Musharraf Resigns!

BREAKING News from Pakistan: Pervez Musharraf has resigned the presidency!

I watched him speak live via BBC-TV; unfortunately I don't have any direct quotes or a link -- not yet, anyway.

[UPDATE: a few news articles are coming online now. Here's a short item from Dawn, and a longer report from Jane Perlez via the International Herald Tribune. And as more articles come along, I may link to a few of them from the text below. But back to our story!]

Musharraf began by claiming that all the allegations against him were false, and he said he could prove as much if he chose to defend himself against the impeachment charges the opposition coalition was preparing to deliver.

But that would have caused too much harm to the country, Musharraf said; it would have damaged both the presidency and the parliament.

Musharraf repeated several times that everything he had done had been for "Pakistan first", and he claimed that he had always conducted himself with honesty and integrity.

He admitted that he might have made some mistakes, but he said he hoped the Pakistani people would put those mistakes behind them. Musharraf said his resignation would reach the speaker of the parliament today.

BBC's prepared coverage was predictably awful. Shortly after Musharraf finished speaking, they cut to an in-studio analyst who spun a few very sad lies about how Musharraf's fate would have been a close call. Hah! Musharraf had almost no support in the parliament, and the parliamentarians are the ones who would have voted. And then BBC showed a canned tribute to Bush's number one ally in the global war to foment terror. They didn't call it that, of course. They still pretend that Bush and Musharraf have been fighting against terrorism, rather than using terror as a political weapon.

But before that happened, and thanks to the spontaniety of live television, they gave their viewers a wee glimpse of forbidden truth.

The BBC's man on the scene in Islamabad, speaking immediately after Musharraf's speech (with no script and no filter) reported that Pakistani TV had placed so much importance on Musharraf's address that they cut away from it -- while he was speaking -- to show people dancing in the streets of Rawalpindi, and lawyers praying -- giving thanks -- in the streets of Islamabad.

This goes against the Western media spin, of course, which holds that Musharraf is a moderate and his opponents are extremists. As usual with the spinning Western media, the reverse is true.

It's the lawyers, not the militants, who have done the most to defeat Musharraf -- and they have done it by supporting a restless pro-democracy movement! Some of them have been beaten bloody for their efforts; some have been arrested. But now they have a chance at actual democratic parliamentary government. Imagine that!

Where are our lawyers???

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FBI Illegally Obtained Reporters' Phone Records

The FBI violated internal policies and federal law to obtain phone records of four reporters from the New York Times and the Washington Post, according to an article published by the Times yesterday.

The reporters involved were all based in Indonesia: Raymond Bonner and Jane Perlez of the NYT and Ellen Nakashima and Natasha Tampubolon of the WaPo.

FBI director Robert Mueller [photo] revealed the violations in private phone calls with the executive editors of the two papers.

Reports from Perlez and Nakashima have been highlighted on this blog in the past -- with Perlez reporting about Pakistan and Nakashima reporting about security checks at the border.

According to the NYT:

The records were apparently sought as part of a terrorism investigation, but the F.B.I. did not explain what was being investigated or why the reporters’ phone records were considered relevant.

The WaPo editor can't figure it out for himself, either:

Mr. Downie said it was not clear to him why the F.B.I. was interested in his reporters’ records in the first place.

“I want to find more about what this is about,” he said. “We will be asking our general counsel to advise us on what more we should be doing about this.”

Perhaps in the mythical golden age of American journalism, when the press posed as an adversary to the government, the FBI would have had a reason for spying on reporters. But nowadays there's really no reason, is there?

Meanwhile the nation's top law enforcement agency continues to show its contempt for the law:

An initial report by the inspector general last year found that the F.B.I. had violated its own policies in tens of thousands of cases by obtaining phone records in terrorism investigations through what are known as national security letters, without first getting needed approval or meeting other standards. In some cases, the F.B.I. used a whole new class of demands — emergency or “exigent” letters — that are not authorized by law. The emergency records were used in the Indonesian episode.

And in this case we see the usual remedy -- an top-secret internal investigation which is said to put the matter right, but of which no details are ever released to the public.

As the NYT phrases it:

The inspector general’s findings have prompted outrage in Congress, with leading lawmakers calling for greater checks on the F.B.I.’s ability to gather private information in terrorism investigations. But bureau officials say they have instituted internal reforms to solve the problem.

This story was brought to my attention by Larisa Alexandrovna, who wrote:

And you wonder why people have stopped reporting the truth. At least some of them are unable to guarantee source protection. You want a free press? Really? Then scream long and loud about this!

I suppose her explanation cuts some ice. But not very much.

The mainstream press stopped reporting the truth decades ago -- as part of the program of psychological warfare against the thinking citizenry which began under Harry Truman.

