‘Chase Them Back To Their Caves’

One of the most disturbing things to me during any election cycle is the tendency for surrogates of campaigns to drop outrageous talking points to drive home misconceptions and fear that the candidates themselves would never utter. They’re usually far enough away from the candidate – state co-chair, errant campaign worker – that the campaigns can say that they can’t control what comes out of every single spokesperson’s mouth.

However these opportunities occur with such disturbing frequency the closer you get to the actual match-ups, that you really have to wonder whether or not the campaigns don’t offer a sly wink and a nod to them.

The latest entry in fear-mongering cheap shots comes from John Deady, the New Hampshire co-chair of Veterans for Rudy. Mr. Deady was interviewed as part of a series of documentaries The Observer of London is filming in New Hampshire. TPM Election Central’s Greg Sargent reports this:

He’s got I believe the knowledge and the judgement to attack one of the most difficult problems in current history and that is the rise of the Muslims, and make no mistake about it, this hasn’t happened for a thousand years. These people are very dedicated and they’re also very very smart in their own way. We need to keep the feet to the fire and keep pressing these people until we defeat or chase them back to their caves or in other words get rid of them.

Here’s the video:

Now you might think this xenophobic utterance is restricted to just the “Islamofacists” or terror jihadists. In an interview with TPM’s Sargent, Deady stands by his comments and then some:

Asked if he stood by his comments in the earlier Guardian interview, Deady said: “I most assuredly do. I’ve been very concerned about this Muslim thing for quite awhile. The average American does not know beans about what the Muslims are about. I am talking about the Muslims in general. I don’t subscribe to the principle that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims. They’re all Muslims.“
In the earlier interview with The Guardian, Deady said of Muslims: “We need to keep the feet to the fire and keep pressing these people until we defeat or chase them back to their caves or in other words get rid of them.”
When I asked Deady to elaborate on his suggestion that we need to “get rid” of Muslims, Deady said: “When I say get rid of them, I wasn’t necessarily referring to genocide. What I was referring to is, stand up to them every time they stick up their heads and attack us. We can’t afford to say, `We’ll try diplomacy.’ They don’t respond to it. If you look into Islamic tradition, a treaty is only good for five years. We’re not dealing with a rational mindset here. We’re dealing with madmen.” When I asked Deady if this was also a reference to all Muslims, he said: “I am talking about Muslims in general.“

So by playing to the fears of those who are awaiting the next 9/11, Deady presses the idea that A) all Muslims lived in caves and need to go back there and B) the Mayor of 9/11 who hopes to be the President of 9/11 is the only one that can protect us from these ungodly, terroristic hoardes that live in our midst!

Rudy’s campaign eventually responded to Deady’s comments, artfully dodging any responsibility for the remarks and certainly not “necessarily referring to genocide”. The New York Daily News got this from the Giuliani campaign:

The Giuliani campaign said it would ask Deady to resign “if these quotes are accurate.” “They are inappropriate and not reflective of our campaign,” said Wayne Semprini, Giuliani’s New Hampshire chairman.

Whew! Glad that’s all straightened out.

via//AOL News

Giuliani campaign’s Muslim fall out

How a Guardian video caused the former New York mayor trouble in New Hampshire

Traveling around New Hampshire last week, the GuardianFilms team dropped in on a Rudy Giuliani house party. With cameras running we caught one of Giuliani’s New Hampshire state leaders as he derided and even threatened Muslims. The story turned out to have some resonance, winding its way from Guardian Unlimited, through the liberal blogosphere and into the US mainstream media before becoming an embarrassment for the Giuliani campaign.

At Manchester mayor Frank Guinta’s house party John Deady blended in with the mostly white, professional crowd. A retired military intelligence officer and state co-chair of Veterans for Rudy, he has been active in Republican politics for decades. He was eager to share his enthusiasm for Giuliani and what he saw as Rudy’s no-nonsense, get tough approach to America’s legions of enemies around the world, particularly the Muslims.

He has got, I believe, the knowledge and the judgment to attack one of the most difficult problems in current history, and that is the rise of the Muslims. Make no mistake about it; this hasn’t happened for a thousand years. These people are very, very dedicated. They’re also very smart in their own way, and we need to keep the feet to the fire and keep pressing these people until we defeat them or chase them back to their caves, or, in other words, get rid of them.

