Right-wing hate-mongers and the unstable individuals they direct and encourge to act

Steve Benen wrote about the shooting of Democratic Congresswoman Gabby Gifford in Tuscon, AZ:

it seems there are two main, big-picture observations that are being bandied about. The first is that this is an excellent time for political pugilists to appreciate the power of language, and come away from this tragedy exercising better judgment. There's a level of toxicity in our discourse just isn't healthy, and it tears at the societal fabric that holds the country together.

The second is that Loughner, by all accounts, is clinically ill, and what might set off an armed mad man is necessarily unpredictable. To this extent, the political/rhetorical environment isn't to blame for yesterday's events; the sickness of a disturbed young man is.

I'm inclined to think the two points aren't mutually exclusive.

It's true. The two points aren't mutually exclusive. An unstable person with a tendency to act out his fantasies is more likely to do so when he is given permission by others to act.

There are indications that Laughner is such an unstable individual. Laughner was rejected by the Army as unsuited to join, and the community college he had been attending has expelled him until he could demonstrate that he was not so mentally deranged that he would not be a danger to other students there. As news about him is reported it's pretty clear that he does not have the ability to predictably control his actions. So he has already been recognized as an unstable individual. What does the current political climate in America do to individuals like Laughner?

There are unstable individuals out there who are more likely to go shooting someone, but what has happened is that the right-wing hate-meisters are setting a climate that gives these individuals targets to hate and they also set a climate that further gives them permission to go after those targets. Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and their ilk name the targets. Sharron Angle - the Republican nominee for Senate - publicly told him to consider "Second Amendment remedies." The only thing missing in the connection is a direct statement to the crazy individual "Now. Go shoot so-and-so."

Sara Robinson wrote an article that listed the similar incidents between January and June of 2009. Chip Bertle summarizes
the dynamic.

Hannah Arendt described the process of demagoguery leading to violence as it occurs in totalitarian regimes ranging from Hitler to Stalin. The demagogue frames the target, but leaves off a direct call for violence. But the message is clear. Unstable people often act first. Political ideologues, however, can be mobilized as the process continues to act as a group.

This really is how organized terrorism begins.

I consider it very likely that soon right-wing politicians and pundits are going to start traveling with open armed guards "because the climate is so dangerous to public figures." (Another market for Blackwater/XE?) That will be another major step towards creating a violent political climate.

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One other thing to consider. The right wing repeats the idea "Guns don't kill. People kill."

Yeah? Watch movies and monitor the tone of the movie when the scene with someone pulling out a gun and cleaning, loading or just checking it. The music gets more ominous as does the entire tone of the movie. Other weapons have similar responses, but a gun has a much stronger one normally. A gun is a symbol of preparing for violence.

So if the climate around you is threatening, it is traditional in America to reach for a gun. Then if something startles you or threatens you, what happens next? Someone gets shot at or even killed.

Guns may not kill, but they make it a lot more likely that someone will get badly hurt or killed.

Another threat to the Republicans eliminated in a small plane crash.

What do Paul Wellstone, Mel Carnahan, Ron Brown, Mickey Leland, John Tower, John F. Kennedy, Jr and Michael Connell all have in common?

Everyone of them was a threat to the Republican Party. Everyone of them died in a small plane crash just before they were to do something the Republicans did not want done.

Michael Connell? Who's he? He was Karl Rove's information systems expert who helped Rove steal the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, among others. He was also about to testify about how he stole elections for Rove in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal civil rights lawsuit against Ohio Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.

Ohio Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell hired Connell in 2004 to create a real-time computer data compilation for counting Ohio’s votes. Under Connell’s supervision, Ohio’s presidential vote count was transmitted to private, partisan computer servers owned by SmartTech housed in the basement of the Old Pioneer Bank building in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Connell’s company, New Media Communications worked closely with SmartTech in building Republican and right-wing websites that were hosted on SmartTech servers. Among Connell’s clients were the Republican National Committee, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and gwb43.com, that housed at one point Karl Rove’s missing emails. Rove’s email files have since mysteriously disappeared despite repeated court-sanctioned attempts to review them. [Snip]

At 12:20 am on the night of the 2004 election exit polls and initial vote counts showed John Kerry the clear winner of Ohio’s presidential campaign. The Buckeye State’s 20 electoral votes would have given Kerry the presidency.