And we only found out about the FBI spying on journalists yesterday.

Cause typically precedes effect, no?

~~~

Meanwhile ... is Brian Ross having any trouble protecting his sources?

Larisa's subsequent post (about the Bruce Ivins / anthrax story) does a much better job of showing us why we're not getting the truth -- in my cold and humble opinion.

Mass Resignations: Pakistani Cabinet Split Over Rule Of Law

In Pakistan, the opposition party PML-N, led by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif [photo], has resigned its seats in the cabinet. This dramatic move shows enormous strain in the "coalition" government elected in February of this year.

The "coalition" is led by the PPP, which was led by Benazir Bhutto until her assassination last December, and which is now effectively in the hands of her widow, Asif Ali Zardari, although it is nominally led by their teenaged son, Bilawal "Bhutto" Zardari, who is currently in England seeking an undergrad degree.

At issue is the status of the Pakistani judiciary; Sharif and the PML-N have consistently stated that their top priority is the reinstatement of all the judges sacked by President Pervez Musharraf when he declared a state of emergency in November.

Asif Zardari and the PPP have talked about re-establishing an independent judiciary but they have thrown one roadblock after another in the way of their proclaimed goal, and in this respect their actions have spoken much louder than their words. In my view, it was only a matter of time before Nawaz Sharif -- who has seemed to see through this charade ever since it began -- obtained enough political support to make this break with the so-called "coalition".

The PML-N have not resigned their seats in parliament, so the government remains in power, although with nine of 24 cabinet positions vacant (including Finance), it doesn't seem as though the government will be able to function much, or at all. In short, the situation is very unstable at the moment.

The problem, from Zardari's point of view, is that a reinstatement of the sacked judges would put the Supreme Court back the way it was prior to the declaration of emergency: in particular, Iftikhar Muhammed Chaudhry would once again be Chief Justice. And Chaudhry, as Jane Perlez of the New York Times puts it, is a "maverick".

Perlez describes Chaudhry as a "country judge from Baluchistan" whose independence threatens the policies of George W. Bush and terror war "ally", Pervez Musharraf. The problem -- although Perlez does not and never will say so -- is that Bush and Musharraf are committed to the destruction of the rule of law, and Chaudhry, the maverick country lawyer from Baluchistan, is committed to upholding it.

Thus, any reinstatement of the Pakistani judiciary would put at risk not only the continuing tenure in office of President Musharraf, but also Pakistan's status as an ally of the United States in the so-called "Global War on Terror".

As long-time readers of this space may recall, President Musharraf was "re-elected" last October in a comic farce that clearly violated at least two (and maybe three) different laws.

Musharraf should not even have been eligible, since he was a General -- and Army Chief of Staff -- at the time. According to Pakistani law, one may only hold one office at a time; you cannot be both a soldier and an elected official at the same time, let alone Chief of Staff and President. For that matter, Musharraf's tenure in office has been illegal ever since he siezed power in a military coup in 1999. And the fact that he resigned his commission after his October "re-election" does nothing to satisfy the law he broke by running for office.

Furthermore, in Pakistan the President is elected by the members of the national Parliament and the provincial Legislative Assemblies. This is supposed to happen just after each new Parliament is elected; they then elect the President who will serve with them during their term in office. But for this cycle, Musharraf revised the timetable, scheduling the Presidential election for October 2007 and the Parliamentary election for January 2008, so that he could be "re-elected" by the same Parliament which had "elected" him in the first place. (The Parliamentary election scheduled for January was postponed to February following the assassination of PPP leader Benazir Bhutto.)

There's also a question of term limits. In Pakistan, as in the US, no President may serve more than two consecutive terms. Musharraf and his supporters claimed that his first term -- from when he siezed power in 1999 to when he arranged to be "elected" in 2003 -- was not a term at all, since he wasn't elected then. But those who oppose Musharraf have a different view.

The previous Parliamentary election was widely seen as rigged. And the notion that the same group of falsely elected Parliamentarians should be able to "re-elect" a military dictator to his third term as President seems exceptionally offensive to those who favor the rule of law. As I've been saying, the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is one of those people. Just before he was sacked, the Supreme Court announced that it was preparing to rule on petitions challenging Musharraf's "re-election". And the ruling was not likely to be favorable to the President -- this is why he declared the state of emergency and sacked the judges. So it seems quite likely that if Chaudhry were reinstated, Musharraf's presidency -- and the changes he made when declaring the emergency -- would soon be declared illegitimate.

This is not the first time Iftikhar Chaudhry has been a thorn in the sides of Bush, Musharraf and the GWOT. He was dismissed from his position amid a flurry of unsubstantiated allegations in March of 2007, after he supported the families of hundreds of people who have been "disappeared" by the Pakistani law-enforcement and intelligence agencies.

He was later reinstated after a large public show of support, but he didn't stay in office very long. "He's a threat to the GWOT," they said. And he still is.

Meanwhile, the PPP continue to play the role of faux-opposition, with Zardari apparently taking instuctions from the Americans who come to visit him every time he comes too close to supporting the rule of law or the much-ballyhooed "transition to democracy" which was supposedly represented by Musharraf's "doffing the uniform" and by Benazir Bhutto's return to the country to lead the "opposition".

In fact Buhtto's return was predicated on the proclamation of a "reconciliation order", which granted her amnsety from the corruption charges which had kept her out of Pakistan for most of the previous decade. Not wishing to show undue favoritism, the presidential order granted unconditional amnesty to many present and former government officials, effectively ending any hope of any Pakistani government official ever being held accountable for anything. Iftikhar Chaudhry might have a maverick opinion about this, as well. But we don't know much about what he thinks, because he's been under house arrest and incommunicado most of the time since November.

Meanwhile, in return for the amnesty -- and for the chance for another turn in power -- Bhutto agreed to keep the PPP in their seats last October for Musharraf's farcical "re-election". So the PPP abstained rather than resigning in protest, like the other opposition parties did.

If everyone had resigned except Musharraf's party, the PML-Q, the "re-election" would have been much more difficult to portray as "democratic". But with the most powerful opposition party on board, it was easy for the media to portray the dissenters as crackpots who just don't appreciate the wisdom of sacrificing the entire legal basis of our civilization so that a few corrupt criminal politicians can wage a bogus war without borders, killing millions of people, destroying one country after another, and making a fortune for themselves and their backers.

Crushing Defeat For Musharraf: "The Myth Is Broken"; "Q Is Finished"; "They Couldn’t Have Rigged It Even If They Tried"

UPDATE: PML-Q concedes defeat

ISLAMABAD, Feb 19 (AFP) Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) conceded defeat Tuesday after elections. “We accept the verdict of the nation,” Tariq Azeem, PML-Q spokesman, told AFP. (Posted @ 14:20 PST)

Original post follows:

