The Tangled Web
It ain’t lookin’ good, kids — here are a number of reads that update the Bhutto assassination and prove that she was an Inconvenient Woman [poised on making trouble] and Musharraf is a Determined Man [and IN big trouble.]
You’ll find Juan Cole in here — always good; you’ll even find crusty, despicable old Bob Novak in this short collection, who says that Dubby threw Benazir under the bus … not hard to believe at all. Articles/videos here indicate that Bhutto had concerns about vote tampering and fears about Musharraf’s military.
The election has been postponed, now — Benazir’s young son is stepping up [sorta] but that’s a future project, isn’t it … and who knows WHAT comes next! The poster event for Mars opposing Pluto, below.
Jude
Bhutto report: Musharraf planned to fix elections
Saeed Shah, McClatchy Newspapers
Monday, December 31, 2007
NAUDERO, Pakistan — The day she was assassinated last Thursday, Benazir Bhutto had planned to reveal new evidence alleging the involvement of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies in rigging the country’s upcoming elections, an aide said Monday.
Bhutto had been due to meet U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., to hand over a report charging that the military Inter-Services Intelligence agency was planning to fix the polls in the favor of President Pervez Musharraf.
Safraz Khan Lashari, a member of the Pakistan People’s Party election monitoring unit, said the report was “very sensitive” and that the party wanted to initially share it with trusted American politicians rather than the Bush administration, which is seen here as strongly backing Musharraf.
“It was compiled from sources within the (intelligence) services who were working directly with Benazir Bhutto,” Lashari said, speaking Monday at Bhutto’s house in her ancestral village of Naudero, where her husband and children continued to mourn her death.
The ISI had no official comment. However, an agency official, speaking only on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak on the subject, dismissed the allegations as “a lot of talk but not much substance.”
Musharraf has been highly critical of those who allege that his regime is involved in electoral manipulation. “Now when they lose, they’ll have a good rationale: that it is all rigged, it is all fraud,” he said in November. “In Pakistan, the loser always cries.”
According to Lashari, the document includes information on a “safe house” allegedly being run by the ISI in a central neighborhood of Islamabad, the alleged headquarters of the rigging operation.
It names as the head of the unit a brigadier general recently retired from the ISI, who was secretly assigned to run the rigging operation, Lashari said. It charges that he was working in tandem with the head of a civilian intelligence agency. Before her return to Pakistan, Bhutto, in a letter to Musharraf, had named the intelligence official as one of the men she accused of plotting to kill her.
Lashari said the report claimed that U.S. aid money was being used to fix the elections. Ballots stamped in favor of the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, which supports Musharraf, were to be produced by the intelligence agencies in about 100 parliamentary constituencies.
“They diverted money from aid activities. We had evidence of where they were spending the money,” Lashari said.
Lashari, who formerly taught environmental economics at Britain’s Cranfield University, said the effort was directed at constituencies where the result was likely to be decided by a small margin, so it wouldn’t be obvious.
Bhutto was due to meet Specter and Kennedy after dinner last Thursday. She was shot as she left an election rally in Rawalpindi early that evening. Pakistan’s government claims instead that she was thrown against the lever of her car’s sunroof, fracturing her skull.
CBS, CNN obtain secret dossier alleging Pakistani vote-rigging scheme
David Edwards and Muriel Kane, Raw Story
Wednesday January 2, 2008
At the time she was assassinated, Pakistani opposition leader Benezir Bhutto was just hours away from meeting with two US lawmakers to hand them a dossier alleging that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) was plotting with its Election Commission to rig the upcoming elections.
According to CBS News, which has obtained a copy of the report, it “alleges widespread plans to stuff ballot boxes, rig voting lists, and intimidate, even kill, opposition voters.”
CNN quotes the document more specifically as saying, “Where an opposing candidate is strong in an area, they have planned to create a conflict at the polling station, even killing people if necessary, to stop polls at least three to four hours.”
The report, titled “Another Stain on the Face of Democracy,” was compiled from Bhutto’s own sources within the police and intelligence services. It was to be given to Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) and Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), because Bhutto did not trust the Bush administration, which is seen in Pakistan as strongly backing Musharraf.
