Thursday, October 11, 2012

The Malalal Yousafzai Shooting Story Reaks of a Pakistani Army Press Release

By Nadrat Siddique

 

Nearly all U.S. corporate media are regurgitating virtually the same set of “facts” on the shooting of Pakistani 14-year old Malalal Yousafzai.

 

Although the event is not far in the past, there are many disparities in the story which shed doubt on its authenticity: One corporate media report mentions the gunmen as being masked. Another says they were bearded. It is unclear how facial hair would be evident on a masked individual.

According to an October 10 BBC report, “One report, citing local sources, says a bearded gunman stopped a car full of schoolgirls, and asked for Malala Yousafzai by name, before opening fire. But a police official also told BBC Urdu that unidentified gunmen opened fire on the schoolgirls as they were about to board a van or bus.”

 

Also worth noting is the vice-like embrace in which Paki government officials have placed this particular girl--or more importantly her story, a story which serves to discredit their opposition. Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf said: "We have to fight the mindset that is involved in this. We have to condemn it... Malala is like my daughter, and yours too. If that mindset prevails, then whose daughter would be safe?" No Paki official offered similar support to the Jamia Hafsa women when their Islamic university was attacked by Pakistani troops in 2007.

 

Even more oddly, the chief of the Pakistan army, General Ashfaq Kayani, has taken great personal interest in the girl. According to the October 10 Guardian, the “powerful military chief has put himself at the centre of a national outrage over the attempted murder” of Malalal. He went to the extent of visiting her personally in the hospital. One wonders what army chief has time or wherewithal to do that. In a statement viewed as highly cynical by those aware of the Pakistan army’s multifarious human rights abuses, he said, "The cowards who attacked Malala and her fellow students, have shown time and again how little regard they have for human life and how low they can fall in their cruel ambition to impose their twisted ideology." (Reuters, October 10)

 

Over and over, the U.S.-funded Pakistani military has been discredited for their extreme barbarism and complete disregard for human rights and the Geneva Conventions. They are viewed as collaborators with the U.S. and NATO by vast segments of the Pakistani population.

In October 2010, the Pakistan military was reported to have shot 250 Taliban prisoners. To shoot a girl such as Malala Yousafzai would not be beyond such a force.

 

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/new-video-appears-to-show-abuse-of-prisoners-by-pakistani-soldiers/

 

They have also collaborated with the U.S. in the killing of hundreds of civilians. Waziristan native Noor Beharam, who has repeatedly risked his life documenting the deaths of women and children, believes that 670 women have been killed by drone strikes. He has taken photos of more than 100 children, their bodies often unrecognizable as human after the strikes.

 

http://www.alternet.org/world/murder-skies-us-creating-new-enemies-where-there-were-none

 

The Pakistan military showed its prowess in media manipulation and propaganda dissemination in the course of the 2007 Lal Masjid siege, when they banned all independent media from the besieged area.

 

This writer would not put it beyond the Pakistan army to have sent one of their own to shoot Malalal. It would be a perfect red herring against the increasingly organized opposition to its human rights abuses and to the U.S. drone strikes in which it is complicit.

 

Ehsanullah Ehsan, Taliban spokesman, ostensibly claimed responsibility for the attack on behalf of the group. Anyone could call the Pakistani media, claim to be Ehsan, and assume responsibility on behalf of his organization in order to discredit it.

 

It is also possible that the action is the work of one or two misguided individuals. They may have conducted the action without the advance knowledge of the Taliban leadership. The TPP is a very large organization, with broad public support among the people of the frontier, and particularly of Swat, where the Pak army has terrorized the population over an extended period of time. Once the deed was done, they may have unthinkingly accepted their organization’s role in it. But was the action sanctioned by the top leadership, and approved in advance of the fact? Where are the interviews with the Taliban leadership to ascertain this fact? The corporate media, in keeping with their role as war time propagandists have conducted no such interviews.

Imagine if a shooting was conducted by a Jewish or White Supremacist gunman. It is extremely unlikely that any and the organizations affiliated with him would be immediately condemned. In this case, however, that is exactly what has happened. And the TPP, which seems notoriously lacking in its communication with the media, has allowed itself to be linked with a single heinous act, and therefore discredited.

 

Interestingly, only the VOA report of October 10 does not credit the Taliban with the girl's shooting. The VOA is highly regarded as the overt U.S. government propaganda organ by independent news analysists and thinkers.

 

The contradictions in detail of the attackers; the fact that Hillary Clinton, the U.S. State Department, the President of Pakistan, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, and the Pakistan Army Chief all went out of their way to condemn the attack when they have yet to do so in a single one of the killings of women and children by U.S. drones or by their Pak army lackeys; and the absence of any detailed interview with the Taliban are all very suspect to an analytical mind. Regardless of who accepted responsibility afterwards, might the shooting be a Pakistan army/intelligence action? I would not be at all surprised if the "details" picked up by all the major media organs stemmed from a Pakistan army press release. The specter of a young girl being murdered by a force endemic to a country and fighting a foreign occupier is perfect wartime propaganda to deflect the war crimes of the occupier.

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