Follow-up on The Bhutto Assassination

So now we know what was on the agenda during that meeting with Benazir Bhutto and Senator Specter and Representative Kennedy.

This part had always stuck in my mind. From the AP:

Two U.S. lawmakers cut short their visit to Pakistan in the wake of the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., had been scheduled to meet Thursday with former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and President Pervez Musharraf. They were advised to leave the country by the State Department after Bhutto's assassination.

And:

Specter said in a telephone interview Thursday from his Islamabad hotel room that he and Kennedy were to dine with Musharraf and meet later in the night with Bhutto.

Ever wonder what were they going to talk about? Now we know:

The day she was assassinated last Thursday, Benazir Bhutto had planned to reveal new evidence alleging the involvement of Pakistan's intelligence agencies in rigging the country's upcoming elections, an aide said Monday.

Bhutto had been due to meet U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., to hand over a report charging that the military Inter-Services Intelligence agency was planning to fix the polls in the favor of President Pervez Musharraf.

Safraz Khan Lashari, a member of the Pakistan People's Party election monitoring unit, said the report was "very sensitive" and that the party wanted to initially share it with trusted American politicians rather than the Bush administration, which is seen here as strongly backing Musharraf.

Considering the discredited story the Musharraf government is trying to sell about the assassination, this little piece of information doesn't bode well for Pakistan.

I still don't know why she didn't want to give the report to the Bush White House, though. If anyone knows a thing or two about rigging elections, it's that crowd.

A former GOP political operative who ran an illegal election-day scheme to jam the phone lines of New Hampshire Democrats during the state's tight 2002 U.S. Senate election said in a new book and an interview that he believes the scandal reaches higher into the Republican Party.

Allen Raymond of Bethesda, Md., whose book Simon & Schuster will publish next month, also accused the Republican Party of trying to hang all the blame for a scandal on him as part of an "old-school cover-up."

Raymond's book, "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative," offers a raw, inside glimpse of the phone scandal as it unraveled and of a ruthless world in which political operatives seek to win at all costs.

But I digress...

A thought

Benazir Bhutto
1953- 2007

While much can (and will) be said pro and con about Benazir Bhutto, it is hard to imagine many of our own candidates for president being willing to risk their own very lives for democracy. And, it is completely impossible to imagine the current residents of the White House doing so.

(Most crass use of Bhutto's death by a candidate for president so far: Huckabee's warning to watch out for "any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country" to demonstrate his new found religion on border security and illegal immigrants.)
.