Rana trial Day 3: Thank Chicago Tribune for an amazing turn of events

Just when I thought nothing of great import was going to come out of this trial:

Rana trial judge orders release of some sealed documents on 26/11
PTI via Times of India
May 25, 2011, 08.28pm IST

CHICAGO: The District court conducting the Mumbai attack trial in the US today ordered that some of the over dozen sealed documents presented in the court as key evidences be made public.

Some of the documents are believed to have key evidence of links between Pakistan's powerful intelligence agency ISI and LeT and other terrorist outfits blamed for the November 2008 Mumbai carnage in which 166 persons were killed.

The order by U S District Court Judge Harry Leinenweber came on a plea by The Chicago Tribune newspaper which sought public access to over a dozen sealed documents in the Tahawwur Rana case. Details of which of the documents would be released was not immediately available.

The news daily had argued that keeping the documents under secrecy undermines the benefits of public scrutiny.

Invoking the First Amendment and common law rights, the paper asked the court to give it access to at least the redacted versions of the documents that have been presented under seals in the court and are believed to have key evidence of links between ISI and LeT and other terrorist outfits.

The First Amendment to the US Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights and covers the freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

The documents have not been made available to anyone. In fact, some of these documents are not even available to Rana's attorneys. Rana is the co-accused in the Mumbai attack case and his trial is likely to throw light on ISI's links to the incident.

Yes, the defense had tried earlier and failed to get some of those documents unsealed. But neither the prosecution nor the judge would want to see the Chicago Tribune launch a huge campaign over being denied access to the documents. I guess I shouldn't get my hopes up; the documents might be so heavily redacted as to throw no new light on the ISI connection to 26/11 or David Headley's work as an informant for the U.S. But at least the Tribune tried -- which is more than all the other U.S. news organizations did.

Rana Case: Today the United States of America goes on trial along with a man whose identity is unknown to many Americans

Great power attracts evil to it like iron filings to a magnet, so one shouldn't be surprised at the number of people in Washington who over the course of a half century have used every justification to entangle the world's most beneficent democracy with a society where brutality is considered the defining badge of manhood and the cruelest cunning is admired as a governing principle.

So here we are today, waiting for the opening statements in the Chicago trial of Pakistani-Canadian Tahawwur Hussein Rana along with six Pakistanis being tried in absentia for their alleged roles in the 2008 Mumbai massacre and/or the planning for a terrorist attack on a Danish newspaper. Dr Rana's defense argument was shot down even before the trial began. From Bloomberg's May 16 report:

Rana’s lawyers told prosecutors in January that he planned to assert as a defense that he was acting “pursuant to his actual or believed exercise of public authority on behalf of the government of Pakistan and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency,” and not Lashkar-e-Taiba, U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber said in an April 1 ruling.

Prosecutors opposed

Prosecutors opposed Rana’s bid to raise the ISI defense, as well as a bid to subpoena the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of State for any cabled messages between the U.S., Pakistani and Indian governments concerning Rana, Headley, the ISI or Major Iqbal.

Supporting his bid, Rana’s lawyers cited Headley’s grand jury testimony in which he’d allegedly testified that Headley told Rana he had met with Major Iqbal, and that Headley had been asked to work for the ISI and to conduct surveillance in Mumbai.

Leinenweber rejected Rana’s bid to defend himself by claiming he believed his actions were in service to the Pakistani government and the ISI.

“Defendant’s proposed defense that Pakistani government and ISI officials sanctioned his violations of U.S. federal law is objectively unreasonable,” Leinenweber ruled. “Regardless of whether defendant believed Headley conducted surveillance on behalf of the ISI or Lashkar in Mumbai, his argument that a non-federal official can have actual or apparent authority to exempt him from violating a federal law fails.”

Subpoena Quashed

The judge then quashed the FBI subpoena, holding his rejection of the ISI defense rendered that evidence irrelevant.

December 16, 2009

Headley may have tipped off US about 26/11
Economic Times (India)

Indian agencies suspect that eagerness of American agencies to protect its mole -- David Coleman Headley, who in all probability was a CIA agent who had successfully infiltrated LeT and managed to tip off the US of an impending sea-borne LeT attack on Mumbai well ahead of 26/11 -- may have made them reticent about sharing specific details of the 26/11 plot with India despite being in the know.

The US — which continued to share intelligence with India regarding LeT's plans to target National Defence College and other targets here, all sourced from Headley, until September this year — may have decided to arrest him only to preempt LeT's plans to target the office of Danish publication Jyllands Posten in Copenhagen, Denmark.

It has now become amply clear that Headley was the source of information behind US agencies' alert to India in September 2008, warning of a LeT attack on Mumbai through the sea route. Investigations into the 26/11 conspiracy have confirmed that the LeT operation was originally planned for September, but had to be aborted twice due to logistical glitches. The 10 gunmen finally set sail from Karachi on November 22, 2008.

