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Al Qaeda Did It?

By Larry Johnson on December 28, 2007 at 1:42 PM in Current Affairs

Yep, it’s official. Al Qaeda, not Hillary, killed Benzir Bhutto. How do we know? Well, the Pakistani Interior Minister said so.

Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema said that on Friday, the government recorded an”intelligence intercept” in which militant leader Baitullah Mehsud “congratulated his people for carrying out this cowardly act.”

He also let us know that she died from hitting her head. Amazing how Pakistani authorities could know such a thing since no autopsy was performed. Must be the equivalent of psychic healing. Worth noting that the physician who examined her at the hospital emergency unit appeared to indicate that she had a hole in the side of her head.

I do not rule out Islamic radicals who are not part of the government as possible culprits. But they are not the only folks with motive and access. In fact, the Government of Pakistan’s rush to pin this on Al Qaeda smacks of scape goating. There are longstanding ties between Al Qaeda and elements of the military and the intelligence service.

The virtual absence of any uniformed security detail around her gives further credence
to the belief that elements within the military and ISI did away with her. There was no doubt that Benazir was a high risk for an assassination attempt. Why were Pakistani authorities so passive when it came to her security? It would be one thing if she resisted efforts to cover her. But the opposite is true. She had specifically and repeatedly asked for more security. At least she was not suicidal.

AQ is always a convenient boogeyman, but there is a pretty significant gap between what they claim to do and what they have actually accomplished over the last two years. Talking a good game and doing something are two different things. President Musharef and his crowd have some explaining to do.

UPDATE: The notion that a woman standing up in a car, with her torso above the sunroof (at least from chest up) would be thrown downward and strike her head defies physics. The bomb was below her, not above. The blast wave was moving up. If anything, it should have popped her out of the car. Or blown her to the right. Except she had already been shot and was collapsing inside the car. That’s what an autopsy likely would have demonstrated.

UPDATE 2:  The best indicator of whether a jihadist group was responsible for this attack will be a posted video of the incident.  As we have seen in Iraq, the jihadi film editors can’t wait to film the ambush of a U.S. military column and then put the video down with some religious music.  Let’s see what AQ does.

  • Mr.Murder

    There’s so many splinter groups within the fabric of their political landscape. It’s obvious someone close to the security element was in on this if we’re to believe reports of an AK being used, hard to hide one of those through a security screening…

    Had it been true Al Qaeda work would we not have seen an official declaration made before all this naming her? What about making the hit on a date of larger historical relevance to the cause, regionally or otherwise?

    We would have seen multiple attackers, from several points, staged in a series of events, instead of one man? They operate in cells and teams.

    Keep your enemies closer, as the saying goes…

  • Percy

    What? Obama is wrong? Hillary didn’t kill Bhutto? Come on… after all, Obama was raised in Indonesia, he knows all about foreign policy and stuff like that!

  • Helen Rainier

    It will be a while before any of this can be sorted out and as far as whether or not we will ever learn what really happened — don’t count on it.

    I don’t buy this latest story that she “hit her head” and that was how she died. Lies, lies and more lies.

  • Aces

    When events such as this happens, my first thought is always, “Who has the most to gain by this?”. She had been marked when she first announced that she was returning. When the first attempt did not succeed, I knew the second was coming. I just did not know when. No one ever looks at the unintended consequences of their acts. We can only guess what will happen next.

  • Philip Henika

    “Less than five metres from the SUV, a thin, young man pulled out an AK47 and fired at her five times. Bhutto took a hit in the neck and the chest, and fell. As her startled security moved to act, the shooter, or someone close to him, blew himself up, killing 30 people and damaging her SUV further. Some reports say she lay dying for close to 10 minutes after that as people kept away from the vehicle fearing another blast. Her temple had been pierced, either by a bullet or by one of the ball bearings usually packed into a suicide belt.”

    http://indiatoday.digitaltoday.in/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2944&issueid=34&Itemid=1

    includes a graphic

    • TeakWoodKite

      Close range. eh?

    • Ron England

      Why pictures like the ones here in this article are not on the front page of every newspaper and Media broadcast?

      Are the American public too afraid to see the real world?

