Arrest of CIA Agent Sheds Light on American Covert War in Pakistan, Straining U.S.-Pakistani Relations

Find the Amy Goodman interview with the Correspondent reporting from Pakistan

U.S. officials have (finally) admitted clearly that an American detained in Pakistan for the murder of two men was a CIA agent and a former employee of the private security firm Blackwater, now called Xe Services.

Declan Walsh has been reporting from Pakistan and Afghanistan and is the author of the new book, Insh’Allah Nation: The Crisis of Modern Pakistan.

Find this article on Huffingtonpost here where comments and tweets are starting to come in - including this one "Raymond Davis may be the Eugene Hasenfus of the war in Afghanista­n. Just the tip of the iceberg. Hasenfus' crash and detainment blew the lid off the Iran-Contr­a affair." See also at this site other related articles including one from The New York Times.

Text: U.S. officials have admitted an American detained in Pakistan for the murder of two men was a CIA agent and a former employee of the private security firm Blackwater, now called Xe Services. Up until Monday, the Obama administration had insisted Raymond Davis was a diplomat who had acted in self-defense. The arrest of Davis has soured relations between the United States and Pakistan and revealed a web of covert U.S. operations inside the country, part of a secret war run by the C.I.A. The Guardian of London first reported Davis’s CIA link on Sunday and noted that many U.S. news outlets knew about his connection to the CIA but did not report on it at the request of U.S. officials. We speak with Declan Walsh, the Pakistan correspondent for The Guardian, who first broke the story. [includes rush transcript]

Find the original posting link to Democracy Now! (with a three part transcript of interview and audio available here

Find this article also featured on Huffingtonpost here

December 02, 2010, Jeremy Scahill (author of -Blackwater-) shared the following with Democracy Now!: WikiLeaks Cables Confirm Secret U.S. War Ops in Pakistan

Despite sustained denials by the Pentagon, the leaked cables from WikiLeaks confirm that U.S. military special operations forces have been secretly working with the Pakistani military to conduct offensive operations and coordinate drone strikes in the areas near the Afghan border. A U.S. embassy cable from October of 2009 states: "These deployments are highly politically sensitive because of widely-held concerns among the public about Pakistani sovereignty and opposition to allowing foreign military forces to operate in any fashion on Pakistani soil.” The cables confirm aspects of a story about the covert U.S. war in Pakistan published in The Nation magazine last year by investigative journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent Jeremy Scahill.

Find this earlier item from Scahill here

Declan Walsh | guardian.co.uk
Declan Walsh is the Guardian's foreign correspondent for Pakistan and Afghanistan.
www.guardian.co.uk/profile/declanwalsh

Declan Walsh (declanwalsh) is on Twitter. Sign up for Twitter to follow Declan Walsh (declanwalsh) and get their latest updates.
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Find a progression of items from Pakistan, World and US news on this Raymond Davis case here at oneheartforpeace blogsite and on the blogsite nomorecrusades as well.