Pakistani police officer: “Mystery crowd” stopped Bhutto motorcade

McClatchy, extending its usual fine job in U.S. reporting to international coverage, has a boatload of new information related to Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.

Some snips and pieces:

A police officer, Ishtiaq Hussain Shah of the Rawalpindi police, who witnessed the assassination said that a mysterious crowd stopped Bhutto'’ car that day, moving her to emerge through the sunroof. …

Bhutto, apparently thinking she was greeting her supporters, emerged through the sunroof of the bulletproof car to wave. …

It was Shah’s job to clear the way for the motorcade. But 10 feet from where he was standing, a man in the crowd wearing a jacket and sunglasses raised his arm and shot at the former prime minister. …

Who organized the crowd is only one of the mysteries two weeks after the assassination. …

The second report emerged in the Pakistani media, with detailed information about the pistol and bomb. It rejects the government's conclusion that Bhutto died when the force of the suicide blast threw her head against the sunroof lever of her car. Such an impact couldn't have fractured her skull, it said. The government refused to confirm the report's authenticity, but a security official verified it to McClatchy.

Really, though, go read the whole thing.

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Cover-up in Bhutto assassination

U.S. intelligence claim the suicide bomber in the Benazir Bhutto assassination was there to take out the gunman who actually killed her.:

According to a former high ranking US intelligence official, who wishes to remain anonymous due to the delicate nature of the information, the US intelligence community understands the gunman to have been killed in the blast following Mrs. Bhutto’s assassination.

“He was killed, probably not knowing that the suicide bomber was there,” said this source. “We don’t know for sure if the two men arrived together. We do know that the assassin died in the explosion, and was probably meant to.”

Several other US intelligence officials concur that the bomber was likely "inserted" to “clean up” evidence of the shooting, including eliminating the gunman.

Well, this just adds to the idea that this was in some way a governmental job.

Several questions:

1. Will Scotland Yard’s assist on the assassination investigation come to the same conclusion as an on-the-record finding? If not, how much obstruction will either Musharraf, or somebody in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, throw up?

Answer? Plenty:

“The investigation will be opaque and less effective than what happened in Lebanon,” said Larry Johnson, former CIA officer and Deputy Director for Transportation Security, Antiterrorism Assistance Training, and Special Operations for the office of Counterterrorism in the US State Department.

Others interviewed for this article share Johnson’s skepticism and believe that the Bush administration will likely look the other way should any connection between Musharraf and the assassination be discovered, because, they say, at this point, the US has “no workable solution” and cannot discontinue support for Musharraf, given the options.

“We are being held hostage to Musharraf’s whim,” said one former intelligence official.

And, don’t you think Musharraf knows what Johnson said?

2. Who is behind the hit? Musharraf directly? Musharraf indirectly? Musharraf not having any advance knowledge? Will an anonymous U.S. intelligence source leak any preliminary ideas, at the least, on that?

(That's all for now, folks.)

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Bhutto reportedly had info about Pakistani ISI election sabotage

And now, Musharraf is practicing other “sabotage”

Assassinated Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto reportedly had information Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency was working to rig the Jan. 8 parliamentary election. And, not trusting BushCo, she was going to present this information to Sen. Arlen Spector and Rep. Patrick Kennedy.

The fraud reportedly was to include fake ballots, and U.S. aid money was being funneled to finance the effort.

I don’t doubt something like this, to be honest. Nor do I doubt President Pervez Musharraf knew ISI was up to something. Exactly what he knew, I don’t know.

Now, the assassination itself. My guess is ISI was behind it. The gunman, as I’ve noted before, is not al-Qaeda/Islamist style. At the same time, the way he was able to penetrate so closely to Bhutto suggests someone who had been spying out the campaign, possibly even someone with at least a tenuous “in.” I doubt Musharraf was involved. He probably figured a mix of ballot-stuffing, martial law and post-election browbeating was enough; in short, I don’t think even he would be that stupid. If nothing else, if Bhutto got to be trouble, he could have revived the old corruption charges against her or invented new ones.

Now, that said, how high in ISI might the assassination plot have gone? Given that a brigadier general is reportedly behind the election fraud, I’d say someone about the same rank would have headed operational planning. Higher ranks may have heard something, but only on a “plausible deniability” basis.

