Posted on 08/21/2004 7:18:05 AM PDT by LakeLady
Has anybody heard anything about or from Mansoor Ijaz recently?
He is the American born businessman of Pakastani heritage that was a pundit on Fox and other stations at the beginning of the war on terror? He had supported and worked closely with the Billary administration, but was very critical of them after 9/11. I respected his opinions and would like to know what his current take on the situation is.
He's running the Marathon at the Olympics.
All kidding aside, I have not seen him recently either.
Now that you mention it..haven't seen him in a while. Wonder what he's up to.
Good question. I haven't seen him in a while either. Seemed he was a regular on FNC up until a few months ago.
Maybe he's in Gitmo.
He goes in and out of the trouble spots. May God protect him.
All I know is that if you look his name up on one of those campaign contributor sites, he's given a lot of money to democrat candidates and no money to republicans.
ping ?
He is a self avowed dem. But, he is also one who (IMHO) is very concerned with US security and is more a patriot than a democrat.
If he was concerned about American security, he wouldn't be donating to guys like Howard Dean.
He was always upfront about being a Democrat, that's why his support of our actions was so profound.
Follow the money.
He may have thought a dem was going to win the election and is looking for a job.
I still think the guy is on the level. He outed Clinton for his failures with UBL and has a lot of contacts in the Middle East.
Mansoor Ijaz is a foreign affairs commentator on Fox News and in the National Review. He also runs the investment firm Crescent Investment Group, Inc. whose top advisors and/or directors also include former CIA director R. James Woolsey, Jr.. He has also sat on the Council on Foreign Relations. According to the Pakistani daily, Dawn, he is a "lobbyist for Pakistan."
Ijaz says he attempted to broker a hand-over of Osama bin Laden from the government of the Sudan to the U.S. in 1996, since then he has criticized the Clinton National Security team of having failed to get their man. This story has telescoped through the right wing press to lay blame on Clinton et al. for having failed to fight terrorism. According to Samuel Berger, who was National Security Advisor under Clinton, Ijaz was unreliable because of his oil investment interests in Sudan. (There's an interesting side-bar on this on p. 113 of Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.)
Ijaz also managed to become involved in the Daniel Pearl situation in 2002. According to Dawn, Ijaz was a reference given by Pearl to Khalid Khawaja, a former Pakistani intelligence officer; Pearl had hoped Khawaja would arrange a meeting between himself and Shah Gillani, reportedly Richard Reid's spiritual mentor.
Ijaz has been on the forefront of arguing in his National Review Online pieces that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, and he has been advocating to increase U.S. military support for the Pakistani Government, especially the sale of F-16s.
According to his Benador Associates' biography, Mansoor Ijaz is "founder and chairman of Crescent Investment Management LLC, a New York investment partnership between Ijaz, Lt. Gen. James Alan Abrahamson (USAF Ret), former director of President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, and Turkey's Global Group. Former CIA Director, R. James Woolsey, Jr. serves as vice chairman of Crescent's Board of Governors....
"Ijaz received his SM degree in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985 where he trained as a neuro-mechanical engineer in the joint MIT-Harvard Medical School Medical Engineering Medical Physics Program. He received his bachelor's degree Magna Cum Laude from the University of Virginia in 1983, where he majored in Physics. He has applied the extensive modeling experience he gained at MIT to develop Crescent's proprietary currency, interest rate and equity risk management systems, CARAT, TRACK and RMU.
"Ijaz is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves as Foreign Affairs Analyst and Counterterrorism Expert for Fox News Network. Prior to his exclusive contract with Fox News, he appeared frequently on a variety of financial and political news programs for CNN, CNN International, BBC, ABC, NBC, MSNBC and CNBC. He has commented for Public Broadcasting System's Newshour with Jim Lehrer and Nightline with Ted Koppel.
"Ijaz has been featured twice in BARRON'S Currency Roundtable discussions. He has also contributed to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, International Herald Tribune, The Washington Times, The Christian Science Monitor and the Times of India.
"As a private American citizen, Ijaz negotiated Sudan's counterterrorism offer to the William Jefferson Clinton administration in April 1997 and proposed the framework for a ceasefire of hostilities between Indian security forces and Mujahedeen fighters in Kashmir in August 2000. He regularly meets with the leaders of Islamic countries on matters related to combating terrorism, nuclear proliferation and improving human rights. He also meets regularly with US government officials.
"Ijaz's father, Dr. Mujaddid Ahmed Ijaz (deceased), a prominent American physicist, was an early pioneer in developing the intellectual infrastructure of Pakistan's nuclear program.
"Much of Ijaz's time away from Crescent's daily affairs is spent in designing, funding and implementing projects for people in third-world countries. He has built rural elementary schools dedicated to countering the damaging influences of religious radicalism in his parent's native Pakistan. He has supported the construction and operation of democracy schools in Eastern Europe. And he is presently forming a charitable fund to support women acting as heads of families who have been widowed by the ongoing conflict in Kashmir.
"Ijaz earned All-American weightlifting status while attending the University of Virginia. Born in Florida in 1961 and raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Ijaz lives in New York City today with his family."
"The Rediff Interview" with Mansoor Ijaz, November 28, 2000:
Involved in matters of conflict resolution in regions like Azerbaijan, Jammu & Kashmir and Sudan, Mansoor Ijaz calls himself a reclusive thinker. The nuclear physicist and neural sciences engineer educated at MIT and Harvard runs an investment agency with business interests in Europe, the Middle East and Far East.
Having been involved in Pakistan's foreign policy, Ijaz was invited to broker a dialogue in Kashmir. He has been able to persuade the Indian government on the merits that it is imperative to open the doors of dialogue and constructive engagement with both the Kashmiri political leadership as well as militant leaders.