~~~

Early and unofficial results from the Pakistani parliamentary elections show a landslide for the opposition parties and a crushing defeat for pro-American terrorist general Pervez Musharraf and his party, the PML-Q. The Islamic extremists also appear to have lost ground.

Supporters of the party of Pakistan's former prime minister Nawaz Sharif celebrate the unofficial results of Pakistan's general elections in the street of Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

Carlotta Gall and Jane Perlez in The New York Times:

Pakistanis Deal Severe Defeat to Musharraf in Election

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan : Pakistanis dealt a crushing defeat to President Pervez Musharraf in parliamentary elections Monday, in what government and opposition politicians said was a firm rejection of his policies since 2001 and those of his close ally, the United States.

Almost all the leading figures in the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, the party that has governed for the last five years under Mr. Musharraf, lost their seats, including the leader of the party, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussein, the former speaker of parliament, Chaudhry Amir Hussein, and six ministers.

Though official results would not be announced until Tuesday, early returns indicated that the vote would usher in a prime minister from one of the opposition parties, and opened the prospect of a parliament that would move to undo many of Mr. Musharraf’s policies and that may even try to remove him.

Sharif supporters celebrate in Taxilas. In early, unofficial results, Pakistanis dealt a crushing defeat to President Pervez Musharraf, in what government and opposition politicians said was a firm rejection of his policies since 2001 and those of his close ally, the United States.

The early edge went to the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party, which seemed to benefit from a strong wave of sympathy in reaction to the assassination of its leader, Benazir Bhutto, eight weeks ago, and may be in a position to form the next government.

The results were interpreted here as a repudiation of Mr. Musharraf as well as the Bush administration, which has staunchly backed Mr. Musharraf for eight years as its best bet in the campaign against the Islamic militants in Pakistan. American officials will have little choice now but to seek alternative allies from among the new political forces emerging from the vote.

Politicians and party workers from Mr. Musharraf’s party said the vote was a protest against government policies and the rise in terrorism here, in particular against Mr. Musharraf’s heavy handed way of dealing with militancy and his use of the army against tribesmen in the border areas and against militants in a siege at the Red Mosque here in the capital last summer that left more than 100 dead.

Others said Mr. Musharraf’s dismissal last year of the Supreme Court chief justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, who remains under house arrest, was deeply unpopular with the voters.
...

By association, his party suffered badly. The two main opposition parties — the Pakistan Peoples Party and the Pakistan Muslim League-N of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif — surged into the gap.