The dossier also accuses Musharraf’s regime of diverting US aid into political dirty tricks, charging that “ninety percent of the equipment that the USA gave the government of Pakistan to fight terrorism … is being used to monitor and to keep a check on political opponents.”
Pakistani Senator Latif Khosa told CBS, “The ISI has set up a mega-computer system which has the capacity to hack any of the computers in Pakistan, and it is connected with the Election Commission of Pakistan’s computers and therefore they will overturn the results.” Khosa also charged that computers are being used to change the voter rolls.
Pakistan’s government has called the allegations “ludicrous.” Musharraf’s top spokesman told CNN that he had never heard of the dossier but that the allegations were “just a pack of lies … laughable … ridiculous.”
CNN analyst Peter Bergen noted, “There’s no reason to believe that she was killed because of this dossier, because the people behind her killing almost certainly are al Qaeda and the Taliban, and they’ve got nothing to do with this election.” That is the official Pakistani position, based primarily on allegations of intercepted phone calls from a pro-Taliban warlord who has denied any involvement.
Bhutto herself had accused Gen. Ijaz Hussain Shah, who has been named in the Pakistani media as part of the vote-rigging effort, of plotting to kill her. Shah, described as a close personal friend of President Musharraf, is a former ISI official who now heads the civilian Intelligence Bureau, which supplied many of the guards surrounding Bhutto’s vehicle at the time of an earlier attempt on her life in October.
[open link for three videos]
Analysis: Military slew Bhutto — sources
CLAUDE SALHANI, UPI
12/31/07
WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 (UPI) — Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on orders of lower- and middle-level officers of the Pakistani army and air force, according to various intelligence sources, including members of India’s counterintelligence service.
According to a source who asked to remain unnamed, members of the Pakistani armed forces involved in Thursday’s killing of the former prime minister and leader of the opposition are sympathizers of the ultra-conservative Islamists with ties to the jihadis.
“It’s worrying when half of your lower or mid-level Pak intelligence analysts have bin Laden screen savers on their computers,” a former official of the CIA was reported to have commented.
More than one analyst is of the opinion al-Qaida and other jihadis have managed to successfully penetrate Pakistan’s armed forces and security services. Given the fact Pakistan is in possession of nuclear weapons, the possibility of a pro-al-Qaida regime replacing President Pervez Musharraf would radically change the entire geopolitical alignment in southwest Asia, and it would have a spin-off effect on the Middle East, as well, primarily in regards to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
And it’s not for lack of trying, either. Pro-Islamist groups have tried to assassinate Musharraf multiple times. Two attempts took place in December 2003 when rockets were fired at his vehicle during a visit to Rawalpindi, the same city where Bhutto was assassinated last Thursday.
Then there was an attempt to shoot his plane down with anti-aircraft fire in early 2007. There were also two suicide attacks on the army’s general headquarters and two attacks outside the offices of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency after Pakistani security forces, acting on orders from Musharraf, assaulted the Red Mosque in Islamabad last July; Islamists had sought refuge inside the mosque with dozens of hostages. Scores of people died in the assault, and hundreds were arrested.
Following the two attacks on Musharraf, lower-ranking army and air force officers were placed under arrest. The investigation that followed discovered that the officers had ties with Jaish-e-Mohammad, an Islamist group. In the rocket attack, security forces arrested the son of an army brigadier general. According to the same source, however, only lower-ranking army officials were arrested and court-martialed. “The investigations are dead in the water,” said the source.
Bhutto’s main fear, according to a well-placed source in the intelligence community, was that retired Brig. Gen. Ijaz Shah of the Pakistani Intelligence Bureau would prove a grave threat to her. Bhutto was worried about her security but did not make a big issue of it, some say believing in destiny. But as recently as Dec. 26 she complained that the electronic jammers used to neutralize improvised explosive devices provided by the government were faulty.
Bhutto was well aware of the dangers she faced, having been briefed and having received death threats from her enemies. “She was warned of the dangers yet she continued to behave in a way in which the Secret Service in the U.S. would never accept,” said Thomas Houlahan, director of military assessment with the Center for Security and Science in Washington.
Bhutto insisted on having her own people run her protection, said Houlahan, who added, “but nothing would protect her when she decided to stand through the sunroof of her car.”
“That was extremely reckless,” he said. “I don’t see what could have been done.”
