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Car bomb almost goes off in NYC

Loser lost his job, got angry, some mullah brainwashed him in US, send him to Pak, he saw a video on lighting up a firecracker, didn't work, got arrested. He got F'ed and we got F'ed.

Buying firecrakers: $20
Buying used Pick up Truck: $2100
Buying ticket to Dubai: £1300

Embarrassing the whole country and its citizens: Priceless.


As u says that may be the case.

When it happen in New York, USA you say embarrassing the whole country and citizens.

But when the same happen in Mumbai, India (26/11 kasab) you don't feel embarrassed.

Why is it so???????
 
the sad part of this whole issue is how now all south Asian's will be looked at with suspicion. Try to cross the US border right now and im sure you will know what im talking about.
 
As u says that may be the case.

When it happen in New York, USA you say embarrassing the whole country and citizens.

But when the same happen in Mumbai, India (26/11 kasab) you don't feel embarrassed.

Why is it so???????

What happened in mumbai was even more embarasing, atleast this will be non news in a months time, just like the nigerian guy.

And who said we did not feel embarrased when mumbai happened, you are putting words into my mouth that I did not even utter in the first place. Great going, just use a normal post to turn it around into a sort of baseless accusation.
 
Fareed Zakaria, an Indian who claims to be Muslim, yet has not realised there is no such thing as "Islamic Terrorism." He still believes that the Government of Pakistan would have a hand in funding of the Pakistani Taliban and various other groups, despite Pakistan's proven will to knock them out. He suffers from the Indian paranoia that Pakistan's military is using the militants as an asset to fight India. "Islamic Jihadi's" is the term he used to describe Pakistan's use of Jihadi's against India in the 1965. Was there anything wrong with that? No, obviously just fulfilling the American fear of the term "Jihadi" and associating it with terrorism.

Pakistan is 'epicenter of Islamic terrorism'

Editor's note: Fareed Zakaria is an author and foreign affairs analyst who hosts "Fareed Zakaria GPS" on CNN U.S. on Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET and CNN International at 2 and 10 p.m. Central European Time / 5 p.m. Abu Dhabi / 9 p.m. Hong Kong.

New York (CNN) -- The suspect in the Times Square bombing attempt was caught as he was seeking to flee to Pakistan, a nation that analyst Fareed Zakaria calls the "epicenter of Islamic terrorism."

"It's worth noting that even the terrorism that's often attributed to the war in Afghanistan tends to come out of Pakistan, to be planned by Pakistanis, to be funded from Pakistan or in some other way to be traced to Pakistan," said Zakaria. He added that Pakistan's connection with terrorist groups goes back decades and has often been encouraged by that nation's military for strategic reasons.

Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old naturalized citizen of Pakistani descent, had recently been trained in bomb making in Pakistan's Waziristan province, according to a federal complaint filed in court Tuesday. CNN reported Tuesday that Faisal Shahzad's father is a retired vice-marshal in the Pakistani Air Force.

Shahzad was arrested around 11:45 p.m. ET Monday at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport just before he was to fly to Islamabad, Pakistan, by way of Dubai.

Zakaria, author and host of CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS," spoke to CNN on Tuesday. Here is an edited transcript:

CNN: Based on what we know so far, what lessons can be learned from this incident?

Fareed Zakaria: This does not seem to be part of a larger and more organized effort to penetrate the United States. That doesn't mean such efforts are not under way....it does make you realize just how open we are as a country and how open we are as a society. There is always a level of vulnerability that comes from being an open society and this guy, Mr. Shahzad obviously took advantage of that openness.

CNN: Apparently he traveled to Pakistan on a number of occasions. Does that signal that Pakistan isn't vigilant enough about terrorism?

Zakaria: Well it certainly signals something that we have known for a while, which is that Pakistan is the epicenter of Islamic terrorism. ... The British government has estimated that something like 80 percent of the terror threats that they receive have a Pakistani connection.

So there's no question that Pakistan has a terrorism problem. It has radical groups within the country that have the ability to recruit people and have access to resources that makes for a very combustible mixture.

It should remind us that even when looking at the war in Afghanistan, ultimately the most important place where jihadis are being trained and recruited is not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan. And there's no other part of the world where you have quite the same concentration of manpower, resources and ideology all feeding on each other.

CNN: What feeds the ideology that drives the terror effort?

Zakaria: Pakistan has been conducive to this kind of jihadis for a number of reasons. For the last three or four decades, the Pakistani government, the Pakistani military has supported, funded many of these groups in a bid to maintain influence in Afghanistan, in a bid to maintain an asymmetrical capacity against India -- in other words, to try to destabilize India rather cheaply through these militant groups rather than frontally through its army.

