Good news, for very precisely calculated values of ‘good’: “CIA security officer” Raymond A. Davis is no longer in a Pakistani jail:
A C.I.A. security officer jailed for killing two Pakistanis on a crowded Lahore street was released Wednesday after weeks of secret negotiations between American and Pakistani officials, a pledge of millions of dollars in “blood money” to the victims’ families, and quiet political pressure by Pakistani officials on the courts.
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The fatal shootings by Raymond A. Davis, who was immediately flown out of the country to Kabul, Afghanistan, had ignited a furor here and brought relations between the C.I.A. and Pakistan’s spy service to perhaps their lowest ebb since the Sept. 11 attacks.
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Mr. Davis’s release appears to have temporarily cooled frictions between the two wary allies, but it left unresolved many of the irritants that strained ties in the first place. American officials insisted on Wednesday that the C.I.A. made no pledges to scale back covert operations in Pakistan or to give the Pakistani government or its intelligence agency a roster of American spies operating in the country — assertions that Pakistani officials disputed. […] __
Pakistani and American officials said Wednesday that they were particularly eager to resolve the case before the Lahore High Court could rule on whether Mr. Davis should be granted diplomatic immunity — a protection that American officials insisted he was entitled to. A ruling against Mr. Davis, American officials said, could have set a precedent for other countries to deny C.I.A. operatives diplomatic protections.
So, “our man” in Lahore, “CIA contractor… former U.S. Special Operations soldier and employee of the private security firm known as Blackwater“, has been removed from foreign custody for the low, low downpayment of only $2.3 million:
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed gratitude to the victims’ families in Pakistan and said that the Justice Department has begun an investigation into the shooting that led to Davis’s arrest in Lahore on Jan. 27.
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Clinton insisted that the United States had not made any payment to the families or agreed to reimburse the Pakistani government. But other U.S. officials signaled that Washington had endorsed the “blood money” payments and expects to reimburse Pakistani authorities, who had led an effort in recent weeks to convince the Pakistani families to accept cash in return for dropping the case.
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“We expect to receive a bill,” a U.S. official said…
That would be ‘a bill’ separate from the more than $3 billion dollars Pakistan’s government class already collects from Uncle Sugar every year. I’m sure Mr. Davis is extremely grateful that the Pakistan interpretation of sharia law worked in his favor, this time, although if he’s still in Kabul he may not have much spare time to reflect upon his blessings. If the NYTimes report from last weekend is to be trusted, he’s not the only one breathing a sigh of relief:
…The C.I.A. team Mr. Davis worked with, according to American officials, had among its assignments the task of secretly gathering intelligence about Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant “Army of the Pure.” Pakistan’s security establishment has nurtured Lashkar for years as a proxy force to attack targets and enemies in India and in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir. These and other American officials, all of whom spoke only on condition of anonymity, are now convinced that Lashkar is no longer satisfied being the shadowy foot soldiers in Pakistan’s simmering border conflict with India. It goals have broadened, these officials say, and Lashkar is committed to a campaign of jihad against the United States and Europe, and against American troops in Afghanistan.
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During a visit to Islamabad last July, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared Lashkar a “global threat,” a statement that no doubt rankled his Pakistani hosts…
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C. Christine Fair, a Pakistan expert and Georgetown University professor who closely studies Lashkar’s operations, said that the group was founded by Pakistan’s government in the 1980s to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, a war that that ISI fought in close alliance with the C.I.A. As that war wound down, Professor Fair said, then President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan began redeploying Lashkar fighters to Kashmir because he feared that Kashmiri independence groups might create a separate state in the mountainous region now controlled by India, rather than weld it to Pakistan. The ISI continued to nurture Lashkar, along with others, as a counterweight to the separatist groups…
I seem to remember a Biblical quotation along the lines of “Sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind”, but of course I’m not a Christian warrior-scholar like Blackwater founder Erik Prince, so I could be misinterpreting. It’s not as though any U.S. media seemed to have a grievance about ISI methodology:
Pakistan’s former president Pervez Musharraf has claimed he was not told about Britain’s disapproval of torture, and has no recollection of being told that his country’s intelligence agency, the ISI, should not torture British subjects.