Supporters of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif in Lahore. In Lahore, the political capital of Punjab province, lines were thin, and many voters complained they could not find their names on the voting lists.

By early Monday night, crowds of Sharif supporters had already begun celebrating as they paraded through the streets of Rawalpindi, the garrison town just outside the capital, Islamabad. Riding on motorbikes and clinging onto the back of minivans, they played music and waved green flags of Mr. Sharif’s party decorated with the party symbol, a tiger.

“The tiger has come!” shouted one man on a motorbike making a victory sign. “Long live Nawaz!”

From unofficial results the private news channel, Aaj Television, forecast that the Pakistan Peoples Party would win 110 seats in the 272-seat national assembly, with Mr. Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-N taking 100 seats.

Mr. Musharraf’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, was crushed, holding on to just 20 to 30 seats. Early results released by the state news agency, the Associated Press of Pakistan, also showed the Pakistan Peoples Party to be leading in the number of seats in the national assembly.

The Election Commission of Pakistan declared the elections free and fair and said the polling passed relatively peacefully, despite some irregularities and scattered violence. Ten people were killed and 70 injured in violence around the country, including one candidate who was shot in Lahore on the night before the vote, Pakistani news channels reported.

A voter is marked with ink after casting a ballot in Lahore. Fears of election fraud were stoked by the complaints, mostly from opposition parties, of bribery and the use of state resources for campaigns. Reports also included the production of thousands of counterfeit identity cards and of millions of names missing from voter rolls.

Fearful of violence and deterred by confusion at polling stations, voters did not turn out in large numbers. Yet fears from opposition parties that the government would attempt to rig the elections did not materialize, as the early losses showed.

Official results were not expected until Tuesday morning, but all the parties were already coming to terms with the anti-Musharraf trend in the voting.

Nosheen Saeed, information secretary of the women’s wing of Mr. Musharraf’s party, conceded the early losses. “Some big guns are going to lose,” she said.

At the headquarters of Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, the minister of railways and a close friend of the president, his supporters sat gloomily in chairs under an awning, listening to the cheers of their opponents. “Q is finished,” said Tahir Khan, 21, one of the party workers, referring to the pro-Musharraf party.

The party workers said Mr. Ahmed, who was among the ministers who lost their seats, was popular but had suffered from the overwhelming protest vote against Mr. Musharraf and his governing faction.
...

With Mr. Musharraf as both president and head of the Pakistani military — a post he relinquished last November — the administration poured about $1 billion a year in military assistance into Pakistan after 9/11.

After Mr. Musharraf stepped down from the army, the Bush administration still gave him unequivocal support. Last month, Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, Richard Boucher, told Congress he considered the Pakistani leader as indispensable to American interests.

Such fidelity to Mr. Musharraf often raised the hackles of Pakistanis, and the newspapers here were filled with editorials that expressed despair about Washington’s close relationship with the unpopular leader.

Many educated Pakistanis said they were irritated that the Bush administration chose to ignore Mr. Musharraf’s dismissal in November of the Supreme Court chief justice.

The big swing against the Pakistan Muslim League-Q party that supported Mr. Musharraf appeared to bear out the position of the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, Sen. Joseph Biden, Jr, who has been a critic of the administration’s Pakistan policy.

On his arrival Sunday to observe the elections, Mr. Biden said: “I don’t buy into the argument that Musharraf is the only one. We have to have more than just a Musharraf policy.”

As a starting point for a new policy, Mr. Biden said that the United States needed to show Pakistanis that Washington was interested in more than the campaign on terror. “We have to give the vast majority of Pakistani people some reason to believe we are allies,” Mr. Biden said. To that end, he would propose that economic development aid be tripled to $1.5 billion annually.

But Washington could take some comfort in the losses of the Islamic religious parties in the North West Frontier Province that abut the tribal areas where the Taliban and Al Qaeda have carved out bases.

This is the standard liberal media lie, one of several places where it rears its head as "context" in this otherwise fine report. (Most of the others have been snipped.)

Washington needs the terrorists. Bush needs strong Islamic and Islamist parties which he can call "IslamoFascists"; the term itself is another Orwellian aspect to this war of spin and terror.

"The IslamoFascists want to create a global caliphate", says the twice unelected president, and all the bobbleheads nod along in unison.

But Islam and Fascism are utterly incompatible, so there cannot be any real IslamoFascists, although there are some seriously corrupt "Islamic" business-government combinations. Two of America's "firmest" Asian allies in the supposed Global War on Terror are Saudi Arabia, where the royal family does most of the business, makes most of the money, and runs one of the most repressive governments on the planet; and Pakistan, where the military is entwined in the "civilian" economy to an extent companies like SAIC, Halliburton and Blackwater can only dream of (at this point). The army produces and sells all manner of everyday "civilian" consumer items, from breakfast cereal on through the day.