At the same time, could Bhutto have done more to protect herself? She talked to U.S. officials about hiring private U.S. or British bodyguards; the U.S. suggested she look at private Pakistani companies with international reputations who already do things like provide embassy service.

This is a toughie. I can understand the U.S. position that even private U.S. guards would have looked like too much direct involvement by the U.S. On the other hand, if ISI did penetrate the security she had when she was killed, they might have penetrated a private Pakistani company, no matter how sterling its reputation.

But, in either case, she never did beef up her security. Perhaps she had a stereotypical Muslim fatalism expressed in one of two classic words: “kismet” or “inshallah.”

Meanwhile, Musharraf has announced he will suspend the election; a “date certain” has not been announced, and may or may not be on Jan. 2.

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In the latest ‘shock me’ news from Pakistan

First, it’s alleged that Rawalpindi’s police chief, and not Benazir Bhutto’s husband, blocked an autopsy into the exact cause of her death. And, in the totally unsurprising, President Pervez Musharraf sounds like he’s going to (indefinitely?) delay the Jan. 8 parliamentary election.

So, will Bush/Condi Rice actually do something beyond hand-wringing, like cut aid to Pakistan, or something even more serious, like a mild, but visible, set of limited sanctions against the country, and encouraging Musharraf to resign?

This is doubly true now that Britain’s Channel 4 has aired video footage clearly showing Bhutto being shot before the explosion. Gun-wieldng hitman are definitely not the mark of al-Qaeda; I would guess the same to be true of Islamist groups inside Pakistan.

That, the blocked autopsy, (her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, has said the family was against exhumation because it did not trust the government) and the refusal to use international help to investigate, all point to some degree of Pakistani government connection, if not outright collaboration. Simple hand-wringing just won’t cut it.

Meanwhile, political opponents inside Pakistan, and not just Nawaz Sharif, are calling for Musharraf to step down and be replaced by a national unity government. In U.S. politics, its interesting that this was the position adopted by Bill Richardson, then some other “second-tier” Democratic presidential candidates; however, none of the Democratic “big three,” nor any Republicans, have taken up that position.

From where I stand, the tepid response of the Democratic “big three” is yet another reason to question just how much newness they bring to foreign policy, and another reason to not vote for them.

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Bush Once Again Refuses To Allow Crisis To Interrupt Vacation

If anything has been predictable in the administration of George W. Bush, it's that Bush loves his European-style month-long vacations.

And when he's vacationing in Crawford, Bush doesn't like to be interrupted, come hell or high water.

And while, around the globe, politicians are scrambling to cope with the world's latest crisis, the stunning assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Bush has once again shown that his leisure time comes first, before any other priority.

It's not the first time that Bush has relaxed in Crawford while a major crisis was unfolding.

Who can forget how a vacationing Bush casually strummed a guitar in 2005 as Hurricane Katrina unleashed its fury in the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States? Who can forget how Bush ignored officials' warnings about how Katrina could breach levees and put lives at risk?

It wasn't the first time that a vacationing Bush has ignored urgent warnings. After all, in the midst of his 5-week vacation immediately preceding the 9/11 attacks, Bush ignored a Presidential Daily Briefing, hand-delivered to him by CIA officials, who flew from Washington to Crawford in August 2001.

The Aug. 6, 2001 PDB, as we now all know, was titled, "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S." Bush took no action (and indeed, went fishing later that day).

In the turmoil of the past seven years of Bush's presidency, few things in this world have been predictable. However, one thing that has remained predictable like clockwork is that, when crisis strikes, Bush will put his vacation plans ahead of the interests of the nation, and the world.

On Wednesday, Bush arrived in Crawford for the 69th time of his presidency. In all, Bush has spent an incredible 418 days of his presidency in Crawford. In fact, at the current rate, Bush looks to easily beat Ronald Reagan's record as the president who took the most vacation time while in office.
By Marc McDonald of the progressive blog, BeggarsCanBeChoosers.com

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Bhutto assassination: a different take on “martyrdom”

Earlier today, Blue Girl blogged just below about the “martyrdom” of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

While trying to honor the spirit, at least, of speaking no ill of the dead, I might be a little less hagiographic, myself.

