Veneuzuela faces US plots to overthrow Maduro

The US State Department is at it again, supporting attempts to overturn the results of the Venezuelan election and plotting against the United Socialist Party government.

The election held following the death of Hugo Chavez was won by vice-president Nicolas Maduro. But US secretary of state John Kerry is supporting opposition calls for a recount.

As soon as the result was announced, opposition candidate Henrique Capriles presented a series of claims of fraud to the electoral commission. Maduro agreed to a recount, but the electoral commission turned Capriles down. Analysis shows that all the claims he made were entirely false.

In fact, it is virtually impossible to rig a Venezuelan election (unlike in the United States where George Bush was gerrymandered into power by election fraud courtesy of “hanging chads” and the Supreme Court).

There are no "hanging chads" in Venezuela which has a bang up-to-date touch screen voting system. The voter touches the screen to record their vote electronically and then gets a paper receipt which they verify and put in a ballot box.

The electronic tally is then compared with the paper ballot. To rig the result you would have to first somehow hack into the central computer of the electoral commission and then interfere with the paper ballots to make sure they matched.

The fact that his claims were shown to be false didn't stop Capriles appealing to the Supreme Court, which also turned him down. The court's president said the request was nothing more than "a deceit of the people" aimed at destabilising the country.

Seven government supporters have been killed and 60 injured in demonstrations and semi-riots organised by the opposition. Maduro has now publicly voiced his view that the United States and the opposition are planning a rerun of the 2000 coup attempt to topple Chavez.

So just how close is this election result? Well not as close as the one that gave Kerry his chance at the State Department.

Maduro won 50.66% of the vote on a turnout of 78% of the electorate. In the 2012 US election Obama won 51.1% of the vote on a turnout of 57.5%.  Some 93 million eligible Americans did not vote. So which leader has a stronger mandate?

In Venezuela, 97% of eligible voters are on the register whereas in the US a dozen states have been pushing through laws on identity, birth certificates and education, specifically designed to deprive poor voters of their rights.

The US embassy in Caracas is full of CIA spooks and agents provocateurs, as was proved by State Department cables published on Wikileaks. One cable sent in November 2006 details how dozens of non-government organisations (NGOs) were financially maintained by the US government-funded Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI).

This included “over 300 Venezuelan civil society organizations”, ranging from disability advocates to education programs. All very well-intentioned you might think.

However the real purpose was revealed by then-US ambassador to Venezuela William Brownfield as “penetrating Chavez’s political base... dividing Chavismo... protecting vital US business ...[and] isolating Chavez internationally”. The strategic objective was to develop "opposition-aligned civil society organisations".

So far Capriles is the closest the US has got to achieving this. He is a relatively astute, Columbia University-educated tax lawyer who comes from a wealthy family. He has recognised that there is no way to win elections on a platform of dismantling the social and political achievements of the Chavez era, so he claims he will continue them.

His main target is Venezuela's oil and other resources, which he would make “more efficient” by transferring them to the private sector and opening them up to exploitation by the big oil corporations.

Although the Wikileaks cable refers to a period when George W. Bush was in the White House, there can be little doubt that the Obama administration’s reactionary foreign policy continues his predecessor’s policy of destabilisation. For Washington, democracy is alright – unless you don’t get the result you want.

Penny Cole

Why Ecuador stands shoulder to shoulder with Assange

Ecuador’s defiant decision to grant Julian Assange political asylum shows how far the country has come in shaking off shackles that not so long ago had reduced it to a plaything of the United States.

From 1960, the Central Intelligence Agency plotted and planned to destabilise the elected populist government led by José María Velasco Ibarra because it refused to break off links with Castro’s Cuba and crackdown on the left.

Philip Agee was a senior CIA officer in Ecuador during that period. Years later, after denouncing the CIA, he blew the whistle in a book called Inside the Company. Agee revealed how the CIA organised the infiltration of trade unions, political parties and social organisations at the highest levels in Ecuador. Where no suitable organisations existed, the CIA created them, complete with headed paper and committees.  

Agee's account shows how the CIA used bribery, intimidation, bugging and forgery. He spent four years in Ecuador penetrating Ecuadorian politics and, by his own admission, subverting and destroying the political fabric of an already wretchedly poor and unstable country.