      Are we softer in our morals that we can not allow our selves to see the death and destruction around us?

      “Demand the Truth”

      • Philip Henika

        Here is an excerpt from OBL’s famous 1998 fatwa: “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God, “and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,” and “fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God.”

        Curiously, OBL’s obsession with the Holy Sites has been lost with the Al Sahab media blitz which is one reason that I think that OBL and Zawahiri messages should be downplayed or ignored by mainstream media. The stated motivation for Al Qaeda kills in 1998 was for the protection of the Holy Sites. You may be right that the current assassinations are political but the motivation would have come from a different source than OBL’s original intent.

        • Shirin

          Just a couple of points of information, for whatever it is worth:

          Bin Ladin can issue all the make-believe “fatwas” he likes, but the reality is that he has no qualifications or standing to issue fatwas, so his “fatwas” have about the same legal and religious impact as a “fatwa” issued by the guy who runs the liquor store on the corner. (I’m not arguing, of course, that they don’t have another type of impact, or that they do not convince a small number of people who are extremely eager to be convinced.)

          Also, on a number of levels, I don’t find his Qur’anic reference terribly applicable to his make-believe fatwas, though I would have to defer to others who are more well versed than I am on this sort of thing (I wouldn’t defer unless they gave me convincing arguments, though).

          • Retired

            Well said. I’ve often wondered if bin Laden’s supposedly devout followers wouldn’t be offended by his promiscuous issuance of “fatwas.” Your phrase “eager to be convinced” is a perfect characterization of those who follow him.

            • Shirin

              A couple of weeks ago on the show Boston Legal one of the characters confessed that she had assumed a false identity in order to hide from her former boyfriend (or fiance, or husband – I forgot which), a jealous Pakistani who had put out a “fatwa” on her life when he thought she was cheating on him.

              I didn’t know whether to laugh or throw something at my TV.

    • Larry Johnson

      Don’t know about an AK-47, but there is a clear image of a handgun being fired three times courtesy of the Pak video released today.

      • TeakWoodKite

        The video they are showing that has a man shooting a pistol and then she his hidden from view. There is someone holding a cell phone camera that appears to be in video mode. Wonder where that cell phone is now.

    • anwaya

      I’m just back in Delhi from doing touristy things. Whoever produced the graphic in the India Today piece hasn’t explained how the gunman and the suicide bomber planned to attack. Bhutto was in an armoured Land Cruiser: how is a gunman armed with an AK-47 going to get through the armour?

      I still believe (though I have not been able to follow in detail) that the gunman had to be waiting for Bhutto to get out of the vehicle, and that the bomb was the event that was meant to make that happen. The theory in this article doesn’t explain events sufficiently for my liking.

  • CK

    Actually, this is all Charlie Wilson’s fault or maybe that texas socialite who led him around by the other snout.
    Or maybe it is Alexander the Greats fault; he had history in Afghanistan.

  • Philip Henika

    Why Bhutto’s assassination isn’t Al Qaeda? – correct me if I wrong.

    Al Qaeda does not use snipers. They prefer the explosive as the primary cause of death.

    Al Qaeda does not do political assassination i.e. the Bhutto assassination has been characterized as a “new” tactic and so, if it is unprecedented then suspicion could very well lie with groups that do.

    Death by head injury as claimed by Pak government official is incongruous with witness accounts e.g. I read a report that Bhutto was lying on the hospital bed with a bandaged neck.

    • Ron England

      Al Qaeda does not do political assassination i.e. the Bhutto assassination has been characterized as a “new” tactic and so, if it is unprecedented then suspicion could very well lie with groups that do.

      Sorry this is not true. Al Qaeda prefers political assassination over all other methods to cripple the opposition.

      “Demand the Truth!”

  • mainsailset

    So, now under the new & improved post 9/11 Bushdumb, our allies are able to definitively point to AQ even whilst Bhutto’s body is still warm, but the USS Cole investigation where teams actually asked questions and ran down leads took 3 months. My oh my, how intelligence has improved under Bush’s guidance.

    • Ron England

      Excellent Point!

    • Cee

      Hillary called for an international investigation into this death.

      Did she do that when Daniel Pearl was murdered?

