The 9/11 attack on the USA, ten years out: "We should not move through history as sleepwalkers."

Pentagon 9/11 memorial

I feel that ZenPundit Mark Safranski's September 11 essay, The Nine Eleven Century? speaks for many Americans both in its summary of the meaning of 9/11 for Americans and its concerns about where responses to the tragedy are leading America as a nation. My regret is that I didn't see the essay yesterday, else I would have posted about it then. The entire essay is an important read but here I quote from the closing paragraphs:

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, as we remember the fallen and the many members of the armed services of the United States who have served for ten years of war, heroically, at great sacrifice and seldom with complaint, we also need to recall that we should not move through history as sleepwalkers.

We owe it to our veterans and to ourselves not to continue to blindly walk the path of the trajectory of 9/11, but to pause and reflect on what changes in the last ten years have been for the good and which require reassessment. Or repeal. To reassert ourselves, as Americans, as masters of our own destiny rather than reacting blindly to events while carelessly ceding more and more control over our lives and our livelihoods to the whims of others and a theatric quest for perfect security. America needs to regain the initiative, remember our strengths and do a much better job of minding the store at home.

The next ninety years being molded by the last ten is not a future I care to leave to my children. I can think of no better way to honor the dead and refute the current sense of decline than for America to collectively step back from immersion in moment by moment events and start to chart a course for the long term.

9/11 ten-year anniversary terrorist bomb threat against New York and Washington: What did you do with the bunny, Mr Obama?

A cautionary tale about media manipulation in the Age of Obama


This evening, minutes before President Barack Obama spoke to a joint session of Congress to put forward his "American Jobs Plan," I emailed a correspondent ("X") to warn him about breaking news that had just been announced on FNC (Fox News Channel) about a "credible" but officially uncorroborated terrorist threat specific to New York City and/or Washington, DC.

This post shows my email, the correspondent's responses, and my subsequent replies and updates. Before I begin, the brevity the language in the email communications requires a little unpacking, particularly for readers outside the United States:

FNC, along with CNN and MSNBC, is one of the three '24/7' national cable news stations in the USA. The parent company of FNC is Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp, which has been in hot water because of a phone hacking scandal.

Translations of the email shorthand

> "ops" is shorthand for operation/operatives; in this case political operatives at the White House.
> "AQ Central" refers to the al Qaeda command.
> "ailes" refers to Roger Ailes, chairman of the Fox Television Stations Group.
> "Brennan" refers to John O. Brennan, chief counterterrorism advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama; officially his title is Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, and Assistant to the President.
> "CNN gofer" refers to CNN being an unofficial "go-fer" or propaganda outlet for the Obama White House or to be more precise the U.S. Department of State -- a situation that goes back many years (check out CNN's key role in shaping U.S. news coverage of the 'color' revolutions in Eastern Europe) and is too complicated to explain here, except to note that although many American's assume CNN is 'left' leaning politically, close attention to its reporting over a period of years reveals that it is really oriented toward promoting State Dept. policies, which are oriented to mesh with European Union policies. And so in my estimation only within that parameter does CNN support Liberal political US agendas -- a situation that deepened this year to promote the Obama administration's spin on the 'Arab Spring' and U.S. involvement in the bombing of Libya. As I noted, it's complicated.

Now to the emails.

6:36:32 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time
Breaking - new intel credible AQ planned attack NYC or DC
Just now: FNC Jennifer Griffin report from the Pentagon. Intel not from Abbottabad. Threat "more than aspirational" but they don't have names. [*]
Pundita ["P"]

6:50:48 P.M
ailes drivel. murdoch despair. griffin tabloid rubbish.
X

8:03:52 P.M.
NO. WHITE HOUSE OPS!!! First, WH pulled fast one on GOP by telling them in advance that the speech would be 43 minutes longo w/o applause but speech was actually 32 minutes (Shep Smith reporting just now.) In other words, ops wanted to discourage GOP from making TV response to jobs speech so response wouldn't interfere with football game opener. so WH ops faked out GOP.

THEN: WH, Homeland Security, DOJ put out info about credible but unconfirmed threat so news aired JUST BEFORE job speech.

