Who killed Benazir?
By Humayun Gauhar | Published: May 31, 2009- Digg
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Trying to identify assassins of the great is a zero sum game. Theories sprout up instantaneously, depending on where the theorists are coming from politically. The real assassins are hardly ever definitely identified. Surprising, then, that an experienced journalist like Seymour Hersh slipped into the maze called 'Who killed Benazir Bhutto?'
I should refresh your memories. Pakistani newspapers of May 18, 2009 carried a story by Online, a private Pakistani news agency, that Hersh had claimed in an interview to an Arab TV channel that a "US special squad killed Benazir Bhutto"? The channel was not identified. Try as I might I have not been able to find the purported interview on any English language Arab television channel. The salient points in the story are?
Seymour Hersh told an Arab television channel that the Joint Special Operation Command was formed and headed by Dick Cheney.
Within the JSOC is a "death squad".
The squad killed Benazir Bhutto.
At the time General Stanley McChrystal, the new US army commander in Afghanistan, headed it.
It also killed Rafik Hariri and the Lebanese army chief for refusing to allow the US to set up military bases in Lebanon.
Ariel Sharon, the then prime minister of Israel, was also a key man in the plot.
Many websites suspect that Benazir was killed because she said in a November 2, 2007 interview to Sir David Frost on Al-Jazeera TV that Osama Bin Laden had been murdered by Omar Saeed Sheikh because it took away the justification for the presence of the US army in Afghanistan.
The BBC website that carries transcripts of Al-Jazeera interviews edited out her words about Osama's death.
Newspapers of May 20 carried a vehement denial by Seymour Hersh. The Nation also carried a rather acerbic letter to the editor written, it seems, in some umbrage by the US ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson. Hersh described as "complete madness" reports that the squad headed by General McChrystal "had also killed Hariri and the Lebanese army chief." "Vice president Cheney does not have a death squad. I have no idea who killed Hariri or Bhutto. I have never said that I did have such information. I most certainly did not say anything remotely to that effect during an interview with an Arab media outlet." McChrystal, he said, had run a special forces unit that engaged in "High Value Target activity...while I have been critical of some of that unit's activities in the pages of the New Yorker and in interviews, I have never suggested that he was involved in political assassinations or death squads on behalf of Cheney, as the published stories state." He regretted that he hadn't been first contacted by any of the publications before they printed the story (point taken). "This is another example of blogs going bonkers with misleading and fabricated stories and professional journalists repeating such rumours without doing their jobs...and that is to verify such rumours."







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