Twelfth Bough

i run my own damn think tank

Archive for January 1st, 2008

A face that launched a thousand shipwrecks

Jan 1

Posted by Marlena in Bush/Cheney, Israel, Stupidity | No Comments

I was just poking around the news and found this story about Bush not planning to visit Yasser Arafat’s tomb.

Bush would not stop by Arafat’s newly-built mausoleum during his visit to Ramallah, a source in the US Consulate in Jerusalem told The Jerusalem Post. The PA has invested millions of dollars in building the mausoleum in the Mukata “presidential” compound.

“I’m not aware of any plan to lay a wreath at Arafat’s tomb,” the source said. “This issue was not raised during preparations for President Bush’s tour and I doubt if he would do so.”

To avoid embarrassing the Palestinians, Bush may meet with PA President Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem or at the Prime Minister’s Office in Ramallah.

In response, a senior PA official said, “Of course we are very disappointed, although we weren’t surprised.”

The official said the PA leadership had decided not to make a big issue out of the visit to Arafat’s mausoleum to avoid creating a crisis with the US.

Almost all foreign leaders who visit the Mukata stop by Arafat’s tomb to pay respects or lay a wreath on it.

Abbas has decided to dispatch two of his aides to Washington for talks with US officials ahead of Bush’s Middle East tour, which is scheduled to begin January 9.

What a guy. He’s really bending over backwards to help the Palestinians.

Anyway, the picture of Bush accompanying the article is pretty funny. It looks like he’s trying to make an important fashion decision or something, which got me looking around at some other pictures. A couple of things stand out to me in these photos. First, this man makes more faces than a second grade boy on the Game Cube. He’s laughing, he’s joking, he’s grimacing, he’s giving the thumbs up, he’s wiping his nose, he’s raising his eyebrows, he’s gesturing. On rare occasions he seems to be troubled, but not usually. The whole frikkin world is coming unglued, and George Bush is still having fun. In fact, he may be having more fun than ever. Second, and this follows, people look at Bush like he’s a Barnum and Bailey freak-show specimen on the loose. Really. The expression of people around him, over and over again, is “WTF?”

If you’re following the Bhutto story…

Jan 1

Posted by Marlena in Pakistan | No Comments

Cryptogon has everything interesting in one place.

Update: Here’s more re: Al Qaeda, ISI, CIA, NYT…

Note the Timing

Jan 1

Posted by Marlena in Corruption & Crime, Pakistan | No Comments

Here’s another piece of the Bhutto assassination puzzle. According to this source, on the day she was killed, Bhutto was scheduled to meet with Arlen Specter and Patrick Kennedy and provide evidence that the ISI was preparing to tamper with the elections.

Bhutto had been due to meet U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., to hand over a report charging that the military Inter-Services Intelligence agency was planning to fix the polls in the favor of President Pervez Musharraf.

Safraz Khan Lashari, a member of the Pakistan People’s Party election monitoring unit, said the report was “very sensitive” and that the party wanted to initially share it with trusted American politicians rather than the Bush administration, which is seen here as strongly backing Musharraf.

“It was compiled from sources within the (intelligence) services who were working directly with Benazir Bhutto,” Lashari said, speaking Monday at Bhutto’s house in her ancestral village of Naudero, where her husband and children continued to mourn her death.

…Musharraf has been highly critical of those who allege that his regime is involved in electoral manipulation. “Now when they lose, they’ll have a good rationale: that it is all rigged, it is all fraud,” he said in November. “In Pakistan, the loser always cries.”

…Lashari said the report claimed that U.S. aid money was being used to fix the elections. Ballots stamped in favor of the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, which supports Musharraf, were to be produced by the intelligence agencies in about 100 parliamentary constituencies.“They diverted money from aid activities. We had evidence of where they were spending the money,” Lashari said.

Lashari, who formerly taught environmental economics at Britain’s Cranfield University, said the effort was directed at constituencies where the result was likely to be decided by a small margin, so it wouldn’t be obvious.

It’s not clear what has happened to this evidence. Presumably it still exists. But why does Lashari speak of the evidence in the past tense: “we had evidence”? Was the evidence only in Bhutto’s head, or didn’t someone have pieces of paper or other such actual proof? Strange.

I get the impression, convenient as it is for Musharraf and the ISI, that Bhutto’s assassination makes this report moot. But it seems to me that her murder makes these allegations all the more relevant.