“CIA financing of conservative groups in a quasi-religious campaign against Cuba and ‘atheistic communism’ helped to seriously weaken Velasco's power among the poor, primarily Indians, who had voted overwhelmingly for him, but who were even more deeply committed to their religion,” says William Blum in his Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II.  

“CIA agents would bomb churches or right-wing organizations and make it appear to be the work of leftists. They would march in left-wing parades displaying signs and shouting slogans of a very provocative anti-military nature, designed to antagonize the armed forces and hasten a coup.”
 

A series of interventions by the armed forces that began in November 1961 culminated in a coup in July 1963 when the presidential palace in Quito was surrounded by tanks and troops. Civil liberties were suspended, leftists arrested and the 1964 elections cancelled. At the local CIA headquarters, champagne corks popped. It wasn’t until 1979 that civilian rule was restored.
 

Today’s president, Rafael Correa, has repudiated the country’s foreign debt and has placed the country in solidarity with other radical regimes in South America like Bolivia and Venezuela. The decision to give Assange asylum is consistent with Ecuador’s determination to assert its political independence from Washington.

The foreign minister’s statement that insists Assange is in danger from the United States (while rejecting the UK’s threat to storm its embassy) is well founded. Washington would like nothing better than to extradite Assange to the US to face trial for espionage alongside Bradley Manning, the soldier who allegedly collaborated with WikiLeaks.

Key figures have cleared the path. Australian prime minister Julia Gillard has denounced fellow citizen Assange for publishing previously secret cables that exposed America’s crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Several senior US senators have called for Assange to be tried for publishing the cables sent by American embassies.

Washington's aim is to put Assange on show trial with Manning. By having them both in the dock at the same time, the US/FBI hope to "prove" a conspiracy between the two men and have them convicted for treason - with a sentence of life (until death) in jail.

Shortly after the dramatic video of the 2007 Baghdad airstrike which killed Iraqi journalists was released by WikiLeaks in 2010, Assange was in Sweden where he applied for residency. After sexual relations with two women, an arrest warrant was issued but soon withdrawn. He was questioned by police and allowed to leave the country. Within 10 days, the investigation was reopened by another prosecutor and upgraded to alleged rape. His residency request was denied soon afterwards.

Assange is not charged but wanted for questioning. Following his arrest in Britain last year, Assange volunteered to present himself for questioning at the Swedish embassy in London. This was rejected by the country’s right-wing government. Who can doubt then that if he reaches Stockholm, Assange will be questioned about the sex accusations and then handed over to the Americans who, by then, will have an arrest warrant?

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Corporate version of the CIA exposed

Are the Yes Men – a group of anti-corporate activists who stage amazing stunts – just an insignificant bunch of pranksters? Those who control one of the world’s biggest spy companies and their corporate paymasters don’t think so.

The Global Intelligence Files, five million emails obtained by the Anonymous hacker group and released by WikiLeaks this morning, reveal that Dow chemical corporation paid an intelligence firm, Stratfor, to spy on the Yes Men.

Dow Chemical is the owner of Union Carbide, the company responsible for the 1984 gas disaster in Bhopal, India in which thousands died and more than half a million suffered terrible injuries. (Dow is also a sponsor of the London 2012 Olympics).

But snooping on the Yes Men is only the tip of Stratfor’s vast iceberg of espionage. Its tentacles around the world show that the CIA has a serious rival in the private sector. The company runs networks in governments and media companies especially those close to the Israeli government and Mossad. The latter are referred to within the company as the “Confed Fuck House”.

Stratfor, which is based in Texas, counts the US government plus other countries, and arms manufacturers, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Ratheon amongst its paymasters. It trains US marines and “other government intelligence agencies” in becoming “government Stratfors”.

WikiLeaks’ Global Intelligence Files are an email trail, tracking networks of informants who are paid through Swiss bank accounts and pre-paid credit cards. They include “government employees, embassy staff and journalists around the world”. WikiLeaks has found Stratfor’s list of informants and evidence of secret deals with media organisations, including Reuters, plus records of many payoffs.

Knowing there is good money to be made by exploiting corporate fears about whistleblowers and leaked information, Stratfor has been anxious to exploit what it called the “leak focused” gravy train. “This is an obvious fear sale, so that’s a good thing,” writes one operative. But in the case of General Hamid Gul, former head of Pakistan’s notorious ISI intelligence service, Stratfor generously provided complimentary membership.