These are the IslamoFascists, if such there are on Earth. Pseudo-Islamic fascists, to be accurate, and allies of our government.

On the other hand there's no doubt that pseudo-Christian fascists (so-called "Christo-Fascists") do exist in large numbers and have drafted plans -- published and publicly available for many years now -- according to which they will take over the American government (by stealth) and then the world (in the usual American way.)

In order for these imperialist dreamers to implement their evil schemes, the radical Islamic parties have to gain support, and perhaps the best news from this election -- news which probably won't make much of a dent in the mainstream account -- is confirmation that the radicals in Pakistan have virtually no support from the electorate.

The New York Times won't report certain aspects of the story, for fear of being called treasonous or for fear of lost advertising revenue, or simply because telling the truth about the GWOT is as unpalatable as telling any of the other ugliest truths about America, and the New York Times is not in the business of telling any of those stories.

But you've read it here: the administration is very unhappy with the collapses of both the PML-Q and the lunatic fringe.

The greatest blow [against] Mr. Musharraf came in the strong wave of support in Punjab province, the country’s most populous, for Mr. Sharif, who has been a bitter rival since his government was overthrown by Mr. Musharraf in a military coup in 1999 and he was arrested and sent into exile.

He returned in November last year and although banned from running for parliament himself, has campaigned for his party on an openly anti-Musharraf agenda, calling for the president’s resignation and for the reinstatement of the Chief Justice Chaudhry and other Supreme Court judges.

It's interesting how the NYT portrays Nawaz Sharif's reappearance at the center of Pakistani politics as a simple "return" in November. That was his second "return", actually. The first time, he was arrested and deported before he even got out of the airport! Some democracy!

Underscoring the reversal for Mr. Musharraf was the downfall of the powerful Chaudhry
family of Punjab province who had underwritten his political career by creating the political party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, for him.

“They myth is broken, it was a huge wave against Musharraf,” said Athar Minallah, a lawyer involved in the anti-Musharraf lawyers’ movement. “Right across the board his party was defeated, in the urban and rural areas. The margins are so big they couldn’t have rigged it even if they tried.”

A few hours after the size of the defeat became clear, the government eased up on the restrictions against Aitzaz Ahsan, leader of the lawyers’ movement that has opposed the president.

Mr. Ahsan, who has been under house arrest since last November when Mr. Musharraf imposed emergency rule for six weeks, found the phones in [his] house were suddenly reconnected.

“Musharraf should be preparing a C-130 for Turkey,” Mr. Ahsan said, referring to Mr. Musharraf’s statements that he might retire to Turkey where he spent his childhood.

Two politicians close to Mr. Musharraf have said in the last week that the president was well aware of the drift in the country against him and they suggested that he would not remain in office if the new government was in direct opposition to him. “He does not have the fire in the belly for another fight,” said one member of his party. He added that Mr. Musharraf was building a house for himself in Islamabad and would be ready soon to move.

Of course the official results are still to be released, and it could be that by this time tomorrow the PML-Q will have made a massive comeback. Or does that only happen in America?

It'll be pretty sad if "the greatest democracy in the history of the world" is shown up by a military dictatorship.

