On the day she was killed, Benazir Bhutto was hours away from handing over a report to two American congressmen proving that Ijaz Shah and the ISI were planning on rigging the Jan. 8 elections against her. Of course, Neoconservative commentator Robert Novak predicted this would be the case in a column he wrote last month.

Conservative columnist Robert Novak frequently comments on “elections.”

“Twenty million names have disappeared from the national voters list, whose preparation was financed with U.S. aid. When this was discovered, the government said that anybody on the old list would be permitted to vote. But the new list is flawed, with millions of names repeated to permit multiple votes by individuals. Musharraf’s efforts to keep Bhutto out have been orchestrated for two years by retired brigadier Ijaz Shah, who left Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) to become the president’s chief of civilian intelligence. The ISI, a state within a state, is aligned against Bhutto and would be at the heart of any vote-rigging.”- Robert Novak, 12/3/07

Bhutto’s report, in addition to her Oct. 16th letter to Musharraf, also implicates Ijaz Shah as spearheading the plot to stop her candidacy - either by election fraud or by assassination. Her report was compiled from intelligence sources within the ISI, and just as Novak predicted, US money was being used to set up rigging centers in 100 parliamentary constituencies. If Novak could predict this, the Bush administration could too. A State Dept. official admitted on December 6 that “the elections [in Pakistan] won’t be perfect.” Yet, Bush still described Musharraf as “someone who believes in democracy.” Even Robert Novak, a partisan hack most famous for committing an act of treason on the administration’s behalf, had to ask: was the president of the United States issuing Musharraf a free pass to rig next month’s elections in Pakistan? If so, it would make sense why Bhutto would want to give her report to two American Congressmen, and not directly to the White House. One of her aides said that the report was “very sensitive,” and that they preferred to share it with trusted politicians rather than the Bush administration. According to Novak’s most recent column on the assassination, Bhutto expressed great distress about the Administration’s ambivalence, but like the email she sent to CNN, asked him not to write about it.

Benazir Bhutto was used to ambivalence from the White House, but lucky for her, she always had something to offer. According to the obituary that ran last Sunday in the New York Times, Bhutto gained favor with George Bush Sr. by promising to fund the Mujahideen against the Soviets in 1988. With that support from her network in Washington she successfully became Pakistan’s first female Prime Minister, in spite of her father’s opposition to CIA/ISI. “Had the Americans not put their foot down, the military-intelligence services would have stopped her” said her former adviser. Eventually Bhutto realized the Mujahideen’s power was growing beyond her control, and in the late 80’s she told Bush Sr., “you are creating a Frankenstein.”

Last year, Bhutto promised again to fight America’s enemies, except this time it would be the same “Frankenstein” she helped create. Her speeches indicate she was actually willing to do it, too, emphasizing Musharraf’s failure to drive Al Qaeda/Taliban fighters from Pakistan’s northwestern provinces. Whether her rhetoric was genuine or not we’ll never know, but most people in Washington, including Neocons like Robert Novak, really believed she could fight the war on terror better than Musharraf. Ostensibly, this is why the White House demanded she be allowed to return to Pakistan. Why then did George W. Bush not put his foot down like his father did? “The assassination of Benazir Bhutto followed two months of urgent pleas to the State Department by her representatives for better protection,” says Novak. “The U.S. reaction was that she was worried over nothing, expressing assurance that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf would not let anything happen to her.”

If she was proven to be tougher on Islamic radicals, and was thus in constant danger, why were her pleas for extra protection rebuffed not just by the regime in Pakistan, but by our own State Department and CIA (not to mention Mossad and Scotland Yard)? Bhutto’s report showed that in addition to planning to rig the elections through acts of terrorism and electronic hacking, that “ninety percent of the equipment that the USA gave the government of Pakistan to fight terrorism is being used to monitor and to keep a check on their political opponents.” Perhaps the Administration thinks our money is better spent doing that than fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But what good would that do anyway?

Besides the clip from CNN below, American journalists seem to be taking the party line from Pakistan with regards to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. First they said she was shot in the neck and chest. Then it was a piece of shrapnel. Then it was a neck fracture. Now they’re saying she died of a fractured skull after ducking into her sunroof too quickly. Her aide, who brought her body to the hospital, called this “bizarre, dangerous nonsense … it’s beginning to look like a cover-up.” The aide claimed that in addition to the gunman carrying the bomb, there was also a sniper on a nearby building. Of course, it doesn’t really matter how she died. Thankfully, the London Times and the Guardian are covering the far more prescient issue: could Bhutto’s assassins have been backed up by the ISI? Do we have any reason to believe anything this Brigadier General tells us, about intelligence intercepts or her cause of death? These are the same people who tried to show western journalists a video of the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed only to have it mocked as a forgery by the few reporters allowed to see it.

