"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.The second report, which Ms Bhutto did not plan to release to the media, alleged that the ISI was using some of the $10 billion (£5 billion) in US military aid that Pakistan has received since 2001 to run a covert election operation from a safe house in G5..." Rest of story here.
After the assasination Qazi Hussain Ahmad, the leader of Jamaat-i-Islami, while recognizing ideological differences with Bhutto's party, quickly expressed "deep sorrow and grief" over the assasination of Bhutto, and called for a public strike.
Given the Jamaat's history of praising Bin Laden as the hero of the Islamic world, this statement of "grief and sorrow" carries no weight other than the weight of its own hypocrisy.
>Worth reading: Robert Novak's What Bhutto was Worried About. Novak revisits Bhutto's disatisfaction with the security provided for her and her appeals to Washington over it, giving the situation a nuanced cast. Novak suggests things had gone so far that:
"her camp no longer viewed the backstage U.S. effort to broker a power-sharing agreement between Musharraf and the former prime minister as a good-faith effort toward democracy. It was, according to the written complaint, an attempt to preserve the politically endangered Musharraf as George W. Bush's man in Islamabad. "Novak notes that "President Bush confirmed that judgment with his statement Thursday, within hours of learning that Bhutto was dead, when he urged that the elections scheduled for Jan. 8 be held in furtherance of Pakistani 'democracy.'"