But from then until around 2am, the flow of information mysteriously ceased. After that, the vote count shifted dramatically to George W. Bush, ultimately giving him a second term. In the end there was a 6.7 percent diversion—in Bush’s favor—between highly professional, nationally funded exit polls and the final official vote count as tabulated by Blackwell and Connell.

Until his death Connell remained the IT supervisor for six Congressional committees. But on the day before the 2008 election, Connell was deposed by attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis about his actions during the 2004 vote count, and his continued involvement in IT operations for the GOP, including his access to Rove’s e-mail files and the circumstances behind their disappearance.

Various threats have been repeatedly reported involving Connell and other IT experts close to the GOP. On July 24, 2008, Arnebeck emailed Attorney General Michael Mukasey, stating: “We have been confidentially informed by a source we believe to be credible that Karl Rove has threatened Michael Connell, a principal witness we have identified in our King-Lincoln case in federal court in Columbus, Ohio,….”

Connell’s death comes at a moment where election protection attorneys and others appeared to be closing in on critical irregularities and illegalities. In his pre-election deposition, Connell was generally evasive, but did disclose key piece of information that could prove damaging to Karl Rove and the GOP. Examining attorneys in the King- Lincoln-Bronzeville civil rights lawsuit, stemming from the 2004 election theft, were confident Connell had far more to tell.

There is widespread concern that this may be the reason he is now dead. This is the report from Alex Jones' Inforwars:

Michael Connell, the Bush IT expert who has been directly implicated in the rigging of George Bush’s 2000 and 2004 elections, was killed last night when his single engine plane crashed three miles short of the Akron airport. Velvet Revolution (”VR”), a non-profit that has been investigating Mr. Connell’s activities for the past two years, can now reveal that a person close to Mr. Connell has recently been discussing with a VR investigator how he can tell all about his work for George Bush. Mr. Connell told a close associate that he was afraid that George Bush and Dick Cheney would “throw [him] under the bus.”

A tipster close to the McCain campaign disclosed to VR in July that Mr. Connell’s life was in jeopardy and that Karl Rove had threatened him and his wife, Heather. VR’s attorney, Cliff Arnebeck, notified the United States Attorney General , Ohio law enforcement and the federal court about these threats and insisted that Mr. Connell be placed in protective custody. VR also told a close associate of Mr. Connell’s not to fly his plane because of another tip that the plane could be sabotaged. Mr. Connell, a very experienced pilot, has had to abandon at least two flights in the past two months because of suspicious problems with his plane. On December 18, 2008, Mr. Connell flew to a small airport outside of Washington DC to meet some people. It was on his return flight the next day that he crashed.

On October 31, Mr. Connell appeared before a federal judge in Ohio after being subpoenaed in a federal lawsuit investigating the rigging of the 2004 election under the direction of Karl Rove. The judge ordered Mr. Connell to testify under oath at a deposition on November 3rd, the day before the presidential election. Velvet Revolution received confidential information that the White House was extremely concerned about Mr. Connell talking about his illegal work for the White House and two Bush/Cheney 04 attorneys were dispatched to represent him.

Here is a report on the plane "accident" itself.

Connell was a highly experienced pilot. His crash is suspicious.

Current cover stories include the possibility that his plane ran out of fuel. But its crash was accompanied by a very large fireball explosion that burned for more than ten minutes. A trooper on the scene immediately identified Connell, but newspaper accounts say his body was charred beyond recognition.

Connell told various sources that he was being threatened by Rove. He canceled at least two previous flights due to mechanical failure. A father of four, his decision to fly from a highly restricted airport in Maryland remains a mystery. Connell reportedly did contract work for security-industrial agencies, like the CIA. Connell also openly acknowledged that he was the first IT contractor to move his servers behind the firewall of the US House of Representatves [Sic] where he oversaw the websites of the House Judiciary Committee, Intelligence Committee, Ways and Means Committee, and Administrative Committee, arguably the four most powerful committees in the House.

Is there any proof that Connell was assassinated? No, not at this time, but tipsters certainly anticipated it, warned that his plane would be sabotaged, and then he was killed in a suspicious plane crash.

