Updated February 5, 2008:
Via Joachim Martillo, we offer CIA: Mehsud behind Benazir killing? There's a lot of pretty interesting stuff here. When I wrote my post Benazir Bhutto Killed in Pakistan three weeks ago, I said that I thought that Al Qaeda did it. We still do not have a whole lot of evidence that this is true. I have now changed my mind; I think that the Pakistani ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence Agency) killed Bhutto.
But that is sort of like saying that Al Qaeda did it, since AQ, the Taliban and the ISI are all sort of interlocking entities in some ways. More precisely, the are individuals and even powerful factions inside the ISI that have very close ties with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. I am certain that the ISI knows exactly where Osama bin Laden is most of the time and is just refusing to turn him in to the US.
The CIA blamed Baitullah Mehsud, a major Pakistani Taliban leader in South Waziristan, for the killing. But Mehsud himself is generally considered to be an ISI asset. The only evidence that the Pakistani government has against Mehsud is a phone call after she was killed. The call supposedly takes responsibility for the killing, but instead it is more congratulatory than anything else.
The Pakistani government says that at the time of the call, Mehsud could not have known about the killing, but that is ridiculous, since it was all over the TV screens of most of the nation by that time.
The Pakistani government called Scotland Yard in to determine the cause of death, but not, notably, to investigate who did it. The investigation proved that the Pakistani government lied after she was killed when they said she fell and hit her head on the shaft of her limousine cover.
Scotland Yard proved that she was killed by a gunshot, as was clear from some of the videos released later, which showed the gunman firing a gun and Bhutto's body jerking backwards right afterwards, whereupon she fell into the limo. That the Pakistani government deliberately lied about how she died is telling.
So is the fact that they immediately washed down the street afterwards, destroying all evidence, supposedly because it was a main street that got hit and it needed to be open for traffic immediately.
What garbage. I assure you that if Hilary Clinton of John McCain was hit by a closeup gunshot followed by a suicide bomber that killed 20 supporters on Madison Avenue in New York, that street would be shut down for a bit, possibly even days. The press would be dogging all over LE to not miss a thing as the conspiracy theories immediately sprouted all over the Internets.
So, she was shot several times by the shooter, apparently from only a 5-10 feet away. That right there suggests it in not Al Qaeda, since Al Qaeda usually does not use a single asset like that, or if they do, they have him blow himself up with a sui-bomb, destroying both evidence and the chance that he will be interrogated and spill.
A single shooter is more like the ISI - this is one of their favorite ways to kill people. Bhutto pretty much deserved to be killed anyway, but not by the ISI. She deserved to be killed by the supporters and relatives of her very own brother, whom Benazir had murdered because he was a threat to her feudal-like dictatorship at the head of her Pakistani People's Party.
Yes, in 1996 under Bhutto's reign, a shooter killed her own brother while he was surrounded by 200 Pakistani police and security forces in front to a home. By the way, all of the surrounding streets were sealed off by the same security guys, who of course had nothing to do with the killing.
Well, anyway, the shooter somehow penetrated the cordon blocks around the area, then mingled inconspicuously with army of 200 cops, then he shot Bhutto's brother and close range, and then, get this! He escaped! He escaped from a 200-cop crowd and made his getaway through the locked-down security cordon! I mean, these Pakistani killers are positive Houdinis.
Well, of course, Benazir, who hated her brother, denied having anything to do with the killing. Benazir is just as nasty as the Ptolemaic Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt, of which Cleopatra was a member. This glorious dynasty consisted of inbred and racially pure Macedonian Nazis.
The Afrocentric fools who say that Cleopatra was Blacks are silly - the Ptolemaic line guarded their Macedonianness better than Nazis guarded Germanness - and they hated all other races like good little Nazis too.
The Egyptian city Alexandria, of which the Macedonian Queen Cleopatra held sway as Queen of the Macedonian colony of Egypt, was a racially pure Macedonians-only city, and the despised Egyptian "niggers" were not allowed entry, or perhaps only as slaves.
So despised were the dark-skinned Egyptians that it was inconceivable that any Macedonian monarchical supremacist would father a child by one. It is true that in the declining days of the Egyptian Empire, say the last 100 years - imagine the collapse of Rome in the Lower Nile - Black, or actually Mulatto Nubians, ruled Egypt. But this is a far cry from the Black Egypt the Afrocentrists pitifully claim.
