U.S. Officials Equate Pakistani Spy Agency With Terror Groups in Leaked Documents

These aren't the first documents outlining U.S. suspicions -- U.S. military field documents released by Wikileaks last summer suggested that Pakistan allowed ISI agents to meet with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions. But these are the first documents showing that some U.S. officials actually equated the ISI with other known terrorist groups, hardly an indication of trust. There is a striking contrast between the documents and rosy comments made by U.S. officials at the time.

The Guardian quotes another document, called the "Joint Task Force Guantanamo Matrix of Threat Indicators for Enemy Combatants," dated September 2007, that lists the ISI among 36 questionable groups, including Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the Iranian intelligence services, and the Muslim Brotherhood. The document says that through associations with one of these groups, "a detainee may have provided support to Al Qaeda or the Taliban, or engaged in hostilities against US or coalition forces (in Afghanistan)," the Guardian account says. (The newspaper does not provide a link to that document.)