[threadbear]

Damned ironic that so shortly after the National Intelligence Estimate, commissioned by several intelligence services in the U.S., stated quite clearly that Iran was NOT a nuclear threat, a new one seems to have popped up. Perfect timing!!!

[wisconsin_cur]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'K')ARACHI, Pakistan (AP) - Residents of Pakistan's largest city cautiously emerged from their homes Sunday and struggled to find food and fuel amid the blackened buildings, shattered glass and burnt-out vehicles littering the streets of Karachi.

[Zardoz]

The mainsteam media is not covering the Pakistan rioting at all. I searched all over and found only this Reuters story:

Pakistan suffers "colossal" damage in violence

Even the BBC is ignoring it. Very weird.

[Cid_Yama]

Benazir Bhutto's supporters are wondering if the UN Security Council is helping cover up a conspiracy behind her killing.

The Pakistani opposition leader's supporters have asked Council members how they knew that she was killed by "terrorists," and not the government she opposed.

Delegates from Belgium and Africa, wanted to know why Bhutto's murder should be described as a terrorist act in the statement in the absence of any conclusive evidence.

But the United States envoy who had introduced the draft statement insisted that the cause of her death was a terrorist act and that its ally Pakistan would like to retain that wording.

"Why should Pakistan tell us what to do?" the Belgian delegate reportedly asked in response. "It's not a member of the Council."

Critics have also wondered why the Council did not call for an international investigation into her murder as it did in the case of Lebanese politician Rafik Hariri, who was killed in relatively similar circumstances in 2005.

Since her murder at a public rally last Thursday, Bhutto's supporters have consistently charged that the government, led by President Pervez Musharraf, was responsible for the assassination of their leader.

http://us.oneworld.net/article/view/156457/1/3319

[pana_burda]

mmmm ........ why "weird?

That´s the usual!

I would love to explain further yet this ain´t the thread to do it.

[TheDude]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('threadbear', 'D')amned ironic that so shortly after the National Intelligence Estimate, commissioned by several intelligence services in the U.S., stated quite clearly that Iran was NOT a nuclear threat, a new one seems to have popped up. Perfect timing!!!

[virgincrude]

Since Musharraf helicoptered in (in 1999 he ordered the ousting of Nawaz Sharif from the safety of his airborne 'copter) he has been following the IMF recipe for success: all those well known austerity measures and opening up the country to the highest bidder stuff. Which is to say, the entire nation's piss-poor infrastructure is slowly becoming foreign (private hands) owned. The results, as always (cf; Argentina) means the creation of a new 'middle class' who suddenly own shares, has not just one, but two cars (many run on natural gas canisters) goes shopping to the new mall, has offices in the latest foreign funded construction on the edge of the city and sips coffee in pseudo-Starbucks smoking Marlborough.

The famed economic miracle of Pakistan has totally passed over the heads of the people mentioned in the article The Dude posted, who suddenly find they can't afford basic produce. The reaction to Bhutto's assassination was not a nationwide outpouring of grief over the loss of another Dear Leader, but mostly the opportunistic looting carried out by this perpetually downtrodden underclass. The one Bhutto is supposed to have had her grass roots in. She did not even speak their language, English was her first language, she was taught Urdu which she spoke grammatically incorrectly, and her Sindi (her own constituency/province) was practically non existent.


Rioters and looters were ripping out the whole ATM, not just holding people up in their cars and stealing watches. This is not 'politically' motivated, unless you want to claim the looting in New Orleans was also politically motivated (arguably, that IS the bottom line.)

The difficulty for Western on-lookers is the ghastly contrast between those rubbish strewn streets, where dead chickens and offal are simply discarded in the front gutter, and our manicured lawns and garbage collection ... People in Pakistan have had meat rationing for years. When you do find running water (in the major cities and upper crust hotels,) it is guarranteed to poison you. During the annual Shi'ia celebrations of Muharram, people get killed. During the yearly kite running Springfestival, children die decapitated by the unseen glass coated wires strung across the road, as their fathers drive them home on the back of the motorbike. And the kite flying and the wires are both officially banned .... I've seen pedestrians knocked down and immobilised in the busy main street of Lahore, and the driver simply speed off. The newspapers report these kinds of small tragedies, daily. If you haven't been there and witnessed it, if you haven't seen and talked with the people, all you can go by is what you're told by the Western media, and whatever spin they want to put on it.