A few months ago, I blogged about how Bhutto didn't have a lot of popularity behind her when she was forced out either time, especially the second time, in large part because her husband was known as "Mr. 5 Percent" due to the degree of his graft. And, let's also not forget that a Swiss court, not a power- or corruption-influence one in Pakistan, found the two of them guilty of money laundering.

See Wiki for her bio on this and other details of her political life.

Over at AmericaBlog, they note how BushCo basically tried to push her down Pakistan's throat.

In terms of policy implications, this is reflective of a massive US foreign policy blunder, in that the Bush administration, in a monumentally stupid move, shoved Bhutto down the throat of Musharraf (and the rest of Pakistan) as a savior, despite her lack of broad popular support and general reputation as corrupt. In making someone who didn't necessarily have the ability to deliver the savior for democracy in Pakistan, we simultaneously set up our own policy to fail and offered Musharraf a return to (or continued) total power in the event that our little power-sharing arrangement didn't work.

Yes, she was getting large turnout at her rallies. But, would it have held up in a, say, semi-free election?

That said, if she's martyred, she's martyred to let another round of stupidity in Bush foreign policy as much as anything. She’s martyred to a Pakistan that has a history of withdrawing one foot, at least, from a fully democratic stance. She’s martyred to a country that, although not Afghanistan, has its own degree of tribalism. She’s martyred to a country that may well have as much corruption as any in Asia. She’s martyred to a country that saw all three of these elements intersect in her two terms as prime minister, some of it out of her control and some of it certainly inside.

And, Sharif has political reasons to blame Musharraf (assuming parliamentary elections are allowed to go through). Beyond trying to boost his candidacy, let’s not forget he’s a client of the late former Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq.

Bottom line: yes, let's remember Bhutto for working for women's rights and other issues. But, let’s not forget her ethics issues, nor let us forget that, in her second term as Prime Minister, she supported the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Again, she changed her mind later, but that was after the horse was out of the barn.

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Pakistan in 1,000 words or less

Dropping a non-Iraq foreign policy post here!

Ted Rall’s latest column another home run, a great snapshot of the contradictions of both the country and President Pervez Musharraf. The president walks a tightrope, and in doing so (though this is outside the purview of Rall’s column), induces contradictions, if not outright schizophrenia, from Bush, who alternates between pushing him too hard, treating him like a toady, and treating him with kid gloves.

Pakistan is a military dictatorship with a wild, freewheeling press, ruled by an antidemocratic despot who respects many democratic institutions. A graduate of a Catholic high school and a Presbyterian college, General Pervez Musharraf came to power by allying himself with radical Islamist political parties who convinced him to invite Afghanistan's Taliban militia into Pakistan to fight India. Most Pakistanis are secular and favor modernization, yet watch their nation's Talibanization in passive silence.

If your head is spinning, congrats--you're Pakistani for 1000 words.

Musharraf is playing a dangerous game, balancing the hopes and fears of educated liberals to the left against radical Muslim clerics on the right. Most leaders who deploy a strategy of reverse triangulation end up with no support at all. Because Musharraf has transformed the Pakistani political system into the personification of his policies, Pakistan itself could follow suit.

The biggest clash in Pakistani society, however, is common to the Third World: a widening gap between the lives of a few well-off individuals and millions of everyone elses. Frustrated at the toll that the dismal condition of Pakistani highways took on its bus lines, South Korea's Daewoo conglomerate decided to spend $375 million to build its own. The privatized six-lane toll road of immaculate asphalt allows elite motorists to zip through the impoverished wasteland separating Islamabad and the Punjabi capital of Lahore in a mere four hours. If you're Jamal Schmo, it costs 12 hours and the occasional broken axle.

The thing is, he is probably, faults and all, close to our best alternative to lead Pakistan at this time. Benazir Bhutto, though having new-found popularity in Pakistan, probably still has the virus of corruption in her bloodstream.

And, it was actually Bhutto who first opened the door to the Taliban in Afghanistan, before her second deposition.

Anyway, as far as Musharraf, the attempt to depose Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry has been his biggest mistake to date. Up until that point, more American policy leaders could probably turn a halfway blind eye to him, but he has now taken bending Pakistan’s constitution too far.

But, again, options in Pakistan aren’t the best.

Cross posted at SocraticGadfly.

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