Deady wasn’t the only one with intense pro-Rudy sentiments at the party. Another supporter told us, “We are going to protect what is ours. If it means we’ve got to shoot you in the head then so be it. I think he’s the guy who can do that.”

It was all pretty typical of the red meat crowd that Giuliani attracts.

Not long after our mini-documentary went up on December 27, two prominent gossip sites were running with it. Wonkette’s headline read: “Rudy Supporters Unsurprisingly Anti-Muslim” with the subhead, “Shut the Fuck Up.” Gawker ran with, “Giuliani: The Candidate Who Will Shoot You” and the subhead: “We’re All Gonna Die.”

When Greg Sargent from the influential Talking Points Memo called Deady, he confirmed that when he made the comments he was referring to Muslims in general and not just Islamic terrorists.

“I don’t subscribe to the principle that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims. They’re all Muslims,” he told Sargent. “When I say get rid of them, I wasn’t necessarily referring to genocide. What I was referring to is, stand up to them every time they stick up their heads and attack us. We can’t afford to say, “We’ll try diplomacy.” They don’t respond to it. If you look into Islamic tradition, a treaty is only good for five years. We’re not dealing with a rational mindset here. We’re dealing with madmen.”

Deady had other stuff on his mind, like airport security. “Instead of goosing every little old lady,” Deady said, “why not take a look at those people who are between the ages of 18 and 38 and are acting strange?” He added: “I’m not a bigot really. I may sound like one. But I’m only quoting what’s factual.”

Not long after this, other media began to take notice. The Giuliani campaign, which had initially hedged on Deady, said it would now look into the veracity of the quotes.

On YouTube the Giuliani video generated 30,000 hits and over 600 comments over a couple of days. The story on the Fox News site also drew a torrent of debate with over 400 comments.

CBS News described Deady’s remarks as “jaw-dropping comments about Muslims.” Once what bloggers derisively refer to as the MSM (mainstream media) moved in Deady was as good as gone.

With the campaign already in decline in local New Hampshire polls and beginning to slide nationally, it didn’t need the headache of spending days explaining that Deady had been misinterpreted. Fox News reported that the “reponse was swift” after Giuliani “faced questions Friday night about the comments.”

Two days after the video first appeared on the Guardian site, Deady had submitted his resignation. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post summed it up in a headline that read: “Rudy Ax Over Muslim Bash.” The tabloid described how “Rudy Giuliani’s campaign was rocked by controversy when a prominent New Hampshire volunteer resigned after making inflammatory comments about Muslims in an interview.”

Fox News noted that, “Similar fallout occurred recently in the Hillary Clinton camp when New Hampshire adviser Bill Shaheen warned in an article that Democratic rival Barack Obama’s admissions of past drug use could provide easy fodder for the GOP if he were the nominee. Shaheen resigned after making the comments.”

Fox added that the campaign calendar was another factor: “Giuliani’s campaign was quick to contain the damage in the final days before the January 3 Iowa caucuses and January 8 New Hampshire primary.”

After he resigned Deady got another call from Greg Sargent looking for a reaction. Deady was doing no more talking, he’d had enough. “This is not going to go any further with me,” he said. “I’m way beyond my depth with you people.”

via//Guardian Unlimited

Benazir Bhutto: An Age of Hope Is Over

Nineteen years ago at the end of December, Benazir Bhutto, fresh from her first, exhilarating election victory and newly sworn in as Prime Minister of Pakistan, met Rajiv Gandhi, the youthful prime minister of India, for talks in Islamabad. She was 35, he was 44. There was obvious good will, almost intimacy, between them. The air was full of promise and hope that these two modernizing scions of dominant political families would turn decades of war and hostility between their nations into a new era of peace.

Three and a half years later, Gandhi was assassinated. There had been no breakthrough with Pakistan to bolster his legacy. Now Bhutto is dead, at another moment of renewed anticipation. An age of hope is over.