Opposition to Bhutto was to be found not only in the country’s armed forces and bin Laden sympathizers, but also from old Zia ul-Haq loyalists who did not want the daughter of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in a position of power. “They especially loathed the idea that Bhutto had pledged the United States to allow U.S. intelligence to interrogate rogue atomic scientist A.Q. Khan and allow U.S. forces to hunt for bin Laden on Pakistani soil.
“She did not have much of a chance,” Houlahan said.
Musharraf’s Watergate?
Physicians Coerced by Military;
Nawaz: Musharraf Must Go
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
It looks increasingly as though someone in the military government in Pakistan may have been somehow complicit in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
An attorney for the physicians who put out the story that Ms. Bhutto died of a concussion went to CNN on Monday and said that his clients were pressured by the military. They appear not to have actually agreed with the concussion story, and felt coerced but could not speak out because they had been threatened with being fired if they did.
So what we can conclude is that elements in the Pakistani military forced government physicians to deny that Bhutto was shot. But newly surfaced videotape shows conclusively that she slumped after shots rang out; and she did not throw her head back against the sun roof lever as the physicians were coerced into maintaining.
So, why did these military elements make the physicians file a false report? About that we can only speculate. But it should be noted that lying about a crime is usually a sign of guilt. If the military was completely uninvolved, why should it care how she died?
You could construct a speculative scenario in which the shooter used a standard army issue revolver (I’m not a hardware guy, but I think that would be a .38) because he saw a target of opportunity, but that Plan A had been to detonate a belt bomb. If he used a service revolver, that would raise the question of who gave it to him and why. What if the bullet were found, say at the crime scene? If Benazir were not struck by a bullet, then the army could always maintain that it was fired by a soldier on the scene in the midst of the chaos, and was aimed at the perpetrators. But if she was killed by the army bullet, then it could not be explained away. (In fact, the bullet has not been found, but someone may have been afraid it would be).
Motive? Well, the military’s suspicions of her would have been rather heightened in mid-November when she reacted heatedly to then Gen. Musharraf’s declaration of a state of emergency:
‘”It is time for him to go. He must quit as President,” she said as police detained dozens more of her supporters on the tenth day of a state of emergency. “There are no circumstances in which I could see myself serving with General Musharraf.”
She later reconsidered, but there are some things you cannot take back. For instance, say you threatened a Mafia don that you would pull his guts up through his nose. Then later you said you didn’t really mean it.
The government stonewalling on the issue of an autopsy and the coercion of government employees to toe a pre-determined line, smells to high heaven of complicity. It could be incompetence or stupidity, of course. And the Pakistani military is not all one thing. There is the Inter-Services Intelligence, some members of whom have long ties to Muslim militants. There is the officer corps, etc.
Three further notes: The Pakistan People’s Party members and other opponents of Musharraf already were thinking like this before circumstantial evidence emerged that made it even more plausible. I fear their conviction will now be unshakeable, which does not bode well for social peace. It would be a feud.
Second, the physicians would not have had their lawyer speak out about their having been coerced by the military if they thought that Musharraf was likely to continue in office. That is, they have made a bet on a PPP prime minister and are more afraid of being punished by the new government than they are of being punished by the old one. Do they think the old one is about to be overthrown?
And, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, head of the Muslim League (N), called Monday for Musharraf to resign, saying of him, “He is a one-man calamity and the source of all the problems. The country is burning.”
Oooops?
The Benazir Bhutto dossier: ’secret service was diverting US aid for fighting militants to rig the elections’
Jeremy Page, Times UK
January 1, 2008
On the day she was assassinated, Benazir Bhutto was due to meet two senior American politicians to show them a confidential report alleging that Pakistan’s intelligence service was using US money to rig parliamentary elections, officials in her party said yesterday.
The report was compiled by the former Prime Minister’s own contacts within the security services and alleged that the Inter-Services Intelligence agency was running the election operation from a safe house in the capital, Islamabad, they said. The operation’s aim was to undermine Ms Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and to ensure victory for the Pakistan Muslim League (Q) party, which supports President Musharraf, in the elections scheduled for January 8.
Patrick Kennedy, a Democratic congressman for Rhode Island, and Arlen Specter, a Republican member of the Senate sub-committe on foreign operations, have confirmed that they were planning to have dinner with Ms Bhutto on Thursday evening but were not available for comment yesterday.