But it would be even sadder if that didn't happen.

~~~

(All photos for this piece are courtesy of the New York Times; please see this slideshow for more.)

37 Dead As Suicide Bomber Attacks Pakistani Political Rally

More horrible violence racks Pakistan in the final days before Monday's parliamentary election, as Jane Perlez of the New York Times reports from Lahore.

A suicide bomber rammed a car into a campaign rally in the tribal areas on Saturday, killing 37 people and wounding at least 90 others.

The attack in Parachinar, a town in Kurram, occurred two days before parliamentary elections on Monday and was apparently intended to deter voters from participating, said Brig. Javed Cheema, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry.

“It’s the same people who have been carrying out attacks, whose purpose is to create confusion and chaos and stop the polling process,” Brigadier Cheema said. The government of President Pervez Musharraf has blamed a Pakistani Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, who is allied with Al Qaeda, for the steep rise in suicide attacks in the past year.

It seemed unlikely, however, that the attack on Saturday would have a significant effect on voter turnout because the tribal areas, which are semiautonomous and border Afghanistan, are considered remote and lawless by most Pakistanis.

Thus Perlez points out one aspect of the Interior Ministry's announcement that seems odd, but she doesn't mention the other: The government has no proof of anyone's complicity in anything.

She goes on to describe the scene of the attack:

The rally at Parachinar was organized by Syed Riaz Hussain, a candidate for the national Parliament who is affiliated with the Pakistan Peoples Party, the opposition party of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in December. After the rally, supporters of Mr. Hussain gathered on a roof for food, and others stayed on the roadside below in a large group, Brigadier Cheema said.

The suicide bomber, driving a car filled with explosives, attacked the group on the side of the road, the brigadier said. Kurram is known for sectarian violence between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, although Saturday’s attack was aimed at a political rally. According to one account, the people at the rally had emerged from a Shiite shrine and were on their way to the headquarters of Mr. Hussain when the bomber drove into the crowd.

Hours later, two people were killed and eight wounded in a suicide attack outside an army media center in the northwestern Swat Valley, Agence France-Presse said.

The Parachinar attack was the first violent incident in the immediate prelude to the election that pits President Musharraf’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, against two main opposition parties, the Peoples Party and the faction of the Pakistan Muslim League led by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

The first violent incident in the immediate prelude to the election but not the first violent attack of the campaign and likely not the last either, sad to say.

Mr. Musharraf was re-elected late last year to a five-year term as president, but the parliamentary elections are viewed by many as a referendum on his rule, which has been marred in the last year by an increasingly aggressive insurgency of Islamists, the killing of Ms. Bhutto and the imposition of emergency rule.

It's very interesting to see what details are left out of this report.

For instance, Jane Perlez gives no indication that Musharraf's "re-election" (last October 6) was even more "marred" than his "rule" has been. As we have discussed here many times, Musharraf's "re-election" was a tragic farce, the conduct of which violated three distinct laws. The Supreme Court of Pakistan was about to strike down the "result" of that "election" when Musharraf imposed emergency rule on November 3.

Musharraf said he was going after the terrorists, but one of his first moves was to sack the Chief Justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, and the eight other justices who refused to go along with the program. Those nine judges are still under house arrest, more than three months after the emergency was declared. These facts are well known to anyone who cares to learn.

So when the Americans send observers to monitor Monday's election, they are not really interested in democracy; if democracy were the goal, the US would have cut ties with Musharraf a long time ago. He did take power in a military coup, after all.

Oh, no. What the Americans are interested in is the appearance of democracy.

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who will be an election observer, said Friday before leaving Washington for Pakistan that the United States should cut military aid to Pakistan if the elections were substantially rigged.

Guess what, Joe? The election last October was substantially rigged -- illegal three times over. The president could only maintain his power by arresting the Supreme Court and keeping them still and quiet, so that's what he did.

The rule of law is still suspended and the honest judges are still under house arrest and bombers are ravaging the opposition and the government keeps blaming it on "extremists".

But the fact remains that extremists are barely represented in Pakistani parliaments and have very little to lose in this election. Musharraf, whose hold on power grows increasingly tenuous, has much more to lose, should the election go ahead as scheduled and in peace. And therefore it is very difficult to dismiss the claims of those who say Musharraf and/or his security forces have been behind all this violence.

The American collaborators in this farce have said nothing about any of this; if they had any principles (other than maintenance of power) they wouldn't be sending observers at all -- they'd be denouncing the horrific Pakistani-American farce that pretends to be democracy.

Democracy In Action: Slain Leader's Crown Passes To Her Son

The PPP, Pakistan's largest opposition party, has democratically chosen to honor Benazir Bhutto's lifelong commitment to democracy by democratically treating the leadership of the party as an heirloom and handing it to her 19-year-old son, Bilawal Zardari, a handsome young man who lacks any political experience, but whose political future has been well-planned for a long time.

Bilawal will democratically assume the responsibilities of his position once he has finished his degree at Oxford. His education will include private tutelage in the labyrinths of Pakistani politics. Lucky Bilawal.

While he's being groomed, the party leadership will remain in the Bhutto family, democratically resting in the hands of his father, Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto's widowed husband.

And to mark the democratic occasion, the new democratic leader-in-waiting has changed his name, adding his mother's (maiden) name, as Somini Sengupta reported in the New York Times:

The elder Mr. Zardari said his son would henceforth be known as Bilawal Bhutto Zardari.

Now, at least, nobody will ever forget who Bilawal's mother was.

According to Somini Sengupta, the elder Mr. Zardari

instructed reporters not to ask his son any further questions, saying he was “of a tender age.”

Asif Ali Zardari is not a candidate for the upcoming Parliamentary elections, so he will not be eligible to become Prime Minister.

That honor would most likely fall to PPP vice president Makhdoom Amin Fahim, although "the elder Mr. Zardari" added that this decision "would have to be made by party leaders," according to Somini Sengupta.

All this is speculative of course, and assumes that the PPP will win the upcoming election. The poll, scheduled for January 8, may be delayed by several weeks because of the assassination and the violence that followed it, most of which now seems to have subsided.

PPP leadership have already declared their intention to run; this ruins any possibility of a boycott, such as the All Parties Democratic Movement was trying to organize. As Somini Sengupta puts it:

The other main opposition party, led by Nawaz Sharif, another former prime minister, also decided Sunday to call off his previously announced boycott of the vote.

So much for the APDM. Without a united opposition -- and with no boycott of what will certainly be a rigged election -- whatever happens next cannot be much more than crude street theater, to be performed with many of the provisions of Musharraf's November 3 declaration of emergency still in place, although officially the state of emergency is over.

In effect, by choosing to participate in such a shady game, the current PPP leadership continues Benazir Bhutto's path of legitimizing the military dictatorship which only last month declared a state of emergency in order to better fight the terrorists, then arrested hundreds of lawyers and judges and human rights activists, sacked the Supreme Court, shut down independent media, and so on ...

And no matter when the next election is held, it's only for Parliament, not President. Under normal circumstances the next President would be elected by the incoming Parliament, but Musharraf has already rigged the matter so that his next term in office is assured.

And unless I am very wrong, Bilawal can go back to his studies, and his father can go back to managing his Swiss bank accounts, and Musharraf can go back to making new laws declaring his abuses legal and permanent and beyond the reach of any court, because democracy in Pakistan is not to be restored.

It could never be restored because it never existed in the first place. At best it was a dream and a hope, and perhaps also a slightly possible outcome. But the potential is long gone, because the corporate- military- terrorist establishment has already taken over in Pakistan, where the PPP has just been decapitated.