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“Never. Never once, I don’t remember it all”, he says in an interview to be broadcast on Monday night. He adds: “Maybe they wanted us to continue to do whatever we were doing; it was a tacit approval.”
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Musharraf was president of Pakistan from 1999 to 2008, at a time when British subjects were abused in his country’s jails, according to evidence heard in British courts. One, Binyam Mohamed, was held unlawfully. MI5 gave the CIA information about the Ethiopian-born UK resident, in behaviour condemned by high court and appeal court judges in Britain…
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He says: “We are dealing with vicious people and you have to get information. Now if you are extremely decent we then don’t get any information… We need to allow leeway to the intelligence operatives, the people who interrogate.”
El Cid
You hate America.
cynn
And so it goes…
Joe Beese
At least Davis was man enough to look at the Pakistanis he was murdering.
Others get to avoid that unpleasantness.
Mark S.
Wait, this dipshit worked for Blackwater and we’re trying to argue he has diplomatic immunity? Yeah, I don’t think that was gonna fly.
Warren Terra
It’s worth keeping in mind that Davis gunned down two Pakistani government agents in an apparently unprovoked attack as they were keeping an eye on him in their own country, killing one of them as he was trying to flee – that last according to Davis’s own version (other accounts allege that he shot both in the back without warning). And it’s worth keeping in mind that the emergency response team Davis called from his safehouse killed a young man as their SUV raced the wrong way down a one-way road – and didn’t even reach the scene. I sure hope that appearances are deceiving, and Davis was doing some awfully good work in Pakistan – because it sure looks like he was a heavily armed thug hopped up on ignorance and adrenaline, and that Davis’s emergency response team was little better.
P.S. anyone want to bet as to whether Davis can speak, let alone read, either Urdu or Pashto?
cleek
they hate us for our (ability to buy our) freedom!
Omnes Omnibus
@Warren Terra: If Davis was indeed Special Forces in the Army, he should have some capacity in the languages of the countries in which he was deployed.
Omnes Omnibus
@Warren Terra: If Davis was indeed Special Forces in the Army, he should have some capacity in the languages of the countries in which he was deployed.
wengler
Millions for murders, not one cent for teachers.
James E Powell
In America, this little incident will be forgotten in a matter of weeks. In Pakistan, it will be remembered forever.
Omnes Omnibus
@Omnes Omnibus:
@Omnes Omnibus:
Apologies for the double post.
Delia
Hmmm. Price goes way up when a CIA guy is caught redhanded doing the murders. As I recall, if some fighter pilots bomb a wedding party, the payoff’s only a few thousand bucks.
Mark S.
@Delia:
They also had his ass in prison. They don’t get to do that with the pilots.
srv
@Joe Beese: Triggerman is eating steak now in Nevada. God Bless America.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
I recently got my hands on an advance copy of a really, seriously good book on Pakistan called Pakistan: A Hard Country — everything, everything, I read about the place now makes more sense to me.
http://www.amazon.com/Pakistan-Hard-Country-Anatol-Lieven/dp/1610390210/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1300335691&sr=1-1
AT
Congress needs to block this out of control spending!
JWL
You show me a taxpayer that begrudges ponying up blood money, and I’ll show you a socialist.
Anne Laurie
@Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther: I’d love to see your review of that. What little I know about Pakistan has come from what can only be considered severely biased sources (mostly Indian or British/Bangladeshi/Afghan expat); it would be nice to have a readable rebuttal to the frothing jingoism of someone like Hitchens.
gene108
@James E Powell: I honestly wish they let him go to trial for murder. You are right, the Pakistani people will remember this for a long time and it has had a negative influence on our standing among Pakistani’s, from what I’ve read.
