The ransoming of Raymond Davis

[CHIMO]

You are accused of shooting two Pakistani citizens. Pay $2.3m. Get out of jail free.

If it sounds like a line from a chance card in a game of Monopoly, where the richest player wins, welcome to the world of life and death in Pakistan where the Obama administration has paid "blood money" to spring a CIA agent suspected of two killings from jail on Wednesday.

Raymond Davis, a former Blackwater contractor, who was employed by the CIA in Pakistan, was arrested for the killing of two Pakistani citizens in Lahore on 27 January 2011. One of the men was shot in the back as he was running away. The US government first claimed that Davis was protected by diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Conventions. On Friday, US officials paid the two victims families a reported $2.3m; and Davis was released less than seven weeks after he went to jail. (Compensation to families of civilian victims of US-led coalition forces in Afghanistan amounts to a few thousand dollars per person, if anything is paid at all.)

Consider the case of Shane Bauer, a freelance journalist, and a good friend of mine. We worked together to expose US funding of death squads in Iraq. On 31 July 2009, he was arrested by Iranian border guards while hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan, an area I too have hiked in. Almost 20 months later, he is still a prisoner in Iran, where the US government has barely lifted a finger to help him.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/mar/16/cia-pakistan

[DCKit]

1. I'm really disturbed by the tit-for-tat aspects of this case.

We'll never be able to get rid of Xe as long as the U.S. government backs their illegal, immoral actions.