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            Now that Mir Aimal Kasi is safely dead and buried, a number of people have decided to spring to his defence, among them such celebrated advocates of citizens’ rights and the democratic way of life as former Interior Secretary and former so much else Mr Roedad Khan of the deceased Civil Service of Pakistan. There wasn’t one word out of any of these gentlemen when Kasi was aqbducted in Pakistan by the FBI, aided by the notorious ISI, and flown secretly to the United States. Nor does one recall anyone standing up for Kasi during his trial, nor when he was sentenced, neither when one after another of his appeals was rejected, nor when he lay waiting for the end on death row, and neither when the date of his execution was announced. Now that it is safe to speak, they are speaking and, taking this opportunity to sing their own praises and sell themselves as champions of the Rule of Law. May I suggest that the one decent thing these gentlemen of leisure can do is to revert to the silence they had until now maintained. Long walks in the morning on Islamabad’s forlorn roads will do their body and soul good.

            There has been one exception: Barrister Iqbal Geoffrey in Lahore who never gave up till the end though his efforts in courts, in Pakistan and the United States, came to nothing. As for the Government of Pakistan, how could it question the legality of Kasi’s abduction when it was the prime party to that abduction? Farooq Leghari who is now in the National Assembly was the President of Pakistan at the time and Nawaz Sharif the Prime Minister. Isn’t it time they came forward and told the truth? Wouldn’t they know who received the millions of dollars in bounty that was on Kasi’s head?  A British journalist once said Pakistan is one country where truth is impossible to find. Does anyone, for example, know to this day who killed Liaquat Ali Khan or Dr Khan Sahib or Gen. Zia-ul-Haq? Why doesn’t the new Baloch prime minister do the honourable thing and find out who sold his fellow Baloch Kasi down the river? It is not enough to have just condoled with the family.

            There is no question about Kasi not having been guilty as charged. He killed those people on 25 January 1993 but he was man enough to confess. He told me as we sat across each other, separated by bulletproof plexiglas in that Virginia jail, that he had killed them. He gave me the same reasons that he had given in court and he continued to give until the end. However, I wasn’t and I am not satisfied that he did what he did to avenge US treatment of Muslims and Muslim states. Kasi thus becomes another Pakistani mystery that will never be solved.

            The Virginia Supreme Court that rejected Kasi’s appeal against his death sentence confirmed that “agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) apprehended defendant in a hotel room in Pakistan. Defendant had been travelling in Afghanistan the entire period, except for brief visits to Pakistan.”  According to the court record, Agent Bradley J. Garrett “and three other armed FBI agents, dressed in ‘native clothing’ arrested Kasi. Nowhere did the court say that the FBI was accompanied by Pakistani agents. In other words, long before Pakistan’s “principled” entry into the US-led war on al Qaeda, the FBI had the run of the country if it so wished. It is not a post 9/11 phenomenon.

            The Virginia Supreme Court judgment says, “Defendant responded to a knock on the room’s door and the agents rushed inside. Defendant who has a master’s degree in English immediately began screaming in a foreign language and refused to identify himself. After a few minutes, defendant was subdued, handcuffed and gagged. Garrett identified him through the use of fingerprints.” Had Pakistani agents been in the raiding party, they would have told the FBI what Kasi was saying in “a foreign language.” It stands established therefore that they were not there,. I can’t think of another country that would allow this. Iqbal was right: ‘Hammiyat naam tha jis ka gayi Taimoor ke ghar se.’ (What they call honour has departed the House of Taimur)

            The court record says that a hood was placed over Kasi’s head and he was driven in a vehicle for about an hour to board an airplane. During the trip, Garrett told him who he was. The flight lasted over an hour. When it landed, Kasi was transferred to a vehicle and “driven for about 40 minutes to a ‘holding facility’ where he was turned over to Pakistani authorities.” There were eight cells in that “facility” and Kasi was placed in one of them, duly handcuffed, this time by his own countrymen as the FBI had removed the ones they had put on him. It was the FBI that took a look at Kasi’s injuries and checked his blood pressure and pulse. His Pakistani captors had not bothered. The FBI kept on eye on Kasi all the time he was in that cell from where he was “released” on 17 June after which the FBI “handcuffed, shackled and hooded” him for his 15-minute ride to a US military plane that flew non-stop for 12 hours to Washington.

            After 15 pre-trial hearings, Kasi was tried by a single jury during 10 days in November 1997 upon his plea of not guilty to the indictments. He pleaded not guilty because he believed that what he had done was for the right cause. He did not consider it murder, just as he approved of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon but not on the World Trade Centre that he felt was a civilian target. His own attack he saw as directed at the CIA, a legitimate target. It is important to understand how he viewed his actions.

            Kasi in his appeal said that the trial court had committed 92 errors. So voluminous was the record of the case that the appendix alone ran into 4,903 pages. The court rejected all 92 objections. Kasi died courageously, unafraid and dignified until the end. Garrett told the court that during the flight from Pakistan, Kasi did not express any fear or indicate he was making a statement because he was afraid. But why did he kill those innocent people who were family men and who were not responsible for the policies of their government? To that question, there is no answer.

