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Warren Weinstein’s Devotion to Pakistan Was Part of a Lifetime of Service

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

WASHINGTON — For more than a decade, Warren Weinstein, an American aid worker and economic adviser, worked in Pakistan trying to improve living conditions there. He moved to the city of Lahore. He learned the Urdu language and dressed in the traditional clothing.
His work came to an abrupt end in the summer of 2011, just days before he was scheduled to return to his family home in Rockville, Md., when he was abducted by a group of armed men who broke into his home in Model Town, an old, affluent neighborhood in Lahore.
United States intelligence officers searched for him for years, but the White House revealed on Thursday morning that Mr. Weinstein, 73, had been killed when he was present during an American counterterrorism strike at a compound of Al Qaeda in January. Giovanni Lo Porto, 37, an Italian who had been held since 2012, was also killed in the strike.
                                                                  CreditSITE Intelligence Group, via Reuters
Reporter's Notebook: Warren Weinstein: A Gracious Host, Immersed in Pakistani LifeAPRIL 23, 2015
 
The home of Warren Weinstein's family in Rockville, Md., on Thursday.CreditJose Luis Magana/Associated Press

•                                                      CreditStephen Crowley/The New York Times

Obama Apologizes After Drone Kills American and Italian Held by Al QaedaAPRIL 23, 2015

Killing of Americans Deepens Debate Over Use of Drone Strikes
Though the Obama administration says two American Qaeda operatives were not “specifically targeted,” their deaths touch on a debate over killings without due process.APRIL 23, 2015