There is a terrible symmetry in the lives and deaths of these two political leaders. Both were the children of powerful people: Indira Gandhi as India’s prime minister and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto her counterpart in Pakistan. Together, in 1972, they had negotiated an agreement over Kashmir, but their heirs were never able to build on it. Their respective children, Rajiv and Benazir, had seen those parents suffer politically motivated deaths: Indira murdered in 1984 by bodyguards revenging her attacks on Sikhs, and Zulfikar hanged under the regime of General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq in what many Pakistanis consider a thinly disguised judicial execution.

Young Gandhi and Bhutto, both killed in suicide attacks, ultimately became the victims of inherited policies. Rajiv Gandhi had tried to put an end to Indian meddling in Sri Lanka and its support for a vicious Tamil Tiger rebellion. He was killed by a Sri Lankan Tamil suicide bomber, a woman who moved toward him to touch his feet in an age-old gesture, then triggered an explosion that blew them both apart. While it is too early to know who killed Benazir, Pakistan’s policies on Afghanistan are the backdrop to this tense and dangerous moment. Her father and his successors had supported Afghan rebels in order to become a player in Afghanistan and counter Indian influence in Kabul lately aligning riskily with American policies. Rajiv’s mother, whose intelligence agencies roamed the region causing havoc, had set out to weaken Sri Lanka, South Asia’s most developed nation.

Benazir Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi were both campaigning to return to power when they died. Both had been elected, then vilified. She lost support among middle-class Pakistanis for her feudal ways and unwillingness to take on social issues–child labor or the mistreatment of women–or chip away at the power of the military, and was driven from office twice on charges of corruption, much of it attributed to her husband. In India, Rajiv was the perennial butt of attacks from unreconstructed leftists and traditionalists who scoffed at his Westernized style, Italian wife and fresh ideas that rattled the khadi crowd. On the night he died, a policeman told me they had identified his remains by his expensive imported running shoes. Suspicions linger that Gandhi or those close to him may have been involved in illegal payments for arms contracts.

Tragically, political violence has been the bane of modern South Asia, from Afghanistan and Pakistan east to Bangladesh. Militants and fanatics of all stripes and dogmas and grievances have assassinated leaders since much of the region gained independence from Britain in the mid 1940s. It has been a formidable hindrance to development of political institutions.

In New Delhi, Mohandas K. Gandhi was killed in 1948 by an outraged Hindu. Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated in 1951–in the same Rawalpindi park where Benazir Bhutto was attacked–and General Zia ul-Haq perished in a still mysterious plane crash in 1988. In Sri Lanka in 1959, Prime Minister S.W.R.D Bandaranaike fell victim to a fanatic Buddhist monk, the first of two generations of more than a half-dozen leading politicians to die in shootings and bombings. (Tamil Tiger rebels would later try but fail to kill Bandaranaike’s daughter, Chandrika Kumaratunga, when she was president.) Sheikh Mujibir Rahman, founder and first Prime Minister of independent Bangladesh, was murdered in 1975; in 1981 Bangladeshi President Ziaur Rahman, was shot in an army coup. Nepal’s entire royal family was wiped out in one evening in Kathmandu in 2001, apparently by a disaffected crown prince.

Hindus and Muslims killed one another by the hundreds of thousands after the partition of British India in 1947 into Pakistan and modern India. And compared with Pakistan since then, India has experienced much more large-scale sectarian and political violence, with thousands of Sikhs butchered in the streets of Delhi and elsewhere in North India after Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, and up to 2,000 Muslims slaughtered by Hindu nationalists in Gujarat–Mahatma Gandhi’s birthplace–in 2002. In both cases, political parties have been deeply implicated yet no political leader has been punished–in a democracy.

As the world mourns the loss of Benazir Bhutto, it would be myopic to focus only on Islamic-inspired violence and on Pakistan. This is a region with a turbulent post-independence political history. Our (Islamophobic?) preoccupation with Muslim terrorism in Pakistan and Afghanistan often blocks out a bigger picture. From end to end, South Asia is a region drenched in blood.

via//The Nation

2007 Worst Year Yet in Iraq

Despite all the claims of improvements, 2007 has been the worst year yet in Iraq.