The President walked up to a microphone and spoke for five minutes. “Is that it?” I asked? “Yeh, that’s it,” replied one of our handlers. “What about iftar,” I asked. “There is a coke machine at the back of the briefing room, if you have the coins”

Some journalists longer in tooth and claw than others will surely remember the colourful and eccentric newspaper cartoonist of the Lahore of the 1960s, Qazi Aslam. I have been thinking about him a lot since I came back from a White House iftar last week.

But first, the Qazi Aslam story and what it has to do with the White House. This happened in the closing days of the Civil and Military Gazette which used to be housed in a building on the Mall that is no more, having made way for that ugly something that goes by the name of Panorama Centre. It is typical of Lahore that an eyesore like this should be given such a grand name. Did Patras Bokhari not write that a backroom in the old city with nothing inside except a couple of chairs and a broken harmonium is likely to be called the International Academy of Art and Music?

But I speak of the Mall’s pre-Panorama days. Every evening before the sun set, outside the Civil office, Qazi Aslam would place his cartoon of the day with captions by Prof. G. M. Asar, who too after having been fired by Government College, Lahore, for speaking his mind about Iqbal, had found refuge in the dying newspaper that Kipling once edited. One of Qazi’s cartoons that became a great hit and was removed by the police on a complaint from the American Consulate or the CIA or the Roberts Club boys (seat of the Special Branch) was captioned “Yankee throws feast”. It showed Uncle Sam in his long coat, big top hat and striped trousers playing host to a bird in front of whom is placed a serving dish that is so shaped as to make it impossible for even a single morsel to be lifted from it.

Well, that is more or less what happened to my iftar at the White House, the President’s good deed for Muslims during the month of Ramadan. This is the second time he has notched up merit on that count. Last year, the Foreign Press Centre, operated by the State Department for foreign journalists based here, phoned to ask if I would like to accept an invitation to the White House for iftar. Some other Muslim journalists would be there. Although I was not fasting, an iftar is an iftar and having only heard of but never experienced that legendary Texan hospitality, I presented myself at the White House as instructed. There were about eight or ten others, a Turk or two and the rest Arabs. After clearing security we got in.

We hung around there for three quarters of an hour, some of it spent in the daily briefing room. The sun had already set. Suddenly, there was movement and pell-mell we were led into the White House proper. We turned right into the Treaty Room but were made to stand just inside the doors. The Muslim ambassadors were already seated, along with some Muslim leaders (quite a few of them entirely self-styled). The President walked up to a microphone, spoke for five minutes and returned to the head table. That was the signal to shoo us out. “Is that it?” I asked? “Yeh, that’s it,” replied one of our handlers. “What about iftar,” I asked. “There is a coke machine at the back of the briefing room, if you have the coins.”

This year when the Foreign Press Centre called, I asked if we were being invited to an iftar proper. “Yes, this year we have arrangements,” I was told. And this was what he meant by arrangements. We were let in and after about twenty minutes led to the Executive Office Building. There on the fourth or fifth floor, we were shown into a room with a table in the middle laid with a couple of long plastic bottles containing soft drinks, a dozen or so half bottles of water and a box of cookies. That was all. We were then taken to the Treaty Room and treated exactly as we had been treated the year before.

Qazi Aslam was right. Yankee throws feast.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

            Whenever there is a change of government in Pakistan, I ask myself if this time around the State of Pakistan will finally confer the recognition that it has denied for over half a century to its greatest writer. And every time, the expected happens, namely, nothing. One can, therefore, assume that nothing will happen this time either, because Saadat Hasan Manto remains an embarrassment to the Establishment.

            One of the best and most moving pieces written on Manto after his death at the age of 43 in 1955 was by Muhammad Khalid Akhtar, who sadly is no longer among us. He wrote, “Though his life was brief, he straddled our world like a colossus. In prose that was pure as a pearl, he continued to prick our dead conscience, shocking us out of our self-absorption, our complacency. He made us see ourselves in his shimmering mirror as we really were. He forced us to think so that we could be better human beings. By that I do not mean being intelligent, frugal and reticent, or to confuse selfishness with wisdom, to have no goal in life except one’s own and one’s children’s advancement … no, none of those qualities will be found in Manto’s ideal man, who is not from the privileged class. You will not find him in a mosque or a clubhouse, but on the road of life, taking long strides, devoted to his fellow beings, not holding on to the precious treasure of life, but showering it on others … Manto adhered to no particular ‘ism’ but if he had an ‘ism’ or a creed, it was his love for mankind, the greatest creed of all.”

            Manto arrived in Lahore from Bombay in 1948 and as long as he lived regretted ever having left the city that he loved and where he had spent the happiest and, financially, the most creative part of his life. In Lahore, the movie industry was in a ravaged state, still reeling from the shock of partition. Manto sold just one script. The movie was a flop. He never found any work after that. There was very little money to be made from writing. Most writers depended on their earnings from state radio, but Radio Pakistan had put every leading writer on its banned list, Manto included. What money he made in Lahore was through token book royalties, advances from publishers or by newspaper and magazine articles for which he was paid between twenty and thirty rupees a piece.

