Rawstory is reporting (http://rawstory.com/news/2007/US_intelligence_suggests_coverup_in_Bhutto_0107.html) that the government of President Pervez Musharraf may have been involved in a cover of in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. My gut reaction has always been to have suspicions about the rush to blame the murder on Islamic fundamentalists in order to shore up the U.S. aid to Musharraf and also allow the Chimperator to run around using the terror bogeyman once again. It was all just a little bit too convenient. Meanwhile, al Qaeda is denying responsibility and the method of the assassination do not match Al Qaeda's usual format. Here are highlights from the coverage:
Mrs. Bhutto was shot when she stood up through the sunroof of her vehicle after a campaign rally for her Pakistan Peoples Party in Rawalpindi. Immediately after the shooting, a suicide bomber detonated an explosive, killing 25 people as well as himself.
The Musharraf government's initial reaction was to blame either al Qaeda or other terrorists closely linked to al Qaeda. However, contradictions in official statements, as well as the behavior of police – who hosed down the streets in Rawalpindi just an hour after Mrs. Bhutto was assassinated – quickly began to cast doubt on the official version of what happened, leaving serious questions surrounding Musharraf and the ISI and putting more pressure on the United States to pull back its support for Pakistani leadership.
According to a former high ranking US intelligence official, who wishes to remain anonymous due to the delicate nature of the information, the US intelligence community understands the gunman to have been killed in the blast following Mrs. Bhutto's assassination. "He was killed, probably not knowing that the suicide bomber was there," said this source. "We don't know for sure if the two men arrived together. We do know that the assassin died in the explosion, and was probably meant to." Several other US intelligence officials concur that the bomber was likely "inserted" to "clean up" evidence of the shooting, including eliminating the gunman.
The reports that an al Qaeda suicide bomber had killed Mrs. Bhutto disappeared as quickly as they had surfaced, when footage showing a gunman and an audio capture which clearly indicated several shots fired prior to the explosion began to circulate online and in news accounts. Indeed, the changing official position as to the cause of death indicates that someone was very interested in making it appear that Mrs. Bhutto had died in a suicide bombing, with initial medical reports out of Rawalpindi on Thursday claiming she had died as the result of the explosion.
Others interviewed for this article share Johnson's skepticism and believe that the Bush administration will likely look the other way should any connection between Musharraf and the assassination be discovered, because, they say, at this point, the US has “no workable solution” and cannot discontinue support for Musharraf, given the options. “We are being held hostage to Musharraf's whim,” said one former intelligence official.
When asked why the West was even bothering with an investigation that would surely neither help alleviate pressure for any of the parties nor ease diplomatic tension when there is already no viable political solution, one US intelligence official responded that “This investigation is not being done for [the United States]. We are not the audience. The Pakistani people are.”
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