Insulting one’s intelligence

Things are “out of control” when a young man is picked up in front of his family in broad daylight in Islamabad.

Absolutely nothing angers one more than someone trying to insult one’s intelligence. The most stupid and ludicrous stories are trotted out to try and fool us lay people all of the time, particularly by those who, even now, consider themselves beyond the reach of the law. What amazes, nay infuriates one no end, is the extent of the lies and damned lies that are put about, even in matters of human pain and suffering. Consider the heartbreaking case of the kidnapping of young Omer Mahmood Khan, son of the unfortunate Mehmood Ahmad Khan who had only recently moved his family from Canada back to the Citadel of Islam.

A report in this newspaper of record of March 17, 2012, states, inter alia:‘The counsel for Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) and Military Intelligence (MI) has revealed in the Supreme Court that Indian spy agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and Israel’s Mossad are active in Pakistan. He was speaking during the hearing of the missing person’s case. He said that they were behind kidnappings in the country and were being helped by terrorist groups.

‘The chief justice asked the defence counsel if the agencies had any credible information of the involvement of RAW and Mossad, and why they did not take any action against them. “We did not bar you from taking action against RAW and Mossad.”

Terming the intelligence agencies’ reply on Adiala missing persons unsatisfactory, the apex court on Friday took suo motu notice against the abduction of a boy who used to provide food at camps set up by the relatives of missing persons outside parliament.

The report said: “A two-judge bench headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry directed Inspector General of Police Islamabad and Attorney General of Pakistan Maulvi Anwarul Haq to submit a report of the incident by March 17 and present the abductee before the court on March 19.” The chief justice also remarked that this time someone was abducted right under the government’s nose’.

In the event, the boy Omer Mahmood Khan, who had been kidnapped in broad daylight by goons driving two double cabins with tinted glasses, a black Corolla, a white Suzuki Baleno and a Suzuki Mehran, “in front of his mother, father and younger brother” returned home that same evening too terrified to say what had happened to him over the week that he was in custody. We also know that his family followed the convoy carrying the poor chap but were stopped at Faizabad near the ISI’s ‘Hamza Camp’. Er, as an aside, is this the same camp that blew up quite mysteriously on April 10, 1988 killing up to a thousand people, almost all of them ‘bloody civilians’, when an audit of weapons, particularly ‘Stinger’ ground to air missiles supplied by the United States was about to be carried out? And, er, where is the inquiry into that atrocity? (Would My Lords consider suo motu action even now, please?).

If My Lords of the Supreme Court are doing what they must on the missing persons/unlawful kidnappings case in Islamabad, My Lord the Chief Justice of the Peshawar High Court, Justice Dost Muhammad Khan and his Brother Justice Waqar Ahmad Seth are doing likewise. The CJ actually went to the extent of saying “They are lying... how long will we tolerate it... things are going out of control” when told that the interior and defence ministries were both denying that they had picked up two brothers, Sufaid and Zahid on December 29, 2010.

Whilst the exertions of the honourable Supreme Court and Peshawar High Court have already yielded some missing persons; including those of the Adiala Eleven that remain alive after the ministrations of the ISI, and one from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa who remained disappeared for thirteen months, My Lord Khan is right that things are getting “out of control” despite all that the superior judiciary is trying to do to enforce the rule of law and the Constitution when a young man is picked up in front of his family in broad daylight in Islamabad.

Things must surely be out of control when the lawyer representing the ISI and the MI has the effrontery to tell the Supreme Court, no less, that RAW and Mossad are behind the kidnappings and the disappearances, not the ISI and the MI! So then, RAW and/or Mossad are tearing around Islamabad’s security road-block ridden roads in convoys of up to six cars, two of the convoy’s SUVs with forbidden blacked-out windows picking up people? And then releasing their prisoners when the Supreme Court admonishes the ISI/MI? Really, now?

If that is so, is it the case that the three agencies: ISI/RAW/Mossad are working in tandem? If they are not, what the devil are the ISI and the MI doing about RAW and Mossad running about freely in the Land of the Pure? Is it because of the ineptness and inefficiency of the highest order on the part of our agencies that foreign ones are allowed a free hand to do what they will? I mean, can you believe any of this? And yet we are lectured by the Sipah Salaar-e-Azam that we must not criticise our ‘institutions’!

Let me end by saying that the Khan family is so terrified to say anything that they have switched off their telephones and are not speaking to anyone. Well done, commanders of the Deep State! You may have been caught with your trousers around your ankles on the nights of May 1st, and May 22nd, but you have succeeded in terrifying one more Pakistani family. Shabash!

Can you even begin to imagine what the younger brother would have gone through watching his elder brother being manhandled into a black-windowed SUV? The mother? The sheer terror they must have felt? What if it was your son; your younger brother? Has all feeling left you in your crazed quest for more power, and therefore more pelf? Shame on you!

Published in The Express Tribune, March 23^rd, 2012.