Benazir Bhutto assassinated!

*Buckaroo* wrote:There is no bloody A-Q

It is a proxy organisation for supra CIA/MI6 organisation

Tell that to Marianne Pearl:

Daniel Pearl

Possible next leader of Pakistan?:

The rise of Pakistan's "quiet man"

Probably from Mushy's own party.

Basil wrote:

*Buckaroo* wrote:There is no bloody A-Q

It is a proxy organisation for supra CIA/MI6 organisation

Oh FFS!

I really miss the 'ignore' feature from the C4 forum.

Still, Buckaroo's not the only moron in the world, there's a lot of them in Aus, if this list of most read stories on ninemsn.com.au is correct:

Most read articles
1.Irwin may use celebrity psychic to contact Steve

2.Benazir Bhutto killed in suicide attack

3.Hicks to apologise after release

Yes, more Aussies seemingly want to read about the 'possibility' of a 'psychic' 'contacting' the late dickhead Steve Irwin than about Bhutto's assassination. Hopefully ninemsn users are only representative of the people who still think Channel Nine is a quality journalistic organisation.

Unbelievable.
How the hell was this "assassin" allowed to get up close to her so as to shoot her in the neck FFS?
And then conveniently set off a bomb in order to destroy all possible evidence.

If Musharraf really did have a hand in Bhutto's assassination, then more bloody fool he, as surely he would have known this act would have torn the country apart, as it is doing.
Regardless of her past corruption, Bhutto was clearly being heralded as the saviour of Pakistan judging from her audiences.

This atrocity is bound to lead to internal strife in Pakistan which may well see Mushy ousted.

Is Imran Khan's life at risk at all?

JGK wrote:Is Imran Khan's life at risk at all?

Yep, as is Nawaz Sharif's.

Pity both Benazir and Nawaz, democratically elected twice, ****-ed up, lied, cheated and conned their people.

Merlin: Musharaf imprisoned, amongst others, charity workers during his emergency, leaving extremists to continue their war against the ordinary people of Pakistan, bombing the **** out of them. What security was Benazir provided with? How was she so ignorant of those who recalled that she did nothing for the majority whilst in power twice, rather stole heavily from them? Was power more important to her than being a mother? Seems so. Life is cheap in Pakistan, even her's.

Al Qaida have taken resposibility.

Allan D wrote:

*Buckaroo* wrote:There is no bloody A-Q

It is a proxy organisation for supra CIA/MI6 organisation

Tell that to Marianne Pearl:

Daniel Pearl

Daniel Pearl and Nik Berg (remember the jew supposedly beheaded by a certain Zarqawi) were killed by CIA.


Omar Saeed Sheikh who was accused of killing Daniel Pearl was an MI6 agent.

doremi wrote:Al Qaida have taken resposibility.

there is no such creature called 'Al Qaida', it is just a proxy for public deception to cover up for black-ops carried out by CIA/MI6.

What are you talkin' bout, Lags.

Are you saying that the covert operations that the CIA run include crashing planes into buildings?

Shocking as it may sound. The answer is 'yes'


Islamists are just tier-5 footsoldiers or convenient smokescreen in such operations. Plz refer to article by ex-CIA man Rober Baer.

I don't understand the mentality of people, of whatever religion or political leanings, who feel that it is acceptable to take someone's life because they disagree with them.

Whether it was Al-Qaeda or 'El Presidente', its a sad day for democracy.

Yep. An absolute farkin tragedy for Pakistan.

Bucks hasn't even reacted to being addressed as Lags.

furriner wrote:Bucks hasn't even reacted to being addressed as Lags.

He will probably wear it as a badge of honour.

filosofee wrote:

JGK wrote:Is Imran Khan's life at risk at all?

Yep, as is Nawaz Sharif's.

Pity both Benazir and Nawaz, democratically elected twice, ****-ed up, lied, cheated and conned their people.

Merlin: Musharaf imprisoned, amongst others, charity workers during his emergency, leaving extremists to continue their war against the ordinary people of Pakistan, bombing the **** out of them. What security was Benazir provided with? How was she so ignorant of those who recalled that she did nothing for the majority whilst in power twice, rather stole heavily from them? Was power more important to her than being a mother? Seems so. Life is cheap in Pakistan, even her's.

Fil, with her expert knowledge of her homeland is quite right. There is a curious apotheosis that overtakes famous people when they are they are subject to violent or sudden death and all sorts of virtues and qualities are attributed to them that were not in their lifetime. It is as if Mark Antony's famous lines in his funeral oration in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar":

"The evil that men do lives after them
The good is oft interred in their bones"

has been reversed.