One of the first big moves this year was the launch of a troop “surge” by the U.S. government in mid-February. The goal was to improve security in Baghdad and the western al-Anbar province, the two most violent areas. By June, an additional 28,000 troops had been deployed to Iraq, bringing the total number up to more than 160,000.

By autumn, there were over 175,000 U.S. military personnel in Iraq. This is the highest number of U.S. troops deployed yet, and while the U.S. government continues to talk of withdrawing some, the numbers on the ground appear to contradict these promises.

The Bush administration said the “surge” was also aimed at curbing sectarian killings, and to gain time for political reform for the government of U.S.-backed Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

During the surge, the number of Iraqis displaced from their homes quadrupled, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent. By the end of 2007, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that there are over 2.3 million internally displaced persons within Iraq, and over 2.3 million Iraqis who have fled the country.

Iraq has a population around 25 million.

The non-governmental organization Refugees International describes Iraq’s refugee problem as “the world’s fastest growing refugee crisis.”

In October the Syrian government began requiring visas for Iraqis. Until then it was the only country to allow Iraqis in without visas. The new restrictions have led some Iraqis to return to Baghdad, but that number is well below 50,000.

A recent UNHCR survey of families returning found that less than 18 percent did so by choice. Most came back because they lacked a visa, had run out of money abroad, or were deported.

Sectarian killings have decreased in recent months, but still continue. Bodies continue to be dumped on the streets of Baghdad daily.

One reason for a decrease in the level of violence is that most of Baghdad has essentially been divided along sectarian lines. Entire neighborhoods are now surrounded by concrete blast walls several meters high, with strict security checkpoints. Normal life has all but vanished.

The Iraqi Red Crescent estimates that eight out of ten refugees are from Baghdad.

By the end of 2007, attacks against occupation forces decreased substantially, but still number more than 2,000 monthly. Iraqi infrastructure, like supply of potable water and electricity are improving, but remain below pre-invasion levels. Similarly with jobs and oil exports. Unemployment, according to the Iraqi government, ranges between 60-70 percent.

An Oxfam International report released in July says 70 percent of Iraqis lack access to safe drinking water, and 43 percent live on less than a dollar a day. The report also states that eight million Iraqis are in need of emergency assistance.

“Iraqis are suffering from a growing lack of food, shelter, water and sanitation, healthcare, education, and employment,” the report says. “Of the four million Iraqis who are dependent on food assistance, only 60 percent currently have access to rations through the government-run Public Distribution System (PDS), down from 96 percent in 2004.”

Nearly 10 million people depend on the fragile rationing system. In December, the Iraqi government announced it would cut the number of items in the food ration from ten to five due to “insufficient funds and spiraling inflation.” The inflation rate is officially said to be around 70 percent.

The cuts are to be introduced in the beginning of 2008, and have led to warnings of social unrest if measures are not taken to address rising poverty and unemployment.

Iraq’s children continue to suffer most. Child malnutrition rates have increased from 19 percent during the economic sanctions period prior to the invasion, to 28 percent today.

This year has also been one of the bloodiest of the entire occupation. The group Just Foreign Policy, “an independent and non-partisan mass membership organization dedicated to reforming U.S. foreign policy,” estimates the total number of Iraqis killed so far due to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation to be 1,139,602.

This year 894 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq, making 2007 the deadliest year of the entire occupation for the U.S. military, according to ICasualties.org.

To date, at least 3,896 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.

A part of the U.S. military’s effort to reduce violence has been to pay former resistance fighters. Late in 2007, the U.S. military began paying monthly wages of 300 dollars to former militants, calling them now “concerned local citizens.”

While this policy has cut violence in al-Anbar, it has also increased political divisions between the dominant Shia political party and the Sunnis – the majority of these “concerned citizens” being paid are Sunni Muslims. Prime Minister Maliki has said these “concerned local citizens” will never be part of the government’s security apparatus, which is predominantly composed of members of various Shia militias.

Underscoring another failure of the so-called surge is the fact that the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad remains more divided than ever, and hopes of reconciliation have vanished.

According to a recent ABC/BBC poll, 98 percent of Sunnis and 84 percent of Shia in Iraq want all U.S. forces out of the country.

via//Antiwar.com

Obama Aide Ties Pakistan to Iraq War

DES MOINES — The chief strategist of Senator Barack Obama’s campaign said Thursday that the assassination of the Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto “underscores the case for judgment” when voters begin to select their presidential candidates next week.