In an extraordinary statement on Thursday, President Obama apologized for the strike and hailed Mr. Weinstein as a humanitarian who had committed his life to a “spirit of service” to his own country and to the people of Pakistan.
“He devoted his life to people across Africa and South Asia,” a somber, grim-faced Mr. Obama said. “He was a loving husband, father and grandfather, who willingly left the comforts of home to help the people of Pakistan.”
Elaine Weinstein, Mr. Weinstein’s wife, expressed her grief at the discovery of his death in a statement she posted on a website,www.bringwarrenhome.com, that had been set up to find him and bring him home safely.
“We are devastated by this news and the knowledge that my husband will never safely return home,” she wrote. “We were so hopeful that those in the U.S. and Pakistani governments with the power to take action and secure his release would have done everything possible to do so, and there are no words to do justice to the disappointment and heartbreak we are going through.”
A veteran aid worker, Mr. Weinstein had spent more than 40 years traveling the world, serving in Africa and South Asia before settling in Pakistan, where his wife once wrote that he had sought to help strengthen the country’s dairy, agriculture and furniture industries.
A Fulbright scholar who earned his Ph.D. in international law and economics, Mr. Weinstein was proficient in seven languages. He served as a Peace Corps director in Ivory Coast and Togo. From 2004 until he was captured in 2011, he worked as an adviser for J.E. Austin Associates, a contractor for the United States Agency for International Development.
“He was a genuinely warm person,” said Stephen R. Weissman, the former staff director for the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Africa, who first met Mr. Weinstein in 1974. “Someone said to me that he is not worried about Weinstein being with Al Qaeda because he would win them over. He was that kind of person.”
Mr. Weinstein’s relatives have attributed his decision to take an assignment in Pakistan to his longstanding affinity with that troubled country, which was also felt by the Pakistanis he met.
 “He was an unassuming man who liked wearing shalwar kameez and lived happily without much security,” said Fasi Zaka, a consultant who met Mr. Weinstein in Peshawar, Pakistan, the capital of conflict-ridden Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province. Shalwar kameez is the baggy trousers and long shirt that constitute Pakistan’s national dress.
“Behind the genial exterior was a very smart man committed to Pakistan and making its broken systems work,” Mr. Zaka said. “The first time I met him, he said, ‘Show me the smart kids who aren’t afraid of getting their hands dirty in the field.’ ”
In a column she wrote last year for Newsweek, Mrs. Weinstein described the sense of peace and security that her husband often said he felt working in Pakistan.
“Warren especially respected the culture’s focus on hospitality and the welcoming of strangers embodied in unwritten codes such as the concept of Pashtunwali,” Mrs. Weinstein wrote. “This welcoming atmosphere, and the protection it promised, gave my husband a great sense of peace and safety, and he made every effort to reciprocate it.”
But she also described her concern for her husband’s failing health. She said he had severe asthma and a heart condition. She said she worried that his health would suffer during his captivity.
“If he is not afforded the traditional Pakistani hospitality that he has come to love and respect, I fear that we will lose him,” Mrs. Weinstein wrote in the column.
Mrs. Weinstein said that during her husband’s captivity, he was not allowed to communicate with anyone back home. The only images that she saw of him were the occasional videos released on the Internet by Al Qaeda. The last of those, in December 2013, showed Mr. Weinstein with a gray beard and wearing a cap.
In the video, he pleaded with Mr. Obama to negotiate with the captors for his release, saying he felt “abandoned and forgotten” by his country.
“The years have taken their toll,” Mr. Weinstein said in the video. “I have been cut off from my family. My wife, who is over 70, my two daughters, my two grandchildren, my son-in-law and perhaps new members of the family whom I have never met. Needless to say, I have been suffering deep anxiety every part of every day.”
Mr. Weinstein’s death from an American drone strike is a tragic twist on a case that had already put a human face on the cost of United States involvement in the campaign against terrorism. In the 2013 video, and in an earlier one in 2012, Mr. Weinstein had pleaded with the president to secure his release.
“My life is in your hands, Mr. President,” Mr. Weinstein said in the 2012 video. “If you accept the demands, I live. If you don’t accept the demands, then I die.”
Jeanene Harlick, a longtime friend of Mr. Weinstein’s daughter Alisa, said the family had struggled during his captivity, though they initially stayed quiet about it, fearing that starting a public campaign might hurt their chances of getting him back.
“They were frustrated with the way the government was dealing with it, and that the government was giving them very little information,” said Ms. Harlick, 41, of San Mateo, Calif., who met Ms. Weinstein in 2004 when they were both journalists at a newspaper in Oregon.
Ms. Harlick described Mr. Weinstein as a selfless person who passed on his generosity and compassion to his daughter.
“Most of his life was spent in foreign countries, and that was very hard for his family, but he did it because he was so devoted to helping these people,” Ms. Harlick said.
He reveled in his aid work and had an active and unusual mind, she added, learning several languages to communicate in the countries where he traveled, and even inventing his own language and filling many journals with writings in it.
Mr. Weinstein’s family had mounted a yearslong multimedia campaign to return him to the United States. They used the Twitter hashtag #BringWarrenHome, and they sought media appearances to keep pressure on his captors and on the United States government.
The website, which includes pictures of Mr. Weinstein and his wife in happier times, was updated Thursday morning with a small black box bearing white type: “Warren Weinstein was kidnapped on August 13, 2011, while working in Lahore, Pakistan, and died in captivity during a U.S. counterterrorism operation in January 2015.”
Meredith McCain, 65, lives across the street from Mrs. Weinstein in Rockville, on a quiet street where neighbors tied yellow ribbons around the trees. Ms. McCain said that she did not know Mr. Weinstein because he was often abroad, but that his wife had once attended a birthday party for Ms. McCain’s sister, with whom she lives.
“She talked about him in the here and now,” she said, adding, “He was never off her mind.”
Curtsy:The New York Times,April  23, 2015
Source Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/world/asia/warren-weinsteins-devotion-to-pakistan-was-part-of-a-lifetime-of-service.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=b-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

Warren Weinstein: A Gracious Host, Immersed in Pakistani Life

By AUSTIN RAMZY

When I got to Warren Weinstein’s house in Lahore, Pakistan, in the summer of 2005, he had a case of beer and a crate of mangoes waiting.
He was deeply worried about my comfort, and turned the aging air-conditioners in his house up full blast.
Warren’s daughter Alisa, my friend and graduate school classmate, was spending the summer with her father. At an age when most men are contemplating retirement, he was working tirelessly on an economic development project funded by the United States Agency for International Development that focused on local industries such as dairy and gemstones.
He was an intense man, with powerful appetites for food and intellectual stimulation. He was always chatting up random strangers, probing and questioning, to understand the place and the culture better.

                                                                       CreditLt Col Leslie Pratt/U.S. Air Force, via Reuters

News Analysis: Drone Strikes Reveal Uncomfortable Truth: U.S. Is Often Unsure About Who Will DieAPRIL 23, 2015

Warren avoided foreigner hangouts in Lahore; he saw an unnecessary risk of terrorist attack and distraction from his work. Instead of living ensconced in a foreigner bubble, he tried hard to cultivate Pakistani friends, learned Urdu and sought to immerse himself in local life.