Although, to quote probably the most famous sermon ever given, apart from the Sermon on the Mount:

"Each man's death diminishes me. No man is an island, entire unto himself. We are all part of the continent, part of the main."

there is nevertheless a considerable element of rough justice in the way Benazir Bhutto met her end.

This is by no means the first political assassination in Pakistani history. On 17 August 1988 President Muhammed Zia-ul-Haq died, along with the then US Ambassador and several others, in a plane crash whose cause has never been explained but in which foul play has long been suspected. The reaction of the Bhutto family was quite different then to what is now. Benazir Bhutto is said to have "rejoiced". General Zia, ironically hand-picked by her father as Army Chief of Staff, had, of course, displaced her father 11 years before in a coup and then signed his execution warrant.

Whether or not Benazir through contacts in the army was implicated in Zia's killing is moot. However what is not in doubt is that she benefited greatly from his sudden demise. Within 4 months of his death she was sworn in as the first female head of government of an islamic state in modern times at the age of 35.

Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq

However there are two other deaths closer to home literally in which she bears an even greater level of suspicion. In 1985 her youngest brother, Shahnawaz, died suddenly, possibly of a drug overdose but also perhaps of deliberate poisoning in Nice, France at the age of 27. Benazir had taken over the leadership of the PPP the year before and for a politician (especially a female one) trying to achieve the leadership of a predominantly Muslim state it was clearly an embarrassment to have a close relative living a dissolute playboy lifestyle on the French Riviera and Shahnawaz' death, for whatever reason, removed that embarrassment to her.

Shahnawaz Bhutto

However the more serious, as well as more violent, death in the family which was to prove far more politically embarrassing was that of her closest sibling, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, who by the time of his sister's second premiership in the 1990s had become politically estranged, having become a revolutionary communist and having supported the Soviet puppet regime in Afghanistan which his sister's administration had helped the West, through the mujihadeen, overthrow.

In September 1996 he was repeatedly shot by the police in an upscale suburb of Karachi after an altercation. Even in dictatorships the police are not usually in the habit of killing the close relatives of the head of government without getting a dispensation first and there was considerable suspicion at the time that Benazir had at least given the green light for Murtaza's elimination. However even by the murky standards of Pakistani politics even the rumour of fratricide was seen as beyond the pale and very shortly after Benazir was removed from office for the second time:

Murtaza Bhutto

So there we have the Bhutto family history, a father executed by a subordinate he had trusted and promoted, two sons dead in mysterious circumstances possibly on the orders of a sister seeking political advantage and a daughter killed by extremists whom she had had a hand in promoting (since she had, during her second premiership between 1993-96, sustained the Taliban in power in Afghanistan as a "stabilising" force thus, inadvertently, leading to 9/11).

Not so much the equivalent of the Kennedys and the Gandhis but more of the Corleones in "The Godfather" trilogy or the Borgias or the Julio-Claudians or the family-slaughtering members of the House of Atreus. Just as the murder of Clytemnestra lifted the curse from the House of Atreus it would be a blessing in disguise if the killing of Benazir Bhutto has lifted the curse of the House of Bhutto from Pakistani politics.

I doubt anyway if the "dream team" of Benazir Bhutto as PM with Musharraf as President being heavily promoted by the West (although Musharraf would have had to reverse his constitutional amendment of 2002 in which he had prohibited any prime minister from serving more than two terms) would have worked for one very good reason that I have come across in researching this piece - pure, old-fashioned snobbery:

"The current hatred of Gen. Musharraf has little to do with the nature of his government. His real "crime" is that he is a Muhajir, the son of one of millions of Indian Muslims who fled to Pakistan during partition in 1947. Although it was Muhajirs who agitated for the creation of Pakistan in the first place, many native Pakistanis view them with contempt and treat them as third-class citizens.

Ms. Bhutto herself, as prime minister in the summer of 1995, referred to Pakistan's Muhajirs as "rats" and said they had "bad blood." In an interview with India Today, a Muhajir spokesman responded that "we have bad blood; it was this blood that built this country."

Even for Western-educated Pakistanis like Ms. Bhutto (the scion of an elite Sindhi family), the sight of a common Muhajir like Gen. Musharraf as Pakistan's supreme power holder is intolerable. Pushing for his fall has little to do with "a return to democracy." It is far more a matter of restoring Pakistan's equivalent of Jim Crow."

Link

However I agree with fil that Musharraf seems to be keener on suppressing the secular opposition than cracking down on the fundamentalists especially when it seems like, for those who have seen the recent film "A Mighty Heart" starring Angelina Jolie about the kidnap and murder of Daniel Pearl, every backstreet of every Pakistani city appears to harbour an Al-Qaeda cell. It is these he should be going after not a load of numpty lawyers and journalists and ex-national team captains with too much money and time on their hands.

