It was revealed on Monday that former prime minister Imran Khan had urged President Arif Alvi to take action against “abuse of power and transgressions of our laws and of the Constitution” as well as to define “clear operating limits” for the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR).
The PTI leader wrote to the president on November 6 to request that he take note of “severe wrongdoings” that were endangering the nation’s security. A copy of the letter is accessible at Dawn.com. He further requested that Alvi name and confront the “guilty.”
Since the PTI administration was overthrown, he bemoaned, the party had been subjected to “an ever increasing amount of bogus claims, harassment, arrests, and custodial torture.”
Rana Sanaullah, the interior minister, allegedly frequently threatened Imran with death. Additionally, he reaffirmed his allegations that the interior minister, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, and a senior military official were involved in a plot to kill him.
The assassination attempt failed because of my protection from Allah, he claimed, adding that the plot had been operationalized earlier this week during our long march.
Imran brought up three different issues in his letter, including the leak from the PM’s office, the cypher debate, and the ISPR’s function.
A “secret communication between myself as prime minister, the Chief of Army Staff, and the director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), over a supposedly secure line, was ‘leaked’ to the media,” he said, violating the Official Secrets Act.
This begs the extremely important question of who or what organisation was responsible for the obviously unlawful wiretap of the PM’s encrypted phone connection. The highest level of national security has been violated, he declared.
In September, a number of different audio recordings that purportedly showed PTI and PML-N leaders having private conversations that weren’t intended for public listening surfaced.
Imran continued by discussing the cypher controversy, which the previous prime has long used as justification for a plot to topple his administration.
He said that the National Security Committee (NSC) meeting that took place during his leadership “determined this was an unacceptable intrusion into our internal concerns,” and that decision was later reiterated at the meeting held under the Shehbaz administration.
The former, though, “contradicted the decision made by the NSC under two governments and stated that the message of the US government conveyed by our envoy in Washington DC in the cypher was not an unacceptable intrusion into our internal affairs but merely a case of “misconduct,” according to the joint press conference of the DG ISI and DG ISPR.”
“The issue that requires investigation is how two military bureaucrats can openly defy an NSC ruling. The grave concern that these military administrators are purposefully attempting to fabricate a story is also brought up by this.
Imran also asked how the director of Pakistan’s top intelligence agency could hold a news conference in front of the public and how two military bureaucrats could hold a “very political press conference.”
“A military information organisation like the ISPR needs to have very specific goals and should only provide information on defence and military-related topics. In your capacity as the military’s top commander, I implore you to start outlining these precise operational parameters for the ISPR.
Alvi should defend the nation’s democracy and Constitution, Imran concluded in his letter.
“The law of the land cannot be disregarded by anyone or any government agency. We have witnessed widespread abuse of citizens by rogue state organisations, including torture in detention and kidnappings that were all committed with no repercussions.
“You occupy the highest position of state and I am begging you to act now to stop the misuse of power and abuses of our laws and of the Constitution, which safeguards the fundamental rights of every person,” Imran stated in the letter.