Its noxious methods are clear: “You have to take control of him. Control means financial, sexual or psychological control,” CEO George Friedman wrote on 6 December 2011 on how to exploit an Israeli intelligence informant on the medical condition of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.

They also reveal close cooperation with Goldman Sachs, whose managing director Shea Morenz joined Stratfor’s board of directors in 2011. He worked closely with Friedman to set up an offshore share structure which could use intelligence to “trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularly government bonds, currencies and the like”.

The emails, which are presently being analysed by media organisations and members of the public, point to the fears haunting those at the top of corporate and state trees. They include contain classified information about US government and Stratfor’s attacks on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

Assange remains under house arrest, where he has been since December 2010, fighting extradition to Sweden over alleged sex crimes. A decision from the UK Supreme Court on his extradition to Sweden is expected in March. Meanwhile, prosecutors in the US are still trying to pin him down under the 1917 Espionage Act.

Thanks to the socialised nature of today’s technologies and courageous whistleblowers, like Bradley Manning, it has become impossible to keep secret the vast web of connections between the corporations, intelligence agencies and political rulers. This latest cache should give confidence to all those seeking to end their rule.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Assad in the firing line on the road to Damascus

The turmoil that has been sweeping Syria since January, when demonstrators caught the fever of the Arab spring revolutionary movement, is reaching a climax.

On Friday, tens of thousands protested against President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime in Aleppo, Suweida, Deraa and near Damascus on Syrian Independence Day. At least 22 are said to have been killed when security forces opened fire in Deraa.

The anti-government movement has deepened the crisis of the 40-year-old Assad dynasty. It is disrupting the mosaic of national, religious, ethnic, and oil politics together with big power interests. In response to the power of Friday’s Day of Rage, al-Assad promised to lift Syria’s emergency laws which have been in force since 1962.

To add to complexities, yesterday saw the publication of US embassy cables, released by WikiLeaks .They reveal that the US State Department has been promoting various “civil society strengthening initiatives”, such as the Movement for Justice and Development to the tune of $12m between 2005-2010.

The US has had an on-off relationship with Damascus over the decades, partly because of its anti-Zionist stance and partly because it is viewed as a cat’s paw for Iranian interests in the area. At the same time, the Bush administration used Syria to torture people as part of its “extraordinary rendition” programme. The US re-opened relations with Syria in 2010, appointing a ambassador to Damascus for the first time for five years.

In a desperate measure to satisfy protesters, al-Assad promised to lift the emergency laws that have ban gatherings of more than five people by Monday 25 April. Assad took over after his father Hafez al-Assad, who died in 2000, continuing the “hereditary dictatorship” that has kept Syria under the grip of state security forces. Amongst other authoritarian measures, the regime banned Facebook in attempts to stop anti-government blogging. In desperate moves to cling on to power he has been firing ministers and making promises and concessions (at least on paper) over the last couple of months.

But even while pledging to lift the state of emergency, al-Assad threatened: “We will not tolerate any attempts at sabotage.” So far over 200 people have been killed during the unrest, including four in the last 24 hours. Many were murdered by pro-regime thugs wielding revolvers, stun guns and batons.

Al-Assad and his brutal secret police will no doubt seek to exploit the WikiLeaks revelations to discredit those seeking reforms and/or to topple his regime. Like his fellow tyrants in the region, Assad seeks to rally support against his opponents by painting them as agents of foreign oppressors.

But rather than revealing the power of US imperialism, WikiLeaks cables actually show the state of disarray within Washington’s ruling circles, the divisions between the presidency and covert operations machinators. The US wants to maintain its cosy relationship with the feudal Saudi monarchy and keep the oil flowing, but at the same time manipulate the rulers of less powerful states like Syria, which they see as unreliable and too close to Iran.

It is not an unwillingness to sacrifice and even risk death that holds back the the hundreds of thousands who have espoused the cause of the Syrian revolution. They include, amongst others, the Youth of 4-5 February movement, the Syrian Days of Rage and the Syrian Revolution Facebook which has nearly 120,000 followers.