So it has found it useful to have these militant groups and to support them. It has always assumed that these groups will not attack Pakistanis and therefore was not a threat to Pakistan itself. And to a large extent that's true, these groups by and large have attacked people in Afghanistan, India, in the West but not in Pakistan. But that is changing, because these groups are so intermingled and often sufficiently ideological, and also because the Pakistani military is beginning to take them on.

But fundamentally the reason this has gone on is that there has been a policy of the Pakistani state and particularly the Pakistani military, to encourage these groups, to fund them, to ignore their most pernicious activities. And some of it goes back even further than four decades. In the 1965 war against India, the Pakistanis used Islamic jihadis...

And the great hope now is that finally the Pakistani government is getting serious about this. Frankly it remains a hope.

CNN: Why do you say that it's only a hope?

Zakaria: Over the last few years, it appears that the Pakistani government has begun to understand that these groups all meld together, that they are a threat to a stable and viable modern Pakistani state. But when I talk about the Pakistani government you have to realize that there are different elements in it.

The Pakistani civilian government really does understand the danger that Islamic terrorism poses to Pakistan, but the civilian government in Pakistan appears quite powerless. Most power lies with the military.

The military in Pakistan has a somewhat more complex attitude. It does believe that these militants have gone too far. It does believe that it has to take on the militants. And it has actually battled them quite bravely over the last few years.

CNN: So what's the reason for thinking the military supports militant groups?

Zakaria: It still holds within it the view that at the end of the day, the United States will leave the region and that they will have to live in a neighborhood which will have a very powerful India and an Afghanistan that is potentially a client state of India's -- and that in order to combat this Indian domination, they need to maintain their asymmetrical capabilities, their militant groups.

It is interesting to note that Ahmed Rashid, who may be the most respected Pakistani journalist, has reported on the way in which Pakistani government has thwarted and put obstacles in the way of any kind of talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban.

The message it has sent to the Afghan government is very clear. If you want to have any negotiations with the Taliban, you have to understand that since we are the critical intermediary -- since the Taliban leadership all lives in Pakistan -- the Pakistani military's terms to the Afghan government are, we want you to push back on Indian influence in Afghanistan, we want you to shut down Indian consulates in various Afghan cities.

In other words, the Pakistani government is still obsessed with the idea of an Indian domination of the region, and they're using their influence with the Taliban to try to counter Indian influence. This is the old game that the Pakistanis have played.

That's what makes me skeptical that there's been a true strategic revolution in Pakistan... There are still people who believe that there are good terrorists and bad terrorists, and some you can work with to further Pakistan's goals.

CNN: In the attempted car bombing in Times Square and the Christmas Day attempted bombing, you have two failed plots that don't appear to be highly sophisticated. Does that tell us anything about the terror groups?

Zakaria: At some level, that tells you about the weakness of the terror groups. You do not have highly organized terrorist groups with great resources and capacity that are able to plan spectacular acts of terrorism the way they were in the 1990s and on 9/11.

What you have now are more isolated, disorganized lone rangers and while they're obviously very worrying and one has to be extremely vigilant, it is also at some level a sign of the weakness of an organization like al Qaeda that it is not able to do the kind of terrorist attacks it used to.

To be sure, it's important to be very vigilant and make sure you have groups like al Qaeda on the run. But I don't know that in a free society, you will ever be able to prevent an individual with no background in terrorism who's broken no laws and is radicalized from attempting to make some kind of trouble.
 
Last edited:
Fareed Zakaria, an Indian who claims to be Muslim, yet has not realised there is no such thing as "Islamic Terrorism." He still believes that the Government of Pakistan would have a hand in funding of the Pakistani Taliban and various other groups, despite Pakistan's proven will to knock them out. He suffers from the Indian paranoia that Pakistan's military is using the militants as an asset to fight India. "Islamic Jihadi's" is the term he used to describe Pakistan's use of Jihadi's against India in the 1965. Was there anything wrong with that? No, obviously just fulfilling the American fear of the term "Jihadi" and associating it with terrorism.

Pakistan is 'epicenter of Islamic terrorism'

Editor's note: Fareed Zakaria is an author and foreign affairs analyst who hosts "Fareed Zakaria GPS" on CNN U.S. on Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET and CNN International at 2 and 10 p.m. Central European Time / 5 p.m. Abu Dhabi / 9 p.m. Hong Kong.

New York (CNN) -- The suspect in the Times Square bombing attempt was caught as he was seeking to flee to Pakistan, a nation that analyst Fareed Zakaria calls the "epicenter of Islamic terrorism."