~~~

Meanwhile, the country continues to mourn the slain two-time Prime Minister, while more details continue to emerge indicating that Thursday's assassination was a state-sponsored hit, carefully planned and carefully covered up.

Athar Minallah, a board member of the hospital where Ms. Bhutto was treated, released her medical report along with an open letter showing that her doctors wanted to distance themselves from the government theory that Ms. Bhutto had died by hitting her head on a lever of her car’s sunroof during the attack.

In his letter, Mr. Minallah, who is also a prominent lawyer, said the doctors believed that an autopsy was needed to provide the answers to how she actually died. Their request for one last Thursday was denied by the local police chief.

This is from Jane Perlez in Lahore:

Pakistani and Western security experts said the government’s insistence that Ms. Bhutto, a former prime minister, was not killed by a bullet was intended to deflect attention from the lack of government security around her. On Sunday, Pakistani newspapers covered their front pages with photographs showing a man apparently pointing a gun at her from just yards away.

Her vehicle came under attack by a gunman and suicide bomber as she left a political rally in Rawalpindi, where the Pakistani Army keeps its headquarters, and where the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency has a strong presence.

The government’s explanation, that Ms. Bhutto died after hitting her head as she ducked from the gunfire or was tossed by the force of the suicide blast, has been greeted with disbelief by her supporters, ordinary Pakistanis and medical experts.

Jane Perlez writes for the New York Times.

Apparently it's OK to write reports like this for the NYT if the crime was committed in Pakistan.

Mr. Minallah distributed the medical report with his open letter to the Pakistani news media and The New York Times. He said the doctor who wrote the report, Mohammad Mussadiq Khan, the principal professor of surgery at the Rawalpindi General Hospital, told him on the night of Ms. Bhutto’s death that she had died of a bullet wound.

Dr. Khan declined through Mr. Minallah to speak with a reporter on the grounds that he was an employee of a government hospital and was fearful of government reprisals if he did not support its version of events.

Coincidence theorists like to ask "How could they keep a conspiracy quiet?"

There's the answer.

The medical report, prepared with six other doctors, does not specifically mention a bullet because the actual cause of the head wound was to be left to an autopsy, Mr. Minallah said. The doctors had stressed to him that “without an autopsy it is not at all possible to determine as to what had caused the injury,” he wrote.

But the chief of police in Rawalpindi, Saud Aziz, “did not agree” to the autopsy request by the doctors, Mr. Minallah said in his letter.

A former senior Pakistani police official, Wajahat Latif, who headed the Federal Investigative Agency in the early 1990s, said that in “any case of a suspected murder an autopsy is mandatory.” To waive an autopsy, Mr. Latif said, relatives were required to apply for permission.

In this case apparently they didn't do that; it was the chief of police who canceled the autopsy.

But then again the family didn't ask for the scene of the crime to be obliterated an hour later.

They didn't even ask for security to be pulled away from Benazir just as she left the rally in Rawalpindi.

Do you think these things just happen on their own?

Musharraf Goes Civilian

Pakistan's President General Pervez Musharraf has resigned his post as Army Chief of Staff in order to become a civilian.