  • http://cujo359.blogspot.com Cujo359

    Just how many rounds did Ms. Bhutto hit her head against?

    I expected this sort of announcement, but it’s insulting to the intelligence of anyone who’s even mildly aware of what’s going on over there. It’s obvious that they were involved, whether Pakistan’s government actually planned the attempt or just stayed out of the way. No one stood to profit from her death more than they did. Read Lotus’s Who’s Who in Pakistan, and it’s pretty clear that they aren’t above using force on their rivals.

    • TeakWoodKite

      Recent history would suggest a bargin was struck akin to ” you leave us alone and…” CNN is showing a video of the gun “person”. Can make out if it is an AK, the stock is similar, but it is not a 45 cannon…

  • Ron England

    By the Way, the concussion from a nearby explosion would kill her, not the bump of her head on the roof opening.

  • TeakWoodKite

    And the award for propa ‘gandi’ goes to Rupert. Get a women with a ME accent to tell us what to think…it must be true she has an accent.And this broadcast on the airwaves we “own”?

    “terror chat rooms buzzing over Bhutto assassination” …we have not heard anything from Muslim women especially in the UK and the US about….her role …

    Now the picture has Ms. Bhutto wearing the red dress and Hillary in green…

  • Donovan Fraser

    It is all such theater, killings and suspects rounded up and probably executed before the end of the episode like a well orchestrated episode of 24 . so tidy…wish we could solve cases this fast in America.
    reminds me a little of Oswald, opps i slipped and insinuated the “C word” .
    After all we all know there are NO such thing as a conspiracy.
    ———————————————————-

    i’d bet money on Mushariff being part of this…Al Qaeda is starting to sound like the default reason for everything bad in the world . Everything from the markets to global warming.

    did you hear? Al Qaeda even has spaceships fitted with an Islamic “laser beams” ( ILB) to convert us non believers into the ways of jihad…
    just kidding.

    If I didn’t know better i would venture to guess governments made Al Qaeda up to have their eternal and elusive enemy so they could wage war on our sensibility and reason and they are kicking our asses.

    • Cee

      You know better.

      See The Power of Nightmares

      http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares

      • Donovan Fraser

        this was very good. i agree, all bullshit this fear thing.
        I tried to download it but couldn’t open it on my mac
        Bummer

        • TeakWoodKite

          There was an ISO download that should work. it’s 4 gigs, so you can download and burn it to DVD.Given a steady pipe.

    • http://www.petgazette-pets.com OleHippieChick

      All fascisti need a Goldstein.

    • reggie

      Many people refer to them as Al-Ciada.

  • MataHarley

    I mentioned that Baitullah was my first choice to suspect in the threads yesterday – the one about the candidate’s posturing on the incident, I believe. Thus his name appearing today surprises me not one whit.

    However, clarification is needed here… Baitullah Mehsud, the brother of the now deceased “rock star” terrorist, Abdullah Mehsud, is the newly appointed leader of Pakistan’s Taliban.

    However certain factions of the Taliban and AQ work in tangent on common goals. It makes no sense to attribute any particular action to merely one jihad movement. Sometimes it takes the contacts, finances and contributions of many for one group to carry out the deed.

    Also, the World Islamic Front statement of 1998 united so many of them, and the list grows and morphs daily. So take care not get hung up on a particular group’s name (even they have many “aka”s). In short, they are all part of the global Islamic jihad movement.

    Lastly, it’s absurd to think AQ or any jihad movement will not use sniper attacks. I am quite certain they will use any and every method at their disposal to accomplish their end goal.

    • TeakWoodKite

      They even used Bush, like a fiddle, and had him do all the heavy lifting. It is not hard to imagine from an intel point of view, to use his daddy’s contacts against us. Working a room looking for angles.

      Being just a tad ignorant of the finer points,I am just floating in the breeze here.

  • cruzdelsur

    This is where I have a problem: Ms. Bhutto gets into a SUV, with dark tinted glass. Photos after the bombing show that the windshield was still intact after the explosion. I assume they were bullet proof. How the hell does someone aim at Bhutto through the dark bullet proof glass?