The strategist, David Axelrod, said voters should take into consideration that the Iraq war led to the rise of terrorist activity and political instability in Pakistan. Mr. Axelrod said that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton backed the Iraq war in 2002, while Mr. Obama did not.

“She was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq, which we would submit was one of the reasons why we were diverted from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Al Qaeda, who may have been players in this event today,” he said, according to Time.com. “So that’s a judgment she’ll have to defend.”

Phil Singer, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, responded, saying the situation should not be politicized. “This is a time to be focused on the tragedy of the situation, its implications for the U.S. and the world, and to be concerned for the people of Pakistan and the country’s stability,” Mr. Singer said in a statement.

In a telephone interview on Thursday evening, Mr. Axelrod said it was indisputable that the war took the United States’ attention away from fighting terrorists in Pakistan.

“I think she should be held accountable as everyone should who was involved in that vote for a flawed policy,” Mr. Axelrod said. “That’s a long way from saying that she bears responsibility for the events of today. That would go too far.”

via//New York Times

Bhutto said she’d blame Musharraf if killed

Two months before her death, former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto sent an e-mail to her U.S. adviser and longtime friend, saying that if she were killed, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf would bear some of the blame.

She cited his government’s denial of her request for additional security measures after the October suicide bombing that targeted her upon returning to Pakistan from exile.

“Nothing will, God willing happen,” she wrote to Mark Siegel, her U.S. spokesman, lobbyist and friend.

“Just wanted u to know if it does in addition to the names in my letter to Musharaf of Oct 16nth, I wld hold Musharaf responsible. I have been made to feel insecure by his minions and there is no way what is happening in terms of stopping me from taking private cars or using tinted windows or giving jammers or four police mobiles to cover all sides cld happen without him.”

Bhutto was seeking to become prime minister for a third time when she was assassinated; her death comes exactly two weeks before Pakistan’s January 8 parliamentary elections.

Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S., Mahmud Ali Durrani, on Thursday insisted Musharraf’s government provided the former prime minister with unprecedented security. He said that terrorists and extremists, who also have targeted Musharraf, were the only ones responsible for her death.

Bhutto wrote the e-mail on October 26, eight days after at least 130 people were killed and hundreds more wounded in Karachi by the suicide bombing that occurred as Bhutto’s motorcade passed.

Siegel forwarded that e-mail to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, with instructions he not report on it unless Bhutto was killed.

Just before returning to Pakistan after eight years of self-imposed exile, Bhutto told CNN she was aware of threats against her and said that some had come from people who hold “high positions” in Pakistan’s government. She said she had written a letter to Musharraf about her fears, apparently the same letter she refers to in her e-mail to Siegel.

In a speech, she listed four groups she believed posed the biggest threat to her and her cause — the Taliban in Pakistan, the Taliban in Afghanistan, al Qaeda and a suicide team from Karachi that she did not describe.

After the October bombing, she accused elements in the government and security services of trying to kill her and asked Musharraf for “basic security,” including vehicles with tinted windows and private guards in addition to police guards. Three United States senators repeated the request in a letter to Musharraf.

Bhutto was concerned by the lack of security she had upon her arrival in Karachi and called the October 18 bombing “very suspicious,” Siegel said. He accused Pakistani authorities of not investigating the assassination attempt and of refusing Bhutto’s request for Scotland Yard and the FBI to aid in the investigation.

Bhutto and her husband had asked for jammers to impede the detonation of bombs; special vehicles with tinted windows; and four police vehicles to surround her at all times, Siegel said.

“She basically asked for all that was required for someone of the standing of a former prime minister,” Siegel told CNN’s “The Situation Room.” “All of that was denied to her. … She got some police protection, but it was sporadic and erratic.”

Bhutto was concerned the problem was worsening as the January elections neared, Siegel said.

At the time of the October suicide bombing, Bhutto was riding in a truck from Karachi’s airport to the tomb of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan. She had moved from the roof to inside the bulletproof, armed vehicle just moments before the blast and was unharmed.