Email Bhutto told CNN not to report on unless she was killed.

I bring up this point because not only did Khalid Sheikh Mohammad fund the attempt on Bhutto’s life in 1993 when she was running for re-election, but he was protected by the ISI after he did it. Reports show KSM sent his nephew, Ramzi Yousef, who planned the WTC bombing 5 months before, to carry out the assassination. But before Bhutto’s rally began, Yousef was caught by a police patrol and the bomb went off prematurely. Later that year US Agents found photos of KSM and Yousef with associates of Bhutto’s political rival, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, a longtime friend to the ISI famous for receiving millions of dollars from Bin Laden. This is the same guy who underscored yesterday’s assassination with “it is not a sad day, it is a dark, darkest, gloomiest day in the history of this country. Something unthinkable has happened. Something inconceivable, unthinkable has happened.”
First off, this was arguably the most conceivable, forseeable assassination in the history of assassinations. In a park named after an assassination. How many times does a person have to narrowly escape being assassinated before they get some police escorts who don’t abandon their posts right before the shooting starts? This woman’s main security were a bunch of guys wearing white tees inscribed “willing to die for Benazir.” Second, it’s not like people didn’t know the ISI was targeting her just cause Wolf Blitzer was sworn to secrecy about her email. Her party has been the main opposition to the ISI since her dad founded it. But probably the biggest indication of a plot to kill her would be the the bombing of her last rally in Karachi, which she claimed her security detail could have prevented if all the street lights weren’t mysteriously turned off right before the attack. 136 people dead, no investigation, and all the forensic evidence lost after the police brought in firehoses to wash away the crime scene. You can’t tell me that Al Qaeda has the power to influence police to destroy evidence, abandon their posts, turn off the streetlights, and block an independent investigation. And it appears that Bhutto even knew who in the government was behind the bombing. In her letter to Musharraf, in which Bhutto was careful not to implicate Musharraf personally, she accused three senior officials in his regime for financing and organizing the attacks. One of these guys was Ijaz Shah, Director General of the Intelligence Bureau. You might remember Ijaz Shah from a Nicholas Kristof column where he threatened to have a Pakistani rape victim killed if she wouldn’t shut up. (”We can do anything. … We can just pay a little money to some black guys in New York and get people killed there.”)

Previous assassination attempt in Karachi.

In the 1990’s Ijaz Shah was also the handler for Omar Saeed Sheikh, 9/11 paymaster and alleged murderer of Daniel Pearl. They were so close in fact that after Pearl’s murder, Sheikh turned himself into Shah, and stayed with him for one week before being handed over to the police for his trial. The fact that Bhutto named Ijaz Shah as one of her suspects in the Karachi bombing might indicate that he gave the order for yesterday’s assassination. Maybe not. It’s important to note that in her letter, Bhutto also named another politician and Hamid Gul, a former ISI Chief, who has recently been marching against Musharraf (and, most likely, on behalf of Nawaz Sharif). This would back up what the Times said about it being unlikely that Musharraf actually gave the order. However, there’s enough entrenched interests in the military regime and its Directorate for Inter-Service Intelligence willing to kill civilians in order to stop a power-sharing agreement, even without the consent of the General.

So did he give the order? Most likely not. Did he do anything to stop it? Well, her email implies that she was stopped from taking her own cars, getting her own security, using tinted windows, or even using jammers to disrupt bombs. Whether this means she wasn’t allowed to get her own jammers, or they just weren’t provided for her, is uncertain. More importantly, did Musharraf have a reason to let it happen? Yes. Don’t forget he owes the success of his coup to the ISI, and his power to the unquestioned authority of the Pakistani army - something Bhutto would undoubtedly be challenging if she were to win. And after the military puts the riots down, which they will, you could say it’s pretty much win-win for the regime. After all, what could be better for securing Pakistan’s military aid than a friendly reminder to the Americans about the threat Al Qaeda still poses, and Pakistan’s vital role in the war against terrorism. Just look at the coverage on CNN. With a nuclear arsenal at stake, nobody’s going to really care about where all the billions went or an independent investigation or even democracy. Americans are going to look to Pakistan and say, well at least there’s order. Now let’s help them beat Al Qaeda. At least, that’s what the General is counting on.

Back to how she was killed though (CNN’s preferred issue). “We provided excellent security to Ms. Bhutto, but our expert advice was ignored by her,” the Ministry spokesman said. This whole business of whether Bhutto “unfortunately” killed herself, recalls something Musharraf said about Daniel Pearl, who himself was investigating links between the ISI and terrorist groups. “Perhaps Daniel Pearl was over-intrusive. A mediaperson should be aware of the dangers of getting into dangerous areas. Unfortunately, he got over-involved … He got caught up in intelligence games.” Just goes to show you, whenever anyone in this government says the word “unfortunately,” they’re saying it with their tongue in cheek.