December 17, 2009

Mumbai terror suspect David Headley was ‘rogue US secret agent’
by Rhys Blakely in Mumbai
(London) Sunday Times

A key terror suspect who allegedly helped to plan last year’s attacks in Mumbai and plotted to strike Europe was an American secret agent who went rogue, Indian officials believe.

David Headley, 49, who was born in Washington to a Pakistan diplomat father and an American mother, was arrested in Chicago in October. He is accused of reconnoitering targets in India and Europe for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Pakistan-based terror group behind the Mumbai attacks and of having links to al-Qaeda. He has denied the charges.

He came to the attention of the US security services in 1997 when he was arrested in New York for heroin smuggling. He earned a reduced sentence by working for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) infiltrating Pakistan-linked narcotics gangs.

Indian investigators, who have been denied access to Mr Headley [they have since been given access], suspect that he remained on the payroll of the US security services — possibly working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) — but switched his allegiance to LeT.

Mr Headley, who changed his name from Daood Gilani, was in Mumbai until two weeks before the attacks on the city, which claimed 166 lives last November. It is alleged that he spent months checking targets in India’s commercial capital, using his Western looks and anglicised name to move in elite social circles, hobnob with Bollywood actors and even to pass himself off as Jewish.

Despite being firmly on the radar of the US intelligence agencies, he was allowed to return to India as recently as March. Indian officials are furious that their American counterparts did not share details of that visit at the time. The Indian media has raised the possibility that Mr Headley was being protected by his American handlers — a theory that experts say is credible.

“The feeling in India is that the US has not been transparent,” said B. Raman, a former counter-terrorism chief in the Indian foreign intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing.

“That Headley was an agent for the DEA is known. Whether he was being used by the CIA as well is a matter of speculation, but it is almost certain that the CIA was aware of him and his movements across the subcontinent.”

According to Mr Raman it is probable that Mr Headley, who was arrested when the US authorities learned that he was about to fly to Pakistan, was listed on the main database of the US National Counterterrorism Center, a facility used by the CIA and several other American agencies to track terror suspects.

Indian officials suspect that US agencies declined to share intelligence to avoid compromising other secret operations and to be able to deny any link with Mr Headley.

Analysts believe that the US may also have been anxious to avoid sharing information that could further raise tensions between India and Pakistan, nuclear-armed neighbours who have fought three wars.

According to documents put before a court in Chicago, Mr Headley had links with the Pakistan Army and, through it, with al-Qaeda.

As well as helping to co-ordinate the Mumbai atrocity, Mr Headley is accused of planning attacks on Mumbai’s Bollywood film industry, the Shiv Sena, a Hindu extremist group also based in Mumbai, a major Hindu temple, and a Danish newspaper that had published cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

The US authorities allege that he was close to Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a former Pakistani schoolmate and businessman who is also being charged with planning to attack the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. Mr Rana is accused of having known about the attack on Mumbai in advance.

The CIA denied that Headley had worked for the organisation.

“Any suggestion that Headley was working for the CIA is complete and utter nonsense. It’s flat-out false,” Paul Gimigliano, from the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs, said.

The Indian Home Secretary, Gopal Krishna Pillai, has said that his Government would seek the extradition of Mr Headley — a request that has so far been stonewalled by US officials.

Extradition is now unlikely given Headley's guilty plea. As to the conjecture that the U.S. government may have been "anxious to avoid sharing information that could further raise tensions between India and Pakistan," that is complete and utter nonsense. Through a fluke, blind luck, or the intervention of God -- however you want to view it -- Indian authorities learned within the first hours of the massacre that LeT and ISI were the masterminds of the attack.

(In December 2009 I detailed the unraveling of the plot in Part 2 of Alden Pyle in Pakistan

What the Indians didn't know at first, what they couldn't understand, was how the U.S. came to warn them of the attack. Was it through information picked up by signals intelligence, through CIA field operatives, or through an informant? It was important to know the answer because if the source was an informant, the question was why the U.S. hadn't allowed Indian intelligence officers to question the informant, given that the Indians were much better able than their American counterparts to prise meaningful clues from an informant about a LeT planned attack on Mumbai.

In other words, Indian authorities were looking at the possibility that the government of the United States had withheld vital information that in the right hands could have averted the massacre.

If any Americans would observe that such things can happen in intelligence work because governments need to protect their secrets, they might think differently if they considered the possibility that it was Americans who were the primary target of the terrorists who laid seige to Mumbai, with the Britons also a primary target.