What Pakistan desperately needs now is a De Gaulle who can restore order out of chaos as well as remould the democratic institutions. Bhutto and Musharraf were going to part of a triumvirate guaranteeing order and stability whilst waging war on islamic terrorism. Two of the trio are still in place. Will Musharraf exit the same way as he came in possibly before the end of next year? Will this man prove to be the Cromwell or De Gaulle of Pakistan or simply another "General General" to quote GWB?:

Ashfaq Pervez Kayani

Time alone will tell.

They're saying now that she wasn't shot but bumped her head and hit by shrapnel and died. Sounds a little far fetched after going the bullet to the neck angle for over 24 hours.

The video released by the govt. clearly shows the gun. Scary.

So how much longer has Musharraf got to live?

doremi wrote:They're saying now that she wasn't shot but bumped her head and hit by shrapnel and died. Sounds a little far fetched after going the bullet to the neck angle for over 24 hours.

The video released by the govt. clearly shows the gun. Scary.

Actually what they are saying is that the gunman fired three times and missed and then blew himself up (they later found his head the other side of the street) and it was the force of the explosion as she was trying to duck down back into the car that forced her head against one of the metal struts holding up the sun roof which caused the skull fracture from which she died. The argument is that if she had been struck by a bullet or a piece of metal from the explosion she would have sustained an injury to the left side of her head, given the position of the gunman, rather than the right which is where she received her injury.

The explanation is a supposition rather than fact as you cannot see from the video whether or not she struck her head but unless there was somebody else in the car who hit her at the side of the head or she was struck with a blunt object in the ambulance on the way to hospital it seems the most probable scenario. The question to ask is why did they have a sun roof in an armoured car with bullet-proof glass and why did she poke her head through thus negating the protective arrangements of the vehicle?

The government offered Bhutto's husband, who looks like succeeding her as head of the PPP, another post-mortem but he opted for a swift burial instead, in the Muslim tradition, also presumably allowing the conspiracy theories to become entrenched and not complicated by anything so confusing as actual facts.

US Presidents have not ridden in open-top vehicles since JFK in Dallas in 1963 and the Secret Service might well have learned their lesson from Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo in June 1914 when Prinzip had two goes before achieving his objective, botching the first attempt but being given a second chance after FF's driver conveniently retraced his route after finding a road blocked. Would-be assassination victims face their greatest threat when they're getting in or out of cars as Ronald Reagan found out in 1981. But don't try going out through the kitchen at the back - that can provide its own difficulties too as Bobby Kennedy found out at the Ambassadors Hotel in 1968.

Henry wrote:So how much longer has Musharraf got to live?

I guess that's up to GWB!

The doctors, in the hospital where Bhutto was treated, are silent? Wonder why!

Lots of unanswered questions:

1) Hindu journalist Nirupama (?) Subamaniam witnessed Benazir's assasination and said "I heard shots, Benazir fell into her car, then an explosion and then the car sped away". The car went directly to hospital as per report. Driver not hit.

2) Reports said wounds in neck, head and chest.

3) There were other people in the car - what are their statements?

4) One report spoke of brain "oozing out" of head wound - sounds like exit wound

5) Pakistani spokesman said "no bullet injury, only shrapnel injury". But if she fell into the car before the explosion how did the shrapnel injury occur?

6) Pakistani Govt spokesperson now says she hit her head against something. This will not split open the skull. You need velocities of over 100 meters per second to begin to do that knid of damage - so the "lever" story falls in the same category as "bulb burst in air vacuum"

7) Reports say "open cardiac massage" was done. If the bullets did not kill her - the doctors could have killed her this way. Why had the heart stopped beating? The heart does not require the brain to keep beating, but will stop due to blood loss if the head is blown away (unlikely from a mere fall), or if breathing has stopped from base of brain injury.


Why was a post mortem not done? Two reports on this: (a) We were not instructed to do one and (b) Post mortem not needed if cause of death is known

Both lies. Or new Paki laws.

Police abandoned security posts before Bhutto assassination

Perhaps more shockingly, an attendee at the rally where Bhutto was killed says police charged with protecting her "abandoned their posts," leaving just a handful of Bhutto's own bodyguards protecting her.

"Police officers had frisked the 3,000 to 4,000 people attending Thursday's rally when they entered the park, but as the speakers from Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party droned on, the police abandoned many of their posts," wrote Saeed Shah in an essay published by McClatchy News Service. "As she drove out through the gate, her main protection appeared to be her own bodyguards, who wore their usual white T-shirts inscribed: 'Willing to die for Benazir.'"