CNN’s Dan Rivers, in Karachi to cover her return to Pakistan, remarked at the time that her security appeared to be loose, saying his crew was able to walk up to the side of her vehicle without being stopped by authorities.

Durrani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S., insisted security surrounding Bhutto then was more than adequate.

“There were, I think, a sea of security people,” he said. “She was surrounded by police vehicles. And had it not been one of the police vehicles which took the blast in Karachi, unfortunately she would have died there.

“There was a bubble around her of security. The PPP [People's Party of Pakistan, Bhutto's party] insisted that they have their own private loyalists around. They were there too. And there were about 7,800 to 8,000 security people deployed just for that,” Durrani said.

“That is more security than anybody deploys anywhere in the world.”

Bhutto “is not a security person,” said Durrani. “She’s a politician. I think the government of Pakistan provided her all the security that was necessary. You tell me — the way she was hit, she would have been hit with tinted windows or without, or without the IED … so it’s just a blame game.”

After the October attack, Bhutto said police offered to let her use a helicopter for the trip from the airport, but she told them she wanted to be near her people. She said she did not regret that decision.

“She believed in democracy, and she believed in speaking to the people,” Siegel said. “It’s not reckless to go out and touch the people. Don’t blame the victim for the crime. The person that was supposed to be protecting Benazir Bhutto and the other candidates was the government of Pakistan with the government of Pervez Musharraf.”

At the same time, Siegel acknowledged, “She was moving almost in a sea of humanity,” he said. “No system in the world can protect you against that.”

Blitzer noted that Bhutto was shot Thursday while standing out of her vehicle’s sunroof — seen by some as a a reckless action after the October incident.

Getty Images senior staff photographer John Moore, who was at the scene of her assassination, told CNN he was surprised at Bhutto’s actions, considering the earlier suicide attempt. The rally was smaller than expected, he said, and the people he spoke with said they “were just afraid to come out, for the simple reason that they all remembered what happened in Karachi.”

Siegel grew emotional as he told Blitzer that Bhutto was “the bravest person I ever knew. … She knew that there were risks coming back, but those risks were important, she thought, for the fight for democracy.”

via//CNN.com

ANALYSIS: Conspiracy theories abound over Benazir Bhutto slaying

The most intriguing question that arises from the assassination of Benazir Bhutto is who plotted and carried out the killing.

After the failed assassination attempt in Karachi, observers in Pakistan theorized extreme Muslim groups who were outlawed by President Pervez Musharraf, or Al-Qaida elements aligned with these groups, were responsible.

From these groups’ point of view, Bhutto and her party are an enemy, perhaps an even more dangerous enemy than Musharraf. Yet, in Pakistan, considered one of the world’s most fertile breeding grounds for conspiracy theories, many more possible suspects will be bandied about. Indeed, the blame can be laid at the feet of any of a large number of elements.

The most astounding aspect of Thursday’s events is the negligence displayed by Bhutto’s security detail. According to reports, the assassin managed to approach Bhutto and position himself within a short distance of her, before proceeding to shoot her and detonate the explosives with which he was strapped. Not only did the assassin want to cause maximum casualties, but he also hoped that authorities would later be unable to identify him and thus ascertain which organization he was working for.

What makes the security failure all the more startling is the fact that it comes just weeks after the first assassination attempt following Bhutto’s return to Pakistan from a lengthy political exile.

In the attempt, suicide bombers killed 150 people, although Bhutto escaped unharmed. Under these circumstances, it was chiefly incumbent on her security guards to do all in their power to prevent direct access to her, even during the course of an election campaign in which a candidate seeks to come into contact with the public.

One can make the claim – and some already have – that foreign agents of countries in conflict with Pakistan (re: India) orchestrated the assassination so as to create chaos and to create an image of a country that is unstable and unreliable.

Others will point the finger at Musharraf and his supporters, who viewed Bhutto as a rival who was likely to win next month’s elections.

The likelihood of both claims is extremely low, especially considering the apparent deal in principle struck between Musharraf and Bhutto whereby both would enter a power-sharing arrangement and form a joint coalition.

Another possible perpetrator is former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, a bitter political rival of Bhutto who once ordered her husband arrested on corruption charges.

via//Haaretz