gained weight, perhaps because conditions improved since his transfer to the jail from intelligence agency detention centers Reuters conjectured. Jamil, a village schoolteacher, says he himself has been forced to adopt a disguise, dark glasses and cap, to ward off unwanted attention since appearing on TV to defend his younger sibling. Jamil, who spends much of his day worried passersby are actually security agents tailing him said, “My brother has become a victim of the U.S. game.” He used the term “angels” for agents, as many Pakistanis do because they are believed to be invisibly everywhere. Jamil reasonably contends, “If my brother had really played a role for America, I think the Americans should have kept it secret.”
It’s difficult accepting an American asset wasn’t protected, regardless of the contention that the doctor declined help, when under the circumstances it appears his needing help might have been why he assisted in the first place. Because elders and former officials were already accusing the doctor of making money performing unnecessary operations on unsuspecting villagers and sexual harassment of nurses his brother dismisses as baseless. Some former colleagues have described Afridi as a diligent professional and U.S. officials also verbally defend him. “Available information showed Afridi was a respected member of the Pakistani health care community,” said a senior U.S. official in Washington. “We are aware of efforts, put in place since Dr. Afridi’s arrest, to denigrate his character.” U.S. officials say the doctor declined relocation of himself and his family after the bin Laden raid, but there’s no way to independently confirm that. Jamil Afridi said he did not know whether his brother had received that offer, but believed Afridi would have been reluctant to take his two sons and a daughter out of Pakistan, where he had a stable job and his wife worked as the principal of a government college. “He had a good future,” Jamil Afridi said. “Why would he move to the U.S. to live there?”
Nonetheless this doesn’t seem to realistically add up unless the asset was deemed expendable.
Naseem Bibi, a nurse who worked on his immunization drive in Abbottabad, also defended Afridi. “He was very nice to all the people in the team and did his job very diligently,” she said. But supposedly Afridi was trailed by accusations for years that he sought easy money convincing patients to undergo unnecessary surgery at his private clinic. Mohammad Yousaf, an elder from Khyber, said his sister had suffered months of complications and remained bed-ridden after Afridi performed surgery to treat her fever. “We are illiterate villagers and thought whatever the doctor advised would be good,” Yousaf said.
Yousaf referring to himself and fellow villagers as illiterate doesn’t sound consistent either, does it?
Reuters contends allegations of medical malpractice are not unusual in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and it is impossible to verify the validity of the claims. But it’s certain Afridi rankled his superiors as the provincial health department report on his performance in March 2002 contended this. “Keeping in view his extreme lust for money, I am ashamed to even call him a doctor. He is a corrupt, unreliable and low category officer.”
In The Operation, Afridi organized an immunization drive in Abbottabad, where U.S. officials suspected Bin Laden was hiding. To obtain DNA samples from children living in bin Laden’s compound and prove their father’s identity, according to a former Pakistani security official. Afridi went to bin Laden’s house, accompanied by three health workers, and told bin Laden’s wives that an anti-hepatitis drive was underway and he took cheek swabs from the children under the pretext of the campaign. “A woman went in to the house and said ‘bring the children out, the doctor is waiting and he will give them the drops’,” the former official said. “That’s when he used the swabs.” It was unclear whether the CIA used the swabs to determine if the children were bin Laden’s, but the doctor provided intelligence on the house’s tight security arrangements.
Sadly this just further illustrates how difficult it is to protect the innocent in this ironically backward modern world.
Upset People Needing Hope
6/25/2012
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Doctor Who Assisted in Bin Laden's Execution Still In Pakistani Prison
6/5/2012 concluded: Sadly this just further illustrates how difficult it is to protect the innocent in this ironically backward modern world.
Peshawar Central Jail
November 9 - December 2, 2016
Still in jail. Tragic ramifications multiply. And idealistic trampling of reality from belief in a military solution is two wrongs making a right, etc., etc., etc.
Yes, all this must be done while that finished as well too. But when? Other than awarding each other prizes for effort? No unassailable imagery's been maintained to explain revenge must be done. Over. Finis. Done. Obviously our ceremonial advances coming far short of actually convincing enough of everyone. All the more like wailing in the wind. Unfortunately.
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The Same Old Sold New Again
Honesty in a corrupt world is surely, almost, near enough, an oxymoron. Corrupt honesty? Most anything's tainted and poisoned by desperation. Explained over by explaining over and over again. Smoothing out a liturgic blind obedience to monster mantras leading horses to water soothingly coerced by drinking. Wink, wink.
Politics rooted in the excuse of cultural demise. Fighting for ethics by clouding the mirror with deceit. Getting over. Casting a spell. The idea of an Embellisher-in-Chief has always been wrong, and, more pronounced, wrong as ever. Bigly.
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The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty. President George Washington
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Repeating inanities.
For instance? The New York Times' Lies in Guise of News In The Trump Era by Nicholas Kristof frames the troublesomeness underlying toying with facts. Another experiencing of America's already constructed partitioning. Pulitzer vs. Hearst
For instance? The New York Times' Lies in Guise of News In The Trump Era by Nicholas Kristof frames the troublesomeness underlying toying with facts. Another experiencing of America's already constructed partitioning. Pulitzer vs. Hearst
What's more diplomatic than addressing the subject of carving American opinion with such bitter vehemence vitriol substitutes for weighing substance with facts. Where a bred sycophance obliterates doubt where understanding begins.
So the President-Elect and the suspicions about what he's already said, plus track record of self-embellishers puddling about in the expanding wake, promises bandwagons for everybody.
Just One Republican Left Is All I See
The smiles are all there. Criminal Enterprise System profiteers. Pompously exploited Public Relations ethics vaunting honor as exclusive to ruthless mentalities.
Often anger confuses and, like arrogance leads blindly down dark paths lit without light. The first part of this century will be recalled as the Mandate. When most vocabulary was reduced to adjectives that hid disclosure while clarifying nothing except what arrogance reveals.
The strength of a conspiracy's more important than intellectual honesty and ethics. …
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A post: 11:39 AM, November 9, 2016 (edited)
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