CIA chief places blame for Bhutto assassination
Echoing Musharraf, Hayden says al-Qaeda, militants behind ex-PM’s death
The CIA has concluded that members of al-Qaeda and allies of Pakistani tribal leader Baitullah Mehsud were responsible for last month's assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, and that they also stand behind a new wave of violence threatening that country's stability, the agency's director, Michael V. Hayden, said in an interview.
Offering the most definitive public assessment by a U.S. intelligence official, Hayden said Bhutto was killed by fighters allied with Mehsud, a tribal leader in northwestern Pakistan, with support from al-Qaeda's terrorist network. That view mirrors the Pakistani government's assertions.
Who could have possibly imagined that al Qaeda was responsible for this sickening act of violence? There must have been some crack inspector on this case who was able to interpret incredibly subtle cues to finally figure out the mysterious, top-secret organization that was behind this atrocity.
Actually, as I noted right after the attack, this was pretty obvious from the outset. Not to you, though. To you, skeptical analyst that you are, it was quite possibly a case of Musharraf using his security forces to knock off a political rival. And the amazing thing is that al Qaeda knew perfectly well that you (and, more importantly, the people of Pakistan) would react that way. They kill and then sit back munching popcorn while the robotic masses savage their own leaders. You should care about that, especially if you, yourself, have a tendency to immediately join al Qaeda's political wing whenever they slaughter innocent people.
When al Qaeda killed 200 innocent people in Spain 3 days before their national election, the jihadists knew that anger would be directed toward the politician who was ahead in the polls and who they were trying to defeat (and did defeat). Right on cue, the people of Spain (and people around the world, for that matter) thought that the big story was that Prime Minister Aznar initially blamed Basque separatists for the attack. But that was the little story. The big story was that everyone was acting like puppets on strings controlled by al Qaeda. Aznar was defeated, and his socialist successor immediately obeyed al Qaeda's demand that Spanish troops be withdrawn from Iraq. Yes, opinion polls showed that the Spanish people wanted troops withdrawn from Iraq. But, in the more important poll (i.e., the election that was about to take place), they were going to empower a man who pledged to keep the troops in Iraq to fight al Qaeda. And that's precisely why al Qaeda decided to direct the Spanish people to elect someone else instead (and the Spanish people sheepishly complied).
In America, people reacted with disgust directed at George Bush when al Qaeda deliberately engineered an explosion of sectarian violence in Iraq. For the most part, mainstream media reporters and mainstream Democrats refused to even allow for the possibility that al Qaeda was the single most important cause of the sectarian chaos. Instead, for reasons that I will never completely understand (but that al Qaeda seems to understand very well), everyone went through preposterous mental contortions in a truly Herculean effort to frame the situation in Iraq as a civil war between Shiites and Sunnis, who have hated each other for centuries.
That's how good al Qaeda is. Not only do they successfully engineer savage attacks on a country's leader by deliberately slaughtering innocent people, they do so repeatedly and no one learns from it. What that means is that, in time, they'll do it again. When it happens, watch your reaction. And before you do what you are impulsively inclined to do, consider using the British as your model. When trains were bombed in London, the British did not immediately savage Tony Blair. That was impressive to me. When al Qaeda bombs a train (or worse) at some point in the future, I suggest that you use the British as your model.
5 comments:
We should consider when someone is trying to manipulate us, but too many seem to have lost that ability, like losing vision from being in the dark too long. Maybe a majority has become so accepting of advertising and political statements at face value that we can't see what is just below the surface, the real agendas.
The the credit of the British, they have endured low levels of local terrorism for years, which may have served to keep their eyes open.
Perhaps that is cause for hope for the rest of us, but, sadly, to get to that point, we must face slaughter among our ranks before the light dawns and we recognize the butchers aren't our leaders but someone else that will enjoy our deaths.
It seems it would be so much easier to learn the lesson from the British or Spanish or Iraqis or Pakistanis but we seem to prefer to follow the self-serving and misguided advertising and agendas of illiberal liberals and the dogmatic MSM instead of thinking for ourselves.
I agree with you.
Actually, Aznar was not defeated in the March 2004 elections. If the Partido Popular had won the elections as predicted by the polls Mariano Rajoy, Aznar's successor as leader of the PP, would have become PM.
Anyway, thanks for the great blog.
Its sad to note that while Bhuttos's assasins were "behind a new wave of violence threatening that country's stability", self-professed supporters of Bhutto were behind a wave of violence in an orgy of burning public property.
Oooops!!!!!!!!!
That is 'assassins'
Cheers
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