Then, right AFTER O's speech ended came WH statement, reported by Shep Smith from news wire and/or WH source:

"New statement from WH just now: WH official: "the president was briefed on the threat this morning and has been briefed on it throughout the day. Information is 'unconfirmed.' intel community has not yet confirmed. Shep Smith added but threat is specific, from overseas, from AQ Central, and involves a car bomb or car bombs."

2 breaking news reports on the threat - ABC news (Australia) 'Credible' threat of 9/11 attack anniversary and Fox Federal Authorities Probe Possible Terror Threat Around 9/11 Anniversary. CNN, other news orgs now piling on with their reports on the threat; story sprouting more legs than a centipede.
P

9:03:54 P.M.
"Awaiting NYC news conference on threat" - CNN just now
"threat quite credible -- security community became aware of threat 2 days ago. Brennan has been in touch with Obama throughout the day"
P

9:08:46 P.M.
CNN, Obama playing bomb threat like a fiddle
CNN analysis of Jobs Speech bumped from opening of CNN's Piers Morgan show 9-10 PM. Fox not caught napping; sticking with analyses of speech in their 9 PM leadoff.
P

9:06:28 P.M.
Gofer CNN making HUGE issue of bomb threat
P

9:10:11 P.M
Upcoming Presser from [NYC Mayor] Michael Bloomberg
"potentially a very serious threat" WH briefing security committee and other key members of House on why they're taking terrorist chatter more seriously than in the past and why they're alerting US public of risk. [presser began at 9:42]
P

10:53:45 P.M.
no worries. no chatter. noise.
X

10:54:44 P.M.
Thank you. BASTARDS. white house ops forced bloomberg, nypd to call presser w/in hour of obama speech.
P
__________

Here, my all-time favorite observation about Barack Obama; it's from the comment section for an April 11, 2008 report at the ABC News (U.S.) news blog site.

The report details Obama's attempts to explain away contemptuous, patronizing remarks he made about white, low-income Pennsylvania residents while he spoke to a private fundraising gathering in San Francisco and was unaware that his remarks were being recorded.

The ABC report prompted more than 200 comments, including this gem from one Ms. Sonia Trevino:

obama reminds me of a magician i saw as a little girl. he put a bunny in a hat and then pulled out a quarter. i was 7 y.o and i was not fooled i stood up and screamed where is the bunny, where is the bunny, what did you do with the bunny.

Yes, Mr. Obama; what did you do with the bunny?

I offered the email exchanges about the terrorist threat as a cautionary tale about government manipulation of information and the policies of major news media outlets, which make it easy for governments to influence public opinion without having just cause to do so. ("Just cause," in a genuine democracy, is a very high bar, usually relating to national security issues.)

Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, has clearly revealed himself, since releasing hundreds of thousands of unredacted classified documents, to be a monster. He's a kind of terrorist who is less interested in honest, transparent government than in destroying the governing institutions of free societies. And yet the machinations of governments within free societies, with regard to manipulation or "shaping" of information for the public, help Assange and those who support him to rationalize the hacking of government websites.

* Around 9 PM CNN began reporting that the government did have 3 names but the names were such common Arabic ones that it couldn't use them to indentify the persons associated with the threat, which reportedly involved a car bomb or bombs.

Pakistan: May 1 killing of Osama bin Laden and May 4 arraignment of Rana in a Chicago court. Keep your eye on the little cat feet.

"Thanks" is a paltry word to convey my happiness with President Barack Obama, the Central Intelligence Agency, U.S. Navy Seals and all others who were directly involved in tracking down bin Laden and bringing him to justice.

However, I would be even happier if Operation Geronimo had been carried out just a tad earlier so as not to distract press attention from the arraignment of one Tahawwur Hussain Rana.

I know, I know; so little time, so many terrorist names to keep straight. But you remember my April 22 post about Rana and Admiral Michael Mullen; right? Rana is the terrorist who from all indications is planning on singing in a U.S. criminal court about his involvement with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

If Rana is not somehow persuaded to keep his mouth shut at his trial, which starts May 16, this is going to be extremely embarrassing to the White House, U.S. Congress, CIA, State Department, Pentagon and in particular highest-ranking U.S. military officers, such as Mullen, who have been covering for the ISI and Pakistani military.