Brigadier Javed Cheema licks his lips for the 20th time. This is what poker players call a tell. Or a Ministry Spokesman with severely chapped lips.

In keeping with recent tradition, the New York Times is finally uncovering things the CIA was doing two years ago (destroying evidence). And our National Intelligence Estimate is just now telling us things Iran stopped doing five years ago (making nukes). But as our President displayed after the Intelligence Estimate was released, facts matter little compared to the context you put them in. “I have said Iran is dangerous,” Bush declared, “and the NIE estimate doesn’t do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world - quite the contrary.” Great.

But the New York Times shouldn’t start patting themselves on the back just yet. They too are guilty of Bush-style logic, jumping to the easiest, most convenient explanation as to why the two Interrogation tapes were destroyed. Notice their attempt to put the headline “9/11 Panel Study Finds that CIA Withheld Tapes” into context.

While informative, this info-graphic bears little relation to the far more pressing information in the article it ran next to, except if you assume the interrogation tapes were destroyed because the two Al-Qaeda operatives were waterboarded. The thing is, the 9/11 Panel didn’t ask for the videotapes of the interrogations, only the information that was extracted from them. So if it was the information on the tapes that the CIA was withholding, and nobody cared how they got it, why are we all assuming they were destroyed in 2005 because of a little waterboarding? Doesn’t the fact that the CIA was hiding them prove there might be something on the tapes a little more dangerous than a guy getting water poured on him?

According to the memo from Philip Zelikow, the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, the Panel first requested the CIA’s operational cables and internal documents relating to the interrogations. The CIA refused. Then they tried coming up with a list of questions about what the detainees said. Twice the CIA delivered responses that either didn’t satisfy the questions or were deemed insufficient. Then eventually the panel just gave up. The memo basically lays out those three attempts to find out the content of the tapes, and it proves the CIA was determined to keep even a summary of the tapes secret. Then for years the CIA denied even having them. Sure sounds like there was little more than waterboarding going on, yet that point gets lost in the New York Times article. The most important paragraph of the Zelikow memo didn’t even get mentioned by the writer, Mark Manzetti.

“Late in its investigation, reacting to press allegations that Abu Zubaydah had referred to a Saudi prince in his interrogations, the Commission asked “what information does the CIA have” about whether such assertions were made in Zubaydah’s interrogations. (CIA Question for the Record No. 3, dated May 20, 2004). We knew the CIA believed this was untrue but we asked the question formally to get any relevant information for the record. We cannot find a record of a CIA response. ” - Page 6 of the Zelikow Memo

Philip Zelikow, a former deputy to Condoleezza Rice, makes a vast understatement when he refers to the press allegations surrounding “a Saudi prince.” In fact, Zubayda named four Saudi Princes, at least one of whom was flown out by the Administration in the week after 9/11. At least someone thought there was something to the assertion, because that prince and two others Zubayda named all died in the same week after their names were leaked abroad. Zubayda also attempted to hang himself after making the confession. This story is explained in more detail in an earlier post on this blog and by the journalist who uncovered the story.

I urge everyone to read that link, because unlike me, Gerald Posner has actually talked to sources in the White House and the CIA. I realize that Posner may come off pompous, but his information has been confirmed by at least one other journalist, James Risen, who verified the story with his own sources. Also note that Possner is famous for being a debunker of conspiracy theories, not an advocate of them; and that the CIA never gave any evidence to the 9/11 Commission to disprove Possner’s claims. Now I’m not suggesting everything Zubayda confessed to was true. I have no doubt Zubayda was tortured, and torture tends to produce lots of false leads, which in turn lead to false terror alerts. This is probably why our Administration is such a fan. However, placing these tapes’ destruction in the context of the waterboarding debate obscures the more pressing issue: that these tapes were withheld and destroyed because of their content. And if the content of that tape can produce three dead Saudi princes in one week, there’s probably something to it.

What’s going to be very interesting to see is what the former Head of the National Clandestine Service who gave the order for the tape destruction, Jose Rodriguez, says when he goes before Congress on January 15. There’s been numerous reports proving he consulted CIA and White House lawyers (including Alberto Gonzalez and Chief of Staff David Addington) before destroying the evidence. But requesting immunity was probably a good move on his part, considering he’s been burned twice before by the CIA - once during the Iran-Contra affair, and then again in 1997 when he was demoted for trying to protect his friend from prosecution in the Dominican Republic. Who knows who’s going to go to jail if Rodriguez refuses to be the fall guy this time around.