"It's worth noting that even the terrorism that's often attributed to the war in Afghanistan tends to come out of Pakistan, to be planned by Pakistanis, to be funded from Pakistan or in some other way to be traced to Pakistan," said Zakaria. He added that Pakistan's connection with terrorist groups goes back decades and has often been encouraged by that nation's military for strategic reasons.

Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old naturalized citizen of Pakistani descent, had recently been trained in bomb making in Pakistan's Waziristan province, according to a federal complaint filed in court Tuesday. CNN reported Tuesday that Faisal Shahzad's father is a retired vice-marshal in the Pakistani Air Force.

Shahzad was arrested around 11:45 p.m. ET Monday at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport just before he was to fly to Islamabad, Pakistan, by way of Dubai.

Zakaria, author and host of CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS," spoke to CNN on Tuesday. Here is an edited transcript:

CNN: Based on what we know so far, what lessons can be learned from this incident?

Fareed Zakaria: This does not seem to be part of a larger and more organized effort to penetrate the United States. That doesn't mean such efforts are not under way....it does make you realize just how open we are as a country and how open we are as a society. There is always a level of vulnerability that comes from being an open society and this guy, Mr. Shahzad obviously took advantage of that openness.

CNN: Apparently he traveled to Pakistan on a number of occasions. Does that signal that Pakistan isn't vigilant enough about terrorism?

Zakaria: Well it certainly signals something that we have known for a while, which is that Pakistan is the epicenter of Islamic terrorism. ... The British government has estimated that something like 80 percent of the terror threats that they receive have a Pakistani connection.

So there's no question that Pakistan has a terrorism problem. It has radical groups within the country that have the ability to recruit people and have access to resources that makes for a very combustible mixture.

It should remind us that even when looking at the war in Afghanistan, ultimately the most important place where jihadis are being trained and recruited is not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan. And there's no other part of the world where you have quite the same concentration of manpower, resources and ideology all feeding on each other.

CNN: What feeds the ideology that drives the terror effort?

Zakaria: Pakistan has been conducive to this kind of jihadis for a number of reasons. For the last three or four decades, the Pakistani government, the Pakistani military has supported, funded many of these groups in a bid to maintain influence in Afghanistan, in a bid to maintain an asymmetrical capacity against India -- in other words, to try to destabilize India rather cheaply through these militant groups rather than frontally through its army.

So it has found it useful to have these militant groups and to support them. It has always assumed that these groups will not attack Pakistanis and therefore was not a threat to Pakistan itself. And to a large extent that's true, these groups by and large have attacked people in Afghanistan, India, in the West but not in Pakistan. But that is changing, because these groups are so intermingled and often sufficiently ideological, and also because the Pakistani military is beginning to take them on.

But fundamentally the reason this has gone on is that there has been a policy of the Pakistani state and particularly the Pakistani military, to encourage these groups, to fund them, to ignore their most pernicious activities. And some of it goes back even further than four decades. In the 1965 war against India, the Pakistanis used Islamic jihadis...


And the great hope now is that finally the Pakistani government is getting serious about this. Frankly it remains a hope.

CNN: Why do you say that it's only a hope?

Zakaria: Over the last few years, it appears that the Pakistani government has begun to understand that these groups all meld together, that they are a threat to a stable and viable modern Pakistani state. But when I talk about the Pakistani government you have to realize that there are different elements in it.

The Pakistani civilian government really does understand the danger that Islamic terrorism poses to Pakistan, but the civilian government in Pakistan appears quite powerless. Most power lies with the military.

The military in Pakistan has a somewhat more complex attitude. It does believe that these militants have gone too far. It does believe that it has to take on the militants. And it has actually battled them quite bravely over the last few years.


CNN: So what's the reason for thinking the military supports militant groups?

Zakaria: It still holds within it the view that at the end of the day, the United States will leave the region and that they will have to live in a neighborhood which will have a very powerful India and an Afghanistan that is potentially a client state of India's -- and that in order to combat this Indian domination, they need to maintain their asymmetrical capabilities, their militant groups.

It is interesting to note that Ahmed Rashid, who may be the most respected Pakistani journalist, has reported on the way in which Pakistani government has thwarted and put obstacles in the way of any kind of talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban.

The message it has sent to the Afghan government is very clear. If you want to have any negotiations with the Taliban, you have to understand that since we are the critical intermediary -- since the Taliban leadership all lives in Pakistan -- the Pakistani military's terms to the Afghan government are, we want you to push back on Indian influence in Afghanistan, we want you to shut down Indian consulates in various Afghan cities.

