The United States will cut $33 million from its aid package to Pakistan in protest of the 33-year imprisonment sentence handed down to the Pakistani doctor who helped U.S. intelligence track down Osama bin Laden.
Although that represents only a small percentage of the hundreds of millions in aid the United States is expected to provide Pakistan next year, it is a “very strong symbolic step,” said Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal on Jansing & Co. Friday.
Calling the sentence “unjust” and “inexcusable,” Blumenthal, a member of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee said Pakistan continues to be a troublesome ally. “We need to face the fact that the Pakistanis have been against us, as well as for us,” he said. “They have basically been two-faced.”
Blumenthal said there was “bipartisan outrage,” at the sentencing and said he believed the United States would be able to aid the doctor.
On Thursday, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the head of Pakistan’s ruling party and son of the country’s president, told Andrea Mitchell that what the doctor had done was illegal and so his punishment just. “Anyone collaborating with foreign intelligence, even of a friendly country, anywhere in the world, that’s a crime,” Zardari said. Blumenthal scoffed at that notion, saying it was “logical if you are in an Alice in Wonderland situation, as one of my colleagues said, where the opposite of truth is taken as the truth.”
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