Who Killed Benazir Bhutto?

Justifying Intervention in Pakistan

Justifying Incineration of Pakistan

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

Pakistan's government claimed that al-Qaeda killed Benazir Bhutto without providing any evidence, but compared to other players in Pakistani politics al-Qaeda received quite small strategic or tactical benefits from the act.

Nawaz Sharif now stands alone as the chief opposition leader and may receive many of Bhutto's votes.

Parvez Musharraf can use the ensuing chaos as an excuse to cling to power and possibly make at least part of the Bush administration very happy.

According to reports, Condi Rice pressured Benazir to return to Pakistan. Rice could even have threatened seizure of Benazir's wealth, for the USA has developed such capabilities, and outstanding corruption charges against Benazir and her husband would have made such action legal and possible under US law.

In post-return interviews Benazir had certainly shown a willingness to be a good US puppet and to permit direct US military intervention in Pakistan. (Of course, she could have been trying to pull a Chalabi on the Neocons in the Bush administration.)

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Video Description

Sir David speaks to former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto about her controversial return to Pakistan, who she thinks is behind the deadly bombing of her convoy in Karachi last month, and whether she and Musharraf can forge a power-sharing agreement.

Factions within Pakistani ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) might have considered Benazir's Nov. 2, 2007 interview with David Frost more than enough reason to kill her as would anyone that thought she might have fingered him in the October assassination attempt.

The CIA has had a longstanding working relationship with ISI. If Benazir represented a threat to that relationship, the CIA might have taken her out.

So far Neocons and the US Israel Lobby have orchestrated the incineration of Afghanistan and Iraq. They have increased the harshness of US policy toward Palestinians. They have provided political space for Israel to cluster-bomb Lebanon. They destroyed the best possibility for stability in Somalia in a decade. They are in the process of inciting attacks on Sudan and Iran on the model of the US invasion of Iraq. Adding Pakistan to the list of Arab and Muslim states to be destroyed would hardly be much of a stretch for politically influential ethnic Ashkenazi American extremists, fanatics, and racists.

I spoke with David Frum after the overthrow of the Taliban in Pakistan. He considered the alliance with Pakistan a strategic liability and argued that the USA should be attacking Pakistan and not working with that country.

I pointed out that good arguments identified Israel as an even greater strategic liability and that the USA should end its alliance with that state.

Frum replied that Americans had already decided on that issue. I asked when. We have had no genuine public debate on Israel and certainly no public vote. He had no answer, but I was more impressed that already in December 2001 a representative Neocon was already gunning for Pakistan. From the Neocon standpoint, a Pakistan under Benazir Bhutto working closely with the USA might diminish the importance of Israel to the USA. Neocons control US army intelligence and could have ordered a hit on Benazir.

By similar logic Israeli Mossad might have decided to knock her off.

From the Neoconservative and Israeli standpoint, however friendly toward Neoconservative policy and Israeli interests Benazir might have been, she may be more valuable as a victim with whom Americans might identify because of her physical attractiveness, her perfect English and her Harvard education. A dead Benazir would serve exceptionally well as the focus of a marketing campaign into manipulating the USA to intervene in Pakistan. (Is it surprising that Hillary Clinton, who along with Angela Merkel has been heavily funded and supported by Israeli-American billionaire and arch-Zionist manipulator Haim Saban, was among the first to call for an independent international investigation of the murder of Benazir?)

The early reports on the assassination indicated the possibility that there might have been two or even three independent simultaneous attempts to kill Benazir. One attempt might have involved close associates of Benazir.

Any police officer knows that a competent investigation must check out family and friends. Benazir's son Bilawal and her husband Asif Ali Zardari have benefited directly from the assassination by taking control of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), which she headed. Benazir also has many personal enemies including family members as the article Aunt Benazir's False Promises below indicates.

Benazir and her family do not fit the profile of idealistic democracy advocates as they have sometimes been portrayed in US media.

The French, Polish, Spanish, and Swiss governments have provided documents that indicate the involvement of Benazir and Zardari in corruption totalling more than $1 billion, and the couple was ordered to pay millions of dollars back to the Pakistani government. Benazir asserted that all the charges were politically motivated.

The Bhutto family were part of the old feudal elite in Sindh.

I overlapped with Benazir's younger sister Sunny (Sanam) when we were undergraduate students at Harvard.