Sarfraz Ali Lashari, a senior PPP official who works in its election monitoring cell, told The Times that he had helped to compile a 200-page report on the Government’s efforts to rig the poll, which Ms Bhutto planned to give to the Americans and to the press the day she was killed.
“But there is another report relating to the ISI and she was going to discuss it with them,” said Mr Lashari, an envi-ronmental economist who taught at Cranfield University for several years.
The second report, which Ms Bhutto did not plan to release to the media, alleged that the ISI was using some of the $10 billion (£5 billion) in US military aid that Pakistan has received since 2001 to run a covert election operation from a safe house in G5, a central district of Islamabad, he said.
“The report was done by some people who we’ve got in the services. They directly dealt with Benazir Bhutto,” he continued, adding that Ms Bhutto was planning to share the contents of the report with the British Ambassador as well as the US lawmakers.
Asif Ali Zardari, Ms Bhutto’s widower and the new co-chairman of the PPP, confirmed the existence of the report, its basic contents and Ms Bhutto’s plans to meet the US lawmakers last Thursday. Asked if such a report was in his possession, he said: “Something to that effect.” Asked if Ms Bhutto was planning to share its contents with the American legislators, he said: “I am not in a position to make an answer to that.” Asked if the report contained evidence that the ISI was using US funds to rig the elections, he said: “Possibly so.” He declined to give further details, but said the confidential report could have been one of several motives for killing Ms Bhutto, who died after a suicide-bomb and gun attack on an election rally near Islamabad. “It was a general combination of all of these things. The fact that she’s on the ground exposing everybody, I guess, would have been one reason. There are many views and many reasons one can think of for her assassination.”
The allegation is likely to fuel the already intense speculation surrounding the death, which triggered nationwide riots and raised fears that President Musharraf could reimpose emergency rule and postpone the elections.
Electoral fraud is nothing new in Pakistan, which has been led by military rulers for more than half of its 60-year history, and whose politics is dominated by feudal and tribal loyalties. In 1996 a former army chief called Mirza Aslam Baig alleged in court that he had been aware of a secret ISI political cell that distributed funds to antiPPP candidates in the run-up to the 1990-1991 elections.
Ms Bhutto had often accused President Musharraf, who seized power in a coup in 1999, of rigging elections and there have been reports that foreign financial aid to Pakistan’s Central Election Commission was being used to fix the result of next month’s poll.
However, the report that Ms Bhutto allegedly planned to share with the US politicians made the more serious allegation that the ISI was directly involved in rigging the coming parliamentary elections – and was using American money to do it. The United States has given Pakistan at least $10 billion in military aid since President Musharraf agreed to back the War on Terror after the September 11 attacks.
The money was supposed to be used to help Pakistan’s armed forces to fight al-Qaeda and Taleban militants sheltering in northwestern tribal areas near the porous border with Afghan-istan. But there has been almost no accounting for the funds, most of which have been transferred in cash directly to the Defence Ministry, and critics of President Musharraf say that much has been diverted towards other aims, such as upgrading forces on the border with India, or into private pockets.
This month the US Congress ordered the Government to withhold a portion of military aid to Pakistan until President Musharraf demonstrated progress in the campaign against the militants and in a transition towards civilian, democratic rule.
Mr Lashari, the PPP official, said that Ms Bhutto wanted to share the report with them because she did not entirely trust the US Government, which still regards President Musharraf as a key ally in the War on Terror. “The idea was to discuss it with all the international stakeholders, mainly including Britain and the United States, but we didn’t want to share it with anyone who could use it against us,” he said.
“It would be unwise to do anything that would annoy Musharraf. and the international stakeholders. Everything could collapse if the Army comes to know that there is something substantial against them. It’s dangerous to name people in Pakistan.” Pakistani media reports have alleged the existence of an ISI safe house used to rig the elections and identified Ijaz Hussain Shah, a retired general who heads the civilian Intelligence Bureau, as one of those involved.
Mr Lashari also said that Ms Bhutto was planning to show the report with the British Ambassador, Robert Brin-kley. A spokesman for the British Embassy denied any knowledge of the report. The ISI does not have a spokes-person, but a government official dismissed the allegations as baseless.