            In a postscript to one of his collections, Manto wrote, “You the reader know me as a story writer and the courts of this country know me as a pornographer. The government sometimes calls me a communist, at other times a great writer. Most of the time, I am denied all means of livelihood, only to be offered opportunities of gainful work on other occasions. I have been called an expendable appendage to society and accordingly expelled. And sometimes I am told that my name has been placed on the state-approved list. As in the past, so today, I have tried to understand what I am. I want to know what my place in this country that is called the largest Islamic state in the world is. What use am I here? You many call it my imagination, but the bitter truth is that so far I have failed to find a place for myself in this country called Pakistan which I greatly love. That is why I am always restless. That’s why sometimes I am to be found in a lunatic asylum, other times in a hospital. I have yet to find a niche in Pakistan.”

            In January 1983, it occurred to a group of Manto’s admirers, including Muzaffar Ali Syed, to ask Prof. G. M. Asar, one of Manto’s close friends and Laxami Mansion neighbours, to reminisce about him, especially his last days. Rashida Syed, Muzaffar’s wife transcribed the minutes of the meeting held at Hamid and Qaisra Alvi’s home in Islamabad. These were published in the magazine Nairang-e-Khyal in 1984. Some of what Prof. Asar said needs to be shared as we approach Manto’s 48^th death anniversary next year. When asked why Manto was still anathema for the establishment, he replied, “Every political system, every administration, that this country has had, has used Islam to promote its own ends, used it as a trading commodity for political purposes. As long as that continues, there will be no tolerance in any educational or collective monopoly for Manto, an artist wedded to the truth.”

            Manto was always a drinking man, but in Bombay he led a well-regulated life. He would go to work in the morning, come home in the evening and do his drinking within reason. This routine was destroyed when he came to Lahore. Not only did his earning power crash but he had no fixed place to go to during the day. Ahmed Rahi once recalled how Manto used to long for a place he could go to every morning. In Pakistan, unlike Bombay where he drank a better brand of whiskey, he was forced to drink the awful substitute distilled by the outfit Minoo Bhandara now owns. At times, he drank even worst stuff. According to Prof. Asar, “I would always tell him, ‘Yaar, why are you after your own life?’ In his ringing voice he would reply, ‘I am never going to die.’ I would say, ‘Bhai, Manto will not die, but it is not Manto I am in love with but Saadat and I can see that you are after Saadat’s life.’ That was how it was. We were close, we were neighbours and we met everyday. Manto’s feeling for other human beings, his belief in the equality of man, these were the most outstanding traits of his personality.”

            A little prayer Manto once wrote mirrors his human and artistic personality. “Dear God, Compassionate and Merciful, Master of the universe, we who are steeped in sin, kneel in supplication before Your throne and beseech You to recall from this world Saadat Hasan Manto, son of Ghulam Hasan Manto, who was a man of great piety. Take him away, O Lord, for he runs off from fragrance, chasing filth. He hates the bright sun, preferring dark labyrinths. He has nothing but contempt for modesty but is fascinated by the naked and the shameless. He hates what is sweet, but will give his life to sample what is bitter. He does not so much as look at housewives but is entranced by the company of whores. He will not go near running waters, but loves to wade through slush. Where others weep, he laughs; where they laugh, he weeps. Evil-blackened faces he loves to wash with tender care to highlight their features. He never thinks about You, preferring to follow Satan everywhere, the same fallen angel who once disobeyed You.”

All through the years of his captivity, Kasi continued to think of the two men he had killed as some sort of collateral damage. Once he said that had they not been working for CIA, they would not have died

Mir Aimal Kasi is dead, gone to meet his Maker, convinced to the end that he had done right. He did not see his actions as directed against individuals but the looming, unresponsive entity called the American government. He felt that he had scored a hit for justice and fair treatment for the Muslims of the world. Ironically, his act of raw daredevilry outside the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency more than nine years ago, may have done more to deepen the mistrust in which Muslims are now generally held than brought them any relief.

Kasi did not see himself as a terrorist, but as a soldier fighting for a just cause, a political worker who believed that the United States and its policies were unfair to Muslims, support as they did, without apology or reservation, the state of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians. He did not act out of religious zealotry because he was not a religious zealot, yet he must have felt strongly enough for the Muslims of the world to have committed what in the end remained a tragic and quixotic act that cut a young life at its prime. He was just 38 years old when he was put to death through lethal injection by the state of Virginia which is not known for showing mercy to those convicted of murder.

All through the years of his captivity, Kasi continued to think of the two men he had killed as some sort of collateral damage. Once he said that had they not been working for CIA, they would not have died. He said he had left unharmed those others waiting in their cars at that traffic signal but not going to their jobs at the CIA. However, he had a change of heart in the end and a few days before his execution, he phoned the brother of one of his victims to apologise to him. He also sent a message to the young wife of his other victim that he was sorry for the pain he had caused her and the family.

Kasi was a mild-mannered man. When you spoke to him, he answered in a calm, unhurried voice, never raising it and laughing frequently. He appeared perfectly normal and spoke like any normal human being. Even when he laid out his reasons for the attack on the CIA, he did so in a calm voice as if he was speaking about the weather. He did not sound angry though what he did must have been out of deep and uncontrollable anger.

A friend of mine in Virginia who met Kasi a few times before the events of 1993, told me that he found the handsome Baloch a perfect gentleman and rather shy. He said the only time he felt his voice getting somewhat emotional, though it remained under control, was when he spoke of the way Balochistan and the people of that province had been treated over the years by those who ruled from a distant capital. Had he taken up the Balochi cause, he might have achieved some good, but he opted for what he saw as a larger struggle.

From his prison cell, he wrote to a young American who stood with a candle in her hand while they were getting ready to end her friend’s life on the other side of the high wall of the Greensville Correctional Centre in Jarrat, Virginia, 60 miles south of Richmond. She said Kasi loved animals, especially cats. He told two Pakistani journalists who interviewed him over two years ago that had his mother been alive, she would have married him off. Then he laughed, the laughter of a shy young man. He was deeply grateful for the unrelenting efforts Barrister Iqbal Geoffrey had made on his behalf year after year after year. They all came to nothing in the end, thanks partly to Pakistan’s spineless courts and its government.

It will always remain a mystery why he committed that act of desperate terror. He did not appear to be that kind of person. He was not fired by any crusading zeal and he spoke of Muslims rather than Islam when explaining why he had done what he had done. He was not one of those like Osama bin Laden who see the struggle as Islam versus the Forces of Darkness.

In the end, therefore, why Mir Aimal Kasi picked up an AK-47 and sprayed those people with bullets on a cold morning in January nine years ago, will remain a mystery, one that has gone with him to his grave.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

            Quietly and without fanfare on a little noticed day in October, the kiss of death was finally administered to the Associated Press of Pakistan so that what little of life remained in this once vibrant news agency should be entirely drained from its bureaucrat-brutalised body. APP was declared a corporation by the Ministry of Disinformation and Media Destruction, the name by which it should truly go rather than what it calls itself officially.

            Thus APP would entirely join those twin otters of crass propaganda and sycophancy, the Pakistan Television Corporation and the Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation, or, for short, PTV and Radio Pakistan. This then is the real Axis of Evil, not the three identified by George W. Bush.

            All three outfits will be headed by the federal Information Secretary which should make him the Rupert Murdoch or Lord Beaverbrook of Pakistan, except that unlike those two, this one would be dispensing not news but propaganda. The very thought of this official crowing like a drunken cock on top of this heap makes you want to rush to the nearest rest room. Will those who have thus degraded this nation and its urge for free thought and expression ever be brought to justice? Did someone say, yes, but in a week of Sundays? Is there hope for us, run as we are by a gang of hucksters and armed mountebanks.

But let us take a closer look at what the Musharraf regime on the eve of “civilian rule” has done. Here is the Board of Directors of the proposed corporation which is to formulate the
policies and programmes for APP as also to oversee its performance. With the Information Secretary as chairman, the 11-member board mostly comprises government functionaries and some media men, obviously compliant ones. Can such a Board be expected to ensure an impartial, unbiased and professional news service?  Here is the full gang: the managing director of APP and his two counterparts from PTV and Radio Pakistan, the Principal Information Officer, the financial adviser to the Information ministry, the head of CPNE, and the heads of the departments of mass communications from two universities. As a consolation prize to journalists two of them that the government calls “eminent”, which translated into simple English means “spineless.” Will also be on the Board.

By turning APP into a wholly-controlled government outfit, it will also come to be the purveyor of crude propaganda that its sister “news” corporations dish out day and night. That will help neither the APP nor the government nor the country, given the competition that now exists from independent broadcasters and news outlets, almost all of which accessible through the Internet. Why should any newspaper be interested in paying for APP service, made up mostly of government pressnotes and handouts in incorrect English that the monolithic Press Information
Department or PID provides free of cost? Already some important newspapers have stopped subscribing to APP. And when eventually the rest of them opt out too, APP will be history, the Moenjodaro of the news business.

Over the years, professionalism among APP’s men and women has hit rock bottom. Now the huge bureaucratic structure that is being created to manage the agency will ensure the complete elimination of whatever little journalistic flair is still left among those who work for it. Their creative abilities, if any are still left, will entirely disappear under tight corporation controls. Already, years of unrelenting government controls have destroyed much of APP’s credibility. But there was still hope. That can now be safely abandoned. “All truth perishes as it enters these gates” should be APP’s new slogan.

Even though it didn’t seem realistic, many of those who were once associated
with APP still thought that the government would eventually release control over APP so that it could truly function as the national news agency. This was the promise made in the APP Takeover Ordinance of 1961, when the martial law regime of Ayub Khan struck at the independent press, taking in its sweep both the APP and the Progressive Papers Limited. But that was not to be, despite promises by successive governments to settle the question of APP’s status. The PPP went so far as to make it an election pledge to this effect in its 1990 election
manifesto but never implemented it. Established soon after independence as a successor to the Associated Press of India, APP was run by a private trust whose Managing Trustee was Malik Tajuddin, a journalist.

APP went through many upheavals, mainly financial, in its initial years. Pakistan had to grapple with huge problems after its creation and the establishment of a national news agency was a low priority at the time. Nevertheless, from a small office in the dilapidated Badri
Building in Karachi, APP, under the Eastern News Trust continued to expand and spread its network countrywide. Its dedicated staff, especially the journalists, were the agency’s greatest asset, some of them emerging as giants of the profession. Most copy flowing on its rickety teletype machines could be compared to the service of any agency in the world.

Mohsin Ali, who later became Reuter’s Chief Diplomatic Correspondent, was probably the fastest man on a typewriter churning out accurate copy. Then there was the inimitable I.H. Burney, whose dispatches had such depth and sweep that even the complicated issues he wrote about appeared to be simple. And of course, there was the elegant Safdar Ali Qureshi, whose six-hour interview with Chinese Premier Zhou-en-lai was the first given to a foreign journalist in 19 years. It hit headlines around the world.

That was APP at its best. Among its other greats were Abdul Hakim, Mukhtar Zaman, Tony Mescrenhas, A.M.A. Azim, Amanullah, both from East Pakistan, A.B. Azim, I. Rahman, Aslam Sheikh, Zamiruddin Ahmad, M.A. Mansuri, Hasan Akhtar Mirza, Hasan Akhtar Gardezi, Zawwar Hasan, Ahmad Basheer, Ralph Joseph, Shah Alam, M. Aftab, M. Afzal Khan, Raja Asghar and, last but not least, Iftikhar Ali, its distinguished Diplomatic Correspondent in Islamabad who reported some of the great events of the time for APP from the United Nations for 17 years. APP journalists braved adverse working conditions and worked with dedication to put the agency on the world news map despite low wages which were sometimes not paid for months.

Even after the takeover, APP’s heavyweights had the competence and courage to leave out crude propaganda from handouts and pressnotes, pick up the facts and produce readable stories. The government’s public relations men never liked APP’s determination to improve on their propaganda material. That’s why in the early 1960s, governments used PPI (then PPA) to float disinformation. The patronage of PPI continued for a long  time. During Zia-ul-Haq’s period, great favours were bestowed on “Islam-loving” and jehadi “news” outfits. Agencies like the Kashmir Media Service, run by ISI, had more government support than APP. Even today, the current Information Secretary Anwar Mahmood is the NNI’s patron saint rather than the APP’s.

A couple of years after the APP takeover, a PFUJ delegation met Ayub Khan and demanded that APP be released from government control. “I won’t do that in a hurry,” he said. “You chaps have the fire power of a armoured brigade.” Now many years later, another military dictator has finally sealed the agency’s fate. News will now move about in files before it is transmitted. In 1968, when Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia, the Ceteka news agency which was giving a blow-by-blow account of the traumatic developments, was stormed by Soviet troops. Before being led out, a journalist was able to send out just one line, “Freedom has come to an end.” That is as good a requiem for APP as any.

When they brought Kasi in, in fetters and handcuffs, the first thing that struck me about him was his innocent face. Somehow I had expected him to be tall and big. The man who sat across me behind the plexiglass could not hurt a fly

At 9 p.m. on the ninth day of Ramadan, the fourteenth day of the month before the month of Christmas, in a remote part of the state of Virginia, thousands of miles from the city of Quetta, prisoner No 253451 will be executed by lethal injection. His name? Mir Aimal Kasi. Age? 38 years. Crime? Murdering two employees of the Central Intelligence Agency as they waited in their cars for the light to turn green so that they could get to work, as they did every morning, at the Agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

In the spring of 2000, I drove from Washington to the rural town of Waverley, Virginia, site of the maximum security Sussex One Correctional Facility, as jails are called in this country, to meet Mir Aimal Kasi. When they brought Kasi in, in fetters and handcuffs, the first thing that struck me about him was his innocent face. Somehow I had expected him to be tall and big, because that was how he appeared from the picture that was on all “Wanted” posters during the years between 1993 and 1997 when the Americans were looking for him. The man who sat across me behind the plexiglass could not hurt a fly.

I asked why he had killed those people. He replied that he had done so to avenge what the US was doing to Muslims. I said, “But those people had families (one of the victim’s wife was in the car with him).” He just shrugged his shoulders. He did not appear to have any regrets. He told me how he had been arrested and taken to what he thought was the US embassy in Islamabad and then flown for 12 hours non-stop all the way to America in a military aircraft. He had no complaints about his treatment in jail. He said one man who was really working hard to secure his freedom was the lawyer Iqbal Geoffrey in Lahore from whom I had earlier conveyed a message of good wishes to Kasi. I asked him if he had worked with CIA in Pakistan. No, he hadn’t, he replied. I was with him for nearly an hour and I simply could not associate him with those execution style murders.

In 1998, in a series of letters he wrote from jail to Salon, a US website, he said, “I am not proud of what happened. I feel sad the people who came under attack were not powerful people… I wish powerful people would have come under the attack, then it would have been better. I wanted to shoot James Woolsey (the then CIA chief) but was not able to find him, or his timing of coming or going to CIA. If I had found Gates (former CIA director) I would have attacked him, as these are people who make up policies for CIA or US government.”

Kasi rejected the allegation by Gen. Hamid Gul that he had once worked for the CIA and had perhaps turned on the Agency in an act of fury. Gul said in an interview in Rawalpindi in August 1998, “Aimal Kasi was an agent of the CIA… He was working inside of Pakistan and outside of Pakistan.”

Kasi told Salon, “I did not work for CIA. During the war in Afghanistan I had Mujahideen friends who worked with the ISI people in bringing arms from military bases in Pakistan to the Mujahideen arms depot. I sometimes used to go with them. That was all.” He said he had got into the US after buying false papers in Karachi and altering his name to “Kansi”. He had later bought a Green Card in Miami. He expressed surprise that he had not been killed during his assault as he stepped out of his car in the morning rush hour traffic and started firing at cars waiting to turn into the CIA’s main fate in Langley. “I used to pass this area almost every day and knew these two left-turning lanes (for) mostly people who work for CIA. The attack on CIA was my idea alone… Nobody in Pakistan knew about it. I alone planned everything and did it.” He said the idea of the attack came to him after he purchased an AK-47 from a local Virginia gun dealer. After that the attack was “more important than any other thing to me.”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

            There was a world before 11 September 2001 and there is a world after 11 September, and they are different because that single, horrific day and what happened on it changed a great many things forever. The first thing that was lost was trust. Nothing is now to be taken at face value. Everything and everyone is suspect until established otherwise.

            The shock of the World Trade Centre attacks in America was much greater than the shock of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. There was a World War on then, though in distant Europe, but there was a war on in which the American people and the American government were emotionally involved on the side of the Allies. However, it took Pearl Harbour to make them join the fight. The attack on Pearl Harbour also happened far away from the American mainland. There was no physical feel of the event. There was no television of the kind that we have today when news of what is happening is flashed around the world while it is happening.

The American people watched the destruction of the World Trade Centre twin towers in utter disbelief as they tried to convince themselves that what had suddenly materialised on their screens was not a Bond movie but a real event taking place in real time.

That each single member of the suicide squads which carried out the attacks was Arab and Muslim remains the central fact of that seminal event. From then on, it has been difficult to take for granted anyone who looks Middle Eastern, has a Muslim name, wears flowing robes, dons a headdress or sports a beard. “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims,” wrote someone in the days immediately after September 11. That has remained the underlying assumption in America, both popularly and officially.

            Since the establishment by President Bush of the Homeland Security department with its wide-ranging legal and administrative powers, civil liberties have shrunk. That the department and its holier-than-thou chief enjoy the full confidence and backing of the President of the United States himself has tended to undermine and cut into individual rights and basic freedoms. While there have been several attempts, mostly insincere and invariably superficial, to assure the Muslims living in America that they as a community are not suspect and only the radicals among them are to be identified and investigated, this has done little either to reassure the Muslims or to soften the severity of some of the methods used by law enforcement agencies and their over-eager officials to investigate the innocent.

Every single mosque, every Muslim charity, every Muslim welfare organisation, every Muslim group has been investigated and, for all one knows, is still being kept a careful eye on. The federal sleuths have not hit pay dirt, as they were hoping, but nonetheless there has been only marginal letup in their efforts. The gist of the message that has been forced down the throat of every American by the television networks and the press, both serious and popular, is that the Muslims of the world hate America. This has been followed by the question: why do they hate us? Since the premise is unsound whatever is built on it can only be even more unsound.

The fact is that the Muslims of the world do not hate America. What the Bush government, the big think tanks, the great newspapers and the broadcasting conglomerates have failed to understand, if not refused to understand, is that the Muslims of the world do not hate America, but some of the policies that successive American administrations, both Republican and Democrat, have followed. What the Muslims of the world cannot accept, much less understand, is the blind, unquestioning support extended by the US establishment and all US administrations to the state of Israel and its attitude towards the Palestinians.

What few Muslims, including those of the staunch American ally, friend and helper, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, are able to understand is why there is suddenly this mad, mindless, unsubstantiated campaign against Iraq and why the US government has suddenly woken up to the menace that Saddam Hussein is supposed to be. Not a shred of evidence has been produced that there is a link between al Qaeda and Iraq, or that Saddam Hussein has gone mad and is actually planning to attack the United States, and yet … That the Iraqi leader, despite his dictatorial character and foolish policies, is a popular figure in the Muslim world today is entirely due to the naïve thinking of policymakers in the Bush administration. The assemblage of war hawks like Cheney, Rumsfeld and that cold-blooded, venemous woman Condi Rice under one roof is unfortunate and can only produce conflict, first abroad, then at home.

One natural reflection of such convoluted thinking is the ridiculous limits to which airport security in America has been carried. They make you take off your shoes – ask Musharraf’s man Firday Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi – they make you open your bags, they frisk you as if you had just been caught shoplifting and they put you through the wringer if they are less than reassured by your face or something you have said. A Pakistani journalist was grilled for three hours as he arrived, all starry eyed, at a major American airport, having flown direct from Lahore. His fault? He was here to take up a six-month senior fellowship at one of Washington’s most respected think tanks. However, that was not reassurance enough for the oafs who kept interrogating him Kommandant style. He later said he wished he could go back by the same plane that had brought him over.

The present state of affairs is best exemplified by celebrated Canadian-Indian novelist Rohantan Mistry’s decision the other day to call off midway his book promotion tour covering several US cities because he could not bear to be humiliated at American airports by customs and security officials. He is a not a Muslim but a Parsi like my friend “Admiral” Ardeshir Cowasjee, but he has a beard and he looks Pakistani or Arab or what have you. Mistry said he was sick and tired of facing “unbearable” humiliation at the hands of US customs and so out of disgust he had cancelled his tour.

            There was not a word about it in any American newspaper. I suppose it did not qualify as “news that is fit to print.”

Pick up any Indian or Pakistani publication from America and there is one thing they will all have in common: Pundit Maharaj Jee and his various counterparts, selling everything from how to get rid of ingrown toe-nails to the most effective way of ensuring that the “stone-hearted beloved, bound hand and foot in the frailest of threads lies grovelling at your feet.”

You can get Indians — and for Indians read Pakistanis too — out of India but you can’t take India out of them. Were that not so, how else would one explain the money-lined pockets of soothsayers, spellcasters, palmists, star readers, astrologers, black magic practitioners, card readers, mumbo jumbo merchants and assorted mountebanks, based not in Delhi or Lahore, but New York, London and even Paris.

Pick up any Indian or Pakistani publication from America, be it Urdu, Hindi, Gujarati or English, and there is one thing they will all be found to have in common: Pundit Maharaj Jee and his various counterparts, selling everything from how to get rid of ingrown toe-nails to the most effective way of ensuring that the “stone-hearted beloved, bound hand and foot in the frailest of threads lies grovelling at your feet.” All of us has have long maintained secret lists of such flint-hearted ladies, though how one wishes one had heard of Pundit Maharaj Jee somewhat earlier.

Pundit Maharaj Jee operates out of the city of Chester in England but his clientele obviously extends to areas this side of the Atlantic otherwise we would not be reading about him in Pakistani and Indian papers published in America. It appears from the full-page advertisement I was looking at while picking up the usual pungent mirch-masala from my neighbourhood Pakistani grocery which sells everything from Panjsoora Sharif to “asli” basmati rice from Pakistan to Naseebo Lal’s new CD to halal Islami meat.

Pundit Maharaj Jee claims to have been “established in England since 1952” and has declared that “nobody can beat Pundit Jee; 100 per cent guaranteed results.” He also maintains that “nobody has been established in England longer” than him. Here is what he can do. “If you have a problem that has not been solved by anyone in this world and you think that your problem is impossible to solve and you are fully disheartened with everyone else, then ring Pundit Maharaj immediately and all your problems will be solved forever and all your wishes will be fulfilled in seven days guaranteed.” That is an almost God-like attribute, wouldn’t you say since that is how many days, according to the Bible, it took the Lord to fashion the cosmos.

The Pundit Maharaj can solve any problem related to business, finance, career, depression, domestic peace involving husband, wife or children, health, examinations, studies “or anything at all.” Yes, those separated from their beloveds can be reunited as soon as you have sent your money to Pundit Maharaj. Also promised is the following, “If your work has been left incomplete or unsuccessful in any way by any Guru, psychic, holy man or spiritual healer, Pundit Jee will solve your problems 100 per cent guaranteed to your satisfaction.”

That is not all. “If you or your family members’ life is affected in any way by black magic or any evil spirits and you feel helpless because your problems are increasing day by day then you should immediately consult Pundit Maharaj because he will remove all kinds of black magic and evil spirits by his Jantras, Tavij, Mantras and Talismans which are prepared by strong worship and spiritual powers to remove all problems forever.”

However, if Pundit Mahraj Jee is not your shaman, there is always Ajmeri Baba of Bramall, Cheshire, England who, according to another advertisement, is “a name of good news for those Ladies and Gents (capitals Ajmeri Baba’s) who are fed up and have wasted their precious time and money with different spiritual healer and still hanging in the middle without solutions. Thousands of dishearted (yes dishearted) families are leading a very happy, peaceful and successful life due to Baba Jee’s prayers and talismans by the will of God because everything and anything is in God’s hands.”

Ajmeri Baba may have the answer to everyone’s problems, but if he were to sit an English test for me, I doubt he’ll manage more than three out of 100.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

            This is as frightening as a SMERSH hit man walking five steps behind you on a dark street one cold November night in an Eastern European city at the height of the Cold War, but there you have it. James Bond, who seldom met a woman he did not seduce, who never drank a martini that was shaken but not stirred and who never drove a car other than a special edition Aston Martin is forty years old: the James Bond of the movies that is.