The flip side is, I doubt the Pakistanis would just let him sit in jail and rot. I bet he’d be getting worked over to get information out of him, which the U.S. wouldn’t want Pakistan to know about.
Snarla
Actually, western media, it’s not so much that the Pakistanis call it “blood money” as that we translate it that way.
By the way, it’s that there shariah law that makes this possible. Remember that, right-wing putzes.
NonyNony
@Snarla:
Actually, this was the gist of the story that I heard on “The World” last night as I was driving home.
The group that is most wrapped up in the protests demanding that “Islamic Justice” be carried out on Davis is/was the hard-line Islamist factions in Pakistan. Their leadership made this their cause and were demanding the death penalty because that’s their interpretation of Islamic law.
Which means that this whole thing just blew up in their faces when the victims’ families decided to “forgive” the shooter in exchange for money – which is allowed by Islamic law. Apparently the state can still go after him despite the fact that this has been paid off – they hold it on the books for 10 years – but the analysts were saying that they probably wouldn’t since it would run counter to Islamic law and would possibly piss people off if they did. The Islamists had their feet cut out from under them by this maneuver because it was all done strictly in accordance with their interpretation of shar’ia law, so they look like jackasses now (and are trying to spin the story as “the US went in and forced them to take the money” instead of “the families decided to take the money” – which may work, it’s not like the US isn’t the 800 lb. gorilla in the room).
Bulworth
Can’t imagine why the Pakistanis would be upset that one of our fine young Christian militiamen just happened to kill a few of their folk. They’re so ungrateful for everything we do for them.
ppcli
Well, at least you have to assume that this will be something of a blot on Mr. Davis’ career as a Crusader-for-hire. He’ll have to lie low as a fellow in something like the Koch Institute for Liberty Studies (see next post) where instead of killing for Freedom, he’ll just have to content himself with the special Thursdays.
Brachiator
@gene108:
Unfortunately, our “standing” among the Pakistani people doesn’t matter as much as our standing with the corrupt and duplicitous Pakistani leadership.
@Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther: I envy you for having an advance copy of Pakistan: A Hard Country, since it shows as “not yet released” on amazon. But the review makes it sound really interesting, although I probably would not agree with the author’s assertion that Pakistan’s army is “one of Asia’s strongest.”
mclaren
Raymond Davis never “murdered” anyone — he’s a Pentagon JSOC assassin, he conducts targeted killings. Of course he went free. Hell, the limousine disptached from the U.S. Embassy to the scene of his arrest was in such a rush to free him from those pesky local cops that it ran over an innocent Pakistani motorcyclist.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is a peek behind the curtain at the wonderful world of black ops. Usually American assassinations get conducted without fanfare; but once in a while the JSOC assassins screw up, and the U.S. ambassador has to intervene with the local cops and the State Department has to bribe the victims’ families with bars of gold bullions and twelve-year-old boys, when the assassin screws up.
Raymond Davis’ next posting is going to be in Anchorage Alaska where he’ll be assigned to keep watch on a radome in the DEW line. The Pentagon E-Ring honchos want their assassinations done nice and clean and quiet, with no fanfare. Walk up to the victim, put a .22 caliber subsonic bullet in his ear with a SEAL hush puppy (22 cal pistol with integrated suppressor and no rifling) and walk away. That’s how it’s done. That’s how Senator John Kerry assassinated innocent women and children and old men when he was in the SEALS during the Vietnam war, and that’s how it should be done, by gum.
timb
@Warren Terra: There is no fucking way he even reads English as far as I’m concerned. What a huge douchebag. Who knew the CIA worked like the mafia? Oh, everyone did and George Tenet, Freedom award winner, did no one any favors by letting Cofer Black turn the world into his wank-fest, Jason Bourne-esque playground. Too bad that Congress doesn’t do oversight of the CIA any longer.
Danny_K
This is just a preview of the coming war with Pakistan when one of those militant groups strikes within the USA. Remember that the Times Square bomber was trained by the Pakistani Taliban. Also, the USA is evacuating it’s embassy today due to continuing unrest.