    The other thing is that after Bhutto hops into the SUV, a woman jumps in. I would assume that any protective detail would sandwich her between two people on either window side. Was there another person in the SUV in the rear driver side window?If so, that could explain how someone shot “through” a bullet proof window.

    • TeakWoodKite

      Any pot marks on the SUV?

    • Shirin

      But, Larry, I thought she was shot while she was standing up with her upper body sticking out of the sunroof. Is that no longer the claim?

      • Shirin

        Oh – sorry, that wasn’t Larry, it was CruzdelSur.

      • cruzdelsur

        You are right. Had not seen those photos. All I had seen was Bhutto getting into the SUV with tinted windows. Just saw her on BBC with her head out. Sorry….

    • Philip Henika

      The woman may have Sherry Rehman:

      “Bhutto’s spokeswoman Sherry Rehman, who was in the vehicle that rushed her boss to the hospital, disputed that. “She was bleeding profusely, as she had received a bullet wound in her neck. My car was full of blood. Three doctors at the hospital told us that she had received bullet wounds. I was among the people who gave her a final bath. We saw a bullet wound in the back of her neck,” she said. “What the government is saying is actually dangerous and nonsensical. They are pouring salt on our wounds. There are no findings, they are just lying.”"

      • Philip Henika

        No Quarter:

        http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007%5C12%5C30%5Cstory_30-12-2007_pg1_8

        Benazir was shot in the head: Sherry

        * PPP leader says government mounting cover-up over
        Benazir’s death
        * Rehman Malik wants fair investigation of incident

        ISLAMABAD: Pakistan People’s Party Information
        Secretary Sherry Rehman said on Saturday that she saw
        a bullet wound in Benazir’s head when she bathed her
        body after her assassination, AFP reported.

        She said that she was in the former premier’s
        motorcade at the time of the gun and suicide attack
        and rejected government claims that the death was
        caused when Benazir’s head hit her sunroof.

        “I was actually part of the party which bathed her
        body before the funeral,” she said, adding that her
        car was used to transport Benazir to hospital. “There
        was a bullet wound I saw that went in from the back of
        her head and came out the other side. We could not
        even wash her properly because the wound was still
        seeping. She lost a huge amount of blood,” Sherry
        explained.

        Cover-up: Sherry accused the government of mounting a
        cover-up over Benazir’s death. “The hospital was made
        to change its statement. They never gave a proper
        report,” she said. “I believe the Interior Ministry is
        saying that she died from some concussion that may
        have taken place against the sunroof. This is
        ridiculous, dangerous nonsense because it is a
        cover-up of what actually happened,” she added. She
        said the government had denied Benazir the security
        measures she had been asking for, Reuters adds.

        Fair investigation: Rehman Malik, former bureaucrat
        and chief security officer of the late Pakistan
        People’s Party Chairwoman Benazir Bhutto, has said
        that the party does not want to blame any one for the
        murder of Benazir, but wants a fair investigation, NNI
        reported. He said that the government had not provided
        them with a completely bulletproof vehicle according
        to the PPP’s demands and had provided them only with
        jammers. agencies

  • Cee

    I have another problem. Bin Laden Murdered? Frost doesn’t ask for clarification or a correction.

    Here is a November interview with Benazir Bhutto, And notice what she says around 2:14 in the interview…

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIO8B6fpFSQ

  • TeakWoodKite

    Casablanca,the lawless tribal areas. Sounds like a Rummy Vase. Hi I am in Makin, here are the GPS info.

    The government said it would hunt down those responsible for her death in the lawless tribal areas along the Afghan border where Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders are thought to be hiding.

    Cheema described Mehsud as an al-Qaida leader who was also behind most other recent terror attacks in Pakistan, including the Karachi bomb blast in October against Bhutto that killed more than 140 people.

    Mehsud is thought to be the commander of pro-Taliban forces in the tribal region of South Waziristan, where al-Qaida fighters are also active.

    In the transcript, Mehsud gives his location as Makin, a town in South Waziristan.

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071228/ap_on_re_as/pakistan_209

  • TeakWoodKite

    What? Watch and wait?

