Dawn: Gaffes galore by government (From Courtroom No 1)
ISLAMABAD: They just can’t play nice, can they?
Yesterday could have been a quiet, dignified day in court. It wasn’t to be.
First, the government threw a curveball: it decided to challenge the composition of the 17-member bench.
The government’s first argument was unnecessary.
The Supreme Court consists of 18 justices, but the 18th, Justice Zahid Hussain, has been sidelined because he took ...
Dawn: Normality, Pakistani-style By Cyril Almeida
FACEBOOK banned; Sindh and the centre fighting over VAT implementation; scorching summer creating electricity and water shortages; cricket in turmoil, again — give it to me, I’ll take it all.
If the alternative is some kind of national crisis that can potentially derail the democratic project, I’ll take the mini crises.
Dawn: The confrontation that never was By Cyril Almeida
ISLAMABAD: Babar Awan was the coolest cat in Courtroom No 5 yesterday morning. At half nine, the law minister strode in to face five Supreme Court judges wearing Terminator-style shades and chewing gum.
Was a Pakistani version of the Showdown at the OK Corral about to unfold? The alleged bandits versus the rule of law, each struggling to dominate the other?
Dawn: From Courtroom No 1 By Cyril Almeida
ISLAMABAD: They were the hottest tickets in town, the special passes to the marquee event in Islamabad — the Supreme Court hearings on Monday and Tuesday. Then, yesterday, something unexpected happened: nothing.
As 17 members of the country’s highest court solemnly filed into Courtroom No 1, there was an air of expectation. Special security, special passes, media in a tizzy — surely something ...
Dawn: A storm brews By Cyril Almeida
RIGHT, here we go again. It’s the next round between … well, we all know who, but for legal reasons we have to refer to it as the ‘judiciary-executive’ clash.
Come Monday, it’s show time. The black robes of the Supreme Court will all gather in Courtroom No 1 to hear matters of great national import. At this stage it’s pointless to go through the legal minutiae; few doubt that the court can, ...
Dawn: A better dialogue? By Cyril Almeida
AS long as they’re talking, few really care about the ‘modalities’ or the ‘framework’ or the nomenclature of the dialogue between India and Pakistan. The point, after all, is to stop fighting wars, stop obsessing overKashmir, stop squabbling like teenagers over this, that and everything in between.
But peace, or whatever it is that is realistically within the grasp of Pakistan and India, won’t ...
Dawn:Civilian casualties in drone strikes? By Cyril Almeida
ISLAMABAD, May 8: The intensification of the American air campaign in Pakistan — 32 drone strikes this year alone — has sharpened debate in Pakistan and the US over the incidence of civilian casualties.
Paradoxically, however, near the locus of the attacks, the Waziristan agencies, where 95 per cent of the strikes have occurred, there has been little sign of protest, and anecdotal evidence ...
Dawn: The infrastructure of jihad By Cyril Almeida
FROM the moment the world saw footage of the SUV belching smoke in Times Square, you just knew that it was going to be a Pakistani.
And Faisal Shahzad didn’t disappoint. Never mind that the plot seems to be have been ridiculously amateurish, that the ‘bomb’ seems to have been assembled by a third-grade chemistry student, that Shahzad was more bungling idiot than mass murderer.
But now the ...
Dawn: Who killed BB? By Cyril Almeida
IT’S late 2007. A suicide attack has taken place in a high-security zone in Rawalpindi. The top cop in the city is CPO Saud Aziz. The crime scene is quickly scrubbed clean, rendering forensic science largely irrelevant.
BB’s assassination? No, the attack in question occurred in October 2007, “less than a kilometre from President General Pervez Musharraf’s camp office”, according to Dawn’s ...
Dawn: The real crisis By Cyril Almeida
PLAN A is the legalistic, conciliatory route. Lawyers untainted by political affiliations would be recruited to argue the government’s various defences in the Supreme Court. The arguments would be sophisticated and respectful and would be focused on turning the tables on the court legally.