All I'm saying is, a lot of the rioting and looting is, as Pana Burda says, normal. Not immediately to do with the political or energy situation. It's just the usual victims taking advantage of a power vaccuum and the opportunity to grab what they've been denied and also lash out at their masters. It has always been like this, and likely, always will be.

As far as conspiracy theories go, I read on another forum that Arlen Specter (?) apparently the one responsible for the official JFK story was actually in Pakistan the day before the government released the official story of Bhutto's unlikely death from a bump on the head while ducking the assassin's bullet. The truth is being spun and spun, to end up with a similar 'magical bullet' or 'grassy knoll' confusion which hides the kernel of truth, making it indistiguishable from the inventions.

Anyway, this is the best assessment I've seen so far in the Western press:

A Profile of Benazir Bhutto

Pakistan's Flawed but Feudal Princess

[The_Virginian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Heineken', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Zardoz', 'U')tterly innappropriate and uncalled for, Virginian.

The mods will nuke it, of course, but what the hell did you post it for?

[mattduke]

"US special forces snatch squads are on standby to seize or disable Pakistan's nuclear arsenal in the event of a collapse of government authority or the outbreak of civil war following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto."

theherald

"On the day she was assassinated, Benazir Bhutto was due to meet two senior American politicians to show them a confidential report alleging that Pakistan’s intelligence service was using US money to rig parliamentary elections, officials in her party said yesterday."

timesonline

More here:

cryptogon

[leal]

The Pakistan election seams to be delayed:
Link to Google news

[Cid_Yama]

<b>Benazir planned to expose rigging plot</b>

Conspiracy theories swirling round the former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s death have deepened with her party claiming that the day she was assassinated, Benazir had planned to meet two American Senators and show them supposedly clinching “evidence” of the Musharraf regime’s alleged plans to rig parliamentary elections using the U.S. aid meant for fighting terrorism.

The allegation, suggesting that Benazir might have been killed because her “disclosure” would have embarrassed Pakistan’s intelligence services, was widely reported in the British media on Tuesday.

Quoting Sarfraz Khan Lashari, a senior member of Pakistan People’s Party’s election monitoring cell, three national newspapers — The Guardian, The Times and The Independent — said that Benazir planned to brief Senators Patrick Kennedy (Democrat) and Arlen Specter (Republican) on a report that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency was running an operation to rig the elections from a “safe house” in Islamabad.

The Independent quoted Mr. Lashari as saying that the report was “very sensitive” <i>and Benazir wanted to share it with “trusted” U.S. politicians rather than the pro-Musharraf Bush administration.</i>

http://www.thehindu.com/2008/01/02/stor ... 441500.htm

Where an opposing candidate is strong in an area, they [supporters of President Pervez Musharraf ] have planned to create a conflict at the polling station, even killing people if necessary, to stop polls at least three to four hours," the document says.

Khosa alleged that ISI and election commission officials were involved in the plans to rig the polls, adding the dossier contained details about "fake ballots" and "intimidation" of PPP candidates.

He claimed that more than 100 candidates of PML-Q, the party which backs President Pervez Musharraf, were going to get 25,000 "pre-stamped" ballot papers, apparently in Punjab and the places where the polls could be close.

"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," the report says.

Sen. Latif Khosa, who helped put the report together, accused the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence of operating a rigging cell from a safe house in the capital, Islamabad. The goal, he said, is to change voting results electronically on election day.

"The ISI has set up a mega-computer system where they can hack any computer in Pakistan and connect with the Election Commission," he said.

Something the Bush Administration has a lot of experience with.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/0 ... index.html

http://cid-yama.livejournal.com/98692.html

http://cid-yama.livejournal.com/98400.html

[Cid_Yama]

Musharraf has gained a new title in the main streets of Karachi – ‘the secret butcher of Islamabad’.