But why was he killed? This article describes the vote stealing that occurred and lays out Connell's central position in the alleged crime.

4. Ultimately, however, it is the GOP's computerized control of the vote count that may have been decisive. And here is where Rove's e-mails, and the wee hours of the morning after the election, are crucial.

Despite the massive disenfranchisement of Ohio Democrats, there is every indication John Kerry won Ohio 2004. Exit polls shown on national television at 12:20am gave Kerry a clear lead in Ohio, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico. These "purple states" were Democratic blue late in the night, but, against virtually impossible odds, all turned Bush red by morning.

Along the way, Gahanna, Ohio's "loaves & fishes" vote count, showed 4,258 ballots for Bush in a precinct where just 638 people voted. Voting machines in Youngstown and Columbus lit up for Bush when Kerry's name was pushed. Rural Republican precincts registered more than 100% turnouts, while inner city Democratic ones went as low as 7%. Warren County declared a "Homeland Security" alert, removed the ballot count from public scrutiny, then recorded a huge, unlikely margin for Bush.

These and many more instances of irregularities and theft were reported at www.freepress.org and then confirmed by U.S. Representative John Conyers and others who researched the election.

But the most critical reversals may have come as exit polls indicated that despite massive Democratic disenfranchisement, and even with preliminary vote count manipulations, Kerry would win Ohio by 4.2%, a margin well in excess of 200,000 votes.

The key to that reversal may be electronic. It has now become widely known that the same web-hosting firm that served a range of GOP websites, including the one for the Republican National Committee, also hosted the official site that Blackwell used to report the Ohio vote count.

This astonishing conflict of interest has been reported at the epluribusmedia.org on-line investigative service. Cross-postings have come from luaptifer at Dailykos and blogger Joseph Cannon's Cannonfire.blogspot.com. They all confirm that the RNC tech network's hosting firm is SMARTech.com, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. SMARTech hosts georgew.bush.com, mc.org and gop.com among other Republican web domains, in a bank basement.

Furthermore, the same hosting site that handled redirections from Blackwell's "official" site also handled the White House e-mail accounts that have become central to investigations of the Gonzales purge of eight federal prosecutors, some of whom were themselves involved in vote fraud investigations.

Conflicts of interest in programming services and remote-access capability appear throughout the RNC's computer networks, Rove's secret White House e-mail, and the electronic vehicles used by Blackwell to finally reveal his "official" presidential vote counts for Ohio 2004.

One factor may be Ohio's electronic touch-screen voting systems, on which were cast more than 800,000 votes in an election decided by about one-seventh that total. Such vulnerabilities, among other things, have been confirmed in exhaustive reports by Conyers's Committee, by the Government Accountability Office, by the Carter-Baker Commission, by Princeton University, by the Brennan Center, and by others.

But overall, the electronic record of every vote in Ohio was transmitted to the Secretary of State's office, and hosted in real time in Chattanooga. Under such circumstances, the joint hosting of the White House e-mail system and accessibility by Blackwell and Rove to the same computer networks linked to the Ohio vote count, takes on an added dimension.

Mike Connell, a Republican computer expert, helped create the software for both Ohio's official 2004 election web site, and for the Bush campaign's partisan web site during the 2000 election. The success of Connell's GovTech Solutions has been attributed by Connell to his being "loyal to my network," including the Bush family.

Blackwell shared those loyalties. Like Connell, he worked for the Bush-Cheney campaign, serving as its Ohio co-chair. He was also in control of the vote count that was being reported on software Bush loyalist Connell helped design.

It was in a crucial period after midnight on election night 2004 that these paired conflicts of interest may have decided the election. As exit polls showed a decisive Kerry victory, there was an unexplained 90-minute void in official reporting of results. By this time, most of the vote counts were coming in from rural areas, which are traditionally Republican, and which, ironically, usually report their results earlier than the Democratic urban areas.

In this time span, Kerry's lead morphed into a GOP triumph. To explain this "miraculous" shift, Rove invented a myth of the greatest last-second voting surge in US history, allegedly coming from late-voting fundamentalist Republicans. No significant evidence exists to substantiate this claim. In fact, local news reports indicate the heaviest turnouts in most rural areas came early on election day, rather than later.

