IndiaUS wanted Raymond Davis out of Pakistan to gun down Osama Bin...

US wanted Raymond Davis out of Pakistan to gun down Osama Bin Laden

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Raymond Allen Davis was a contractor with the CIA. He was arrested after he shot two men in Lahore on January 27 2011. On March 16, 2011, Davis was released after the families of the two killed men were paid $2.4 million as blood money. Judges then acquitted him on all charges and Davis immediately returned to the United States.

David has penned his memoir titled, “The Cont­ractor: How I Landed in a Pakistani Prison and Ignited a Diplomatic Crisis.” He details his experience in the most interesting fashion.

He speaks about the role that former CIA director Leon Panetta and ISI's former director-general, Ahmed Shuja Pasha, allegedly played in securing his release.

“No two characters in this unfolding drama worked farther below the waterline than … Panetta and … Pasha,” Dawid wrote.

He says that Panetta was a long time Washington insider. However the decision by Obama to appoint him as the CIA director in 2009 came as a bit of surprise since he had very little experience in the military and intelligence communities.

General Pasha on the other hand was Panetta's opposite. He began serving in the Pakistan army in 1974 and climbed his way up the military ladder, he writes.

Davis writes that relations between the CIA and ISI were already tense and ‘my situation escalated it to an even higher level'.

He later found that shortly before former Secretary of State John Kerry's February 15, 2011, visit to Pakistan, Gen Pasha had flown to Washington and asked Panetta “point-blank if I worked [for] the CIA. Panetta responded that I didn't and that the State Department, not the CIA, was handling the matter.”

“Gen Pasha was angered by Panetta's response and grew even more so when Ambassador Munter, after clearing it with officials from the White House and State Department, explained to him 2011 the exact nature of my job.”

“Pasha understood how important it was – for both sides – to get me out of Pakistan as soon as possible, but like his country's president and prime minister, he was happy to let me remain in jail until an acceptable solution to this increasingly vexing problem could be found.”

Working on the problem from the opposite side of the table, Panetta “sat down with Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, on February 21, 2011, and asked for his assistance in getting me out of jail. Haqqani was largely viewed as being pro-American, but in this instance he was not so accommodating.”

Two days after this meeting, the top military brass for both the countries met at a luxury beach resort in Oman. The top-secret meeting had been scheduled months before Davis' arrest to discuss the war in Afghanistan. But his arrest consumed a large partition of it. “Both sides left saying all the right things.”

On March 16, 2011, which was his 49th day in incarceration, Davis appeared before a makeshift courtroom inside Lahore's Kot Lakhpat Jail, not knowing that this would be his last appearance.

“I imagine that at least one of his (Gen Pasha's) texts described the entrance of a man in a suit, whom I recognised but whose name I could not recall,” he writes.

“As soon as this man entered the courtroom, the room went silent. No one spoke a word. If a cell phone rang, the person to whom it belonged got up and walked outside to answer it. The only thing you could hear was the ceiling fan.”

Davis asked a US embassy official who this man was who identified him as an ISI colonel and said: “He's a fixer.”

“What's that mean,” Davis asked.

“Let me put it this way. It's either really good that he's here or really bad,” the embassy official said. “Well,” I said, grinning at the official, “let's hope for option number one.”
It was during this session that the court decided to apply the Sharia law, instead of the penal code.

“What's going on here Carmela,” Davis asked another embassy official.

“They've switched to Sharia law, Ray,” she replied.

“I can't believe they can get away with this. I'm toast, right? They're going to drag me into this prison's courtyard and stone me to death,” Davis said.

“No, Ray. That's qisas. Sharia law also allows for diyat, which the families of the victims have agreed to accept,” Carmela said.

“I could hear words coming out of her, but they made no sense to me, Qisas? Diyat? Huh?” he writes.

“Qisas basically means ‘en ye for an eye,” Carmela explained and Davis gulped as he assumed this would be his fate.

“Carmela must have seen that fear in my eyes because she hurriedly continued: ‘There's also diyat, known as blood money. In this case, compensation gets paid to the victim or the victim's heirs, and the accused goes free.”

This plan had been made several weeks before his final appearance in the court, originated perhaps in a meeting between Secretary Kerry and Ambassador Haqqani four weeks earlier. He also refers to another report, which says that this plan was devised during a meeting between Gen Pasha and Ambassador Munter.

“The Pakistani military was also rumoured to have had a hand in it. So, too, President Zardari and Nawaz Sharif.”

“As soon as I saw the gun's muzzle moving in my direction, I unclicked my seatbelt and started to draw the gun.” The two men on the motorcycle who pulled in front of him at Lahore's Muzang Chowk could not have known how fast he was at drawing his weapon.

“My fastest time – including lifting my shirt, drawing my gun, aiming it and firing – was .95 of a second, while my average was 1.1 second. That's about as long as it takes a hummingbird to flap its wings fifty times or a plane to travel 800 feet.”

Davis used a brand new Glock17 gun, issued to him on his arrival in Lahore. He had received other things, including a camera, phone and Motorola two-way radio, from the CIA contractor he replaced.

“I had left the house that morning with 17 rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber, and while defending myself at Muzang Chowk, I squeezed off 10 as I aimed for the two men on the motorcycle.

“And in a matter of two or three seconds, the entire engagement, from the moment I saw the threat to the moment it had been eliminated, was over.”

Claiming that he had never killed a man before, Davis writes: “Thankfully, all 10 rounds I fired found their intended targets.”

In the final chapter he says that that “ISI … orchestrated his exit. Several guards led me out of the courtroom through a back entrance. … One of the men opened the door, stepped out into a courtyard, and scanned the horizon … once he'd cleared the area, I was waved through door and directed to the SUV idling in the courtyard.”

In the SUV, he met Dale Rush, a doctor from the US Embassy, and a Pakistani man who introduced himself as a colonel. The driver was also from the US Embassy.

The SUV drove him to an airport where a dual-engine Cessna was waiting for him at the runway, with its engine running, and all set to take off.

Davis says that (then) US ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, also was in the plane that flew him to Kabul because ‘with the ambassador onboard the plane, the Pakistanis would not dare mess around with by denying it clearance to take off'.

Davis claims that the US administration wanted to bring him out of Pakistan because it had plans to take out Osama bin Laden and knew that it would be impossible to get him out once that operation was carried out.

“The reason for the US government to get me out sooner rather than later was growing increasingly urgent, and the reason was even more secretive than the efforts to get him out,” he writes.

OneIndia News

Northlines
Northlines
The Northlines is an independent source on the Web for news, facts and figures relating to Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh and its neighbourhood.

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