In an exclusive interview -- his first full length interview, ever -- to Senior Associate Editor Ramananda Sengupta, he says the situation in J&K is in a phase where peace could either go forward in a significant and meaningful way, or the situation will disintegrate into a higher degree of chaos and bloodshed.
"How does Mansoor Ijaz describe himself?"
I'm a reclusive thinker with a cause who seeks to help disenfranchised people wherever they may be. Vis-a-vis your readers' interest in my activities, I'm trying to do nothing more than to enable men of goodwill on all sides of the Kashmir conflict to talk to each other free of the political and militaristic static that often prevents them from mustering the courage to make peace. In the world of conflict resolution, hawks and doves exist on every side of a problem.
The question in Kashmir has become one of getting doves who were once hawks (Yasin Malik, for example) and hawks who want to become doves (Syed Salahuddin, for example) to come together at one table at the invitation of India's doves and with the consent of Pakistani and Indian hawks. In this context, you could define me as a dove willing to use hawkish force and tactics to achieve a lasting peace.
Could we have a little bit about your childhood… what made you a physicist turned hedge fund manager and investment banker?
Well, I'm a born American… born in Tallahassee, Florida. I grew up on a farm in rural Virginia at a time in the US when prejudice was still a problem. The cumulative effect of these biases and racial attitudes helped to shape my thinking process about the world because it made me realise that wherever there are disenfranchised or disaffected people, you have to help raise them up so they do not develop the desperation to tear you down. I've employed this overarching principle of life in the southern Sudan, in Azerbaijan, and now we are attempting the same in Kashmir.
My education as a nuclear physicist and neural sciences engineer out of MIT and Harvard was also critical in developing my sense of pragmatic realism ensconced in a vision. Physics is one science where learning the overarching principle allows you to apply it to every practical problem encountered. I applied my expertise in modeling the brain at MIT to the financial markets in the mid-1980s and started my own investment firm on the strength of these models in 1990.
Our business, built around my proprietary CARAT, TRACK and CALOP Systems, today invests across a broad cross-section of industries including oil and gas projects, high technology, infrastructure development and commercial real estate. Crescent Investment Management and its affiliates, Crescent Equity Partners and The Crescent Investment Group, have partners in Europe, the Middle East and Far East.
"How did your involvement in Pakistan's political and strategic affairs start?"
As I developed a political voice in the US starting in 1993, Pakistan under Benazir Bhutto's second term was making a concerted effort to reconstruct its relationship with the Clinton administration. Initially we, the entire Pakistan American community, tried to help her achieve what were important objectives, including freeing Pakistan of US sanctions.
There was a unique opportunity to build on a new US administration's desire to help Pakistan as well as a new Pakistani administration elected on its commitment to change the old ways of doing business. Unfortunately, the unity of the Pakistani-American community quickly disintegrated into factionalism, hidden agendas and bruised egos and Benazir's people in Washington seized upon the fractures to pursue their own corrupt political and financial agendas.
I began to realise the leaders of Pakistan had no real interest in raising up their poor, desolate and disfortunate people. That realisation was crystalised when I went to Pakistan in December 1995 and found out for myself the exact mechanisms Benazir and her cronies were using to loot Pakistan's poor. They did so by manipulating IMF loans that were granted on the assumption that higher utility and telephone rates would bring in the money to service the loans and then moved the money into unofficial accounts for unauthorized use.
That is when I started writing publicly in the US about the evidence we had of corruption and mismanagement in her government. We hoped the exposure would either persuade her to change her ways or create a mechanism of external accountability from afar to protect those who had no capacity to speak up within Pakistani society. The first of my editorial series in The Wall Street Journal on Benazir's corrupt practices was responsible for sewing the seeds that led to her exit from the scene in Pakistan.
"How did you get involved in Kashmir?"
My interest in Kashmir has always been there, but I chose not to involve myself because I was so deeply involved in trying to change the internal political decision-making process in Pakistan that I didn't feel it was appropriate for me to be involved in structural national security decision-making as well. Also, Kashmir is such a sensitive and emotional issue that rationalising it like I have done with problems in the Sudan and Azerbaijan simply would not work. Pragmatism, however, plays an important role in even the most emotional conflicts....
"So did you volunteer, or were you asked to come into the Kashmiri fray?"
No, I was asked. I would not volunteer for such a thankless task. But once I agreed to evaluate how I could help, my key concern was a strong desire to avoid the appearance of doing the bidding of the American government in Kashmir. At no time during the past year since I began this intervention has the US government asked me to do anything specific on its behalf in Kashmir.
As an American citizen with proximity to the President of the United States and senior national security council officials, I have enjoyed their support of my efforts and I did feel a responsibility to keep them informed of my activities to avoid conflicts of interest. But there was no driving force emanating from Washington.
If anything, the driving force for finding a plausible peace framework has been in New Delhi. My role was to clear a channel for Prime Minister Vajpayee and a man he considered responsible for the Kargil fiasco, General Pervez Musharraf, to talk to each other on a wavelength free of extremist rhetoric on both sides....
"A slightly unrelated topic... if asked, would you be interested in involving yourself in the dispute between India and China?"
Yes. If asked, I would do anything I could to help. I know the Chinese leadership and they know me. I would be prepared to help if my pragmatic realism could be of assistance. And I think that being of Pakistani origin will also help because of the goodwill that Pakistan enjoys with the Chinese.
Thank you! I really appreciate the effort.
May I add you to my Favorites List? :-)
He also called Richard Clarke a liar outright.
Thats good!! I think this is one of the good guys for sure. His credentials are certainly impressive.
The last few times he was on FNC, he was reporting from Belgium. Perhaps he's working on getting UBL?
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