According to a January 13, 2005, release from Cedarville University, a small Ohio-based Christian academy, Connell's GovTech Solutions helped make the shared server system run "like a champ...through the early morning hours as users from around the world looked to Ohio for their election results."

After 2am, despite exit polls showing very much the opposite outcome, those results put Bush back in the White House.

In January, 2005, the U.S. Congress hosted the first challenge to a state's Electoral College delegation in our nation's history. At the time, the compromised security of the official Ohio electronic reporting systems was not public knowledge. But the first attempt to subpoena Karl Rove's computer files had already failed.

Now a second attempt to gain such access is being mounted as the Gonzales scandal deepens.

Congressman Henry A. Waxman (D-CA) has raised "particular concerns about Karl Rove" and his electronic communications about the Gonzales firings.

Rove claims both his own computer records and the RNC's servers have been purged of e-mails through the time the Ohio vote was being reversed. Rove's attorney, Robert Kuskin, has told a Congressional inquiry that Rove mistakenly believed his messages to the RNC "were being archived" there.

But the RNC says it has no e-mail records for Rove before 2005. Rob Kelner, an RNC lawyer says efforts to recreate the lost records have had some success. But it's not yet known whether communications from the 2004 election can be retrieved.

Nor is it known whether the joint access allowed to top GOP operatives Rove and Blackwell was responsible for the election-night reversal that put Bush back in the White House.

But there remains another avenue by which the real outcome of Ohio 2004 could be discovered. Longstanding federal law protected Ohio's ballots and other election documentation prior to September 3, 2006. Blackwell gave clear orders that these crucial records were to be destroyed on that date.

Prior to the expiration of the federal statutory protection, a civil rights lawsuit was filed in the federal court of Judge Algernon Marbley, asking that the remaining records be preserved. The request was granted in what has become known as the King-Lincoln Bronzeville suit (co-author Bob Fitrakis is an attorney in the case, and Harvey Wasserman is a plaintiff).

Thus, by federal law, the actual ballots and electronic records should be available for the kind of exhaustive recount that was illegally denied---or "rigged," as prosecutors in Cleveland have put it---by Blackwell, Bennett and their cohorts the first time around.

Ohio's newly-elected Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, has agreed to take custody of these materials, and to bring them to a central repository, probably in Columbus.

This means that an exhaustive recount could show who really did win the presidential election of 2004.

It may also be possible to learn what roles---electronic or otherwise--- Karl Rove and J. Kenneth Blackwell really did play during those crucial 90 minutes in the deep night, when the presidency somehow slipped from John Kerry to George W. Bush.

There is a lot of circumstantial evidence that the Republicans stole the 2004 election in Ohio, but Mike Connell's testimony would have linked all the various suspicious events together. And Karl Rove is said to have threatened Mike Connell's life if he talked.

Bhutto assassination tied more closely to Musharraf.

As more details are revealed about the assassination of Benizar Bhutto, it becomes clearer that it was an elaborately planned and well-executed operation involving a large group of people, inside knowledge of Bhutto's anticipated movements and sloppy security conducted by the Pakistan Peoples Party. McClatchy Newspapers provides a more detailed report on what has been learned.

By Saeed Shah and Jonathan S. Landay
McClatchy Newspapers

The assassination
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Two new reports on the assassination of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto on Dec. 27 suggest that it may have been an ambitious plot rather than an isolated act of violence and that the government of President Pervez Musharraf knows far more than it's admitted.

A police officer who witnessed the assassination said a mysterious crowd stopped Bhutto's car that day, prompting her to emerge through the sunroof. And a document has surfaced in the Pakistani news media that contradicts the government's version of her death and contains details on the pistol and the suicide bomb used.

The witness was Ishtiaq Hussain Shah, deputy superintendent of the Rawalpindi police. As Bhutto's car headed onto Liaquat Road after an election rally in Rawalpindi, a crowd appeared from nowhere and stopped the motorcade, shouting slogans of her Pakistan Peoples Party and waving party banners, according to his account.

Bhutto emerged through the sunroof of the bulletproof car to wave.