In other words, the Pakistani government is still obsessed with the idea of an Indian domination of the region, and they're using their influence with the Taliban to try to counter Indian influence. This is the old game that the Pakistanis have played.


That's what makes me skeptical that there's been a true strategic revolution in Pakistan... There are still people who believe that there are good terrorists and bad terrorists, and some you can work with to further Pakistan's goals.

CNN: In the attempted car bombing in Times Square and the Christmas Day attempted bombing, you have two failed plots that don't appear to be highly sophisticated. Does that tell us anything about the terror groups?

Zakaria: At some level, that tells you about the weakness of the terror groups. You do not have highly organized terrorist groups with great resources and capacity that are able to plan spectacular acts of terrorism the way they were in the 1990s and on 9/11.

What you have now are more isolated, disorganized lone rangers and while they're obviously very worrying and one has to be extremely vigilant, it is also at some level a sign of the weakness of an organization like al Qaeda that it is not able to do the kind of terrorist attacks it used to.

To be sure, it's important to be very vigilant and make sure you have groups like al Qaeda on the run. But I don't know that in a free society, you will ever be able to prevent an individual with no background in terrorism who's broken no laws and is radicalized from attempting to make some kind of trouble.

he have highlighted many things
 
Faisal Shahzad Quit Job

For almost a decade, Faisal Shahzad's life in Connecticut was mundane. He earned a business degree from the University of Bridgeport, started a family and bought a three-bedroom home in the suburbs.

Neighbors along Long Hill Avenue in Shelton, where Shahzad bought the house in July 2004, said he and his wife, Huma Mian, who had two children, kept mostly to themselves. They said that Shahzad often left in the mornings wearing a suit and tie, and that Mian often walked their baby down the street.

They rarely did any yardwork and didn't live in the house for long before they started holding tag sales and telling people they were moving to Missouri. They left in July 2009.

"I thought: 'OK, they're not into it,'" said Donna Achille, who lives across the street. "It's just odd. I cannot believe how well they blended in."

On Tuesday, Shahzad, 30, was charged with terrorism and attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction on American soil.

The man that neighbors said they'd occasionally see jogging at night wearing black has admitted to authorities that he received bomb-making training in Pakistan, his homeland. He also has admitted trying to put that training to use in New York City on Saturday night, filling a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder he had bought on craigslist with fireworks, propane tanks and cans of gasoline and trying to set off an explosion in Times Square.

While Shahzad was being questioned by investigators, law enforcement officials from the FBI and from the Bridgeport and New York City police departments combed through an apartment on Sheridan Street in Bridgeport that is believed to be his last U.S. address. Forensic investigators removed a box of fireworks and two bags of fertilizer found in the garage.

A law enforcement source said that Shahzad was armed during the period between the aborted bombing attempt in Times Square and his arrest Monday, shortly before midnight, at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, where he was apprehended aboard a flight that was about to take off for Dubai. The Los Angeles Times, citing an FBI source, reported that Shahzad left two handguns in the car he drove to the airport.

College Graduate
Shahzad, who became a U.S. citizen in April 2009, was never in trouble with the law — not even a speeding ticket. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, citing Shahzad's privacy rights as a U.S citizen, would not disclose records associated with his naturalization application.

He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Bridgeport, finishing his MBA in 2005. He had transferred to Bridgeport from Southeastern University in Washington, D.C.

University of Bridgeport Provost Michael Spitzer said school officials have notified federal authorities of Shahzad's attendance.

"The university abhors acts of violence and terrorism," Spitzer said in a statement. "We work to combat racial and ethnic prejudices and animosity, and believe that education in an international context is the key to understanding the values and beliefs of people from other cultures."

Shahzad took a job in June 2006 crunching internal financial numbers for Affinion Group in Norwalk, a $1.5-billion-a-year global marketing company.

"He was very entry-level," said James Hart, a company spokesman. "He was in our financial organization, which does what any financial organization does — it takes a look at the business results. It analyzes them with respect to what the budget was, what the forecast was."

Hart said that Shahzad worked with raw data and did not interact with clients or see personal or proprietary information. Shahzad left the company voluntarily in June 2009 — about the same time he stopped making payments on his mortgage.


Hart said that Affinion, which has since moved its main offices to Stamford, was not the sponsoring company for Shahzad's work visa.

"We just did the verification that he had all the proper documentation — a permanent resident card and that he was authorized to work here," Hart said. "But he came to us with that already. So there's got to be somebody else out there who had employed him who had provided that."

Hart said there was nothing extraordinary about Shahzad's three years with the firm.

"He was working on kind of the nuts and bolts, the tactical stuff. Unglamorous, I would go so far as to say," Hart said. "So he was just coming in and doing his job and leaving."