Some indication of just how embarrassing things might get can be gleaned from counterterrorism expert B. Raman's description of U.S. machinations to head off Rana in court. From Raman's April 28 paper titled Incriminating Spotlight on ISI in the US:

1. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate has come under incriminating spotlight in the US as a result of the ongoing judicial proceedings in a Chicago court against Tahawwur Hussain Rana of the Chicago cell of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) in connection with the 26/11 terrorist strikes in Mumbai and certain leaked WikiLeaks cables relating to the interrogation of Al Qaeda suspects detained at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba.
[...]
5. In a supplementary indictment to the main indictment against Rana filed before the Chicago court on April 25, 2011, the FBI has for the time given the identifying particulars of LET members A, B, C and D, but not Person A. They have been sought to be prosecuted along with Rana for their role in the 26/11 terrorist strikes. By combining the trial of these four persons with the trial of Rana, the FBI seems to be trying to highlight the role of the LET and to undercut the expected defence of Rana that he had helped the ISI and not the LET.

[See this April 27 Sify report for the names mentioned in the indictment].

6. One has strong grounds for suspecting that the belated decision of the FBI to disclose the identities of these four persons and try them along with Rana is meant to help the ISI in avoiding any embarrassment due to its role in the 26/11 terrorist strikes.

The US intelligence [establishment] may have many differences with the ISI because of its perceived non-cooperation against Al Qaeda, the Jallaludin Haqqani network and the Afghan Taliban, but it is not prepared to initiate any action against the ISI for its role in the 26/11 terrorist strikes.

Raman tactfully avoids mentioning for emphasis that if Americans don't want to properly investigate the ISI connection to the 9/11 attacks and a host of other terrorist attacks on Americans, we're sure as heck not going to lose sleep about the ISI connection to the massacre in Mumbai.

But just to review and reflect on the proximity of the May 1 U.S. operation against bin Laden, who'd been lounging around for years right under the nose of Pakistan's military, to the May 4 arraignment of Rana, how about if we take a walk together down memory lane? I know this will be a boring exercise for readers with encyclopedic knowledge of the war on terror but bear with me.

Let's start in the Philippines. In his May 2 report for GMA website titled, United by plot: John Paul II rises, Bin Laden falls on same day, J.M. Tuazon points out that Pope John Paul's beatification and bin Laden's death happened on the same day, then he goes on to review the history of al Qaeda-linked terrorist plots to assassinate the pope and al Qaeda's activities in the Philippines.

Tuazon doesn't specify motivation for the plots against the pope but he doesn't have to; the facts speak for themselves. Pope John Paul was targeted for one reason and one reason only: he was the world's most visible symbol of Christendom:

On two separate occasions, Osama bin Laden’s international terrorist network, al Qaeda, was linked to plots to assassinate the late Pope John Paul II, hatched in the Philippines no less.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of Bin Laden's lieutenants, had planned to kill the late pope during the pontiff’s 1995 World Youth Day visit to Manila.

The plot called for planting a pipe bomb at the altar in Luneta Park, where the Pope was set to celebrate Mass, and have al Qaeda snipers deployed around the area to “shoot randomly at those fleeing the carnage."

The 1995 plot, however, was foiled after a fire gutted the Josefa Apartments along Quirino Avenue in Manila, where he and nephew Ramzi Yousef had taken quarters. [The fire was started by Yousef when he accidentally detonated a bomb he was making in his apartment.]

Their next plot was an extraordinary and historic success.

Mohammed and Yousef were instrumental in carrying out the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, as they hatched the idea of using aircraft and flying them into the twin towers of New York City.

Mohammed’s conspiracy of a second attempt at assassinating the pope, meanwhile, was hatched in 1999 but was also thwarted following the cancellation of the pontiff’s trip to Manila for health reasons.

“Documents found in a block of flats in Karachi, Pakistan, used as a hideout by Mohammed show that he visited the Philippines on a number of occasions to finalize details for the assassination attempt," [a London Times report] said.
[...]