Shah's job was to clear the way for the motorcade. But 10 feet from where he was standing, a man in the crowd wearing a jacket and sunglasses raised his arm and shot at Bhutto. "I jumped to overpower him," he said later. "A mighty explosion took place soon afterwards."

Shah suffered multiple injuries and is recuperating in a Rawalpindi military hospital, guarded by agents of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate.

Who organized the crowd is still a mystery. "I don't know who they were or from where they came," Shah told the Dawn newspaper. "They just appeared on the road."

The investigation
The second report emerged in the Pakistani media, with detailed information about the pistol and bomb. It rejects the government's conclusion that Bhutto died when the force of the suicide blast threw her head against the sunroof lever of her car. Such an impact couldn't have fractured her skull, it said. The government would not confirm the report's authenticity, but a security official verified it to McClatchy. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitivity.

According to the report, which the paper described as a "top agency" preliminary report, a Chinese Norinco pistol, lot number 311-90, was recovered from the scene. An MUV-2 triggering mechanism for the bomb was also found; the same kind of mechanism, with the same lot number and factory code, had been used in 15 previous suicide bombings in Pakistan. [Snip]

Bhutto's Security
Bhutto's own private-security arrangements seemed poor, chaotic and amateurish. Armored cars are not fitted with sunroofs. Hers was modified in Karachi against all safety advice, according to a security company that operates in that city but spoke only on condition of anonymity. After Bhutto's death, her husband made the startling revelation that she'd been guarded by men he'd met in prison.

Government involvement before and after
Although she had escaped a suicide bombing attack Oct. 18, the day she returned to Pakistan from self-imposed exile, there was no security cordon around Bhutto as she left the park in Rawalpindi. The crime scene was cleared immediately and hosed down, destroying vital evidence. Doctors at the hospital where she was taken announced the night it happened that she'd died of bullet wounds to the head and neck, but they changed their story the next day. There was no autopsy.
[Titles added - Editor WTF-o]

Even if Musharaff did not himself direct the assassination, it is clear that he and his government do not want the details of how it was conducted to be provided to the public or to the international community.

The two biggest questions right now are how much longer Musharaff will be President, and who will replace him.

Musharraf not expected to last in office

Juan Cole provides further insight on the situation in Pakistan.

The government stonewalling on the issue of an autopsy and the coercion of government employees to toe a pre-determined line, smells to high heaven of complicity. It could be incompetence or stupidity, of course. And the Pakistani military is not all one thing. There is the Inter-Services Intelligence, some members of whom have long ties to Muslim militants. There is the officer corps, etc.

Three further notes: The Pakistan People's Party members and other opponents of Musharraf already were thinking like this before circumstantial evidence emerged that made it even more plausible. I fear their conviction will now be unshakeable, which does not bode well for social peace. It would be a feud.

Second, the physicians would not have had their lawyer speak out about their having been coerced by the military if they thought that Musharraf was likely to continue in office. That is, they have made a bet on a PPP prime minister and are more afraid of being punished by the new government than they are of being punished by the old one. Do they think the old one is about to be overthrown?

And, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, head of the Muslim League (N), called Monday for Musharraf to resign, saying of him, "He is a one-man calamity and the source of all the problems. The country is burning."

Dr. Cole makes a lot of sense here. I find his second point especially compelling. The Doctors really wouldn't have released that statement if they thought Musharraf was likely to last in office.

Apparently Dr. Cole was unaware of the story of that Bhutto was going to meet with Sen. Specter and Rep. Kennedy about the fixed election. Whether true or not, that story will also fit into Dr. Cole's first point. The members of the PPP are not going to believe anything the government says. Either Musharraf resigns or Pakistan is headed towards severe instability, even civil war.

Bhutto assassinated just before revealing the election was fixed

It hadn't seemed reasonable that Musharraf would arrange for Benazir Bhutto's assassination. When it happened, he was going to take the blame, and there did not seem to be enough reason for him to walk into that firestorm. That is no longer true. There was a reason he needed her dead and needed her dead when she was killed. McClatchy News has the story.

NAUDERO, Pakistan — 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.

"It was compiled from sources within the (intelligence) services who were working directly with Benazir Bhutto," Lashari said, speaking Monday at Bhutto's house in her ancestral village of Naudero, where her husband and children continued to mourn her death.

