The Hindustan Times reports a Pakistani legislature from Chitral (the northernmost district in the North-West Frontier Province) protesting his province’s innocence in exactly the manner which arouses the most suspicion.

US intelligence agencies’ reports suggesting that Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden was present in Chitral are “unauthentic and unjustified”, Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) legislator Maulana Abdul Akbar Chitrali has said.

“Neither have we sheltered anybody nor will we tolerate foreign interference in the area,” the Daily Times quoted Chitrali as saying.

Raising a point of order in the National Assembly on Friday, Chitrali said that the mountainous Chitral area shared a border with five countries, but “was completely peaceful”.

He said that the CIA and FBI had set up offices in Chitral, but had left the area after locals protested their presence.

A couple of days ago, a US official had said that Laden was living comfortably in a house, possibly with a family and no more than two bodyguards.

And here’s the US anonymous source rumor.

The Guardian writes (with big salty tears running down its editorial cheek):

“Why are the liberals always on the other side?” asks the fictional French military commander Colonel Mathieu when he is challenged, in The Battle for Algiers, for using torture to fight terror. The film suggests that torture works as a tool of immediate necessity, even if the consequences are a blurring of morality and so final defeat. Four decades on, Mathieu’s charge against liberal scruples is still being raised, implicit in the defence of the means being used in a modern battle against Islamic terror…

Reports from Pakistan suggest that much of the intelligence that led to the raids came from that country and that some of it may have been obtained in ways entirely unacceptable here. In particular Rashid Rauf, a British citizen said to be a prime source of information leading to last week’s arrests, has been held without access to full consular or legal assistance. Disturbing reports in Pakistani papers that he had “broken” under interrogation have been echoed by local human rights bodies. The Guardian has quoted one, Asma Jehangir, of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, who has no doubt about the meaning of broken. “I don’t deduce, I know – torture,” she said. “There is simply no doubt about that, no doubt at all.” If this is shown to be the case, the prospect of securing convictions in this country on his evidence will be complicated.

Rational adults would suppose that a terrorist, apprehended outside British jurisdiction, might have to take his chances with the local legal system, and the sort of unsympathetic treatment traditionally meted out to hostes humani generis [the common enemies of mankind], who have by their own actions placed themselves outside both the laws of ordinary society and the laws of war.

Faced wih a choice of, say, 3000 innocent lives versus Mr. Rauf’s supposed privileges and comfort, any responsible person charged, like Colonel Mathieu in the Pontecorvo film, would inevitably be forced to do what was necessary to protect the innocent.

Only imbeciles and sentimental poseurs would agree with the Guardian.

The London Times reports:

A SENIOR member of an Islamic organisation linked to Al-Qaeda is funding his activities through the kidnapping of Christian children who are sold into slavery in Pakistan.

The Sunday Times has established that Gul Khan, a wealthy militant who uses the base of Jamaat-ud Daawa (JUD) near Lahore, is behind a cruel trade in boys aged six to 12.

They are abducted from remote Christian villages in the Punjab and fetch nearly £1,000 each from buyers who consign them to a life of misery in domestic servitude or in the sex trade…

Hafez Muhamed Sayeed… (leader of Jamaat-ud Daawa) was accused of inciting riots in Pakistan this year with speeches denouncing western “depravity” after a Danish newspaper published cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.

The Guardian reports that Peshawar Imam Mohammed Yousaf Qureshi announced a bounty of $25,000 and a car from the Mohabat Khan mosque for the death of an unspecified Danish cartoonist. The holy man (who probably can’t read and write) evidently did not understand that the cartoons were produced by twelve different cartoonists.

Qureshi said the mosque and his religious school would give $25,000 and a car, while a local jewelers’ association would give another $1 million. No representative of the association was available to confirm it had made the offer.

“This is a unanimous decision by all imams (prayer leaders) of Islam that whoever insults the prophet deserves to be killed and whoever will take this insulting man to his end, will get this prize,” Qureshi said.

Denmark, the European, Union and the United States ought to respond decisively to this sort of thing.

What Europe and/or the United States (in the probable absence of European capability) ought to do in response to the sort of thing is what a 19th century British government would have done in response to insolent primitives stirring up native hostility. We should send troops into Peshawar to level the mosque offering this blood money, apprehend and hang Qureshi (with a pigskin rope), pillage and sack the Peshawar jewelers district, and then compel the government of Pakistan to pay for the costs of the expedition.

The man who trained shoe-bomber Richard Reid, Zacharias Mousssaoui, hundreds of other terrorists, 52 year-old Midhat Mursi, also known as Abu Khabab al-Masri, was one of the Al Qaeda leaders present at last Friday’s meeting in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier tribal district, slain in a Predator-drone missile strike directed by US Intelligence operatives. The US government had been offering a $5 million reward for Mirsi’s capture.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command, had been also been expected to be present at the targeted meeting, but is –so far– reported to have failed to attend.

ABC News report.

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Meanwhile, AP is offering a rather confusing story by Riaz Khan, describing Pakistani Intelligence searching for missing bodies of the terrorist victims of last Friday’s missile strike.

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Update

Reuters reports that Pakistani intelligence has identified two others of the slain terrorists. One was Abdul Rehman Al-Misri al Maghribi chief of al Qaeda’s media department, and a son-in-law of al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri. The other was Abu Obaidah al Misri, al Qaeda’s chief of operations in Kunar province, Afghanistan. The presence of Zawahiri’s son-in-law tends to suggest that he was indeed scheduled to be present. The fourth deceased terorist has allegedly not yet been identified.

Hat tip to John Hinderaker.

Southeast Asia News quotes other, more recent sources, indicating that Depkafile and the certain portions of MSM may have been mistaken. Even if Zawahiri is ultimately firmly established not to have been present, the Friday gathering in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier tribal district clearly did constitute the proverbial target rich environment, and US forces on the scene were clearly justified in firing on them.

Islamabad – Authorities in the Pakistani tribal region of Bajaur on Tuesday claimed that a controversial U.S. missile strike on the region last Friday killed ‘at least four’ foreign militants.

‘There is no doubt that 10 to 12 extremists including foreigners had been invited to a dinner,’ said a statement from Mohammad Faheem Wazir, senior official in Khar, the administrative centre of the Bajaur agency.

Based on the findings of a joint investigation team, the statement regretted the loss of civilian lives in the strike but said at least a dozen extremists including two Pakistani clerics wanted by the authorities were also present.