US support for the anti-regime movements in Syria as elsewhere in the Middle east and north Africa has produced a sorcerer’s apprentice. No one is truly in control. In Egypt, the army has arrested former president Mubarak in a desperate bid to retain control of the revolution. In Libya, the West’s intervention has helped create a stalemate and tainted the opposition to Gaddafi. The challenge for revolutionary forces is to create a secular Pan-Arab leadership that can unite the masses and build for the next stage of the Arab Revolution, whose aim has to be social revolution.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Real courage under fire

As WikiLeaks founder Julan Assange works on his appeal in London against extradition to Sweden, Private First Class Bradley Manning will begin another 23 hour day in a 6ft by 12ft cell in the Marine Corp base at Quantico, Virginia. Only Manning now also faces the death penalty.

Accused of leaking thousands of government cables to WikiLeaks, 23-year-old Manning was this week also accused of “aiding the enemy”. Which enemy, you may ask? Unspecified, although it could be WikiLeaks, which US secretary of State Clinton has accused of launching an "attack on America".

Manning’s support group website says, “exposing war crimes is not a crime”. Tell it to the Marines, as the saying goes. They have thrown the book and more at Manning at the behest of the Obama administration, locking up Manning 10 months ago while repeatedly trying to break his spirit.

On the evening of 2 March, Manning was stripped, left naked in his cell all night and forced to stand at attention for the facility’s five a.m. wake-up call, says his lawyer David Coombs, who said this “type of degrading treatment is inexcusable and without justification”.

The next day, Manning was handed an 22 additional military charges as part of his court martial process.They come on top of initial charges of having illegally obtained 150,000 secret US government cables and handing more than 50 of them to an unauthorised person. A provisional hearing is set for May or early June.

Manning is accused of being the source of WikiLeaks disclosures of US state secrets. They include aerial footage of a US military attack on civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan war logs and thousands of US embassy cables. He is being held in Quantico in conditions that have elicited protests from numerous organisations, including his own supporter networks and Amnesty International. The UN is investigating whether his treatment, which includes being held in his 6ft by 12ft cell for 23 hours a day, amounts to torture.

David House, one of few people to have visited Manning in prison, told the Firedoglake news website that the "aiding the enemy" charge was similar to Richard Nixon's treatment of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers which detailed America’s war in Vietnam. Nixon accused Ellsberg of "providing aid and comfort to the enemy". House said: "Today we see the Obama administration continuing the legacy Nixon started by declaring whistleblowers as enemies of the state. It is a sad and dangerous day for transparency advocates everywhere."

Assange yesterday described Manning as an "unparalleled hero" and “America's foremost political prisoner” and someone who had helped change the course of history. “Look at what's happening in the Middle East as a result of some of the material we've been publishing," he added.

Manning is undoubtedly a political prisoner, as Assange says. But bodies like Amnesty International, which are quick to adopt prisoners of conscience around the world, have limited their protest to the conditions Manning is being held under. If they want to be considered an impartial organisation, Amnesty ought to get off the fence.

In the age of the internet and social networks, state secrets are harder to hold onto, which is simply great. US power, control and influence is ebbing away, and Washington doesn’t like it. So Manning is being made a scapegoat for US policy disasters and cover-ups. We should all salute his courage under fire.

You can send Manning messages of support by writing to:

Bradley Manning
c/o Courage to Resist
484 Lake Park Ave #41
Oakland CA 94610
USA

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

The revolution will be digitised

US vice-president Joe Biden has raised the stakes in a global cyber war between those fighting for the right to information about the secret activities of governments and those who protect the warmongering interests of global capital.

By denouncing WikilLeaks founder Julian Assange as “a high-tech terrorist who has put lives and jobs in jeopardy”, he virtually signed a death warrant. Biden also confirmed that the US government is actively seeking a way of charging Assange with espionage.

After originally downplaying the leaks, the second most powerful man in the US Biden has added to Sarah Palin’s baying for blood. Palin has called for Assange to be pursued "with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders”. And we know how the US treats “enemy combatants”.

Assange and his lawyers are currently fighting his extradition to Sweden where the WikiLeaks founder faces charges of sexual molestation, the subject of a salacious witch-hunt in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday. Accusations by two Swedish women he met last August are being talked up in order to cloud the real issues and fuel a character assassination campaign.