The ISI had no official comment. However, an agency official, speaking only on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak on the subject, dismissed the allegations as "a lot of talk but not much substance." [Snip]

According to Lashari, the document includes information on a "safe house" allegedly being run by the ISI in a central neighborhood of Islamabad, the alleged headquarters of the rigging operation.

It names as the head of the unit a brigadier general recently retired from the ISI, who was secretly assigned to run the rigging operation, Lashari said. It charges that he was working in tandem with the head of a civilian intelligence agency. Before her return to Pakistan, Bhutto, in a letter to Musharraf, had named the intelligence official as one of the men she accused of plotting to kill her.

Lashari said the report claimed that U.S. aid money was being used to fix the elections. Ballots stamped in favor of the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, which supports Musharraf, were to be produced by the intelligence agencies in about 100 parliamentary constituencies.

"They diverted money from aid activities. We had evidence of where they were spending the money," Lashari said.

Lashari, who formerly taught environmental economics at Britain's Cranfield University, said the effort was directed at constituencies where the result was likely to be decided by a small margin, so it wouldn't be obvious.

Sen. Specter and Rep. Kennedy need to be put on record regarding whether they had planned to meet with Bhutto and when.

Musharraf will not be believed now no matter what he says or does. Also, Bush had placed everything America had behind him in support of the General, and now that policy has been demonstrated to be utterly ridiculous. So not only is Pakistan a lot more unstable than it was a week ago, the assassination is clearly going to have repercussions here in the U.S. also.

There will be more about the assassination and it looks like it will be sooner rather than later.

More on the Bhutto assassination cover up

Today the New York Times provide more information on the cover up about how Benazir Bhutto was killed.

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.

Mr. Minallah distributed the medical report with his open letter to the Pakistani news media and The New York Times. He said the doctor who wrote the report, Mohammad Mussadiq Khan, the principal professor of surgery at the Rawalpindi General Hospital, told him on the night of Ms. Bhutto’s death that she had died of a bullet wound.
[Highlighting mine - Ed. WTF-o]

This is further confirmation of BBC's channel 4 news on which I based last nights' post Bhutto was shot - Musharaff's government is lying.

It is interesting that it was the Chief of Police who would not permit an autopsy. This, combined with the complaints made by Bhutto's security chief before her assassination that on three different occasions the police had provided faulty cell phone jammers to her security contingent Makes you wonder who in the government was responsible for Ms. Bhutto;s assassination. Were the security guards who did nothing to prevent the assassination (see the video in yesterday's post ) provided by the police? And why did Musharraf refuse to permit the PPP to hire American or British security guards?

As more information becomes available, it seems very likely that the assassination was conducted by someone in the Pakistani government, and less likely that it was outside terrorists.

Bhutto was shot - Musharaff's government is lying

Here is a U-Tube version of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

• Three gunshots before the bomb went off.


• The shooter walked right up behind the SUV, although there were three security guards there.


• The bomber was also right next to the car, in spite of the security guards.


• The reporter states that Bhutto had asked for American or British security guards, but Musharraf refused to let her use them.


• The early reports from the hospital all state the Bhutto had been shot at least twice. Then, suddenly, the hospital changed its story to the strange story that Ms. Bhutto fell against a latch for the sunroof when the bomb went off. However, this video clearly shows that she fell inside the car before the explosion.


• There was also no blood on the latch against which she was said to have struck her head.


• Rawalpindi, the city in which Bhutto was assassinated, is the headquarters of the Pakistani Army and is considered a garrison city.


• Musharraf was, until forced to resign to remain President a very short time ago, the Chief of Staff of the Army.

The government is clearly concealing something that would embarrass them. Is it that Musharraf called for Bhutto's assassination himself, or is it that someone in the Pakistani Army went behind his back and conducted the assassination?

It seems to me that the second choice would call for a scapegoat criminal to be caught and killed, rather than the strange lies that the government has been telling.

There is sure to be more coming out. At the very least, no one in Pakistan is going to believe anything Musharraf or his government says. That will require his replacement or a really sharp crackdown by Musharraf. In either case, his government has no remaining credibility.

That's what it looks like to me as a distant outsider. If someone who has further facts has a different read on the story, I will be very interested in hearing it.