'Below The Radar'
In 2000, public records show, Shahzad was living at an address in Bridgeport. His Social Security number indicates that it was issued in Connecticut between 1998 and 2001, when Shahzad would have been in his late teens or early 20s.

He bought the three-bedroom house at 119 Long Hill Ave. in Shelton in July 2004 from J&D Country Builders for $273,000, paying more than $50,000 in cash and financing the rest with a mortgage from Chase Manhattan bank, records show. Three years later, he granted an interest in the property to Mian.

Achille, the neighbor, said she never knew the couple very well. But she had no reason to be suspicious, she said; they seemed like any family from a foreign country trying to make a new life in America.

"They were just really below the radar," she said.

The wife wore traditional clothes from the Middle East that covered much of her body, but not her face, Achille said. She would walk a baby girl up and down the street, she said.

The man wore American clothes and came and went like any working dad, she said.

Next-door neighbor Brenda Thurman said that her 10-year-old daughter Asia would play with Shahzad's 4-year-old daughter, and that she was friendly with the family. Thurman said the couple also had a son, born in Pakistan in 2008.

When Thurman and Shahzad's daughter played, she didn't say much to Shahzad's wife. Mian indicated that she didn't speak English and the two would communicate by hand signals or through Shahzad. After Shahzad left, about a month before the family disappeared last July, Thurman said she learned that Shahzad's wife spoke English well.

After Shahzad left early last summer, Mian began to sell off the family's possessions. She sold items through craigslist, Thurman said, and held two tag sales.

About that time, Mian gave Thurman's daughter a box full of bracelets that she said had come from their native Pakistan. Asia wore the bracelets and liked them, but Thurman said she is troubled by their source.

"She won't wear them anymore," Thurman said. "I won't let her."

In the backyard of Shahzad's house Tuesday afternoon, rain-soaked bills and personal records were strewn about, and yard equipment stood unused.

Financial Woes
Neighbors said the family hasn't lived in the Shelton house for months, even though they still are the owners of record.

Chase filed a foreclosure suit on Sept. 13, 2009, after Shahzad missed four mortgage payments dating to June 2009. The suit said that Shahzad owed just over $200,000. With late charges and interest, the bank said last week that Shahzad owed a total of more than $212,000.

Shahzad was trying to sell the house himself, listing it on House Boom, a website on which people can list their homes for free. The ad lists the house at $299,000 and says the price has been reduced. It gives the reason for selling as "moving to another state."

Neither Shahzad nor Mian responded to the foreclosure lawsuit.

In January 2009, Shahzad took out a $65,000 second mortgage with Wachovia Bank. The status of that mortgage is unknown, but Wachovia has no actions against Shahzad in state court and did not file an appearance in the Chase foreclosure.

The foreclosure case is pending at Superior Court in Milford.

There are no records showing the family ever moved to Missouri. Authorities have said that Shahzad returned to Pakistan in July 2009 and came back to the United States three weeks later.

Shahzad's last trip to Pakistan was in February 2010. When he returned he was stopped by airport security. He told them he had been visiting his parents in Pakistan for five months and was returning to Connecticut, where he planned to stay in a hotel and look for a job. He told the authorities his wife had stayed behind in Pakistan.

Instead of a hotel, Shahzad moved into the three-story home on Sheriden Street in Bridgeport, sharing it with a roommate, authorities said.


Times Square Bomb Scare Suspect Faisal Shahzad's Connecticut Life Uneventful Until Recently - Courant.com
 
Huma Mian lived in Colorado

The wife of Faisal Shahzad graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a 4-year accounting degree in 2004. Shahzad is suspected of orchestrating a failed car bombing of Times Square in New York City last week.

Faisal’s wife, Huma A. Mian, lived in Colorado most recently with her family in Aurora. Huma’s father, Mohammad Asif Mian, lived in Aurora’s Deer Pointe neighborhood near Buckley Air Force Base until a few years ago. Huma reportedly lived in family housing with her two sisters during her last two years at CU.

While Huma Mian is not suspected of assisting her husband in the failed bombing attempt, FBI spokesman Dave Joly said, “It appears she isn’t even in the country.” Joly did not say whether Mian was being sought for questioning as part of the case against her husband. Mian’s last recorded address is the home owned by Shahzad in Connecticut.

Wife of Times Square car bomb suspect attended CU
 
How is it that you people can still stand up for a person who has been charged with planting a bomb?? He planted a bomb that fortunately didn't go off. How many lives would this man have ended had it been successful. It is understandable that men do stupid things when they lose jobs such as that American who crashed his aircraft into his former office, but a bomb?