The real problem, as Assange himself has said, for the world’s political leaders is not simply that WikiLeaks continues to exist as an organisation. It is the courage of the whistleblowers inside state institutions who actually provide the leaks in the first place.

People like US army intelligence officer Bradley Manning. Manning, who is accused of handing over 90,000 classified Afghan war logs to WikiLeaks, has just turned 23 after being held in solitary confinement for 200 days.

He is detained at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. He spends 23 hours a day alone in a standard-sized cell, with a sink, a toilet, and a bed. US website, The Daily Beast, writes:

The conditions under which Bradley Manning is being held would traumatize anyone. . . He lives alone in a small cell, denied human contact. He is forced to wear shackles when outside of his cell, and when he meets with the few people allowed to visit him, they sit with a glass partition between them … When he was first arrested, Manning was put on suicide watch, but his status was quickly changed to “Prevention of Injury” watch (POI), and under this lesser pretence he has been forced into his life of mind-numbing tedium.

Manning is not the only young person who involved in this secretive cyber and information war. In the past fortnight, the conflict over WikiLeaks drew in thousands of “hacktivists” who brought down credit card companies who refused to process WikiLeaks transactions. A hackers’ collective called Anonymous, organised a mass “DDoS” attack on websites which acted against Assange and WikiLeaks.

DDoS means “Distributed Denial of Service”, and involves the use of “collaborative tools where supporters can voluntarily attach their machines to a botnet in order to assist with a DDoS attack. The preferred tools are usually some version of the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) software.”

Sound like a sci-fi thriller? It is – except it’s true. And young people around the world are being arrested for it. Two Dutch hackers, one aged 19 and another 16 were seized last week, as was a 17-year-old in Manchester. The Met now even has a special e-crime unit called PCeU which specialises in tracking down such people. In Switzerland and Sweden this hackers’ movement has taken the political form of the Pirate Parties.

The case of Julian Assange is about much more than one Australian campaigner. It has taken the war against non-democratic, repressive and secret states into a new dimension. For all Biden’s bluster, the Americans can’t shut down WikiLeaks because its site is replicated by supporters around the globe.

In Britain, students used social networking and micro-blogging to mobilise recently, giving the police the run-around. The notion of the all-seeing, all-powerful state is taking a battering. There is no doubt that the revolution will be digitised!

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

The truth behind secret diplomacy

For all Washington’s outrage at Wikileak’s publication of hundreds of thousands of hitherto secret diplomatic cables from America’s embassies around the world, they confirm much that was already known.

Who doubted that the United States has ever-so cosy relations with Israel at the expense of the Palestinians and that none of the cables published so far mention the continuing suffering in Gaza resulting from the vice-like blockade?
Or that the US spies on the United Nations?

The tittle-tattle gossip about various world leaders says more about the low level of “analysis” made by US embassy staff than anything else. No wonder the United States has been way behind just about every major international change in recent decades.

They were sleeping when the Shah of Iran was overthrown by a popular uprising in 1979 and failed to detect the changes in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. More recently, the absence of a coherent analysis left the United States vulnerable to the attack on the twin towers in 2001. Ironically, the latest Wikileaks releases were made possible by Washington’s decision after the 9.11 failure to pull together in digital form all diplomatic communications from its embassies and link them to the Pentagon.

Clearly there are insiders in the US State Department who believe that the public has a right to know about these cables. And they are correct. You may ask: what has secret diplomacy ever done for us? Behind closed doors, diplomats and states have prepared for war, using pretexts where necessary (before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, for example) and signed away the rights of smaller nations (Yalta and Potsdam at the end of World War II).

Diplomats, it is said, are sent abroad to lie for their countries. The real truth about American foreign policy will never appear in these kinds of cables. For example, to what extent is Washington involved in the current round of assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists?

Two scientists have been killed this year and others injured in highly-sophisticated attacks that have all the hallmarks of Mossad-CIA operations. These will be “deniable” attacks possibly carried out by third parties on behalf of Israel and the US. Perhaps they are the alternative to the full-scale military attack that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and others are demanding or the prelude.

The cables will certainly not reveal the illegal policy of systematic assassination of suspected Taliban and Al-Qaeda personnel in the Afghan-Pakistan border area. These are carried out by unmanned drones and have resulted in “collateral damage”, including the deaths of many innocent women and children.