Now it is evident that Bhutto had compelling proof that clearly outlined the secret poll rigging operations in Pakistan.

Bhutto was to unveil a report about the plot to rig the country's general elections at a press conference on Thursday night after giving it to visiting US lawmakers.

http://www.indiadaily.com/editorial/18856.asp

[billg]

excerpt from article titled Musharraf Still Stands by Amy Goodman:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')drian Levy is a senior staff correspondent for the British newspaper The Guardian and co-author of “Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons.” He describes a “military government repressing human rights, connected tentatively to 9/11, state-sponsored terrorism with radical connections to al-Qaida that was proliferating WMD and of course that was not Iraq, it was Pakistan.” He told me: “The problem facing the Bush administration was their policy post-9/11 was very much to embrace Pakistan as an essential ally in the war on terror in order to allow the narrative over Iraq and the WMD in Iraq to rise. The Pakistanis milked their nuclear program for hard cash, selling to Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, the Axis of Evil powers. We also know there is intelligence to show that they began negotiations very much with Saudi Arabia, Syria and, of course, there are tentative contacts with al-Qaida elements as well.”

The New York Times revealed last week that at least $5 billion in U.S. aid delivered to Pakistan since 9/11 to fight al-Qaida and the Taliban actually went into weapons systems against another U.S. ally, India.

[Cid_Yama]

Reports from a hospital in Rawalpindi state that Benazir Bhutto was killed by a bullet in the back of the neck that damaged her spinal cord and exited from the side of her head. Another bullet hit the back of her shoulder and travelled through her chest. link

It was initially reported a rooftop sniper fired bullets at her car before a second assailant blew himself up about 50 metres down the road link

Video shows suspected gunman on the left side of the car, but the scarf moves forward and to the left, meaning she was shot from the right rear. Was there a sniper as a second gunman and the explosives intended to destroy the evidence? link

[Cobra_Strike]

second gunmen or not, someone definitely wanted her dead....JFK style.

[RdSnt]

Suicide bombers are blunt instruments. The objective is the act itself, not the "kill" rate (the results), that matter.
Bhutto's killing was a precise hit, very different from past Al Qaida actions.
So at the moment I don't believe this was an Al Qaida hit, even though they hint that they are responsible.

If it is Al Qaida, then it constitutes a very significant advance in sophistication and the quality of the people they use.

[dhfenton]

I look at the Bhutto assassination, and the delay in the elections, and I get this great movie idea. Say you've got a democracy teetering on the brink of a police state. And say, that this democracy had a fall election, in November let's say. The crazy right fringe running the show might want to prevent a take over by less fanatical folks, so they can complete their plan for single party rule. Would they be willing to conveniently have an assassination, or staged event that looks like an assassination? They could blame it on terrorists, and delay or cancel elections. The sitting ruler wouldn't necessarily have to be killed, they could just make it appear he was killed, and he could live out his days on a farm somewhere, maybe Peru, for instance. Of course the nuts who put him in power in the first place really don't have any use for him anyway, and they would probably just bump him off to create another "Pearl Harbor like" event. Their chosen nut case would ascend to the rule, and likely declare marshal law. Ending most rights of citizens to have due process. The take over would be complete. Wouldn't that be a great movie? Maybe it will be playing everywhere this fall. LOL

[basil_hayden]

"Say you've got a democracy teetering on the brink of a police state. And say, that this democracy had a fall election, in November let's say. The crazy right fringe running the show might want to prevent a take over by less fanatical folks, so they can complete their plan for single party rule. Would they be willing to conveniently have an assassination, or staged event that looks like an assassination? Their chosen nut case would ascend to the rule, and likely declare marshal law. Ending most rights of citizens to have due process. The take over would be complete. Wouldn't that be a great movie?"

I think it was called JFK, done by Oliver Stone.

[dhfenton]

I'm thinking something a bit more futuristic; but not too far into the future.

[pana_burda]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')ll I'm saying is, a lot of the rioting and looting is, as Pana Burda says, normal. Not immediately to do with the political or energy situation. It's just the usual victims taking advantage of a power vaccuum and the opportunity to grab what they've been denied and also lash out at their masters.