US Senators want Pakistani Taliban blacklisted

Four senators are seeking to force the Obama administration to blacklist the Pakistani Taliban, a day after the failed Times Square bomber pleaded guilty and admitted getting training from the group.

The senators, all from New York and New Jersey, said on Tuesday they would introduce a bill requiring the State Department to designate the Pakistani Taliban a “foreign terrorist organisation.”

“Now that the Times Square terrorist has pleaded guilty in court, it is time to take the next step by confronting the organisation that aided and abetted him,” Senator Charles Schumer, said in a statement.

Schumer, along with Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Robert Menendez, and Frank Lautenberg, wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in May asking that the Pakistani Taliban be added to the list.

At the time, the State Department said it was reviewing such a step but had not made a decision.

A department spokesman said then that adding or removing a group from the list, which now contains 45 organisations, is a lengthy, deliberative process that must follow strict legal guidelines.

Inclusion on the list freezes a group’s assets in the US and imposes travel and financial sanctions on its members.
Faisal Shahzad, a naturalised US citizen, said on Monday he received five-day training in explosives from the Pakistani Taliban in the Waziristan region before returning to the US in February to pursue a one-man scheme to detonate a car bomb in New York.

The indictment said he received $5,000 in cash on Feb 25 from an unnamed co-conspirator in Pakistan and $7,000 more on April 10, sent at the co-conspirator’s direction. Shahzad said in court that the Pakistani Taliban also gave him more than $4,000 when he left training camp.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 23^rd, 2010.