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?