In the New York Times, Carlotta Gall and Jane Perlez write that the change of status leaves Musharraf "with vastly reduced powers" though he is "likely to retain much of his old power"... but only for a while... maybe...

For Musharraf, Reduced Power as the President

A day after resigning as army chief, Pervez Musharraf will be sworn in as a civilian president on Thursday, leaving him with vastly reduced powers and Washington with a far more complex Pakistan to deal with...

Though finally stepping down as army chief, he is likely to retain much of his old power as a civilian president, fortified by his emergency decree on Nov. 3, and loyalists he chose at the top of the military, according to Pakistani officials and analysts.

But in fairly short order, Mr. Musharraf, who plunged the nation into political turmoil with his emergency decree and has been a sometimes frustrating partner in Washington’s fight against terrorism, will become a diminished figure, they said, a civilian president in a country where traditionally the power lies with an elected prime minister, or the military chiefs who have overthrown them.

The new military chief is General Ashfaq Kayani [right in photo], a former head of Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

The NYT continues:

Though General Kayani is considered loyal to the president, the real levers of power will pass to him, and he is believed to favor removing the army from the center of politics, they said. “Kayani is loyal to Musharraf, but also to Pakistan,” one Western military official said.

And as much as Washington has supported Mr. Musharraf, having a chief of the army on the job full time is a change likely to be welcomed. Bush administration officials have already praised General Kayani as someone they can work with.

The phrase "work with" is quite often a euphemism, by the way. And "removing the army from the center of politics" normally means the same as getting the army out of the spotlight.

General Kayani, an infantry commander and a graduate of the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, which he attended in 1987 and 1988, has been described by Western diplomats and military officials as well liked and by far Pakistan’s most capable commander.

He has already played a prominent role in cooperating with the United States. He was promoted to full general and made vice chief of Army Staff in October. He immediately visited units serving on the front lines in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and said that sorting out the difficulties plaguing western Pakistan was a priority, a Western military official said.

Pakistan's Daily Times cut to the heart of the matter:

Top military change won’t affect war on terror commitment: FO

The Foreign Office said on Wednesday that the change in the top military command would not dent Pakistan’s role in the US-led war on terror.

“There would be no shift in the war on terror due to President General Pervez Musharraf’s doffing of uniform … it has nothing to do with the war on terror policy,” Foreign Office spokesman Muhammad Sadiq said at a weekly press briefing.

Ever since 9/11 the US has been paying Pakistan about $100 million a month to "defer the costs" of fighting the war on terror.

Now the new hand on the tiller -- or is that the till? -- belongs to General Kiyani, who is "loyal to Musharraf" but also "loyal to Pakistan" and also a former head of the ISI and also trained by Americans who now say he's the kind of guy they can work with.

And apparently General Kiyani is telling the Americans: Keep that money coming, and we'll keep spending it for you!

So he certainly is the kind of General they can "work with".

And now that Pervez Musharraf has "doffed the uniform," everyone can see what he had on underneath it.

Guess what?

Big surprise!

A business suit!!

Pakistan Engulfed By The GWOT: 'How Do You Function As A Lawyer When The Law Is What The General Says It Is?'

Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf continues his assault on his nation's legal system,
as The Daily Times reported:

The police on Tuesday cordoned off the district courts premises and refused entry to lawyers, litigants and stamp sellers except judges and their staff.

City Police Officer (CPO) Saud Aziz visited the district courts to monitor the situation.

A number of litigants complained that proclamation of emergency had multiplied their woes, as they did not know when the courts would open.

The Pakistani press has been muzzled and dare not report much, but the reactions have been intense, as Jane Perlez reported for the New York Times:

Hundreds of lawyers took to the streets again [Wednesday] in the eastern [Pakistani] city of Lahore and in Multan, about 200 miles to the southwest of Lahore. The police arrested scores of protesters, and more than 100 lawyers were injured in street battles.

In interviews on Tuesday, a day after hundreds were tear-gassed, beaten and rounded up by the police, the lawyers said they had taken to the streets because they felt that Pakistan’s first taste of judicial independence was being snatched away.

“How do you function as a lawyer when the law is what the general says it is?” said a prominent Islamabad lawyer, Babar Sattar, who has a Harvard law degree.

Indeed. The assault on the Rule of Law, otherwise known as the War on Terror, continues.

Athar Minallah, who holds a master’s degree in law from Cambridge and was in General Musharraf’s cabinet during the first two years of his rule, said lawyers were outraged that the general was moving backward.
...
Mr. Minallah said [...] “Musharraf is targeting the liberal forces of this country. Yet they are the ones who want to fight extremism.”

And that's exactly the point. The War on the Rule of Law would not be possible without the extremists -- on both sides.

There's a lot more going on but none of it looks good. What were we expecting?