Warren Weinstein, an American held by Al Qaeda since 2011, was one of the two hostages killed in a counterterrorism operation.CreditSITE Intelligence Group, via Reuters
A former Peace Corps volunteer, Warren, 73,dedicated his life to development work in Africa and South Asia. He saw himself as a peaceful alternative to American influence at a time when United States power is more commonly projected with troops and weapons like the drone that accidentally killed him and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian aid worker also held by Al Qaeda, in January.
After a few days in Lahore with her father, Alisa and I left to travel north. With Pakistani friends of her father’s we drove to Islamabad, Peshawar and Chitral. Warren seemed little concerned about sending his daughter off on a road trip across the country, near some of its least governed areas, confident that his friends would watch after us. And they did. He stayed behind, however, unwilling to take even a few days off from his work.
He visited me a while later in Hong Kong, where I was working. He told me he was happy to be in a place where he could visit a synagogue and openly practice his Jewish faith.
I was eager to repay the hospitality he had shown me in Lahore, and took him and his Pakistani colleagues to the best restaurant I could afford, a nouveau Chinese place overlooking Hong Kong’s harbor.
Warren was annoyed with the artifice and expense. He asked me where normal people ate. The next day we trekked to a Sichuan restaurant in a food court in Hung Hom. We ate smoked duck and fried green beans and he loved it.
Austin Ramzy is a foreign correspondent for The New York Times based in Hong Kong. Twitter: @austinramzy
Curtsy:The New York Times,APRIL 23, 2015
Source Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/world/asia/warren-weinstein-aid-worker-killed-in-pakistan-drone-strike.html?contentCollection=world&action=click&module=NextInCollection&region=Footer&pgtype=article

Devotion to Pakistan typified

hostage's lifetime of service

Giovanna Piazza, sister-in-law of Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto, shows photographs of Lo Porto to a photographer in Palermo, Sicily, Italy, Thursday. The Italian government on Thursday deplored the death of the worker in a U.S. airstrike, calling it a "fatal error" by the Americans. AP PHOTO / ALESSANDRO FUCARINI
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR and ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

Published: Friday, April 24, 2015 at 1:00 a.m.

Last Modified: Thursday, April 23, 2015 at 10:48 p.m.

The New York Times
WASHINGTON -- For more than a decade, Warren Weinstein, an American aid worker and economic adviser, worked in Pakistan trying to improve living conditions there. He moved to the city of Lahore, learned the Urdu language and dressed in the traditional clothing called shalwar kameez.
His work came to an abrupt end in the summer of 2011, just days before he was scheduled to return to his family home in Rockville, Md., when he was abducted by a group of armed men who broke into his home in Model Town, an old, affluent neighborhood in Lahore.
U.S. intelligence officers searched for him for years, but the White House revealed on Thursday morning that Weinstein, 73, was killed when he was present during a U.S. counterterrorism strike at a compound of al-Qaida in January.
On Thursday, President Barack Obama apologized for the strike and hailed Weinstein as a humanitarian who had committed his life to a "spirit of service" to his own country and to the people of Pakistan.
"He devoted his life to people across Africa and South Asia," a somber Obama said. "He was a loving husband, father and grandfather, who willingly left the comforts of home to help the people of Pakistan."
Elaine Weinstein, Weinstein's wife, expressed her grief at the discovery of his death in a statement she posted on a website that had been set up to find him and bring him home safely.
A veteran aid worker, Warren Weinstein had spent more than 40 years traveling the world, serving in Africa and South Asia before settling in Pakistan, where his wife once wrote that he had sought to help strengthen the country's dairy, agriculture and furniture industries.
A Fulbright scholar who earned his doctorate in international law and economics, Weinstein was proficient in seven languages. He served as a Peace Corps director in Ivory Coast and Togo. From 2004 until he was captured in 2011, he worked as an adviser for J.E. & Austin Associates, a contractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development.
In a column she wrote last year for Newsweek, Elaine Weinstein described the sense of peace and security that her husband often described feeling as he worked in Pakistan.
When Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto was kidnapped by al-Qaida in Pakistan in January 2012, the nongovernmental organization he worked for was inundated with emails from around the world expressing concern and care.
"It was amazing how many emails we got saying, 'We hope he's well,'" said Simone Pott, a spokeswoman for the NGO, Welthungerhilfe, one of Germany's biggest agencies specializing in emergency and long-term aid. "He had friends all over the world."
As those friends and colleagues learned Thursday that Lo Porto, 37, had been killed in a U.S. counterterrorism operation in Pakistan three months earlier, they recalled a driven and experienced aid worker who was drawn to those in need.
Expressing his grief for the death of "an Italian who dedicated his life to the service of others," Prime Minister Matteo Renzi of Italy said in a statement that Obama had informed him of the death on Wednesday. The Italian Foreign Affairs Ministry then contacted Lo Porto's family.

