Who orchestrated attack on GEO?

Were Stormtroopers of Secret Agency Responsible for ‘Geo’ Attack, CJ Manhandling?
Islamabad Police Talks of ‘Strangers in Police Uniform;’ Strange Goings on as Pakistan Turns into Mukharabat State

New Pakistan: Issues No 29, March 30, 2007

By Sadiq Saleem

Evidence indicates that Pakistan’s ubiquitous intelligence services now have a secret division of Stormtroopers who might have been responsible for the manhandling of Supreme Court Chief Justice, Mr. Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, as well as for the much condemned attack on the studios of Geo Television.

During the hearing before an inquiry tribunal in the incident of the Chief Justice’s manhandling, the Police Officer incharge of the relevant Police station laid responsibility at the door of “strangers in police uniform.” According to an account of the inquiry tribunal’s proceedings in Dawn, the Station House Officer (SHO) of the Kohsar police station, Inspector Rukhsar Mehdi maintained that he was rather away from the place where the Chief Justice was reportedly roughed up.

“He claimed that some strangers in police uniform were present on the spot where the CJ and his wife were manhandled and forced to ride an official car before proceeding to the Supreme Court where the Supreme Judicial Council was to meet on March 13,” Dawn reported.

Earlier, author and scholar Hassan Abbas, himself a former Police Service of Pakistan officer, had confirmed in an interview on Voice of America (VOA) that the attack on Geo television had been conducted by members of the Corps of Military Intelligence and not by the Punjab police whose uniforms the attackers wore.

Both reports seem to indicate that Pakistan’s intelligence services now have a covert division of stormtroopers who can terrorize people not liked by the regime and can get away with it by shifting the blame to regular branches of government such as the police force.

The police in Pakistan do not have a good reputation so it is easy for General Pervez Musharraf and his Gestapo-like intelligence services to maintain deniability of their involvement in attacks that might cause a backlash as was the case with the manhandling of Justice Chaudhry and the ransacking of Geo television’s studios.

In addition to the two events, there were also reports of intelligence agency personnel dressed as lawyers trying to join lawyers’ protests. These people could have acted as agents provocateurs attempting to discredit the lawyers’ anti-Musharraf campaign or disrupt the protests. But some of them were identified by lawyers who forced them to run off without carrying out their disruptive mission.

Emergence of information about a covert organization that performs more than the usual spying, arm-twisting and blackmailing functions associated with Pakistan’s intelligence agencies confirms that Pakistan is now a full-fledged ‘Mukhabarat State.’ For those who are not familiar with the term, ‘Mukhabarat State’ describes Middle Eastern countries where a U.S.-backed head of state (such as Hosni Mubarak of Egypt) rules with the help of an expansive secret police that manipulates and control every aspect of civilian life.

At the tribunal of inquiry into the manhandling of the Chief Justice, Police Inspector Rukhsar Mehdi was shown a picture published in a section of the press in which the chief justice was surrounded by a number of police officers and a person whose face was not visible grabbing the chief justice by the hair, he said picture was genuine but he could not recognize the man whose hand pulled the Chief Justice’s hair.

When the tribunal head Justice Afzal asked him to recognize a police inspector in the pictures, the SHO said the man-in-uniform was a stranger and not an officer of the Islamabad police. "I have spent years in the capital police but I have never seen this man before," he was reported as saying.