Benazir Bhutto assassination Category: News and Politics I wrote this on 30/12/07 and though the information (and disinformation) continues to shift and flow, I think the broad thrust remains pertinent:1) It is becoming clear that this was a State assassination with aclassic (and utterly shameless) cover-up, the dissemination of disinformation, etc. It must be the first time in the history of the modern world that a post-mortem hasnot been carried out after a murder. And the crime-scene hosed down. Eventhe most incompetant detective would laugh at such measures. Gil Grissomfrom CSI would have a heart attack.2) I think Musharraf did it in order to continue to appearindispensible to the USA. Otherwise, the USA mighthave backed Bhutto as his replacement - which was implicit in theirsending her back to Pakistan in the first place - with the'power-sharing deal' having failed to materialise, they werebacking both horses (Nawaz Sharif-of-the-crocodile-tears and his cohorts aretheirs, too, of course, as well as - like Saint Anthony Blair, OBE, BAE - being theSaudis' great chum) and even in a rigged election, the outcome mightnot have been as absolute as Mush would have wanted. And what would havehappened to the Big Mush then, if he had had to cede at least the facade of power (we know that no Pakistani leader has real power and that they are just puppets of the USA)? No longer Head of the Army, just a politician like the rest of them, he would have become instantly dispensible and therefore exposed and would be assassinatedby some 'lone nut'.Perhaps Bhutto (miracles are possible, though unlikely, and it would'vetaken seven magic mushrooms and a quart of absinthe - but thenPakistan is the World Leader in the processing and export ofdiamorphine - to have produced such an outcome) might havereinstated some of the illegally-deposed judges in order to buttressher power-base against ex-General Mushy. Now the USA will make do withthe Little Prezzy - unless the law and order situation deteriorates(it should deteriorate enough to justify the imposition of Martial Law but not tothe extent that it looks as though he is losing control) to the extentthat it generates the development of a perceived threat to their interests in which case they will have him assassinated in a 'plane crash (does this bring back memories?) and appoint General Kiani (new Head of the Army) or some other Tom, Dick (well, I know they are all dicks but you know what I mean) or Harry as the new president in a state of Martial Law. Watch this space. I've warned people about John Negroponte before. Check out his history on the web.He screwed-up most of Central America in the 1980s and more recently,Iraq, too. He is the death-squad man and now he is the ColonialResident running Pakistan. Many people in Pakistan (not just supporters of Bhutto) are extremely angry. But the Army will crush all dissent and will generate some of its own dissent against the dissenters (as you know, it controls and/ or is in alliance with several political parties and their gangster hoodlums). How convenient that all assassins are now suicide-bombers. It must be in the job description. No need for a Jack Ruby then, eh.3) As with most other political assasinations, we will probably neverknow for certain who ordered and who organised this one. However,along with many others, I suspect those factions of the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) who are the progenitors of the Frankenstein's monsters of the Islamists (Mujaheddin, Taliban, etc., ad nauseam). The actual act appears to have been committed by a skilled marksman who was also obviously a fanatic and who was permitted by the security services to access a place of proximity to the vehicle. The USA has certainly assassinated many political leaders and activists throughout the world and there is a normative amorality which governs the actions of all states. However, this does not mean that every assassination everywhere has been committed by the USA or its stooges. I am aware of the USA's role in creating militant Sunni Islam as a keymilitary-political force during the 1980s and early 1990s (via the ISI, aka 'Rent-an-Assassin' aka 'A Poor Man's Mossad', whose US-directed tentacles spread even unto the marches of Chechnya) and of course as an American stooge (as almost every Pakistani Prime Minister/ President has been), Benazir Bhutto herself supported the Taliban's rise to power in Afghanistan. There are various factions within the ISI (and within the Army itself). Pakistan is a country ruled by another country (the USA) but the local secret police is the ISI, just as in the Shah's time in Iran there was SAVAK. And of course, regardless of the regime, these people never become redundant, there is always, it seems, plenty of work for torturers. Within this general paradigm (admittedly considerably simplified), as in Afghanistan, alliances shift, mutate and sometimes coalesce and I think that it was likely to have been factions within the Pakistani State - indeed, it seems likely the ruling cadres of the State itself - which ordered and organised her assassination as a 'wet operation' to be carried out by one or other of the myriad Jihadist groups which germinate in that country and which are in intimate relation to these elements of the Hard State which creates them. She had become closelyidentified with the USA and with a (currently) anti-Islamist position, she and her family (this is a feudal capitalist society) were hated by certain factions (including those very powerful elites who were of General Zia-ul-Haq's cadre, which include the ISI factions mentioned earlier) and she was a woman and whatever her faults (and they were many), on a very visceral level none of those bastards can stand a woman telling them what to do. A woman Government Minister was assassinated through a not dissimilar lapse in security a few months ago and another, forcedto resign on a ludicrous pretext.4) If the USA are involved in some kind of long-game scenario then itseems likely that it would be as a means of positioning either Musharraf oranother Army general as a 'saviour' of the nation. They willingness ofthe UK and US governments to accept the official Pakistan Govt version ofthe killing suggests complicity at some level, though this may partlybe them closing ranks behind their chosen, well-polished chess-piece,Musharraf. I am resistant to easy, knee-jerk responses. These thingsare often complex and multifactorial. But then, in days of rage ("youdon't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"), I've oftenthought that perhaps one of the USA's agendas is simply to fostersituations of maximum chaos and militarisation combined with economicasset-stripping, throughout what the US state apparatus calls, the'Greater Middle East' in order to seize control of resources and weaken rival economic blocs (esp. the feared China-India-Russia nexus) and thereby to reinforce its own hegemony. It's what empires do. And of course, the USA has often killed or deposed its own stooges (including General Zia-ul-Haq) many times through history and manipulated extremist groupings in various waysadvantageous to the long-term objectives of its military-industrial complex, i.e. its corporate economy which absolutely requires ongoing and unending war in distant places (about which we know lots). Sometimes bits of shrapnel from these wars fly home (e.g. 9/11, 7/7 et al, ad infinitum) and that, too is good only for thesecurity state, as in C19th Palmerstonian fashion, while extolinghuman rights in the states of sometime enemies (ignoring the samethings in the states useful as allies) our own dear governments can engender astrategy of tension and thence manufacture consent (I'm sorry, Icouldn't resist stealing that phrase from Chomsky and Hermann) fordraconian measures, including the tightening of legislation against legitimate,peaceful dissent at home.These are merely my current rambling hypotheses and of course they maybe completely wrong. Maybe Bhutto just swooned because it was a cold,Rawalpindi evening (ah, those days of the maidan, the 'Pindi jail andthe jasmine breeze!) and struck her head on the lever of the sunroof sohard that it produced entry and exit wounds in her chest as well as inher head and neck and perhaps there was and is no gun, no gunman, no bomb,no bullet (magic or otherwise), no dead bodies, no judges in jail, noevil at all in the Land of the Pure. Perhaps Pakistan itself is adream. Or perhaps Pakistan is Narnia, where the Goodies fight theBaddies and elves and hobbits dance around camp-fires, singing sweet naathsinto the freezing night. The words of the Intelligence Brigadier-General(why are there so many brigadiers in Pakistan and so few LittleCorporals?) at the press conference yesterday, in true comedic,oxymoronic flight: "Gentlemen, trust your own intelligence services", were indeedlike something the Mad Hatter might say to the March Hare in Wonderland,Through The Looking-Glass, or should I say, through the bloodied Sunroof. Cup of tea, anyone?
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