Surely, there cannot be any justification to this! Even after all the bombings going on in your country, you still pass him off as "a victim of American bias against Islam". How can such conspiracy theories keep coming into the minds of members who vehemently defend such acts?
 
It is understandable that men do stupid things when they lose jobs such as that American who crashed his aircraft into his former office, but a bomb?

He didn't lose his job. He quit. He began to undo his American life, voluntarily, two months after being granted citizenship. He was/is not a victim of the American economy!!!!
 
He didn't lose his job. He quit. He began to undo his American life, voluntarily, two months after being granted citizenship. He was/is not a victim of the American economy!!!!

I am assuming that he might have had some family problems or perhaps getting fed up of his life becuase of some weird problem.

Much like that nigerian kid who was tempted by women but was too shy and his religion did not allow it, he wrote such things on some website. From there the London mullahs got him and there he goes.
 
Indian-American Bharara to lead prosecution of Faisal Shahzad

New York: India-born US Federal Attorney Preet Bharara, spearheading the prosecution of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, now has another high-profile terrorism case in his hands -- the Times Square bombing plot involving Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad.



A house where Faisal Shahzad lived in the second floor apartment, center, in Bridgeport, Conn., is shown. AP

The job of delivering a conviction on 30-year-old Shahzad will fall on Harvard and Columbia-educated 'legal eagle' Bharara, who is one of the 93 US Attorneys appointed by the US President Barack Obama in May 2009.

Following Shahzad's dramatic arrest over the botched Times Square bombing plot on Saturday last, 41-year-old Bharara said yesterday that "the dedicated agents, detectives, and prosecutors in this case will continue to follow every lead and use every tool to keep the people of New York City safe."

He also vowed that "we will not rest until every terrorist, whether homegrown or foreign-based, is neutralised and held to account."

Bharara heads the US Attorney's office for the Southern District in New York, which covers Manhattan, where the botched bombing took place, and John F Kennedy International Airport, where terror suspect Shahzad was arrested at the last minute as he attempted to flee the United States to Pakistan.

Under Bharara there are over 200 lawyers who handle some of America's most prominent cases, like trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the prosecution of Bernard L Madoff for his multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.

He is also currently handling the prosecution against the Galleon Group, one of America's largest insider trading scam where the defendants include Sri Lankan Raj Rajaratnam and Indian-Americans Anil Kumar and Rajiv Goel.

Previously an assistant attorney in the Southern District, Bharara made his name as the Senate staffer who helped drive Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez from office by uncovering and investigating the Bush Administration's firing of eight prosecutors for allegedly political purposes.

Bharara was born in Ferozepur, Punjab, and his parents immigrated to the United States in 1970 when he was an infant. He grew up in New Jersey and graduated from Harvard in 1990 and Columbia Law School in 1993.

"As a naturalised American citizen from India, Mr Bharara also brings a diversity of background to the post," the New York Times said after the US Senate confirmed him as the United States attorney in Manhattan.

His father, a Sikh, and his mother, who was Hindu, were born in what is now Pakistan, before the partition. His wife's father, a Muslim, had moved from the Indian side to Pakistan during partition.

Indian-American Bharara to lead prosecution of Faisal Shahzad - 1 -  International News ? News ? MSN India
 
Fareed Zakaria, an Indian who claims to be Muslim, yet has not realised there is no such thing as "Islamic Terrorism." He still believes that the Government of Pakistan would have a hand in funding of the Pakistani Taliban and various other groups, despite Pakistan's proven will to knock them out. He suffers from the Indian paranoia that Pakistan's military is using the militants as an asset to fight India. "Islamic Jihadi's" is the term he used to describe Pakistan's use of Jihadi's against India in the 1965. Was there anything wrong with that? No, obviously just fulfilling the American fear of the term "Jihadi" and associating it with terrorism.

Pakistan is 'epicenter of Islamic terrorism'

Editor's note: Fareed Zakaria is an author and foreign affairs analyst who hosts "Fareed Zakaria GPS" on CNN U.S. on Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET and CNN International at 2 and 10 p.m. Central European Time / 5 p.m. Abu Dhabi / 9 p.m. Hong Kong.

New York (CNN) -- The suspect in the Times Square bombing attempt was caught as he was seeking to flee to Pakistan, a nation that analyst Fareed Zakaria calls the "epicenter of Islamic terrorism."

"It's worth noting that even the terrorism that's often attributed to the war in Afghanistan tends to come out of Pakistan, to be planned by Pakistanis, to be funded from Pakistan or in some other way to be traced to Pakistan," said Zakaria. He added that Pakistan's connection with terrorist groups goes back decades and has often been encouraged by that nation's military for strategic reasons.

Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old naturalized citizen of Pakistani descent, had recently been trained in bomb making in Pakistan's Waziristan province, according to a federal complaint filed in court Tuesday. CNN reported Tuesday that Faisal Shahzad's father is a retired vice-marshal in the Pakistani Air Force.

Shahzad was arrested around 11:45 p.m. ET Monday at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport just before he was to fly to Islamabad, Pakistan, by way of Dubai.

Zakaria, author and host of CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS," spoke to CNN on Tuesday. Here is an edited transcript:

CNN: Based on what we know so far, what lessons can be learned from this incident?

Fareed Zakaria: This does not seem to be part of a larger and more organized effort to penetrate the United States. That doesn't mean such efforts are not under way....it does make you realize just how open we are as a country and how open we are as a society. There is always a level of vulnerability that comes from being an open society and this guy, Mr. Shahzad obviously took advantage of that openness.

CNN: Apparently he traveled to Pakistan on a number of occasions. Does that signal that Pakistan isn't vigilant enough about terrorism?

Zakaria: Well it certainly signals something that we have known for a while, which is that Pakistan is the epicenter of Islamic terrorism. ... The British government has estimated that something like 80 percent of the terror threats that they receive have a Pakistani connection.

So there's no question that Pakistan has a terrorism problem. It has radical groups within the country that have the ability to recruit people and have access to resources that makes for a very combustible mixture.

It should remind us that even when looking at the war in Afghanistan, ultimately the most important place where jihadis are being trained and recruited is not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan. And there's no other part of the world where you have quite the same concentration of manpower, resources and ideology all feeding on each other.

CNN: What feeds the ideology that drives the terror effort?

Zakaria: Pakistan has been conducive to this kind of jihadis for a number of reasons. For the last three or four decades, the Pakistani government, the Pakistani military has supported, funded many of these groups in a bid to maintain influence in Afghanistan, in a bid to maintain an asymmetrical capacity against India -- in other words, to try to destabilize India rather cheaply through these militant groups rather than frontally through its army.

So it has found it useful to have these militant groups and to support them. It has always assumed that these groups will not attack Pakistanis and therefore was not a threat to Pakistan itself. And to a large extent that's true, these groups by and large have attacked people in Afghanistan, India, in the West but not in Pakistan. But that is changing, because these groups are so intermingled and often sufficiently ideological, and also because the Pakistani military is beginning to take them on.

But fundamentally the reason this has gone on is that there has been a policy of the Pakistani state and particularly the Pakistani military, to encourage these groups, to fund them, to ignore their most pernicious activities. And some of it goes back even further than four decades. In the 1965 war against India, the Pakistanis used Islamic jihadis...

And the great hope now is that finally the Pakistani government is getting serious about this. Frankly it remains a hope.

CNN: Why do you say that it's only a hope?

Zakaria: Over the last few years, it appears that the Pakistani government has begun to understand that these groups all meld together, that they are a threat to a stable and viable modern Pakistani state. But when I talk about the Pakistani government you have to realize that there are different elements in it.

The Pakistani civilian government really does understand the danger that Islamic terrorism poses to Pakistan, but the civilian government in Pakistan appears quite powerless. Most power lies with the military.

The military in Pakistan has a somewhat more complex attitude. It does believe that these militants have gone too far. It does believe that it has to take on the militants. And it has actually battled them quite bravely over the last few years.

CNN: So what's the reason for thinking the military supports militant groups?

Zakaria: It still holds within it the view that at the end of the day, the United States will leave the region and that they will have to live in a neighborhood which will have a very powerful India and an Afghanistan that is potentially a client state of India's -- and that in order to combat this Indian domination, they need to maintain their asymmetrical capabilities, their militant groups.

It is interesting to note that Ahmed Rashid, who may be the most respected Pakistani journalist, has reported on the way in which Pakistani government has thwarted and put obstacles in the way of any kind of talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban.

The message it has sent to the Afghan government is very clear. If you want to have any negotiations with the Taliban, you have to understand that since we are the critical intermediary -- since the Taliban leadership all lives in Pakistan -- the Pakistani military's terms to the Afghan government are, we want you to push back on Indian influence in Afghanistan, we want you to shut down Indian consulates in various Afghan cities.

In other words, the Pakistani government is still obsessed with the idea of an Indian domination of the region, and they're using their influence with the Taliban to try to counter Indian influence. This is the old game that the Pakistanis have played.

That's what makes me skeptical that there's been a true strategic revolution in Pakistan... There are still people who believe that there are good terrorists and bad terrorists, and some you can work with to further Pakistan's goals.

