It’s Not the Effup
It’s the coverup, stupid. Conspiracy theorized. NYT:
LAHORE, Pakistan — New details of Benazir Bhutto’s final moments, including indications that her doctors felt pressured to conform to government accounts of her death, fueled the arguments over her assassination on Sunday and added to the pressure on Pakistan’s leaders to accept an international inquiry.
Athar Minallah, a board member of the hospital where Ms. Bhutto was treated, released her medical report along with an open letter showing that her doctors wanted to distance themselves from the government theory that Ms. Bhutto had died by hitting her head on a lever of her car’s sunroof during the attack.
In his letter, Mr. Minallah, who is also a prominent lawyer, said the doctors believed that an autopsy was needed to provide the answers to how she actually died. Their request for one last Thursday was denied by the local police chief.
Pakistani and Western security experts said the government’s insistence that Ms. Bhutto, a former prime minister, was not killed by a bullet was intended to deflect attention from the lack of government security around her. On Sunday, Pakistani newspapers covered their front pages with photographs showing a man apparently pointing a gun at her from just yards away.
Her vehicle came under attack by a gunman and suicide bomber as she left a political rally in Rawalpindi, where the Pakistani Army keeps its headquarters, and where the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency has a strong presence.
The government’s explanation, that Ms. Bhutto died after hitting her head as she ducked from the gunfire or was tossed by the force of the suicide blast, has been greeted with disbelief by her supporters, ordinary Pakistanis and medical experts. While some of the mystery could be cleared up by exhuming the body, it is not clear whether Ms. Bhutto’s family would give permission, such is their distrust of the government.
If all they want to do is make themselves look slightly better on the adequate-security-for-Bhutto issue, that train left the station last week.
The article notes a doctor’s claim she was killed by a bullet, a top government spokesman’s report she was killed by a bullet, and a medical report suggesting bullet damage, and witness accounts of buckets of blood. So why would the government want to tell such a contradictory story?
An account of her death that did not involve a gunshot wound was the optimal explanation for the government, said Bruce Riedel, an expert on Pakistan at the Brookings Institution in Washington, and a former member of the National Security Council in the Clinton administration. “If there is a gunshot wound, the security was abysmal,” Mr. Riedel said. The government did not want to be exposed on its careless approach to security, he said.
Oddly, this story makes no mention of suspicions that the government was not simply careless but complicit in Bhutto’s death, but perhaps one thing leads to the other.
There were also provisions under Pakistani law for the exhumation of a body and a delayed post-mortem, Mr. Latif, the former senior Pakistani police official, said. In those cases, the state or a family can ask a magistrate for exhumation. The magistrate then forms a board of doctors to carry out the procedures, he said.
An international inquiry on Ms. Bhutto’s death could not be carried out without an exhumation, a difficult decision in a Muslim country, Mr. Latif said.
In response to a question at a heated news conference Saturday, Brigadier Cheema, the Interior Ministry spokesman, said the government was ready to exhume the body if the family asked.
But Ms. Bhutto’s supporters noted that the family and the party were so furious at President Musharraf, whom many of them blame for her death, that it was unlikely the Bhuttos would trust an exhumation that involved the government.
…
On Sunday a conference of Ms. Bhutto’s party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, called for an inquiry led by the United Nations.
…
Brigadier Cheema made clear, however, that an international inquiry was not in the cards. “At this point in time we are quite confident with the kind of progress that is going on with our inquiries,” he said Sunday.
Foreign experts did not have the expertise, he said, to deal with the peculiarities of tribal areas that are the base of the nation’s terrorist activities. “This is not just an ordinary criminal case where you only need forensic expert,” he said. “We understand the dynamics better.”
UK Telegraph: Bhutto was not allowed to bring in foreign security. US shared threat intel with Bhutto directly, but while pinning hopes on her, failed to push Mush hard enough.
Prior:
Pak It Up, prior election/emergency background and context re Bhutto, Musharraf etal.
Topics: Pakistan
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 7:23 am on Monday, December 31, 2007
4 Responses to “It’s Not the Effup”
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December 31st, 2007 at 10:43 am
Pressure came from a number of quarters for an inquiry modeled after one carried out by the United Nations after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, a former Lebanese prime minister, in 2005.
A commission was established to investigate Hariri’s death. It was headed by a German guy.
His conclusions, as I recall, implicated Syria.
But now, almost 3 years later, (Hariri assassinated February 2005), “people” are calling for continued and further inquiry into who, exactly, orchestrated that particular massive car bombing in Beirut.
There have been other similar assassinations since in Lebanon.
But, in Hariri’s case at least, a 3 year old trail is a little cold by now.
I can imagine similar endless speculation and permanent inconclusiveness in any formal inquiry into who, exactly, is “behind” B. Bhutto’s death.
December 31st, 2007 at 12:43 pm
Whoever did it, and however she died, the ultimate outcome is not going to be as beneficial as the perpetrators expected. This time next year, Pakistan is likely to be bloodier chaos than it is now.
December 31st, 2007 at 5:27 pm
But Rebecca, a bloody chaos is what the enemy seeks. They cannot survive in a stable environment. This is why they assassinate anyone who might bring stability, no matter the country.
December 31st, 2007 at 6:45 pm
Agree, saltydog.
Sowing chaos (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan…Lebanon) is the point.