Cleopatra's Ptolemaics spent most of their time having wild incestuous sex with each other and then, Praying Mantis-like, killing their own brothers, sisters, Moms and Dads to grab the loot. This is who Cleopatra was! Nice person! an exhaustive review of the non-Blackness of Cleopatra via Black author Eugene Stovall, see here.
If you haven't noticed, this excursion was intended to obliquely compare these Ptolemaic animals with the various feudal clans (called politicians) that have ruled and poisoned Pakistan since its founding, and to compare Benazir to Cleopatra. Like the Ptolemaics they are addicted to offing the opposition - its positively a Pakistani pastime, like tea and cricket.
The only Ptolemaic thing I guess the Pakistani elite doesn't do is have tons of incestuous sex with each other, being good Muslims and all. Benazir has the equivalent of slaves in the debt peonage farmers on her feudal estate. And like Cleopatra, Benazir is being preposterously eulogized and virtually worshiped in her demise.
Immediately after the shots that killed Benazir, there was a suicide bombing to kill the shooter and destroy the evidence in the shooter and everything around him. This once again is more ISI style, as Al Qaeda usually doesn't do it this way.
Scotland Yard was only there to tell us that the Pakistani government lied about how she was killed, not to investigate who done it, because it's the Pakistani government that done it. Scotland Yard detectives, off the record of course, said that the Pakistani government, possibly the ISI, killed her. CIA guys are saying the same thing off the record.
The investigation of who done it will be done by Pakistan itself, which means they will never find the true authors of the crime. But it's kind of like asking OJ to find "the real killer" anyway.
Prior to this, the Pakistani government tried to kill her as soon as she got off the plane. Her welcome home rally on a major street in Karachi was hit by several simultaneous blasts, apparently suicide bombers and then multiple bomb cars or suicide bomb cars.
Once again the Houdinis and the most incompetent police on Earth were skillfully utilized by the would-be assassins. This attempt killed about 140 of Bhutto's supporters, a horrible crime, but I guess they deserved it for supporting her, right?
You think penetrating a mob of 200 cops takes skill? Forget it. In this attack the devious little assassins penetrated ~7000 security forces. These 7000 security forces were deliberately chosen from the dumbest classes of all, because all 7000 decided to go on dinner break simultaneously right before the killing!
Then someone screwed up and all of the lights "accidentally" went out. It was one darn thing after another. Then the bomb cars and sui-bomb dudes all went off one after the other.
Of course the government had absolutely nothing to do with this attempt either. These opposition candidates just have the darnedest luck! The Pakistani government first said it was those evil jihadi dudes that done it, then noted that there will be no investigation of the attempt. Why no investigation? Who knows, probably a practical joke of some sort. Wow, what a madcap bunch these Pakistani government guys are.
Right after the Bhutto killing, there was a serious attempt on the life of Nawaz Sharif, also running against Musharaff. The government had nothing to do with that either, of course.
What's clear is that the Pakistani government is trying to kill of lots of its most threatening opposition candidates, and with the article below showing how the CIA is outrageously supporting the Pakistani government in these nefarious deeds, the US is behind the project. Would anyone sell life insurance to any Pakistani opposition politician.
So, get this. The US is backing up the ISI-Al Qaeda-Taliban as they try to Final Solution all of the opposition candidates to Musharaff. Why? God knows. Probably another of those cases where the US just blindly supports an ally no matter what they do, because the alternative is considered to be so much worse.
It's said the US government supported Bhutto, but that is not really true. It's more like they wanted her to be some figurehead in Musharaff's dictatorship, but not to unseat him.
It's said that Bhutto is the champion of women's rights in Pakistan. Well, maybe today, but yesterday she was as bad as the Saudi monarchy. Under President Zia and Bhutto, there was an Islamization campaign, mostly to build up a fundamentalist guerrilla base to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980's.
This had the effect of littering Pakistan with idiotic madrassas that now churn out fundamentalist cretins by the busfull, ready to go fight for Osama bin Laden. It also set off the Sunni-Shia wars in Pakistan, which had been relatively quiescent before.