Nevertheless, the publication of the cables has wrong-footed Washington, in particular secretary of state Hillary Clinton. That can be no bad thing. You have to admire the courage of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. He is victim of a Swedish state frame-up and some US politicians want Wikileaks categorised as a “terrorist” website.

It is fitting that Ecuador has offered Assange "unconditional" residency in the country. Deputy Foreign Minister Kintto Lucas praised people like Assange "who are constantly investigating and trying to get light out of the dark corners of information". In the 1970s, Ecuador was destabilised by the CIA and a brutal military junta ruled until 1979. In September this year, President Rafael Correa was held hostage during an attempted coup d’état. No prizes for guessing who Ecuador’s politicians held responsible.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

US and Pakistan military - a deadly embrace

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari’s current visit to Britain must be one of the most unfortunate ever by a head of state. He has rightly come under fire for lavish junketing while millions of his people are suffering from the worst floods for nearly a century.

In addition, Zardari’s meeting with Cameron behind closed doors this Friday is bedevilled by the Prime Minister’s remark that Pakistan should not be “allowed to look both ways” or be permitted to “promote the export of terror”. Cameron, who remains unrepentant, has himself been attacked by Tory grandee Lord Tebbit who has accused him of running “a sloppy, slap-happy government” a propos these remarks.

Just another spat between the old and new Tories? No, this runs far deeper. Cameron in fact provided a glimpse into the deadly embrace that is the reality of Pakistan’s relationship with the United States and Britain.

The heated exchanges between Cameron and Zardari come hot on the heels of the WikiLeaks Afghan War Diary affair. The 91,000 reports from US military units in the field, embassies, intelligence officers and informers have been denounced as fabrications by Hamid Gul, former chief of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

An astonishing investigation by veteran reporter Christina Lamb in last weekend’s Sunday Times provides chapter and verse about the real nature of this sinister body. Lamb, who was twice expelled from Pakistan after pre-dawn raids on her, first in on her flat in Islamabad and later in Quetta, explains how and why Pakistan’s military intelligence has become the ultimate sorcerer’s apprentice and the ultimate nightmare for both the US and Britain.

As Lamb points out, the WikiLeaks documents show that “Pakistan has been accepting billions in US aid while ISI, its military intelligence service, had been arming and sheltering members of the Taliban. The man who headed ISI during the height of this activity was none other than Kayani.”

Kayani is none other than General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan’s army chief, who, Lamb says, is the “real power in the country”. She was present on Kayani’s C17 executive jet when he met with Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, just as the WikiLeaks Afghan war diary affair broke.

Mullen used the opportunity to denounce WikiLeaks. He tweeted from the aircraft: “Appalled by classified docs leak to WikliLeaks and decision to post. It changes nothing on Afghanistan strategy or our relationship w/Pakistan.”

It was, Lamb writes, Mullen’s 19th visit to Pakistan since 2007. The complexity of US-Pakistan relations goes back to the 1980s when the CIA provided billions of dollars of aid to the Afghan resistance movement fighting the Soviet army of occupation. These funds were channeled through the ISI, often to the anger of the mujaheddin fighters, many of whom who paid the ultimate price for the double-dealing ISI.

But the ISI’s activities were not confined to Afghanistan. They also targeted politicians, especially secular ones like former Prime Minister and opposition leader Benazir Bhutto. An official UN investigation into the Bhutto’s December 2007 assassination accuses the ISI of having an agent in the operating room where doctors tried to revive her. There is a body of evidence suggesting that the agency was responsible for terror bombings in Kabul and the Mumbai massacre during 2008.
Hundreds of thousands of people in the flood-stricken areas of Pakistan are dismayed by the lack of concern and help from their government. Reporters on the ground say that while the state has failed to act, Islamist organisations of all kinds, including Jamaat-ud-Dawa which is thought to be a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group blamed for the 2008 assault on Mumbai, have stepped into the breach.
But while Washington’s support for Pakistan’s military - £11 billion since 2001 – continues to provide succour to the very forces that are killing US troops, the US and NATO cannot withdraw their support. They view the collapse of Pakistan as a worse option than an out-of-control Afghanistan. No wonder that Cameron and Zardari will be meeting behind closed doors!

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary