Sampath Perera ■ Jinnah International Airport in Pakistan’s southern port city of Karachi was raided by an Islamist insurgent group late Sunday night. The fighting continued until Monday, causing a suspension of all operations at the airport, which is used by about 44,000 passengers daily. At least 37 people died, including 10 attackers, according to official accounts. [...] Soon after his election, Sharif pledged support for the US “war on terrorism,” which has served as a vehicle for asserting American hegemony over the region. However, his election promises of negotiations with the TTP reflected concerns within the Pakistani elite about the conflict’s damage to the crisis-ridden economy. The TTP’s apparent ability to target positions in major cities and industrial centres is undermining his government’s agenda to attract foreign investment. [...] The intensifying crisis in Pakistan is inseparably bound up with the escalating geo-political tensions in the region produced by Washington’s drive for dominance over the resource-rich Central Asian landmass, which is accompanied by its “pivot” to Asia to encircle China economically and militarily.

Karachi’s Airport has resumed operations today, but a deadly late night attack shut it down for many hours overnight. It appears that ten militants entered the airport Sunday night, most likely uniformed as airport security personnel, and killed up to 18 people before they were killed by airport security and rapidly responding military units. The TTP, Pakistan’s Taliban, has claimed responsibility for the attack. The New York Times and Reuters, however, chose to be very selective in how they reported the TTP’s claim of responsibility. Both news outlets left out the TTP’s prominent mention of the US drone strike in November that killed TTP leader Hakimullah Mehsud in describing the TTP’s reasons for the attack. By contrast, AP and the Washington Post included the TTP’s reference to the drone strike.

The Pakistani Taliban on Monday claimed responsibility for an attack on Karachi airport that left at least 23 people dead, reportedly including 10 attackers. The group said the act was in revenge for their late leader Hakimullah Mehsud, who was killed in a US drone strike in November. The airport was chosen for the attack "because it serves as the biggest air logistics centre supplying goods for the Crusaders' war in Afghanistan and Pakistan", Umar Media, the official media wing of the Pakistani Taliban, said on its Facebook page. Pakistani officials said a military operation against the militants, who attacked the country’s busiest airport late on Sunday, ended shortly before dawn on June 9. However, security forces later announced that the military operation had been relaunched after gunfire at the airport resumed. For more, see here and here for a report on Pakistan's Dawn news site.

The White House has officially admitted that fake vaccination programs have been used by the United States as a cover for covertly stealing DNA samples from the public as part of the so-called "war on terror." The aim of the scheme, carried out in the Middle East, was to use DNA analysis to identify suspected terrorists who would then be targeted to be killed by the United States. As the New York Times reported in 2011, "In the months before Osama bin Laden was killed, the Central Intelligence Agency ran a phony vaccination program in Abbottabad, Pakistan, as a ruse to obtain DNA evidence from members of Bin Laden's family thought to be holed up in an expansive compound there." "CIA agents recruited a senior Pakistani doctor to organize the vaccine drive in Abbottabad, even starting the "project" in a poorer part of town to make it look more authentic," reports The Guardian.

An FBI agent is being held on anti-terrorism charges in Pakistan after authorities found ammunition in a bag as he boarded a plane in Karachi, Pakistani and U.S. officials said Tuesday. ● The agent was detained by airport police in Karachi about 4 p.m. Monday when he tried to board a Pakistan International Airlines flight to Islamabad. He was in possession of 15 bullets and a magazine for a 9mm pistol, police officials said. On Tuesday, he appeared in court on charges that he had violated local anti-terrorism laws that prohibit the carrying of weapons or ammunition on a commercial flight. A judge ordered that the agent be detained until at least Saturday so Pakistani security officials can investigate the matter.

Retired Pakistani General Hamid Gul says the United States and its allies are seeking to destroy Pakistan by fueling insecurity in the country. ● The former head of Pakistan’s Intelligence Service (ISI) alleged that Washington used the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City as a pretext to invade the neighboring Afghanistan. The former Pakistani intelligence chief, who was often accused of collaborating with the Taliban militant group in Pakistan and Afghanistan, also stated that the United States has failed in Afghanistan and is now seeking to destroy Pakistan. General Gul also pointed out that the US military will have to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan and follow the example of the former Soviet Union in accepting defeat after its military occupation of the country in the late 1970s.

At least 273 civilians in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia have been killed. ● The National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes – an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people. According to a former drone operator for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) who also worked with the NSA, the agency often identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cell-phone tracking technologies. Rather than confirming a target’s identity with operatives or informants on the ground, the CIA or the U.S. military then orders a strike based on the activity and location of the mobile phone a person is believed to be using.

Top-secret documentation collected by Pakistani field officers gives detailed information on 330 US drone strikes that have occurred in Pakistan since 2006. The CIA-run program is estimated to have killed 2,371 people. ● From solitary individuals riding on horseback to mountain hideouts crammed with people, the CIA drone program has had no shortage of targets in the Islamic Republic, according to newly released information obtained by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ). The most complete official record of American drone activity in Pakistan yet published provides an account as to the time and place of each strike, even including in some cases the identity of the homeowners. The document is unique in that it provides a “strike-by-strike account,” opening the window on Pakistan’s view of each incident with that of other authorities.

Supporters of the Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Party, which controls the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan, continue to block a supply route for the US-led NATO forces stationed in neighboring Afghanistan, Press TV reports. ● The PTI activists, who are against the deadly US drone strikes in Pakistan, have blocked one of the main NATO routes on the outskirts of the province’s capital, Peshawar, since November 2013. Protesters spend days and nights stopping all travelling trucks and checking them to ensure they are not carrying supplies for US-led forces in Afghanistan, before clearing them to pass through the province. The continuation of the blockage comes as the protesters and their leaders in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have been under intense pressure from the European Union, Washington as well as the Pakistani government to open the supply line.

The Defence of Pakistan Council (DPC)’s grand national jirga Sunday asked the government to allow the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) to shoot down the drones if the US refused to stop the drone attacks. The jirga also asked the government to immediately halt military operations in the tribal areas, particularly in North Waziristan, and open dialogue with the Taliban in line with the unanimous decisions of Parliament, the All Parties Conference and the Cabinet’s Committee on National Security.

Two masked men shot dead a [CIA] anti-polio vaccination campaign supervisor on Saturday morning after storming into his office in the Ghundai area of Khyber Agency’s Jamrud tehsil. An official of the political administration, Asmatullah Wazir, said that the supervisor Ghilaf Khan, a resident of Bara, Khyber Agency was working in his office at the Expanded Programme of Immunisation (EPI) in Ghundai.

Maryn McKenna: Update: Pakistan, Polio, Fake Vaccines And The CIA
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: How the CIA is Wrecking Polio Eradication in Pakistan
Donald G. McNeil Jr.: C.I.A. Vaccine Ruse May Have Harmed the War on Polio
Ben Richmond: Inside the CIA's Role in Pakistan's Polio Outbreak

Jim Naureckas: Pretending a Name Is Still Secret – in the Name of the Cult of Secrecy ■ In retaliation for a US drone strike in Pakistan that allegedly targeted a religious school, killing six people, the Pakistani political party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf accused both CIA Director John Brennan and the chief of the CIA's Islamabad station, whom it identified as Craig Osth, of "committing murder and waging war against Pakistan." The naming of the station chief was a significant development. As the New York Times (11/28/13) reported, the move is expected to infuriate American officials, who had to recall a previous CIA station chief in 2010 after he was identified in the local news media, also in relation to a legal suit brought by anti-drone campaigners. [...] So Osth's name is out, and it's been out for a long time; concealing it from US readers doesn't make anyone any safer. But it does help bolster the cult of secrecy, which holds that information is to be kept from the citizenry on general principle. And it serves to shield from accountability an official who heads "one of the spy agency’s largest outposts in the world," in the Times' words, and whose influence in Pakistan "has sometimes eclipsed even that of the American ambassador."

Newser.com: Pakistani Party Blows CIA Station Chief's Cover

CIA Officer Craig Peters Osth has been revealed to be the
Chief of Station in Islamabad, Pakistan. He has also been
the COS of Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. (Cryptocomb)

A political party in Pakistan has publicly identified the top CIA spy in the country—and it wants him interrogated and put on trial over a recent US drone strike, reports the Guardian. The PTI party, notably led by a former cricket star named Imran Khan, identified the Islamabad station chief in a letter to police. It named him and CIA chief John Brennan as responsible for a drone strike earlier this month that killed civilians along with militants. Wire services are not naming the station chief. PTI officials say he doesn't have diplomatic immunity and therefore should be tried for murder, reports AP. They also say he should be interrogated to provide the names of the drone pilots who controlled the plane from afar. Assuming the identity is correct, it would be the second time in three years that those opposed to drone strikes in the country have identified a station chief. The first one had to leave the country in 2010.

The Hindu: Imran's party files complaint against CIA station chief ● Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI) has named the CIA station chief in Islamabad, Craig Osth and CIA Director John O. Brennan in a complaint lodged at Tal police station in Hangu district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on Wednesday against the drone strike on November 21 which killed six persons. In a complaint filed for committing the offences of murder and waging war against Pakistan by Shireen Mazari, central information secretary PTI alleged that Craig Osth is running an illegal clandestine spying operation throughout Pakistan but specifically in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and annexed Tribal Areas, wherein Osth and his allies (names not known yet) throw a GPS (Global Positioning System) device at a targeted house/ car and the Drone (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle), which is remotely controlled from an undisclosed location, strikes at the target. In the Hangu case it was Craig Osth and his clandestine network which threw a GPS device at the madrassa in Tal and further ordered the missile strike, which killed and injured a large number of those present including children.

Cryptome: CIA station chief in Islamabad (named leaked) is Craig Peters Osth
The News: CIA chief accused of murder over Hangu drone attack
CLG: CIA, DEA, operated without oversight in Brazil; Craig Osth identified as CIA head
No Right Turn: Burning the CIA

Just hours after a promise not to launch any more drone strikes against Pakistan for the duration of their peace talks with the Taliban, a US drone pounded a religious school in Hangu.

The attack killed eight people, including three teachers and five students. A number of others were wounded in the attack, and drones continued to loom overhead after the attack.

It’s noteworthy for a lot of reasons, and not just that it broke yet another promise. Hangu is not in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where US drone strikes have almost exclusively hit, but is in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwah (KP) Province. Hitting a proper province is much more controversial within Pakistan, and a major backlash is expected on a national level. But that may pale in comparison to the backlash on a provincial level, as the KP Province is ruled by Pakistani Tehreek-e Insaf (PTI), an anti-drone party ruled by Imran Khan which had threatened to blockade the NATO supply route through its province into occupied Afghanistan if the drone strikes didn’t end. They gave an initial deadline of November 20… the day of the latest attack, so it will likely be interpreted locally as timed explicitly to spite them.

The deadline had been moved back to November 23 but the attack is almost certain to spark an enormous response, and will oblige the PTI to at least attempt such a blockade to retain its credibility. It will also add to pressure on Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who has been facing growing criticism for his inability to stop the strikes, a key promise of his campaign.

Six people have been killed in a US assassination drone attack that targeted Pakistan’s northwestern tribal region. ● The attack was carried out during the early hours of Thursday, when the unmanned aerial vehicle struck a seminary in Hangu District of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. The United States carries out drone strikes in several countries including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Washington says it is targeting militants through its drone attacks. However, many of the victims turn out to be civilians. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, between 308 and 789 civilians have died in US killer drone attacks in Pakistan since 2008.

