Earthside Comments: The Musharraf propaganda machine is working overtime to cover-up his complicity and/or culpability for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Now the 'official' line is the Bhutto was killed by bumping her head on the vehicle's sun roof handle. So, the Pakistan military government wants you to believe that it was not exactly lack of security, but a kind of accident that removed Benazir as a threat to their rule.
First, here is a very good analysis by Tariq Ali about yesterday's tragic event.
We also maintain that the instigators of the assassination are Pakistan's military cabal which includes Musharraf. They certainly may have involved al Qaida and/or the Taliban in their crime, but since many members of this ruling junta are in sympathy with radical Islam, the half-truth that this was exclusively an extremist religious plot will further 'catapult' the propaganda.
Then, as reported in the second link below, Bush's unswerving defense of his pal Pervez Musharraf makes him and his misguided meddling in Pakistan culpable in Benazir Bhuttto's killing. Despite the propaganda, that is the truth.
UPDATE!
Here is a video that shows a gunman firing three shots directly behind Benazir Bhutto. The claim by the Musharraf-military government that she died from bumping her head on the vehicle's sun roof handle is clearly propaganda. Indeed, one must wonder how a man on a motorcycle could so easily get close enough to her vehicle to jump on the back and open fire. Bhutto's charge that Musharraf was not providing necessary security is obviously true.
VIDEO
Link: Row Breaks Out Over Benazir Bhutto's Death | Telegraph
The burial of Benzair Bhutto was today marred by heavy violence across Pakistan as a bitter row broke out over how she died.
As hundreds of thousands mourned the murdered opposition leader, the country's Interior Ministry claimed she had died from hitting her vehicle's sunroof when she tried to duck after a suicide attack.
However, one of Miss Bhutto's aide rejected the government's explanation of her death as a "pack of lies".
Brigadier Javed Cheema, a ministry spokesman, said Miss Bhutto had died from a head wound she sustained when she smashed against the sunroof's lever as she tried to shelter inside the car.
"The lever struck near her right ear and fractured her skull," Mr Cheema said.
But the explanation was ridiculed by Farooq Naik, Miss Bhutto's top lawyer and a senior official in her Pakistan People's Party.
"It is baseless. It is a pack of lies," he said.
"Two bullets hit her, one in the abdomen and one in the head. It was a serious security lapse."
Link: A Tragedy Born of Military Despotism and Anarchy | Tariq Ali/The Guardian
Even those of us sharply critical of Benazir Bhutto's behaviour and policies - both while she was in office and more recently - are stunned and angered by her death. Indignation and fear stalk the country once again.
An odd coexistence of military despotism and anarchy created the conditions leading to her assassination in Rawalpindi yesterday. In the past, military rule was designed to preserve order - and did so for a few years. No longer. Today it creates disorder and promotes lawlessness. How else can one explain the sacking of the chief justice and eight other judges of the country's supreme court for attempting to hold the government's intelligence agencies and the police accountable to courts of law? Their replacements lack the backbone to do anything, let alone conduct a proper inquest into the misdeeds of the agencies to uncover the truth behind the carefully organised killing of a major political leader.
How can Pakistan today be anything but a conflagration of despair? It is assumed that the killers were jihadi fanatics. This may well be true, but were they acting on their own?
Benazir, according to those close to her, had been tempted to boycott the fake elections, but she lacked the political courage to defy Washington. She had plenty of physical courage, and refused to be cowed by threats from local opponents. She had been addressing an election rally in Liaquat Bagh. This is a popular space named after the country's first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, who was killed by an assassin in 1953. The killer, Said Akbar, was immediately shot dead on the orders of a police officer involved in the plot. Not far from here, there once stood a colonial structure where nationalists were imprisoned. This was Rawalpindi jail. It was here that Benazir's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged in April 1979. The military tyrant responsible for his judicial murder made sure the site of the tragedy was destroyed as well.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's death poisoned relations between his Pakistan People's party and the army. Party activists, particularly in the province of Sind, were brutally tortured, humiliated and, sometimes, disappeared or killed.
Pakistan's turbulent history, a result of continuous military rule and unpopular global alliances, confronts the ruling elite now with serious choices. They appear to have no positive aims. The overwhelming majority of the country disapproves of the government's foreign policy. They are angered by its lack of a serious domestic policy except for further enriching a callous and greedy elite that includes a swollen, parasitic military. Now they watch helplessly as politicians are shot dead in front of them.