Al Qaeda hostage, American Warren Weinstein, killed in operation

By Catherine E. Shoichet and Ashley Fantz, CNN
Updated 10:32 PM ET, Thu April 23, 2015

(CNN)For years, Warren Weinstein's family frantically searched for details about his whereabouts and pushed for his release.
His wife said she was still searching for answers Thursday after U.S. officials revealed the 73-year-old American aid worker had been accidentally killed in a U.S. drone strike targeting al Qaeda.
"We were so hopeful that those in the U.S. and Pakistani governments with the power to take action and secure his release would have done everything possible to do so, and there are no words to do justice to the disappointment and heartbreak we are going through," Elaine Weinstein said in a statement. "We do not yet fully understand all of the facts surrounding Warren's death, but we do understand that the U.S. government will be conducting an independent investigation of the circumstances."
Gunmen abducted Weinstein in 2011 from his home in Lahore, Parkistan. They posed as neighbors, offered food and then pistol-whipped the American aid worker and tied up his guards, his family said.
Just a few months after Weinstein's capture, al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri released a recording claiming the terror group was holding Weinstein -- and demanding, among other things, that the United States end airstrikes in Pakistan.
U.S. officials called for his release but repeatedly said Washington wouldn't bargain with al Qaeda.

'Entire life working to benefit people'

Weinstein -- a husband, father and grandfather from Rockville, Maryland -- was 73 years old when he was killed, according to a family website detailing information about his case.
He worked in Pakistan as a contractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development from 2004 to 2011, the website says. His employer, Virginia-based consulting firm J.E. Austin Associates Inc., described him as a world-renowned development expert.
"Warren spent his entire life working to benefit people across the globe and loved the work that he did to make people's lives better," his wife said Thursday.
He loved the Pakistani people and their culture, she said, learning to speak Urdu and doing "everything he could to show his utmost and profound respect for the region."
As he announced Weinstein's death Thursday, U.S. President Barack Obama praised what he said was Weinstein's lifelong dedication to service, first as a Peace Corps volunteer and later as a USAID contractor. Weinstein, Obama said, was someone who "willingly left the comforts of home to help the people of Pakistan," focusing his work on helping families escape poverty to give their children a better life.
"This was a man who basically dedicated his life to service, to people in general, but especially to people in a country where the standard of living was low and difficult. ... It's tragic that he was killed the way he was," former U.S. Ambassador Dan Simpson said.
Simpson met Weinstein in 1968 when they were both working in Burundi -- Simpson as a diplomat and Weinstein as a scholar researching several books.
Weinstein "was a very kind person," Simpson said, "and someone who was very sensitive to the needs of the people who he worked with."

Obama: Al Qaeda boasted of holding Jewish hostage

Another hostage was also killed in the January operation, Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto. U.S. officials knew they were targeting an al Qaeda compound in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region in the January counterterrorism operation, Obama said, but they didn't know that the hostages were also there.
Both Lo Porto and Weinstein were people who "believed passionately" that they could make a difference, Obama said.
"There could be no starker contrast between these two selfless men and their al Qaeda captors," Obama said Thursday. "Warren's work benefited people across faiths. Meanwhile, al Qaeda boasted to the world that it held Warren citing his Jewish faith."
Weinstein's health had been deteriorating, Obama said. Last year daughter Alisa Weinstein told CNN her father suffered from a heart condition and severe asthma. But it was still an optimistic time for the family.
That month captors released U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, and that buoyed hopes from Weinstein's family that he could also be freed.
"They have shown with this exchange that they can get this done. If they want to, they can do this," Alisa Weinstein said at the time. "So I know that they can do it for us and they can do it for others."
But a prisoner swap never happened for Weinstein, even though his family pushed for one.

Video, letter showed suffering

Al Qaeda released a video of Weinstein on Christmas 2013. He appeared gaunt and said he was suffering.
"Needless to say, I've been suffering deep anxiety every part of every day, not knowing what is happening to my family and not knowing how they are and because I am not with them," Weinstein said in the video.
At the time, a former colleague and friend said his appearance in the video was jarring.
"Quite honestly, I didn't recognize him in the picture," Laurie Wiseberg told CNN. "He has changed so dramatically from the person he used to be in terms of appearance and I would hope something could be done so he has a chance to be reunited with his family, his wife, his children and grandchildren, and not have to die in a foreign country far away from those he loves."
At the time, The Washington Post also reported that it had received a letter from Weinstein. The letter, which was also posted on the website of the SITE Intelligence group, described his background doing human rights work.
The letter said that before becoming a consultant in 2003, Weinstein had worked as a college professor at the State University of New York - Oswego, as a Peace Corps country director in Togo and Ivory Coast and for USAID and the World Bank.
"I hope that the media can mount a campaign to get the American government to actively pursue my release and to make sure that I am not forgotten and just become another statistic," the letter said. "Given my age and my health I don't have time on my side."