The Times report, published in November 2002, mentioned that news of the 1999 plot against the pope had been suppressed, presumably on orders from the Vatican, until after the 9/11 attacks.

There has been quite a bit of suppression of facts relating to al Qaeda's activities; Tuazon's trip down memory lane, coupled with a 2006 investigation launched by a U.S. House of Representatives committee, underscores this. In his January 2, 2007 report on the investigation Robert Longley, writing for About's Guide to U.S. government news, notes:

Foreign terrorists, including al-Qaeda operative Ramzi Yousef, may have played a role in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, according to an oversight investigation [PDF] by the House International Relations Committee.

In his report The Oklahoma City Bombing: Was There A Foreign Connection? International Relations Committee chairman Dana Rohrabacher (R - California), presents evidence suggesting that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols may have been assisted in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building by "Middle Easterners" and "a German national living at an extremist compound in eastern Oklahoma."

The bomb exploded in front of the Murrah Building on April 19, 1995, killed 168 people, including 19 children, and injured countless others. To date, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols remain the only persons convicted of the crime. McVeigh was executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001. Nichols is now serving a life sentence in a Florence, Colorado supermax prison.

Throughout his trial and appeals, McVeigh contended the FBI had concealed evidence that he and Nichols had actually acted as part of a larger group of conspirators.

Rohrabacher's committee presents extensive, "yet in some cases circumstantial," evidence establishing a relationship between Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef, the al-Qaeda terrorist convicted of carrying out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
[...]
Rohrabacher also finds fault with the Justice Department for both its failures in the initial investigation of the Oklahoma City bombing and for what the committee call its current "lack of willingness" to examine the many question raised in the committee's report.

Rohrabacher wasn't the only one who found fault with the DOJ, and more fault can surely be found somewhere in that mishmash of agencies that were subsumed after 9/11 into a behemoth called the Department of Homeland Security. The dust had barely settled on the Murrah building explosion when credible links to al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were uncovered by independent investigators, links that were never fully explored by the FBI and other U.S. security agencies.

All that says nothing about the U.S. failure to properly investigate the links between the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and Pakistan's military, between Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the same military, and between the same military and the 9/11 attack on the United States. And it says nothing about the laxity of successive U.S. administration in clearly establishing the Pakistani military's connection to its fig-leaf called the ISI.

Yet in July 2004, in a strongly-worded editorial published in the (U.K.) Guardian, British Labor MP Michael Meacher called out the U.S. government for its reluctance to thoroughly investigate Pakistan's role in the 9/11 attack and Pearl's murder in Pakistan while Pearl was investigating ISI links to 9/11.

Meacher observed that to a great extent the ISI was a creation of U.S. aid money and noted:

Another person who must know a great deal about what led up to 9/11 is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, allegedly arrested in Rawalpindi [the Pakistani garrison city] on March 1 2003.

A joint Senate-House intelligence select committee inquiry in July 2003 stated: "KSM appears to be one of Bin Laden's most trusted lieutenants and was active in recruiting people to travel outside Afghanistan, including to the US, on behalf of Bin Laden."

According to the report, the clear implication was that they would be engaged in planning terrorist-related activities.

The report was sent from the CIA to the FBI, but neither agency apparently recognised the significance of a Bin Laden lieutenant sending terrorists to the US and asking them to establish contacts with colleagues already there.

Yet the New York Times has since noted that "American officials said that KSM, once al-Qaida's top operational commander, personally executed Daniel Pearl ... but he was unlikely to be accused of the crime in an American criminal court because of the risk of divulging classified information".

Indeed, he may never be brought to trial.

By gum it turned out Mohammed will indeed never appear in a U.S. criminal court. And even though he'll be greatly hampered by what he can say before a U.S. military tribunal the U.S. government is still dragging its feet about allowing him a day in court.

So I wouldn't hold my breath waiting to learn whether the U.S. Congress will cut off aid to Pakistan's military if investigation turns up that the military was knowingly harboring Osama bin Laden. It's already been made crystal clear that no such cut-off will occur. From a report today by the Associated Press:

[...] "For those who want to cut off aid to Pakistan, I understand your frustration," said [Republican] Senator Lindsey Graham.