Sacrificing Bhutto to prop up Musharraf?
ROBERT NOVAK, Chicago Sun-Times
December 31, 2007
The assassination of Benazir Bhutto followed urgent pleas to the State Department for the last two months by her representatives for better security protection. The U.S. reaction was that she was worried over nothing, expressing assurance that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf would not let anything happen to her.
That attitude led Bhutto’s agent to inform a high-ranking State Department official that her camp no longer viewed the backstage U.S. effort to broker power sharing between Musharraf and former Prime Minister Bhutto as a good-faith effort toward democracy. It was, according to the written complaint, an attempt to preserve the politically endangered Musharraf as President Bush’s man in Islamabad.
Bush confirmed that judgment Thursday when he urged that the Jan. 8 election be held in furtherance of Pakistani ”democracy.” That may be Musharraf’s position, but it definitely is not that of his critics. They say an election would be a sham with Bhutto dead, no successor named to head her Pakistan People’s Party, and Saudi-backed former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif boycotting the balloting.
The Bush administration months ago decided to broker power sharing with the deeply unpopular Musharraf and the popular Bhutto. That decision was based on Pakistan’s strategic importance as a sanctuary for al-Qaida and Taliban fighters. Bush was in a quandary. Bhutto was much tougher than Musharraf on Islamist extremists, but Bush had heavily invested in Musharraf.
When I last saw Bhutto in August in Manhattan, she was deeply concerned about U.S. ambivalence but asked me not to write about it. She had not heard from Musharraf for three weeks after their secret July meeting in Abu Dhabi. She feared the Pakistani strongman was not being prodded from Washington.
Next came Musharraf’s state of emergency and purge of Pakistan’s Supreme Court to guarantee legality of his questionable election as president. According to Bhutto’s advisers, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asked Bhutto to go along with that process in return for concessions from Musharraf. Bhutto agreed but got nothing in return.
The unsuccessful Oct. 18 attempt on Bhutto’s life followed the regime’s rejection of her requested security protection when she returned from eight years in exile. The Pakistani government vetoed FBI assistance in investigating the attack. On Oct. 26, Bhutto sent an e-mail to Mark Siegel, her friend and Washington spokesman, to be made public only in the event of her death.
”I would hold Musharraf responsible,” Bhutto said. ”I have been made to feel insecure by his minions.” She listed obstruction to her ”taking private cars or using tinted windows,” using jammers against roadside bombs and being surrounded by police cars. ”Without him [Musharraf],” she said, those requests could not have been blocked.
In early December, a former Pakistani official supporting Bhutto visited a senior U.S. government official to renew her security requests. He got a brush-off, a mind-set reflected Dec. 6 in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
Richard Boucher, assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, was asked to respond to fears by nonpartisan American observers of a rigged election. His reply: ”I do think they can have a good election. They can have a credible election. They can have a transparent and a fair election. It’s not going to be a perfect election.” Boucher’s words echoed through corridors of power in Islamabad. The Americans’ not demanding perfection signaled they would settle for less. Without Benazir Bhutto around, it is apt to be a lot less.
A more sinister fallout of a free hand from Washington for Pakistan might be Bhutto’s murder. Neither her shooting last Thursday nor the attempt on her life Oct. 18 bore the classic al-Qaida trademark. After the carnage, government trucks used streams of water to clean up the blood and in the process destroy forensic evidence. If not too late, would an investigation by the FBI still be in order?
Musharraf’s critics say an election would be a sham with Bhutto dead.
They Don’t Blame Al-Qa’ida. They Blame Musharraf.
Robert Fisk, Independent UK via CommonDreams
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Weird, isn’t it, how swiftly the narrative is laid down for us. Benazir Bhutto, the courageous leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, is assassinated in Rawalpindi - attached to the very capital of Islamabad wherein ex-General Pervez Musharraf lives - and we are told by George Bush that her murderers were “extremists” and “terrorists”. Well, you can’t dispute that.
But the implication of the Bush comment was that Islamists were behind the assassination. It was the Taliban madmen again, the al-Qa’ida spider who struck at this lone and brave woman who had dared to call for democracy in her country.