There is evidence to suggest just such a possibility and moreover evidence to indicate that instead of hunting down the primary targets the terrorists had planned to blow up two hotels frequented by foreigners and well-off Indians. This would have resulted in enormous collateral damage, by the number and amount of unexploded RDX bombs found after the seige, with thousands of Indians and other nationals killed just to kill relatively few Americans and Britons.

It's still a matter for speculation as to why the terrorists didn't detonate most of the bombs.(1) And the scenario that Americans and Britons were the primary targets is based on the account of the lone surviving terrorist, but again there is just enough evidence to make his account plausible.(2)

The point of the above observations, for this writing, is that various sections of America's criminal justice, political, and intelligence-gathering systems still have a lot of explaining to do about some events leading up to the 2008 massacre in Mumbai. How the trial of Tahawwur Rana is conducted by the prosecution will tell volumes about whether representatives of the systems are determined to see justice done, or whether the trial is just another case of rounding up the usual suspects while the biggest perp gets away with murder again.

1) Maximum Carnage; Pundita, October 28, 2010

There is also the speculation, at least with regard to one of the targeted hotels, the Taj Mahal Palace, that the terrorists underestimated how difficult it would be for their bomb material to collapse the foundation of the 105-year old hotel.

2) From Slate, The Fog of Breaking News; December 3, 2008 (see Slate website for links to press articles cited below):

[...]Who were the terrorists targeting?

Azam Amir Kasab, 21, a Pakistani national [the lone surviving terrorist], claimed the terror strikes, which left nearly 200 dead, were intended to kill as many as 5,000 people and that he and his fellow militants were ordered to target whites -- especially Britons and Americans. The claims were made in what a police source said was a transcript of his questioning.
—The Times of London, Dec. 1, 2008

Police believe attacks at the Leopold cafe, popular with tourists, and at CST station, may have been diversions to provide cover as other gang members stormed their two main targets -- Mumbai's two luxury hotels, the Taj Mahal and Trident-Oberoi.
—The Age (Melbourne) Dec. 1, 2008

"It seemed like they were in a hurry," [Leopold Café owner Farhang Jehani] said. "It was as if they wanted to shoot as many people as they could even though this was not their main target. Their motive might have been to divert the police, who have a station across the street, to keep them occupied as they headed to the Taj hotel."
—Washington Post, Dec. 1, 2008

U.S. government goes to lengths to shield Pakistan's ISI at Rana trial in Chicago. Once again, keep your eye on the USG's little cat feet.

This follows on my Tuesday post. The quotes I've pulled from ProPublica's latest report on the upcoming trial of Tahawwur Hussain Rana will be upsetting to anyone who believes the U.S.-Pakistan relationship will change in significant fashion in light of the revelation that Osama bin Laden was quartered in a Pakistan garrison town.

The ProPublica report presents clear evidence that all costs, including running roughshod over the American criminal justice system, the United States government will continue to cover for Pakistan's military and intelligence services, as it's done for decades. This is a point I emphasized in the Tuesday post so for anyone who thought I was being unduly pessimistic, read on. And be sure to read the rest of the report at the ProPublica site.

Note from the report that the U.S. "intelligence community" still refuses to look at the Mumbai massacre in the context of the history of Pakistani military-sponsored terrorism and massacres going back decades. The community, at least according to the source ProPublica quotes, still insists that rogue officers, not the ISI institution, were responsible for the massacre in Mumbai.

Before proceeding with the quotes I'll note that ProPublica is an award-winning nonprofit American investigative journalism organization. It's been keeping a close eye on Rana's upcoming trial and other issues related to the 2008 massacre in Mumbai, India -- to my knowledge the only U.S. media outlet that's doing so despite the fact that six Americans were killed in the massacre. Here's the link to earlier ProPublica reports on the issues.

I've also included excerpts from a report posted at the Times of India news website that provide additional details about Rana and his trial.

May 4, 2011, 5:11 p.m.

Pakistan’s Terror Ties at Center of Upcoming Chicago Trial
by Sebastian Rotella
ProPublica

It may be years, if ever, before the world learns whether Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) helped hide Osama bin Laden. But detailed allegations of ISI involvement in terrorism will soon be made public in a federal courtroom in Chicago, where prosecutors last week quietly charged a suspected ISI major with helping to plot the murders of six Americans in the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

The indictment has explosive implications because Washington and Islamabad are struggling to preserve their fragile relationship. The ISI has long been suspected of secretly aiding terrorist groups while serving as a U.S. ally in the fight against terror. The discovery that bin Laden spent years in a fortress-like compound surrounded by military facilities in Abbottabad has heightened those suspicions and reinforced the accusations that the ISI was involved in the Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people.

“It’s very, very troubling,” said Congressman Frank Wolf, R-Va., chairman of the House Appropriations sub-committee that oversees funding of the Justice Department. Wolf has closely followed the Mumbai case and wants an independent study group to review South Asia policy top-to-bottom.