This is because Saudi Wahhabi preachers were brought in to teach Saudi Islamo-Nazism to the gullible ignoramuses in the "schools", where religion only was taught, all else being the work of the Devil and all.
As the Saudis are the main force in back of the mass slaughter of Shiites around the world that has been going on for decades now since the Iranian revolution, Shia-hatred was spread in these schools, morphed into the usual Sunni Shia-killing death squads, and Shia Sunni-killing death squads formed in retaliation.
As is the case in most of the Muslim World, Shia bodies piled up more than the reverse. The Pakistani government, mostly Sunni, has more or less supported the mass slaughter of Shia due to the common Sunni Nazi-like hatred of Shia Muslims.
During the Islamization campaign, a set of laws called Hudood Laws were put into place, which were horribly anti-woman. Women were imprisoned after they had been raped, a sort of an honor killing reaction cultivated by the Arab woman-hating, male chauvinist values of family honor that marinated the Islamic stew in Pakistan for centuries.
This is part of a larger cultural area infected with the negative aspect of Arab cultural values, possibly extending to what Carroll Quigley called the Pakistani-Peruvian Axis. It's more sensible to see this area as a crucible of Arab culture than as one of Islamic culture, as the two are not the equivalent. Pakistani feminists protested these evil laws, but Bhutto refused to amend them during her term. Some feminist.
Although the PPP was formed as a socialist and secular party and is a member of the Socialist International, that was mostly campaign fodder to get elected. Once they got in, they didn't do much of anything to redistribute wealth in this semi-feudal land, Benazir being a feudal lordess herself and all.
She also helped form the Taliban that took over Afghanistan and horrified the world. Under Taliban reign, Pakistan was one of only three countries on Earth that recognized the Taliban.
After she returned to Pakistan this year, this histrionic political actress had morphed into a fighter for secularism and her former Taliban buddies were now her worst enemies. All the socialist talk had been dropped long as per US demands during her administration of the 1990's.
So why was she killed? Well, because she said that several high-ranking members of the Pakistani government wanted her dead, and she pledged to go after the ISI's "jihadi asset" option. More to the point, Pakistani Islamic nationalists saw her as bringing the US into Pakistan in the form of a large US land invasion, from Afghanistan, of the Pakistani tribal territories in the West.
Along with this was the fear that USreal (the US and Israel joined at the hip) would concomitantly conspire to neuter Pakistan's prize atomic weapon arsenal. A US invasion of the Territories, not necessarily such a bad idea in theory, is deadly in terms of Pakistani Islamic nationalism - the public will not support such an affront to their sovereignty.
The neutering of the nuke option is also deadly to Pakistani nationalists in the military, as it castrates their best defense against the Indian enemy - the principal enemy around which most Pakistani foreign and military policy revolves. So Bhutto was seen as an agent of the US neoconservatives and probably Israel at a more remote level. A good argument then is that the Pakistani military itself had her killed.
Robert Fisk and Juan Cole (here, here and here ) have both suggested that the Pakistani government killed Bhutto, and that's expert testimony enough for me. An essential website for inside dope about Pakistan, especially the Al Qaeda-infested Western Territories, is here.
On January 18, dozens of Islamists were killed in battles right inside Dera Ismail Khan, a major city which is outside of the FATA agencies where the problems are worse and into the much more civilized NWFP districts.
A recent NY Times article talked about how the Tehrik-e-Taliban (Mehsud's grouping of all of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and allied Islamists in the West) now controls some of the outer suburbs in Peshawar itself, and stages one attack a week in this major Peshawar District city.
Here is a very nice copy of the Northwest Frontier Provinces and the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies. In FATA, the Pak Taliban now control the North Waziristan, South Waziristan, Mohmand and Bajour Agencies. They have de facto control over the Tank, Bannu, Swat, Dir and Shangla Districts in the NWFP. The Kyber, Orakzai and Kurram Agencies are threatened in the FATA.In the NWFP, the Dera Ismail Khan, Larki Marwat, Karak, Hangu, Kohat, Peshawar, Charsadda, Nowshera, Mardan, Malakand, Chitral and Kohistan Districts are all threatened.
Click on the map for better resolution.