Of course, given the childish coverage of this appalling tragedy - and however corrupt Ms Bhutto may have been, let us be under no illusions that this brave lady is indeed a true martyr - it’s not surprising that the “good-versus-evil” donkey can be trotted out to explain the carnage in Rawalpindi.
Who would have imagined, watching the BBC or CNN on Thursday, that her two brothers, Murtaza and Shahnawaz, hijacked a Pakistani airliner in 1981 and flew it to Kabul where Murtaza demanded the release of political prisoners in Pakistan. Here, a military officer on the plane was murdered. There were Americans aboard the flight - which is probably why the prisoners were indeed released.
Only a few days ago - in one of the most remarkable (but typically unrecognised) scoops of the year - Tariq Ali published a brilliant dissection of Pakistan (and Bhutto) corruption in the London Review of Books, focusing on Benazir and headlined: “Daughter of the West”. In fact, the article was on my desk to photocopy as its subject was being murdered in Rawalpindi.
Towards the end of this report, Tariq Ali dwelt at length on the subsequent murder of Murtaza Bhutto by police close to his home at a time when Benazir was prime minister - and at a time when Benazir was enraged at Murtaza for demanding a return to PPP values and for condemning Benazir’s appointment of her own husband as minister for industry, a highly lucrative post.
In a passage which may yet be applied to the aftermath of Benazir’s murder, the report continues: “The fatal bullet had been fired at close range. The trap had been carefully laid, but, as is the way in Pakistan, the crudeness of the operation - false entries in police log-books, lost evidence, witnesses arrested and intimidated - a policeman killed who they feared might talk - made it obvious that the decision to execute the prime minister’s brother had been taken at a very high level.”
When Murtaza’s 14-year-old daughter, Fatima, rang her aunt Benazir to ask why witnesses were being arrested - rather than her father’s killers - she says Benazir told her: “Look, you’re very young. You don’t understand things.” Or so Tariq Ali’s exposé would have us believe. Over all this, however, looms the shocking power of Pakistan’s ISI, the Inter Services Intelligence.
This vast institution - corrupt, venal and brutal - works for Musharraf.
But it also worked - and still works - for the Taliban. It also works for the Americans. In fact, it works for everybody. But it is the key which Musharraf can use to open talks with America’s enemies when he feels threatened or wants to put pressure on Afghanistan or wants to appease the ” extremists” and “terrorists” who so oppress George Bush. And let us remember, by the way, that Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter beheaded by his Islamist captors in Karachi, actually made his fatal appointment with his future murderers from an ISI commander’s office. Ahmed Rashid’s book Taliban provides riveting proof of the ISI’s web of corruption and violence. Read it, and all of the above makes more sense.
But back to the official narrative. George Bush announced on Thursday he was “looking forward” to talking to his old friend Musharraf. Of course, they would talk about Benazir. They certainly would not talk about the fact that Musharraf continues to protect his old acquaintance - a certain Mr Khan - who supplied all Pakistan’s nuclear secrets to Libya and Iran. No, let’s not bring that bit of the “axis of evil” into this.
So, of course, we were asked to concentrate once more on all those ” extremists” and “terrorists”, not on the logic of questioning which many Pakistanis were feeling their way through in the aftermath of Benazir’s assassination.
It doesn’t, after all, take much to comprehend that the hated elections looming over Musharraf would probably be postponed indefinitely if his principal political opponent happened to be liquidated before polling day.
So let’s run through this logic in the way that Inspector Ian Blair might have done in his policeman’s notebook before he became the top cop in London.
Question: Who forced Benazir Bhutto to stay in London and tried to prevent her return to Pakistan? Answer: General Musharraf.
Question: Who ordered the arrest of thousands of Benazir’s supporters this month? Answer: General Musharraf.
Question: Who placed Benazir under temporary house arrest this month? Answer: General Musharraf.
Question: Who declared martial law this month? Answer General Musharraf.
Question: who killed Benazir Bhutto?
Er. Yes. Well quite.
You see the problem? Yesterday, our television warriors informed us the PPP members shouting that Musharraf was a “murderer” were complaining he had not provided sufficient security for Benazir. Wrong. They were shouting this because they believe he killed her.
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. rate mortgage adjustable home loanloan day 7home 100 loan1 5 loans mortgagehour loans 1bankruptcy after loansloan aa car24 hour loans pay day Map
Add comment January 2nd, 2008