CNN: In the attempted car bombing in Times Square and the Christmas Day attempted bombing, you have two failed plots that don't appear to be highly sophisticated. Does that tell us anything about the terror groups?

Zakaria: At some level, that tells you about the weakness of the terror groups. You do not have highly organized terrorist groups with great resources and capacity that are able to plan spectacular acts of terrorism the way they were in the 1990s and on 9/11.

What you have now are more isolated, disorganized lone rangers and while they're obviously very worrying and one has to be extremely vigilant, it is also at some level a sign of the weakness of an organization like al Qaeda that it is not able to do the kind of terrorist attacks it used to.

To be sure, it's important to be very vigilant and make sure you have groups like al Qaeda on the run. But I don't know that in a free society, you will ever be able to prevent an individual with no background in terrorism who's broken no laws and is radicalized from attempting to make some kind of trouble.

this guy is a rabid anti-pakistani fearmonger he's obsessed with pakistan like most other indian commentators muharraff shut him up good during their interview.He doesn't know the first thing about us or never been to the country he's not very credible when it comes to pakistan no pakistani should take him seriously.
 
The guy should be given lethal injection after of course proper investigation.
 
Well having a beard is not obligatory. Wearing Hijab for a woman is obligatory in Islam. I bet if you had pictures of those men's wives they would have some kind of cloth covering their hair atleast.

Take a look at the NYC bomber and his wife and child. If he was an extremist islamist fundamentalist he would make his wife wear hijab. He was definately a westernized Pakistani-American and so is his family. Looks like a normal average AMERICAN couple with their child.

By the way, the beard he has many young Pakistani guys have that and its not for religious reasons just a fashion thats very common among young Pakistani guys.


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This is the most ridiculous and outrageous explanation of a conspiracy theory.
:cheers:




P.S: Omar and you are an elite member of this forum!
 
can you goddam indians stop trolling and flaming....just ignore, and report posts if you have a problem!!!!

For God's sakes....


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back on topic








Fear Grips Pakistani-Americans​
WASHINGTON: A Pakistani-American girl, only 12, refused to go to school on Tuesday, saying she fears other students will ask her questions about the suspect held in New York for a failed attempt to bomb Times Square.

Another girl, 11, went to school when her mother persuaded her to but the mother had to go back to school during the lunch break to counsel her.

A 53-year old man throttled his laughter at a dinner in a Virginia restaurant as a US television channel identified the suspect as a Pakistani-American. “That’s it. We are cooked,” he remarked.

“Sad, very sad,” said Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistani ambassador to the US and Britain who is now working on a book in Washington. “It will hurt all Pakistanis, particularly those living in the United States.”

The Pakistani American Public Affairs Committee condemned the Times Square attempted bomb plot and appreciated the efforts of the US enforcement agencies for saving hundreds of lives.

“PAKPAC is shocked and saddened to learn that the prime suspect is of Pakistani heritage,” said a statement issued in Washington.

“This individual or any accomplice should be tried and punished under American judicial system. Whether this is an act of a lone individual or a group, it harms everyone and benefits no one.”

As a community, Pakistani-Americans have “zero tolerance for such acts as they damage and disrupt the way of life of all Americans”.

PAKPAC also welcomed the full cooperation offered by the Pakistani government.

America’s largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organisation, CAIR held a special news conference in Washington to condemn the bombing attempt.

CAIR leaders assured other Americans that Muslims living in America were as “peace loving as any other group” and stood ready to assist the administration’s efforts to root out terrorism.

These immediate reactions in and around the US capital reflect the fears and trepidations of the Pakistani and Muslim communities in North America as they brace themselves for possible repercussions of the involvement of yet another Pakistani in an alleged terror plot.

Raza Jafri recalled walking near the White House a day after 9/11 when two men stopped him and his wife and shouted: “Terrorists, terrorists. Arrest them.”

The first thing he did was to ask his wife not to wear Pakistani dress in public until it was safe to do so. “It can get worse now,” he said.

At a religious gathering in Springfield Virginia, Imam Wali prayed that “all those who are giving a bad name to Islam and Pakistan may be shown the right path.”

Hamza Muhammad of Falls Church, Virginia, noted that the entire Pakistani society shared the blame for allowing religious extremists and fanatics to function. “They never tire of condemning the extremists but also never take any practical step to purge them,” he observed.

“How should we, living in America contribute to the fight against terrorism?” asked Tahira Mussarat Hussain, a Maryland resident.

“We are against fanaticism but our voices are not heard. We want the whole world to know that we oppose all messages of hate.”

DAWN.COM | International | Fear grips Pakistani-Americans
 
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