    The U.S. has few options in Pakistan. One thing is clear, says Peter Galbraith, senior fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation: It is “not a good idea to have 70 nuclear weapons in the hands of a country that is falling apart.” Some observers believe that U.S. policy in Pakistan has favored personalities over principles. “We have a bad habit of always personalizing our foreign policy,” says P.J. Crowley, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “We’ve done it with Musharraf, and we did it with respect to Bhutto. We are very good at providing technical support to the Pakistani army. We are not good at building indigenous or effective local political processes or strong institutions of government.” Given the realities on the ground, the U.S. is likely to continue to throw its support behind Musharraf. “In terms of political leadership, Pakistan does not have a deep bench,” says Crowley.

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/alqaedasnewterrortactic;_ylt=Aqev_ABai1FA9Sfp7NuwS8_9xg8F

    Zinni also disputes the idea that Washington could have done anything to prevent the assassination. “You want Blackwater out there providing security for her?” he asked, referring to the controversial U.S. private-security firm implicated in the deaths of many Iraqi civilians. “The losing of Pakistan — to whatever degree we’ve lost it, and I wouldn’t write it off yet — goes back to after the first Afghan war,” Zinni says, when Washington neglected the Afghan-Pakistan border roiling with insurgents. “We put them in a bad situation that we helped create,” Zinni says. “I’m no fan of this Administration, but you can’t criticize this Administration for what they inherited.”

    http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1698562,00.html

  • Mr.Murder

    The change in targeting is a mistake were it to be part of the AQ umbrella.

    Politicans can take collateral damage of persons not related to them, not part of the political infrastructure, etc.

    The notion they might be atop the list changes everything…

    Although it should be noted that a van full of persons asked on Dubya’s whereabouts on 9-11, so it’s quite likely we’d have seen that happen already had they been more curious…

  • rakk12

    You are right Larry. Today MSNBC is reporting that a Al Qaeda leader is denying their involvement in Bhutto’s assassination. This one smells fishy and needs to be thoroughly investigated. The easiest answer would be to blame Al Qaeda, which the Pakistani government wants us to believe. However, we can be far from certain of that. There were too many elements in the Pakistani military who were hostile to her. To be sure we need an international investigation, not a Pakistani investigation. That may be the only one that the people of Pakistan may trust to be fair.

  • yogi-one

    Hey I’m going to pull a W and go on my “gut feeling” here:
    my gut tells me this was done not with Musharraf’s direct approval, but by his followers and he was kept one step out of the loop so he could not be directly implicated.

    The lax security, the coverup of the autopsy (if there was one), the immediate statement by the Mushies (hey I just made that up – Mushies and Bushies – haha) that AQ was to blame (another cameo by Osama Bin Boogey-Man, right on cue, kiddies!)

    There won’t be any real investigation. Probably they told her husband to keep his mouth shut, or back to jail for him again.

    There is a NYT feature with video, timeline of Bhutto’s life, and pics by a western photographer who was actually there (these include pics of just before she was shot and just after, when the bombs exploded).

    Interestingly, the NYT article included the statement that two women who worked on preparing the body for burial both said they saw the bullet hole in the neck and out through the skull.

    So its the Mushies and the Bushies, and blame it on Al-Qaeda.

    So what the hell is Al-Qaeda? A name used by the Mushies and Bushies to describe a loose network of homegrown revolutionaries in whatever Islamic country conflicts are happening in. Once upon a time OBL gave some of his inheritance to help fight in Afghanistan and maybe later to finance training and deployment of some terrorists.

    Nowadays “Al-Qaeda” is just a blanket term. Nobody knows if OBL gave money to finance Bhutto’s assassination (he didn’t have any motive to, at any rate), and nobody has evidence that either the gunman or the bomber had any training from or connections to OBL or Al-Zwahiri.

    So for now, I think it’s pretty safe to say OBL (if his kidneys are still functioning, and if he is still in fact alive) or AQ was behind Bhutto’s assassination is BS, or at least wildly off-the-mark speculation.

    I don’t think Mushie himself did it either. Probably it’s a gift from an anonymous benefactor, and the Mushies seem content not to find out who.

    Expect the “official” explanation to be a “single, lone assassin”.

    A single lone assassin? AQ? Am I the only one that thinks these “explanations” are starting to sound like a broken record?

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