A heavy finger on the scale
Pakistani chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry was trying to find people whom the dictator had tortured or disappeared without trial. Some were terrorism suspects fingered by the U.S., guilty and innocent alike; others were political prisoners whom Musharraf disliked.
For Chaudhry’s trouble, he was illegally deposed by the dictator and placed under house arrest. This helped trigger a constitutional showdown where white collar lawyers have been courageously standing up to tear gas and lathi charges.
Today the NYT tells us that Dubya and Cheney are trying to keep Chaudhry out:
[Zardari] was… under pressure… from the United States and Britain not to agree to the reinstatement as chief justice of Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who has been criticized by diplomats for being unpredictable on matters of terrorism. [Link]
Translation: Chaudhry was unwilling to play the patsy and lock suspects away without trial. And Dubya-Cheney want to keep Pakistan’s white knight of democracy and the rule of law out of power. They’re playing J. Edgar Hoover to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Pinochet to Chaudhry’s desaparecidos.
This tag-team of moral midgets remind me of Nixon, and even further back of George III. They’ve inverted what the flag stands for. They piss on America’s tradition of freedom, turning it into just one more banana republic. They’re doing it right now, right in front of our eyes. And they won re-election in ‘04.
Disgusting.
on Monday, March 10th, 2008, 4:59 am in Pakistan, Politics › 
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Yes yes, appalling &c. In the same vein as Bill Maher saying the country’s in fuck-up fatigue from these interminable years, my sense of outrage has been hypertensive as well. I’m maxed out.
More curiously, Manish: when the hell do you sleep?
That photo is frickin’ amazing. If I ran a law school, I’d use this recent slew of Pakistani lawyer action shots to recruit - these guys look like superheroes.
It’s time we all woke up to the fact that when politicians discuss “freedom”, they include the “freedom” to micromanage any other country in the name of American interests. Don’t expect much to change if the donkeys take office. They’ll just (hopefully) be more stealthy about it.
That guy looks like he is about to dash into a phone booth and don an underwear over his suit. The NY Times photos on this current disaster in Pakistan have been awesome. There was also a brilliant one of a totally distraught and shattered-looking man in the aftermath of the Benazir assassination.
I think President George should listen to this George’s inner voice.
I’m not so sure about these lawyers. Seems to me that they bring up constitutionality, which never seemed to a be a matter of great concern in Pakistan pre WoT, out of spite rather than out of ideological commitment. They find their “kofte’s” at a time when foreign pressure is forcing Mush to transgress against the “rights” of the hirsute alpine rageaholics