Rick Reuben wrote:Interesting. The BBC has posted an edited version of the Frost/Bhutto interview. Bhutto's comment about the murderer of bin Laden is not in their version.

The video can be seen here : open video player

The edit can be clearly seen - the picture flips back to Frost to cover up the visual discontinuity that would be there if Bhutto was shown.

Rick Reuben wrote:

barndog wrote:I think as you pointed out earlier it was a slip up.

I don't think I said it was a slip-up. I don't know what it was. I know what she said. I know that she had been in intensive negotiations with CIA and US State Dept. prior to her return from the UK. She may have accidentally let slip some inside knowledge during a public interview. So while it may have been a 'slip up', that does not mean that it could not have been an accidental revelation of truth.

sparky wrote:Tariq Ali's front page piece in today's The Independent articulates the cringe I felt on watching Bilawal Bhutto on the news last night. "Grotesque" is a very appropriate word to lead with. This effectively hands control of Pakistan's main opposition to Asif Zardari a.k.a Benazir's calamity a.k.a. Mr 10% a.k.a. "that murdering **** bastard*". The mainstream options that are being laid in front of the Pakistani voter are thus:-

1. Incompetent, corrupt and brutal military dictator torn between American and military Islamic fundamentalist influences;
2. Incompetent, corrupt and brutal alleged-murderer speaking through his spotty teenage son torn between American influence and his own pocket; and
3. Incompetent, corrupt and brutal career-slime torn between Saudi and pocket influence.

TARIQ ALI: Well, Amy, my first reaction was anger. I was livid that Bush and his acolytes in Britain had fixed this deal, pushing her to do a deal with Musharraf, forcing her to play a role, which, of course, she agreed to do—it has to be admitted—in Pakistan, which she was not capable of playing. She made some extremely injudicious remarks, saying that she would go back, she was the only person who could deal with terrorism, etc., etc. The fact was that this was not the case.

And, you know, to—I wrote at the time that it is a big, big problem when you try and arrange a political marriage between two parties who loathe each other. And so, Musharraf very rapidly, after her return, embarrassed her by instituting a state of emergency. And she then didn’t know whether to defend the state of emergency; finally, she attacked it. So the whole situation was a complete mess.

And now, everyone in Pakistan knows that an election organized in this fashion, under the leadership of a guy who’s become a master at rigging elections, is not going to achieve anything. So Benazir was advised by close advisers, including one of the central leaders of her party, Aitzaz Ahsan, who is still in prison, by the way, saying we must not participate in this election, it’s totally fake and rigged, it should be boycotted. She refused to accept that, because Washington insisted that she participate in this election, and she was torn in her loyalties. And finally, she, a woman of great physical courage, lacked the political courage to defy Washington. And I have to say this, it’s cost her her life. Had she decided to boycott the election, this would not have happened.

And for Washington to send her to Pakistan, reassuring her that she would be safe, is shocking. At the very least, if they were insistent on doing this, they could have provided her with a Marine guard like Karzai gets in Kabul. But, you know, they depended on the locals to guard her, and they obviously couldn’t do it. So she’s now dead. And it’s a tragedy. It’s a personal tragedy for her and her family. And it sort of has begun, embarked on a new crisis for Pakistan, which is going to get worse.

I mean, I think Musharraf’s days are numbered. I don’t think he will be, even if he has this fake election in a week or ten days’ time, which Bush is forcing him to do—I mean, I cannot understand, for the life of me, how the President of the United States can be so isolated and remote from reality as to insist that an election goes ahead when one of the central political leaders in the country, backed by Washington, has just been assassinated. I mean, what the hell are they going to achieve from this election? Nothing. It will not give legitimacy to anyone. It will create possibly, very rapidly afterwards, a new crisis, and then they will have to have a new military leader stepping in.

Cranius wrote:http://www.democracynow.org/2007/12/28/pakistan_in_turmoil_after_benazir_bhuttos

sparky wrote:Ali sounds as posh as expected!

Benazir Bhutto did five years of hard time in prison, much of it in
solitary confinement, after her father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto,
was overthrown and hanged by the worst of Pakistan's military dictators,
General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. But she was a woman who liked her privileges
and her luxuries, and she was never a very effective politician.