World Health Organization, (WHO) stressed that polio cases detected in Syria recently is linked to the strain of Pakistani origin found in sewage in Egypt and the Palestinian territories in the past year. ● WHO said in a statement published on Monday that the genetic sequencing of Polio strain which has crippled to children in Deir- Ezzour indicates that the isolated viruses are most closely linked to virus detected in environmental samples in Egypt in December 2012, which in turn had been linked to wild poliovirus circulating in Pakistan. The statement added that "Syria's immunization rates have dropped from more than 90 percent before the conflict to around 68 percent, clarifying that polio mainly affects children under five and cannot be cured, only prevented.

In Washington, 13 year old Zubair Rehmen along with his 9 year old Nabeela, spoke with members of Congress in a briefing organized by Alan Grayson, to send a message to our elected representatives who authorize our blowback inducing bull in a geo-political china shop of military budget what the rest of the world can see as plain as day: Drone attacks in countries that have not declared war on us and pose no threat to us are illegal, immoral, and create more enemies then they kill.

From Huffpo: He thought little of the U.S. drone buzzing over his family's house one day last year, its incessant sound just one more addition to the rhythm of daily life in northwest Pakistan. As he walked home from school, his grandmother told him to eat a snack before coming to the field to help her pick okra. It was the eve of one of the holiest holidays in Islam, when they would gather for a favorite family dish. He went outside. Dum, dum -- the sounds of missiles pierced the air.

"All of a sudden things became very dark," Zubair Rehman, 13, remembered. The next thing he knew, his grandmother, Mamana Bibi, was gone. "It was like she was exploded to pieces."

Zubair traveled from his home in mountainous North Waziristan with his father, Rafiq ur-Rehman, and sister Nabeela, 9, to Washington for a grim first on Tuesday. The drone victims will appear before Congress to explain for the first time the human fallout of the U.S. program. The briefing was organized by Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.). The Rehmans' story, documented extensively in a report released last week by Amnesty International and in a new documentary from filmmaker Robert Greenwald, serves as a wrenching, first-hand rebuke to the Obama administration's frequent claims that drone strikes have caused few if any civilian casualties. Bibi was the only person killed in the strike. Nine people, including the two children, were hurt.

Medea Benjamin: Drones Have Come Out of the Shadows

US Shrugs Off Criticism, Insists Talks 'An Internal Matter'. ● A Friday drone strike which killed Pakistani Taliban (TTP) leader Hakimullah Mehsud was particularly galling, according to Pakistani officials, because they’d received specific promises that the US would not carry out any strikes during the Pakistani peace talks. Shahbaz Sharif, the chief minister for Pakistan’s Punjab Province and the younger brother of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif says he was assured at “high levels” that there would be no drone strikes during the Sharif government’s peace dialogue with the TTP. The US State Department shrugged off the complaints, insisting that Pakistan’s peace talks were an “internal matter” and unrelated to the drone strike, even though it targeted Hakimullah and other leaders of the group Pakistan is trying to negotiate with.

A U.S. drone strike killed three people in northwest Pakistan earlier today, marking the first such attack since Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif publicly called for President Obama to end the strikes. Just last week, Amnesty International said the United States may be committing war crimes by killing innocent Pakistani civilians in drone strikes. Today we air extended clips from the new documentary, "Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars," and speak to filmmaker Robert Greenwald. The film looks at the impact of U.S. drone strikes through more than 70 interviews with attack survivors in Pakistan, a former U.S. drone operator, military officials and more. The film opens with the story of a 16-year-old Tariq Aziz, who was killed by a drone just days after attending an anti-drone conference in Islamabad. We are also joined by human rights attorney Jennifer Gibson of Reprieve, co-author of the report, "Living Under Drones." ( + Transcript)

UN Urges More Transparency in Killings ● The UN conference on drone strikes opened today in New York with calls from UN experts to see more transparency around the use of drones for extraterritorial executions by nations, and condemnations by several nations of the unlawful use of the attacks en masse by the United States. The Obama Administration was quick to dismiss any complaints, insisting the killings of several thousand people worldwide without any legal oversight by CIA drones was “legal and just.”