Benazir had survived the bomb blast yesterday but was felled by bullets fired at her car. The assassins, mindful of their failure in Karachi a month ago, had taken out a double insurance this time. They wanted her dead. It is impossible for even a rigged election to take place now. It will have to be postponed, and the military high command is no doubt contemplating another dose of army rule if the situation gets worse, which could easily happen.
What has happened is a multilayered tragedy. It's a tragedy for a country on a road to more disasters. Torrents and foaming cataracts lie ahead. And it is a personal tragedy. The house of Bhutto has lost another member. Father, two sons and now a daughter have all died unnatural deaths.
I first met Benazir at her father's house in Karachi when she was a fun-loving teenager, and later at Oxford. She was not a natural politician and had always wanted to be a diplomat, but history and personal tragedy pushed in the other direction. Her father's death transformed her. She had become a new person, determined to take on the military dictator of that time. She had moved to a tiny flat in London, where we would endlessly discuss the future of the country. She would agree that land reforms, mass education programmes, a health service and an independent foreign policy were positive constructive aims and crucial if the country was to be saved from the vultures in and out of uniform. Her constituency was the poor, and she was proud of the fact.
She changed again after becoming prime minister. In the early days, we would argue and in response to my numerous complaints - all she would say was that the world had changed. She couldn't be on the "wrong side" of history. And so, like many others, she made her peace with Washington. It was this that finally led to the deal with Musharraf and her return home after more than a decade in exile. On a number of occasions she told me that she did not fear death. It was one of the dangers of playing politics in Pakistan.
It is difficult to imagine any good coming out of this tragedy, but there is one possibility. Pakistan desperately needs a political party that can speak for the social needs of a bulk of the people. The People's party founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was built by the activists of the only popular mass movement the country has known: students, peasants and workers who fought for three months in 1968-69 to topple the country's first military dictator. They saw it as their party, and that feeling persists in some parts of the country to this day, despite everything.
Benazir's horrific death should give her colleagues pause for reflection. To be dependent on a person or a family may be necessary at certain times, but it is a structural weakness, not a strength for a political organisation. The People's party needs to be refounded as a modern and democratic organisation, open to honest debate and discussion, defending social and human rights, uniting the many disparate groups and individuals in Pakistan desperate for any halfway decent alternative, and coming forward with concrete proposals to stabilise occupied and war-torn Afghanistan. This can and should be done. The Bhutto family should not be asked for any more sacrifices.
Link: Bhutto's Killing May Threaten Pakistan's Stability | Inter Press Service
The assassination of Pakistan's opposition leader and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto threatens to de-stabilise a country which the United States describes as a trusted ally and a frontline fighter in the global war on terrorism.
The attack on Bhutto in Rawalpindi Thursday was an attempt to thwart her election as prime minister of a civilian government. The polls were scheduled to take place next month.
"The military didn't really want civilian politicians in power," says Barnett Rubin, director of studies and senior fellow at the Centre on International Cooperation at New York University.
"They wanted to use them to legitimate indirect rule, and they were going to do it by rigging the election," he added.
Rubin said Washington's strategy is in "tatters" and that it will be scrambling to say the election either needs to be held as planned or postponed rather than cancelled. But Musharraf, he pointed out, is in a position to pre-empt that, "presumably by declaring a state of emergency." ...
... In an interview with IPS in October, Bhutto took a tough stand against military rule. "Under a democratic government of the PPP, the army will have to be in barracks and do its duty to defend the country's borders as its constitutional duty," she said.
"We are not looking at the army sharing power with the civil and political authority. The army must remain subservient to the civil authority," she insisted. ...
... Musharraf, a former army general who shed his military uniform only last month, was accused of running a dictatorship by silencing the opposition, muzzling the press and hijacking the judiciary.
In a television interview last month, U.S. President George W. Bush virtually went into raptures over the Pakistani President when he said that Musharraf has not crossed any legitimate boundaries to be deemed a political outcast.
"As a matter of fact, I don't think he will cross any lines. We didn't necessarily agree with his decision to impose emergency rule, and hopefully he'll get rid of the rule," he added.
Bush's support for Musharraf’s increasingly authoritarian regime also drew stinging criticism from several U.S. Congressmen.
Perhaps the sharpest reaction came from presidential aspirant Senator Joe Biden -- chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- whose response was laced with political sarcasm.
"What exactly would it take for the president [Bush] to conclude Musharraf has crossed the line? Suspend the constitution? Impose emergency law? Beat and jail his political opponents and human rights activists?" Biden asked.
"He's already done all that. If the president sees Musharraf as a democrat, he must be wearing the same glasses he had on when he looked in [Russian President] Vladimir Putin's soul, [and said he was "a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country."] ...
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