Secrecy and denial as Pakistan lets CIA use airbase to strike militants

Secrecy and denial as Pakistan lets CIA use airbase to strike militants

www.timesonline.co.uk

The CIA is secretly using an airbase in southern Pakistan to launch the Predator drones that observe and attack al-Qaeda and Taleban militants on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan, a Times investigation has found.

The Pakistani and US governments have repeatedly denied that Washington is running military operations, covert or otherwise, on Pakistani territory — a hugely sensitive issue in the predominantly Muslim country.

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[edit on 2/18/2009 by semperfortis]

Well, firstly I'm a little surprised to see this in the Times, though in all it looks like a good piece of investigative journalism.

I'm not actually too sure where responsibility lies in US operations - I would have presumed that the Air Force would have handled this, on receiving intelligence. I guess running it all in-house (The CIA) keeps security good-ish.

Most interesting was the really aggressive and energetic denial by the US - then a few paragraphs down, the Pakistani spokesperson just comes out and says it ' yeah, they're using the base'. Classic.

www.timesonline.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

[edit on 2/18/2009 by semperfortis]

It's a good thing that we now know why these drone attacks are all happening.

The CIA is running out of control and it's amock. The military industrial complex has gotten too powerful...

Now, why are the governments and agencies involved denying something so obvious?

Its like Isreal denying covert operations in Gaza and Iran. Its just getting out of hand here, and the CIA gains more and more power through endless corruption day by day.
Governments and agencies deny the obvious because obviously not enough people have questioned their actions over the last years, that's how we got to this point after all.

you know I have been looking for this on Google earth and I cannot find it. I found 2 compounds in that area, but I do not thinks that they are in any way military bases... first of all there are no helicopter landing areas, which would be a must. and there is no clear perimeters set up.

One is at 29° 8'53.82"N 62° 6'50.35"E
the second is at 29° 8'21.71"N 62° 6'47.91"E

The Northern one looks like it may have been an armor base, note the circular mounds of dirt with sets of parallel line around it, these are tracks from some sort of bull dozer to build the burms. Again I do not think this is an American base because of the lack of helicopter pads, and a lack of armor in Afghanistan, and even if we did have tanks over there why would we have a secret CIA armor base in Pakistan?

So this leads me to my original point, how do we know that this story is real and not just a "mistake"?