That the Pakistani Taliban are deep into these two major cities is terrifying, and indicates there is a real insurgency in Pakistan, somewhat akin to the Sendero Luminoso insurgency in the 1980's in Peru in intensity. There's been some very heavy fighting in the NWFP and especially South Waziristan Agency lately, with ~120 jihadis being killed on January 19 alone. Great up-to-date details of this war are on Roggio's site, Long War Journal - no one does it better.
Martillo's title below suggests that the CIA killed Bhutto. It's always a blast to accuse the CIA of killing someone, but in this case it's a bad call. The CIA had absolutely no sane reason to eliminate Benazir Bhutto. Recent anti-Semitic claims that nefarious US Jews called Zionist neoconservatives had Bhutto killed are even more absurd. As Martillo's piece notes, Bhutto was the neocons' best hope for Pakistan.
CIA: Mehsud Behind Benazir Killing?
The CIA Had More Reason!
by Joachim Martillo
The January 19, 2008 issue of the Boston Globe published a CIA claim that South Waziristan tribal leader, Baitullah Mehsud, who maintains strong ties to al-Qaeda and an alliance with the Taliban, was behind the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. The article is entitled CIA Says Pakistan Tribal Head Behind Assassination.
Because Neocons want the CIA to have a free hand to operate in South Waziristan fingering Mehsud serves the interests of at least some US government officials even if there are many reasons why assassinating a possible opponent of Pervez Musharraf or Nawaz Sharif is not obviously in the interests of either al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
The politics of Pakistan and of the assassination of Benazir are no clearer today than they were when Who Killed Benazir Bhutto? appeared on Jan. 1, and the apparent attempt of Fatima Bhutto to reach out to other factions of her family (Fatima Bhutto: Farewell to Wadi Bua*) seems to have failed (Fatima Bhutto Breaks Her Silence, Questions Benazir's Will, Bilawal Being the PPP Chief).
Not only is the intra-family conflict deep and complex (The Other Bhutto), but there is also an Islamic sectarian aspect to the national politics of the Bhutto family, which has Shiite origins. (Zulfikar, which is Benazir's father's name, is the name of Ali's famous sword and is rarely found as a name among Sunni Muslims. Benazir was, in fact, half-Iranian through her mother.)
In majority Sunni Pakistan, the Bhutto's were almost forced into secularist politics, and naturally the Saudis favored Nawaz Sharif over Benazir.
In terms of her international politics, Benazir was directly involved with Neoliberals as Benazir and the Jews: A Love Story from The New York Jewish Week reports. She was also indirectly involved with Neoconservatives through Husain Haqqani, who served both as spokesman and also as top aide to her for over a decade.
Haqqani is an important figure at the Hudson Institute, which is a fanatic Neoconservative think-tank associated with racist ethnic Ashkenazi American ideologues and subversives like Norman "Bomb-Iran" Podhoretz. (See Poverty Fuels Extremism by Husain Haqqani [War on Terror in Pakistan].)
Notes
* Fatima was probably sincere. Sometimes it is hard to remember that the Bhutto clan are actually a real family.
From Daughter of Destiny, An Autobiography, by Benazir Bhutto, pp. 257-8.
The phone rings constantly from Los Angeles, London, Paris -- my mother's friends and relatives calling to congratulate her on my release [in 1984 from prison in Pakistan]. I wasn't ready to talk to anyone yet, and only spoke to Yasmin and Dr. Niazi in London. Ardeshir Zahedi, a friend of my parents and Iran's former ambassador to the United States, arrived with caviar.
My mother, Sunny, and I stayed up talking through the night. It all seemed so unbelievable. Yesterday I had been a prisoner. Today I was free, with my mother and sister. We were together. We were all alive.
Mir! A little brown-haired girl pulling at my coat! "Meet your niece, Fathi [Fatima]," Mir told me, standing in my mother's flat on my second day of freedom. Was my brother really standing in front of me? I saw his lips moving, heard my own voice responding. The noise of our reunion must have been deafening, but I can't remember a thing we said.
At twenty-nine, Mir looked so handsome, his dark eyes flashing one minute, gentling the next as he lifted his eighteen-month-old daughter to give me a kiss. "Wait till you see Shah," Mir laughed. Shah had been eighteen the last time I'd seen him, just a boy. Now he was twenty-five with a longed-for mustache.
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