Hanif Qureshi’s sermon which made Mumtaz Qadri to Kill Governor Punjab Salman Taseer

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Alleged plot to assassinate LHC CJ: ‘Special Branch officials sought to create political rift’

ISLAMABAD: The three-member judicial commission that probed into the alleged plot to kill Chief Justice Lahore High Court Khwaja Mohammad Sharif, has revealed in its report that the apparent objective of the Special Branch report, authored by additional Inspector General, Colonel Ehsanur Rehman and his deputy Shahid Mahmood, was to malign and defame persons associated with the ruling party and the party itself.

This was done, the Commission said, to pitch the Punjab government of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) against the federal government of the Pakistan Peoples Party.

The Commission also questioned the move by the Special Branch Punjab to send one copy of the source report to former prime minister Nawaz Sharif when he was in Murree. The Commission wondered why the report was sent to Nawaz Sharif, who did not hold any official position in the Punjab government. …

Read more : The Express Tribune

No laws to govern spy agencies, SC told

ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court highlighted on Thursday a thorny issue when it asked about laws that governed the country’s spy agencies, but was informed by none other than the chief law officer that there were none.

“Is there any law governing intelligence agencies,” wondered Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, the head of a three-judge bench hearing a joint petition filed by Attiqur Rehman and others against the alleged kidnapping of Dr Niaz Ahmed, Mazharul Haq, Shafiqur Rehman, Mohammad Aamir, Abdul Majid, Abdul Basit, Abdul Saboor, Shafique Ahmed, Said Arab, Gul Roze and Tehseenullah from Adiyala jail in June after their acquittal on terrorism charges.

The court raised the question while referring to a reply submitted on Wednesday by Attorney General Maulvi Anwarul Haq on behalf of two premier intelligence agencies — Inter-Services Intelligence and the Military Intelligence. …

Read more : DAWN

More details : BBC urdu

Bangladesh is secular again

Ruling that Bangladesh is now a secular state, the country’s high court has said that the constitution of 1972 has automatically been restored by a landmark judgment of the apex court that nullified a controversial amendment earlier this year.
“Bangladesh is now a secular state as the Appellate Division (of the Supreme Court) verdict scrapped the Fifth Amendment to the constitution. In this secular state, everybody has religious freedom, and therefore no man, woman or child can be forced to wear religious attires like burqa, cap and dhoti,” a high court bench said on Monday.
Read more : Rediff

Via – Globeistan

Jinnah’s secularism

By A. G. Noorani

Courtesy: Frontline

THERE is an aspect to L.K. Advani’s comments on Jinnah at Karachi which has been overlooked. A month or so earlier, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the rabid Jamaat-e-Islami leader of Pakistan, had denounced Jinnah’s famous presidential speech to Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947. Advani’s praise and quotation from the speech has boosted the morale of Pakistan’s secularists who always cited it.

The speech has been quoted in bits and pieces; never analysed as a whole. Nor for that matter the entire and considerable corpus of Jinnah’s record from 1906 to 1948. There is no single complete series of his Collected Works. One such effort ended in 1931. Historians in India, Pakistan and abroad propound fanciful theories from their own standpoints; never mind the record. The speech was neither an act of contrition or repentance nor a reflection of two Jinnahs. He had unwisely used the poisonous two-nation theory to promote under the slogan of Pakistan, his real objective – a power-sharing accord. Gandhi, Nehru and Patel sabotaged the Cabinet Mission’s Plan of May 16, 1946, for United India which was done in complicity with Stafford Cripps (vide “Cripps and India’s Partition”, Frontline, August 2, 2002).

OPINION – Jinnah’s speech was a crie de coeur. He had not changed his outlook. In 1919 he gave evidence before the Joint Select Committee of the British Parliament on the Government of India Bill. His answers to questions by one of its members, Major Ormsby-Gore, bear recalling today.