"But at the end of the day, if you want to create a failed state in Pakistan, one of the best things to do is sever relationships. It is not in our national security interest to let this one event destroy what is a difficult partnership but a partnership nonetheless."

The Obama administration pushed back on talk of punishing Pakistan.

White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters Tuesday that the U.S. is committed to cooperating with Pakistan despite questions about who in the Islamabad government may have known that bin Laden was in hiding in his compound in Abbottabad.

"We don't know who if anybody in the government was aware that bin Laden or a high-value target was living in the compound. It's logical to assume he had a supporting network. What constituted that network remains to be seen," Carney said. "It's a big country and a big government and we have to be very focused and careful about how we do this because it is an important relationship." [...]

Thank you for feeling our pain, Senator Graham. But a relationship in which a governments pays another military to massacre the government's own troops is best not characterized as "important;" I'd call it an evil unparalleled in the history of warfare, but that's just me.

Moving along, see B. Raman's post about John Brennan's May 2 presser about Operation Geronimo; Raman pulls out exchanges that pertain specifically to the implications of bin Laden living in a garrison town.

If the U.S. government doesn't want to come out and say that Yousef and KSM were Pakistani military assets until they were no longer useful, I will say it. A great many others have said the same; indeed, one can't claim even a passing familiarity with the U.S. war on terror without drawing the same conclusion.

So let's get down to brass tacks, shall we? The mess did not start with 9/11. It started in the late 1940s, at the inception of Pakistan as a sovereign nation. Since that time the U.S. government has been so deeply involved in the machinations of Pakistani's military that there are offices in the Greater Washington, DC region where you don't dare open a closet if you don't want a pile of skeletons falling on you.

B. Raman's May 3 post nails it:

Pak Perfidy will have no enduring impact on its ties with US
[...]
7. There is already an exercise on in the US State Department to respect the sensitivities of Pakistan, to spare it of any undue embarrassment and to avoid any punitive action against it.

8. Yes, tough questions are being asked. They will continue to be asked. Pakistan is embarrassed, but not unduly worried over these tough questions because it knows from the long history of its relationship with the US that tough questions are rarely followed by tough action against the State of Pakistan.

9. Yes. Some actions were taken in the past against some individual officers on the insistence of the US. As against Lt.Gen. Javed Nasir, the Director-General of the ISI, in 1993, who was sacked because of his alleged collusion with the Afghan Mujahideen. As against Lt. Gen.Mahmood Ahmed, another DG of the ISI, in 2001 because of his suspected collusion with the Afghan Taliban. Nasir was sacked by Nawaz Sharif, the then Prime Minister. Ahmed was shifted out of the ISI by Gen.Pervez Musharraf.

10. That is all. Once action was taken against senior officers of the ISI, US-Pakistan relations were back to their normal state of pampering.

11. History is going to repeat itself now after the death of OBL at Abbotabad. One or two senior officers of the Army and the ISI will be identified by the US as responsible for the collusion. The US will ask for their heads. Pakistan will happily offer their heads.

12. The State-to-State relations will be back to their sickening normalcy. The pampering of Pakistan will resume. The exercise to feed and fatten the Pakistani Army and intelligence will resume.
[...]

If any of this pampering was tactically necessary for the U.S. effort in Afghanistan one might scrape up a rationale for it. But as the U.S. operation against OBL demonstrated, it's not.

U.S. scramble to placate Pakistan about Times Square bombing case echoes 9/11 Commission's capitulation to Pak lobbyists

Yesterday saw a scramble in Washington to downplay the Time Square Bomber's alleged association with a Pakistan terror group. The scramble was mirrored on the Other Side of the Pond when the Guardian (a conduit for views from Britain's intelligence agencies) quoted unnamed Pakistani investigators and officials:

Pakistani investigators have found no evidence to support American claims that the failed Times Square bomber was working under the direction of the Pakistani Taliban, the Guardian has learned.
[...]
Officials in Islamabad are perplexed and angry at statements from Washington about Shahzad's links with the Pakistani Taliban, believing that the US is exploiting the issue to apply pressure for new military offensives in Pakistan's tribal border area with Afghanistan, in the north Waziristan region.[...]