“Keep in mind that we’ve given billions of dollars to the Pakistani government,” he said. “In light of what’s taken place with bin Laden, the whole issue raises serious problems and questions.”


Three chiefs of Lashkar-i-Taiba [LeT], the Pakistani terrorist group, were also indicted in Chicago. They include Sajid Mir, a suspected Mumbai mastermind whose voice was caught on tape directing the three-day slaughter by phone from Pakistan. Mir, too, has links to the ISI. He remains at large along with the suspected ISI major and half-a-dozen other top suspects.

Despite the unprecedented terrorism charges implicating a Pakistani officer, the Justice Department and other agencies did not issue press releases, hold a news conference or make any comments when the indictment was issued last week. The 33-page document names the suspect only as “Major Iqbal.” It does not mention the ISI, although Iqbal’s affiliation to the spy agency has been detailed in U.S. and Indian case files and by anti-terror officials in interviews with ProPublica over the past year.


“Obviously there has been a push to be low-key,” said an Obama Administration official who spoke in an interview last week and requested anonymity because of the pending trial. “There is a desire to make sure the handling of the case doesn’t mess up the relationship” with Pakistan.


The first public airing of the ISI’s alleged involvement in the Mumbai attack will begin on May 16 with the trial of Tahawwur Rana, owner of a Chicago immigration consulting firm. Rana was arrested in 2009 and charged with material support of terrorism in the same case in which the four suspects were indicted last week. The star witness will be David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American businessman-turned-militant who has pleaded guilty to scouting targets in India and Denmark. Rana allegedly helped Headley use his firm as a cover for reconnaissance.

Rana’s attorney, Charles Swift, contends that Rana is not a terrorist because he thought he was assisting the ISI with an espionage operation. Swift said the U.S. indictment omits the ISI in hopes of mitigating tensions. [emphasis mine]


“The U.S. is attempting to walk a fine line between disclosure and non-disclosure,” Swift said.

“What’s unusual is that the reason is to protect diplomatic relations... This indictment answers a few questions, but like everything else in this case, it raises even more.”

Even before the bin Laden slaying, the Obama Administration had taken a tougher tone about the ISI’s alleged links to militants. But a U.S. official said this week that U.S. counter-terror agencies still think that any involvement in the Mumbai attacks was limited to rogue officers.


“No one is saying we can’t work with the ISI -- people are just pointing out the problems that exist,” said the official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “I think the problems are largely with individual officers as opposed to the institution.”

[...]

May 5, 2011, 12:58 a.m. IST

26/11 co-accused Tahawwur Hussain Rana arraigned in Chicago court
PTI via Times of India

CHICAGO: Pakistani Canadian Tahawwur Hussain Rana, the co-accused in the Mumbai terror attack case, has been arraigned for the trial that is set to begin on May 16.

Clad in an orange jumpsuit, Rana appeared in the Dirksen Federal Courthouse looking around and exchanging pleasantries with his attorneys.

Rana's attorney Patrick Blegen told Judge Leinenweber that he required time to translate about a 1000 pages of Urdu text in preparation for the trial set for May 16.

The next status hearing is set for May 11, after which there will be jury selection.

Opening statements by both the prosectors and defense willl be presented on May 23.

While co-accused David Headley has pled guilty in plotting the carnage, Rana has pled not guilty in providing material support to the attack.

Rana was indicted by a federal grand jury under 12 counts on Feb 15 last year for planning out the carnage, providing material support to LeT to carry out the bombings, and guiding Headley in scouting targets in Mumbai in the process.

Headley, who was originally Daood Gilani, changed his name in order to carry out the carnage without being caught.

Rana, who had served as a doctor in the Pakistani Army Medical Corps, before he migrated to Canada, is also accused in plotting an attack with Headley on a Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten that published blasphemous cartoons of Prophet Muhammad.

If convicted, Rana faces a possible life sentence. On April 25, in a second superseding indictment, US prosecutors charged four additional men, all Pakistani residents, in the 26/11 terror attacks that left 166 dead including six Americans.

According to court documents filed on May 2, Rana objected to government's jury instructions and said that the government understates the benefits that Headley has received from the government in this case.

As made clear in Headley's plea agreement, Headley is also avoiding extradition to India, Denmark, or Pakistan for his conduct, "so long as he fully discloses all material facts concerning his role with respect to (his) offenses and abides by all other aspects of (the plea agreement)".

Furthermore, Headley received numerous small benefits from the government during his post-arrest interview and proffer sessions normally not provided to those in custody, including hotel accommodations, specially arranged meals, and visits and phone calls with his wife and children, the documents state.

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.