One of my friends was a singer in a rock band and good friends with Sunny's boyfriend Joe Incagnoli. I became acquainted with Sunny. (I am astounded that there was actually serious discussion for a time about bringing Sunny back to Pakistan to run the PPP.)

From personal acquaintance and from reading about the Bhuttos, I simply do not have the impression of much genuine commitment of the Bhutto family to democratization, but I never had any acquaintance with Benazir's brothers Shahnawaz or Mir Murtaza. Mir Murtaza's daughter Fatima seems to be exceptional in her progressive politics.

While the problem of Zionist and extremist ethnic Ashkenazi American domination of academic discourse in important areas of politics and foreign policy constitutes a serious threat to the USA by imposing a sort of Gramscian hegemonic blocking on American political debate, in many regards the issue is less immediate and far more subtle than the dangers that Pakistan faces. Yet, Fatima, who is a Columbia alumna, was willing to take the time to investigate the conflict over Nadia Abu el Haj's tenure application at Columbia and to sign the web petition in support of Nadia Abu el Haj. (See Jacob Lassner and Nadia Abu el Haj, Nadia Abu el Haj and the Truth about the Wizard of Oz, and Long Version of Tenure Wars.)

I also have to give Sunny credit for hanging out with a Boston townie, who was accepted at Harvard and also was trying to make it on the Boston rock scene.

From http://www.rockinboston.com/jhfotos75-81.htm and written by Joe Incagnoli (?).

Tall Ships, 1980.

The bones play to a crowd of fifteen hundred on Pier One, East Boston. We launched a destroyer playing a psychadelic medley version of "Anchors Aweigh/Tarantella"! The picture is full of memory-inducing bits, like the Marc [Bolan] T-shirt, which I bought at Piccadilly Circus, my very first stop after arriving on my first trip to London. I put it on immediately, and it led me to a meeting with Terry Livingstone, who worked at my second stop: a cool guitar shop called Macari's Music Exchange. Terry introduced me to members of the T-Rex Fan Club, took me to the Jewish Cemetery where Bolan's ashed are buried, and bought a few of the guitars I brought over to pay my way on subsequent trips. Also, note my old 1957 Les Paul Standard goldtop, bought with cash I got to put a deposit on a hit man - when the hit was cancelled, I used the remaining funds to grab the goldtop. I took my 1st trip to New Jersey two months after this photo was taken, to sell the guitar in Red Bank, so I could buy a ticket to Pakistan. The white Capezio dance shoes tell you this was close to the seventies.

New Year's Eve, 1980.

With Sunny Bhutto at the Intercontinental Hotel, Karachi Pakistan.

New Year's Eve, 1980.

Sunny and I in Pakistan at the Prime Minister's residence, 70 Clifton. We're sporting matching zipper trousers from a trip to the original Boy shop on London's King's Road. All those zippers and still there were no pockets!

_____________________________

Fatima Bhutto's LA Times Article

[In the article below, Fatima worries that Benazir would tie Pakistan to a Neocon agenda. Her fears are probably correct. Benazir's advisor Hussain Haqqani works at the Neocon Zionist Hudson Institute. See Poverty Fuels Extremism by Husain Haqqani (War on Terror in Pakistan). Her other prominent advisor, friend and lobbyist Mark Siegel is more of a Ziolib, which puts him in the same category as Alan Dershowitz and Martin Peretz. Peter Galbraith, who was a Clinton ambassador, introduced Benazir to Mark Siegel. Galbraith is currently pursuing the longstanding Zionist agenda in Iraq by working for the dissolution of the Iraqi state into separate ethnoreligious enclaves. Galbraith is a longtime associate of Harvard Kennedy School Carr Center Professor Samantha Power, who is an academic prostitute serving extremist Zionists in their program to destroy Sudan. Power's book, A Problem from Hell, provides a specious analysis of genocide and almost certainly won the Pulitzer Prize because it supports and conforms to Zionist genocide discourse.]

Aunt Benazir's false promises
Bhutto's return bodes poorly for Pakistan -- and for democracy there.
By Fatima Bhutto

November 14, 2007

KARACHI -- We Pakistanis live in uncertain times. Emergency rule has been imposed for the 13th time in our short 60-year history. Thousands of lawyers have been arrested, some charged with sedition and treason; the chief justice has been deposed; and a draconian media law -- shutting down all private news channels -- has been drafted.