And U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke emerged from his cone of silence to assure that the Obama administration was in no way considering a lessening or suspension of aid to Pakistan.

Holbrooke also stressed that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hadn't meant exactly what she said last week when she said Pakistan would face "very severe consequences” if a successful terrorist attack on the United States could be traced to Pakistan.

Also yesterday, New York City's Police Commissioner, Ray Kelly, indicated that leaked information about the Times Square Bomber almost helped him escape and that the leak had not come from the New York police. The response from U.S. Department of Justice and FBI officials to Kelly's very serious charge: chirping of crickets.

But before I wade further into Washington's present attempts to placate Pakistan, let's take a trip back in time to get a clearer fix on today:

March 12, 2006

Pakistan weekly spills 9/11 beans

(The Telegraph, India) The Pakistan foreign office had paid tens of thousands of dollars to lobbyists in the US to get anti-Pakistan references dropped from the 9/11 inquiry commission report, [Pakistan's] The Friday Times has claimed.

The Pakistani weekly said its story is based on disclosures made by foreign service officials to the Public Accounts Committee at a secret meeting in Islamabad on Tuesday.

It claimed that some of the commission members were also bribed to prevent them from including damaging information about Pakistan.

The magazine said the PAC grilled officials in the presence of foreign secretary Riaz Mohammad Khan and special secretary Sher Afghan on the money paid to lobbyists.

“The disclosure sheds doubt on the integrity and honesty of the members of the 9/11 inquiry commission and, above all, the authenticity of the information in their final report,” it said.

The report quoted an officer as saying that dramatic changes were made in the final draft of the inquiry commission after the lobbyists got to work. The panel was formed to probe the September 11 terror attack and make suggestions to fight terrorism.

After the commission tipped the lobbyists about the damaging revelations on Pakistan’s role in 9/11, they contacted the panel members and asked them to go soft on the country. The Friday Times claimed that a lot of money was used to silence these members.

According to the report, the lobbyists also helped Pakistan win the sympathy of 75 US Congressmen as part of its strategy to guard Islamabad’s interests in Washington. “US softened towards Pakistan only because of the efforts of the foreign office,” an official was quoted as saying in the report.

The Pakistan foreign office defended the decision to hire the lobbyists, saying it was an established practice in the US.

An observer at the Islamabad meeting said money could play an important role in buying powerful people. The remark came in response to comments made by some US officials after 9/11 that “Pakistanis will sell their mothers for a dollar”.

That's outrageous, if the last remark was aimed at American lobbyists. Here in Washington the bidding at mother sales starts at 10,000 bucks, not a measly dollar.

To return to 2010 there's no question that Pakistanis are upset about what they perceive as Pakistan-bashing in Washington. The Washington Post reported yesterday:

[..] Many Pakistanis have condemned the attempted bombing, saying Shahzad's alleged actions were un-Islamic and hurt both countries. But in editorials, sermons and protests, activists have blamed the West for spotlighting Pakistan as a source of terrorism because of one incident.

The Nation newspaper, an outlet for nationalist views, declared, "It is crystal clear that the U.S. government is always behind such planted arrests."

On Sunday, thousands of supporters of the Jamaat-e-Islami religious party protested in Karachi. Several said they were sure Shahzad had been set up by the CIA.

"He's an innocent person. They want to interlink Faisal Shahzad and the Taliban and create a conspiracy against Pakistan," said Fahad Kashif Iqbal, 20, a student.

Some Pakistani officials have lent credence to such theories or have sought to explain the attempted attack as a reaction to U.S. policy.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik said initially that before cooperating with the United States, "one has to see, is it some conspiracy against Pakistan?" Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said the attempted bombing could have been a response to U.S. drone attacks in the Pakistani tribal areas.

Although most experts and politicians dismissed the conspiracy theories, they too complained that the incident has tarred Pakistan's reputation.

Mushahid Hussain, a leader of the political opposition, said the tendency to link Pakistan with "anything bad, anywhere in the world," was very damaging to his country's image. "It's Pakistan-bashing season," he said.

Pakistan-bashing because of "one incident," eh? What was the Mumbai massacre? A cricket match? For that matter, what was 9/11?