Barry Grey: Reports document US slaughter of civilians in drone strikes ■ A series of reports released over the past several days document the killing of thousands of people, including hundreds of non-combatant civilians, in US drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and other countries. The reports, issued by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch on Tuesday and the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions last Friday, expose as lies the claims of President Obama and administration officials that the drone strikes are “surgical” attacks that kill few civilians. ● All three reports suggest that the United States is concealing the extent of the carnage caused by its program of extrajudicial executions and is in violation of international humanitarian law. The reports were timed to coincide with a United Nations General Assembly debate on drone attacks to take place this Friday. ● Amnesty International devoted its report, “Will I be Next?” US Drone Strikes in Pakistan, to the results of an on-the-spot investigation into nine of the 45 reported strikes that occurred in Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal agency, which borders Afghanistan, between January 2012 and August 2013.

Reuters: U.S. drone strikes killed Pakistani grandmother, laborers: Amnesty
Drone Victims Recount Horror of Follow-Up Strikes Launched Against People Rescuing Wounded
CNN: In Swat Valley, U.S. drone strikes radicalizing a new generation
Jason Ditz: White House Defends Drone Strikes
David Swanson: A New Kind of War Is Being Legalized

● A website in the UK, themindrenewed.com, that downloaded the video from the link in my original report of the Pakistani TV interview with Mohammad Bashir has posted the interview with the original English subtitles. You can view it HERE.
● This interview of an eyewitness to the entire event is powerful evidence that the Obama regime’s story of the killing of Osama bin Laden and his burial at see is a hoax and a lie. Pakistani Samaa TV confirms that Bashir is who he says he is and that he lives next to the alleged bin Laden compound. Samaa TV also confirms that neighbors knew the residents of the “compound.” There has never been any mention of the Bashir interview in the presstitute media. ● Mohammad Bashir, Abbottabad resident and neighbour to the alleged “compound” of Osama bin Laden, gives his eyewitness account of what he saw happen on 2 May 2011 (local time), when – according to the official story – US Navy SEALs assassinated Osama bin Laden. In this interview, soon after the event, with a Pakistan national TV station (Samaa.tv), Bashir gives an account which fundamentally contradicts the official story.

Pakistani National TV Reveals That Obama’s Claim To Have Killed Osama Bin Laden Is “An American Hoax” - Paul Craig Roberts (Includes a transcript of the interview)

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts returns to the Podcast for a detailed analysis of the claimed "assassination" of Osama bin Laden by US Navy SEAL Team 6 in 2011, and to discuss the many disturbing questions surrounding the suspicious deaths of so many of that Team in the subsequent helicopter shoot-down in Afghanistan on August 6, 2011. Dr. Roberts also discusses false-flag operations, gives an update on Syria, comments upon the ongoing revelations about the NSA and gives his reaction to the 2013 US Government Shutdown. (PaulCraigRoberts)

Pakistani National TV Reveals That Obama’s Claim To Have Killed Osama Bin Laden Is “An American Hoax” - Paul Craig Roberts (Includes a transcript of the interview)

Medea Benjamin: U.S. government claims drone victims are mostly
militants, but about half identified victims thus far are civilians and children

Medea Benjamin: Obama and Drone Warfare: Will Americans Speak Out?
Medea Benjamin: Obama Administration Silencing Pakistani Drone-Strike Lawyer
America's Drone Attacks Are 'Killing 49 People for Every Known Terrorist in Pakistan'

President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama met in the Oval Office Friday with Malala Yousafzai, the Pakastani girl who was shot in the head on her school bus by Taliban gunmen for criticizing their rule, including banning education for girls. The White House says the first couple invited Malala -- the youngest ever nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize -- to the White House "to thank her for her inspiring and passionate work on behalf of girls education in Pakistan." In a statement, the White House says the United States "joins with the Pakistani people and so many around the world to celebrate Malala’s courage and her determination to promote the right of all girls to attend school and realize their dreams." :: In a statement released after the meeting, Malala said she was honored to meet with Obama, but that she told him she's worried about the effect of U.S. drone strikes. (The White House statement didn't mention that part.)