The one in the books with whom the James Bond of today has little in common except the name and the number 007, turned forty nearly fifteen years earlier. Most of the world knows James Bond of the movies. According to one estimate, one-fourth of the people of the world have watched one or more than one James Bond movie. The James Bond of the Ian Fleming books, faithfully portrayed in some of the early movies, is a chap worth knowing. Those books are delightful and though the bad old Soviet Union is no longer around and communism threatens the West no more, if it ever did, they still make riveting reading.

There have been many James Bonds but the one Bond who outshines all Bonds remains the man who first played the role: Sean Connery. It is he who is the once and forever James Bond, although it is nearly twenty years since he last played the role. Later this month, on 22 November that is, the 20^th Bond movie will be released worldwide. Though it is based on nothing that Fleming wrote, since the producers ran out of his entire output many years ago, the title is very much Bond: Die Another Day.

The last Bond film made by Connery was The World is Not Enough, based not on a Fleming book but on the Bond family motto. One cynical critic wondered recently if at that rate the Bond movies to come – because come they surely will – would not be named after Bond’s boyhood tortoise, his sockmakers and the level of his cholesterol. The first Bond movie, made in 1961, was Dr No. Few know that Sean Connery was not the first choice for the role though he was among the final six the producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R Broccoli shortlisted. He won the part because  Peter Anthony, the professional model originally chosen, was later thought to be lacking the technique to cope with what was entailed.

The Bond formula has not varied in the last forty years. The world of 1961 has little in common with the one we live in and yet the movies still tell the same story: the debonair British agent with licence to kill hunting out villains with dreams of world domination. Since the Biggest Baddie of today is Osama bin Laden, can we rule out Bond chasing Osama bin Laden and assorted al Qaeda villains somewhere north of Tora Bora, come the next movie? The story would be familiar to all Bond aficionados. Osama bin Laden steals a nuclear bomb from Pakistan and is about to lob it at the United States in a hijacked F-16 when Her Majesty’s government is requested by Washington to lend Agent 007 to rub out the said bin Laden.

            It is nearly half a century since Britain ceased to be anybody’s idea of a world power and yet when we watch a Bond movie we are transported to a world where the sun has not set on the British Empire. The world’s moviegoers have been very generous to Britain in that sense, when the reality is that the British prime minister of today loves nothing more than to fall on his back with all four paws in the air to humour George Bush. But that is politics and it is boring. Far more interesting is Bond and his world, women, villains, lethal weapons and Miss Moneypenny included.

The early Bond movies were great fun. There he was, the lithe and lissome Sean Connery, taking long, resolute strides, dressed perfectly with not a wrinkle in his elegantly cut suit which remained in the same pressed state even after the nastiest of encounters with perfectly horrible men who fought dirty and had never heard of cricket or sipped a martini from a Baccarat crystal glass. Bond prowled around the capitals of the world on Her Majesty’s Secret Service, smashing skulls, smoking cigarettes that had been specially blended for him, breaking hearts and driving those souped up dream cars that the rest of us only know through magazines.

Bond was a wish fulfillment. He was what many of us would have liked to be. He had no wife to nag him, no children with measles, no grubby 9 to 5 job, no overdrafts, no mortgage payments, and no employer on the lookout for a good opportunity to sack him. He did not have to fly by economy and once at his destination, he did not have to search for his bag in a sea of look-alikes, nor was he taken for an illegal immigrant or a terrorist manqué by immigration officials. He smoked without even being aware of what cigarettes could do.

Bond could take punishment without flinching. He could wrestle an octopus off a Caribbean island, swim back to shore looking perfectly calm with not a scratch on his bronzed body and fall into the arms of a golden-limbed blonde in a skimpy bikini. His favourite vodka was distilled out at 65.5 proof and his Scotch was always taken on the rocks. And his women? Just say the names and you could swoon before reaching the end of the list: Vesper Lynd, Honeychile, Domino Vitali, Kissy Suzuki, Mary Goodnight, Gala Brand, Tiffany Case, Solitaire, Tatiana Romanova.

Now for the down side. Bond’s ethics were strictly English public school and he was an Empire loyalist when there was no Empire left to be loyal to. Although not a modern-day Kipling, he believed in Rule Britannia. Almost all the villains in the Bond movies were foreigners including my favourite, Blofeld, as well as that SPECTRE lady who wore shoes with concealed knives with which she tried to kick Bond when he thought there was no more harm she could do. The Bond world was a racist world though he had black helpers and even the odd black girl friend.

But all that one forgives because of the pleasure that Bond has brought to us for more than forty years. For the two hours that we are in his world, we can forget our troubles and live in a place where nice guys do not finish last and where the baddies always get their just deserts. Pakistan, as it tries to make sense of what hit it on October 10, could do with a bit of Bond. So, take it away 007.

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