Moving along, yesterday Richard Holbrooke poured oil on troubled waters. Here is Dawn's version, datelined today, of his press briefing. (Dawn is Pakistan's oldest and most widely read English-language newspaper.)

WASHINGTON: The US State Department has joined the Pentagon and the White House in assuring Pakistan that it remains a key ally in the war against terror and that Secretary Hillary Clinton never spoke about disrupting economic or military assistance to Pakistan.

The assurance came from Mrs Clinton’s close confidant, US Special Representative Richard Holbrooke. [Pundita note: Somehow I doubt Clinton and Holbrooke are BFF.] Her remarks in no way indicated any impact on the flow of US economic or military aid to Pakistan, he told a briefing in Washington.

“As for Secretary Clinton’s interview on (CBS channel’s) 60 Minutes (programme), I think that perhaps it was not fully understood for what she was saying by some people who didn’t see the full text or didn’t appreciate what she was saying,” he said.

On Sunday, Secretary Clinton warned Pakistan that it would face “very severe consequences” if extremists based there succeeded in attacking the United States.

She also said that she believed “somewhere in (the Pakistani) government are people who know where Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda is, where Mullah Omar and the leadership of the Afghan Taliban is, and we expect more cooperation to help us bring to justice, capture or kill those who attacked us on 9/11”.

She was backed by several lawmakers as well, who went a step ahead and warned Pakistan that the aid it was receiving could be stopped if it failed to take “appropriate actions” to stamp out terrorism.

But the initial outburst that followed the botched Times Square bombing last week appears to be losing its steam as US officials now try to water down their earlier tough stance. The Pentagon, which cherishes its close ties to the Pakistani military establishment, is playing a leading role in the effort to allay Islamabad’s fears, backed by the White House and the State Department.

“We’re very satisfied by the cooperation we’re getting on this particular investigation thus far,” said another State Department official, Assistant Secretary Philip Crowley.

Mr Holbrooke said the Obama administration was actually multiplying Pakistan’s civilian and military aid to help Pakistan fight terrorism.

The White House issued similar statements, recognising that thousands of Pakistani soldiers had died fighting terrorists who also killed thousands of innocent Pakistani civilians.

The Pentagon started distancing itself from the anti-Pakistan tirade days before the White House and the State Department realised the need to control the damage their earlier statements had done.

Not to be outdone by Holbrooke's clown act Senator Christopher "Kit" Bond, the senior Republican on the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, emerged yesterday from what was supposed to be a classified briefing to the committee to announce that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was talking through his hat, when he said on Sunday that investigators had evidence the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) helped direct the failed bombing attack in Times Square and likely assisted in financing it.

According to a report from Reuters today, time-stamped 6:39 AM EDT, Bond told the press:

"I am not convinced by the information that I've seen so far that there was adequate, confirmable intelligence to corroborate the statements that were made on Sunday television shows," Bond told reporters after the classified briefing.

"We've heard lots of suspicions and tenuous connections, but as far as I'm concerned you can't make statements prior to getting the intelligence."
[...]
The chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, emerged from the same briefing disagreeing with Bond. She said there was a "high likelihood" of interactions between Shahzad and the Pakistani Taliban.[..]

The Washington Post report today on the same briefing conveyed a slightly different version of Feinstein's remarks. (No time stamp on the Post report so I don't know whether it was filed before or after the Reuters wire report):

[...] Intelligence committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who joined Bond in speaking to reporters after the briefing, said there is a "high likelihood" that Shahzad received some kind of terrorist training in Pakistan. But she said committee members had not been provided with specifics about how the Taliban might have aided the attempted bombing.[...]

I would have to find the text of the presser to learn whether Reuters or the Post conveyed the most accurate version of Feinstein's remarks. But I note that the Post did not fully quote Feinstein's sentence, leading me to believe that the paper, which is a conduit for views from the State Department, preferred to downplay exactly what Feinstein said.

Either way, if the number of U.S. leaks since 9/11 from classified briefings and documents could be converted to actual water Washington would be the Venice of North America.

Have a nice day -- and don't allow your mother to visit Washington unless she's accompanied by a Doberman and a couple armed bodyguards.