Perhaps the most bizarre part of this circus has been the hijacking of the democratic cause by my aunt, the twice-disgraced former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. While she was hashing out a deal to share power with Gen. Pervez Musharraf last month, she repeatedly insisted that without her, democracy in Pakistan would be a lost cause. Now that the situation has changed, she's saying that she wants Musharraf to step down and that she'd like to make a deal with his opponents -- but still, she says, she's the savior of democracy.

The reality, however, is that there is no one better placed to benefit from emergency rule than she is. Along with the leaders of prominent Islamic parties, she has been spared the violent retributions of emergency law. Yes, she now appears to be facing seven days of house arrest, but what does that really mean? While she was supposedly under house arrest at her Islamabad residence last week, 50 or so of her party members were comfortably allowed to join her. She addressed the media twice from her garden, protected by police given to her by the state, and was not reprimanded for holding a news conference. (By contrast, the very suggestion that they might hold a news conference has placed hundreds of other political activists under real arrest, in real jails.)

Ms. Bhutto's political posturing is sheer pantomime. Her negotiations with the military and her unseemly willingness until just a few days ago to take part in Musharraf's regime have signaled once and for all to the growing legions of fundamentalists across South Asia that democracy is just a guise for dictatorship.

It is widely believed that Ms. Bhutto lost both her governments on grounds of massive corruption. She and her husband, a man who came to be known in Pakistan as "Mr. 10%," have been accused of stealing more than $1 billion from Pakistan's treasury. She is appealing a money-laundering conviction by the Swiss courts involving about $11 million. Corruption cases in Britain and Spain are ongoing.

It was particularly unappealing of Ms. Bhutto to ask Musharraf to bypass the courts and drop the many corruption cases that still face her in Pakistan. He agreed, creating the odiously titled National Reconciliation Ordinance in order to do so. Her collaboration with him was so unsubtle that people on the streets are now calling her party, the Pakistan People's Party, the Pervez People's Party. Now she might like to distance herself, but it's too late.

Why did Ms. Bhutto and her party cronies demand that her corruption cases be dropped, but not demand that the cases of activists jailed during the brutal regime of dictator Zia ul-Haq (from 1977 to 1988) not be quashed? What about the sanctity of the law? When her brother Mir Murtaza Bhutto -- my father -- returned to Pakistan in 1993, he faced 99 cases against him that had been brought by Zia's military government. The cases all carried the death penalty. Yet even though his sister was serving as prime minister, he did not ask her to drop the cases. He returned, was arrested at the airport and spent the remaining years of his life clearing his name, legally and with confidence, in the courts of Pakistan.

Ms. Bhutto's repeated promises to end fundamentalism and terrorism in Pakistan strain credulity because, after all, the Taliban government that ran Afghanistan was recognized by Pakistan under her last government -- making Pakistan one of only three governments in the world to do so.

And I am suspicious of her talk of ensuring peace. My father was a member of Parliament and a vocal critic of his sister's politics. He was killed outside our home in 1996 in a carefully planned police assassination while she was prime minister. There were 70 to 100 policemen at the scene, all the streetlights had been shut off and the roads were cordoned off. Six men were killed with my father. They were shot at point-blank range, suffered multiple bullet wounds and were left to bleed on the streets.

My father was Benazir's younger brother. To this day, her role in his assassination has never been adequately answered, although the tribunal convened after his death under the leadership of three respected judges concluded that it could not have taken place without approval from a "much higher" political authority.

I have personal reasons to fear the danger that Ms. Bhutto's presence in Pakistan brings, but I am not alone. The Islamists are waiting at the gate. They have been waiting for confirmation that the reforms for which the Pakistani people have been struggling have been a farce, propped up by the White House. Since Musharraf seized power in 1999, there has been an earnest grass-roots movement for democratic reform. The last thing we need is to be tied to a neocon agenda through a puppet "democrat" like Ms. Bhutto.

By supporting Ms. Bhutto, who talks of democracy while asking to be brought to power by a military dictator, the only thing that will be accomplished is the death of the nascent secular democratic movement in my country. Democratization will forever be de-legitimized, and our progress in enacting true reforms will be quashed. We Pakistanis are certain of this.

Fatima Bhutto is a Pakistani poet and writer. She is the daughter of Mir Murtaza Bhutto, who was killed in 1996 in Karachi when his sister, Benazir, was prime minister.

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