Islamabad : Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has defended the Inter-Services Intelligence in the backdrop of the spy agency’s recent criticism by US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, and reports that US officials at Guantanamo Bay considered the ISI as a terrorist supporting entity.
Speaking at a ceremony on Wednesday, Gilani said that all state institutions, including the ISI, were operating constitutionally and legally.
He further said that the ISI’s operations had full support of the Pakistan Government, the Dawn reports.
Prime Minister Gilani’s comments came in the wake of the publication of classified Guantanamo dossiers that were shown bracketing the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) with al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and other international militant networks.
Earlier this month, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, Admiral Mike Mullen, had also said that the “ISI has a longstanding relationship with extremist networks”.
“It is fairly well known that ISI had a relationship with the Haqqani network, and addressing the Haqqani network from my perspective is critical to the solution set in Afghanistan. … that’s at the core — it’s not the only thing — but that’s at the core that I think is the most difficult part of the relationship,” Mullen had said in an interview. ANI