Wife: U.S. needs new approach for hostages

Weinstein's wife's statement on Thursday thanked some but also blasted the governments of the United States and Pakistan for not doing more to help her husband.
While Maryland members of Congress -- Rep. John Delaney, Sen. Barbara Mikulski and Sen. Ben Cardin -- and members of the FBI were "relentless" in efforts to free her husband, she said others in the U.S. government were "inconsistent and disappointing over the course of 3½ years."
"We hope that my husband's death and the others who have faced similar tragedies in recent months will finally prompt the U.S. government to take its responsibilities seriously and establish a coordinated and consistent approach to supporting hostages and their families," she said.
Pakistani government and military officials also should have done more, she said.
"Warren's safe return should have been a priority for them based on his contributions to their country, but they failed to take action earlier in his captivity when opportunity presented itself, instead treating Warren's captivity as more of an annoyance than a priority," she said. "I hope the nature of our future relationship with Pakistan is reflective of how they prioritize situations such as these."
But ultimately, she said her husband's captors are the ones responsible for his death.
"I can assure you that he would still be alive and well if they had allowed him to return home after his time abroad working to help the people of Pakistan," she said. "The cowardly actions of those who took Warren captive and ultimately to the place and time of his death are not in keeping with Islam and they will have to face their God to answer for their actions."
Opinion: Could Weinstein have been saved?
CNN's Elise Labott, Jim Sciutto and Pamela Brown contributed to this report.

Pakistan says botched strike highlights dangers of US drone war

Islamabad (AFP) - Pakistan said Friday the botched US drone attack that killed two foreign hostages showed the risks of the controversial tactic, as details came to light apparently pinpointing the fatal strike.
President Barack Obama admitted on Thursday that one American and one Italian hostage were accidentally killed in a counter-terrorism operation in January targeting a suspected Al-Qaeda hideout.
Obama said US consultant Warren Weinstein and Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto were killed along with Ahmed Faruq, an American described as a leader of Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS).
Islamabad said it was shocked and saddened by the incident and offered sympathy to the families.
"The death of Mr Weinstein and Mr Lo Porto in a drone strike demonstrates the risk and unintended consequences of the use of this technology that Pakistan has been highlighting for a long time," the foreign ministry said in a statement.
The CIA's drone campaign targeting Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in restive northwest Pakistan has long been highly controversial.

Publicly Islamabad has regularly condemned it as counterproductive and a violation of sovereignty, though past Pakistani leaders are known to have approved some strikes.
The White House gave few details of this incident but it appears from an AQIS audio statement released earlier this month that it was a drone strike on January 15 in North Waziristan tribal area, close to the Afghan border.
AQIS spokesman Usama Mahmood released an audio statement online on April 12 saying the group's deputy leader Ahmed Farouq had been killed in a US drone strike on January 15.
The statement said the strike took place in the Shawal area of the North Waziristan tribal district. He did not refer to the two hostages, but only one US drone strike was reported in Pakistan on that date.
He also described Farouq as Pakistani, rather than American, though it is possible he had dual nationality.

US President Barack Obama speaks during a press conference in the Brady Briefing Room of the White H …
Mahmood also said that US drone strikes in recent months had killed 50 Al-Qaeda members in Pakistan.
The bodies of those killed in drone strikes are usually badly damaged and quickly buried nearby by locals. This is likely to have happened with Farouq and the foreign hostages.
A source in a Pakistani militant group told AFP that in the January 15 strike, missiles hit a mud house in Shawal, which lies on the border between North and South Waziristan tribal districts.
The area, off limits to foreign journalists, is hilly and densely forested, according to local residents contacted by AFP.
Fighters from the Pakistani Taliban and other militant groups have long taken advantage of this natural cover to use the area as a hideout.
The number of drone attacks in Pakistan has dropped sharply from a peak of 101 in 2010 to just 22 in 2014 and four so far this year, according to an AFP tally.
Curtsy:www.news.yahoo.com
http://news.yahoo.com/us-drone-war-under-scrutiny-botched-strike-052729048.html