I got to know Benazir Bhutto a bit in the mid-1970s, when she had
finished her degree at Harvard and was doing graduate work at Oxford
University. She actually spent much of her time in London, in a grand flat
she kept just off Hyde Park.

If you knew a lot of people in town who took an interest in Middle
Eastern and subcontinental affairs (I had been studying at the School of
Oriental and African Studies), and you weren't too old or too boring, you
were likely to end up at her flat once in a while, at what some would call
a salon but I would call a party.

A fairly decorous party as those things went in 70s London, to be
sure, with everybody showing off their sophisticated knowledge of the
region's politics and nobody getting out of hand, but definitely a party.
The hostess was well informed and quite clever, and she obviously had money
coming out of her ears. We knew her dad had been prime minister of Pakistan
before Zia overthrew him, of course, but she was neither a serious scholar
nor a budding politician.

She seemed more American than Pakistani in her style and attitudes,
but beneath the Radcliffe and Harvard veneer she also seemed like thousands
of other young upper-class women from Pakistan and India who were floating
around London at the time. They called one another by girlish nicknames
like "Bubbles," they didn't take anything very seriously (including their
studies), and they seemed destined for a life of idle privilege.

Then Benazir Bhutto went back to Pakistan in 1977, just about the
time that Zia had her father sentenced to death in a rigged trial. He was
hanged in 1979, and Benazir was thrown into jail for five years. But when
she came out after Zia died, she was already the head of the party her
father had founded, the Pakistan People's Party, and by 1988 she was prime
minister. She was only 35.

She was prime minister twice, from 1988-90 and 1993-96, and was
removed from power both times on corruption charges. The charges have never
been proved in court, but the evidence of kickbacks and commissions,
especially to her husband Asif Zardari, whom she foolishly made investment
minister, is pretty overwhelming. But that was not the real problem.

The problem was that she never seemed to have any goal in politics,
apart from vindicating her father by leading his party back to power. At
the start she was hugely popular, but she wasted her opportunity to make
real changes in Pakistan because she had no notion (beyond the usual
rhetoric) of what a better Pakistan would look like. Pakistan is already
pretty good for her sort of people, so it should not surprise us that there
was almost nothing to show for her years in office.

If she had become prime minister again, which was a quite likely
outcome of the current crisis, there is no reason to believe that she would
have done any better this time. Her assassination just makes it harder to
solve the crisis at all.

Benazir Bhutto's party, the PPP, has no alternative leader with
national visibility. The other major opposition party leader, Nawaz Sharif,
is equally compromised by his past failures, and is currently planning to
boycott the elections scheduled for 8 January. Ex-general Pervez
Musharraf, who had himself "re-elected" president in October and imposed
emergency rule in order to dismiss the supreme court judges who would have
ruled his "election" illegal, is totally discredited and unlikely to last
much longer.

The most probable outcome is a new period of military rule under a
different ruler, simply for lack of a good alternative. It is pathetic that
a country the size of Pakistan should have so few inspiring or even
promising candidates for high political office.

The vast majority of Pakistan's politicians, and of the people who
run pretty well everything else in the country apart from the armed forces,
are drawn from the three or four percent of the population who constitute
the country's traditional elite. It is a very shallow pool of talent, made
up of people who have a big stake in the stratus quo and a huge sense of
entitlement.

Look east to India, west to Iran, or north to China, and by
comparison Pakistan's political demography is absolutely feudal. So long as
that remains the case, it is absurd to imagine that democracy will solve
Pakistan's problems. I admired Benazir Bhutto's courage and I am very
sorry that she was killed, but she could never have been Pakistan's
saviour.

ubercat wrote:HOLY FUCK! That assassin looks exactly like That Damned Fly's avatar!

Andrew. wrote:

sparky wrote:Ali sounds as posh as expected!

I take it you mean the sound of his voice/accent? It's amusing. On the other hand, I know someone who interviewed Ali for a college radio program, and there was some fuck-up with the line that resulted in Ali being on hold for the better part of half an hour. Apparently he was perfectly gracious about it all. If you read the SWP-affiliated blogs like Lenin's Tomb, Ali is treated with a certain bemusement but clear respect--as in he has a long history of doing the legwork, showing up for pickets improbably dressed in a jean jacket, etc. Early in the occupation Democracy Now! hosted a debate/interview between Ali and Hitchens (it's still online) and Ali completely outclasses Hitchens.