More on the Bhutto assassination...

A bad conspiracy theory never dies. In the wake of the Benazir Bhutto assassination, blogworld is once again being inundated with the claim that she told David Frost that Osama Bin Laden was killed by Omar Sheikh. As I noted earlier, she obviously made a slip of the tongue, signaled as such by the small catch in her voice. If you look at her commentary in context, it is crystal clear she meant to refer to Omar Sheikh as the man who killed Daniel Pearl for Osama Bin Laden. (The video is here.) On a subsequent occasion, she referred to Bin Laden as alive.

I don't know whether Osama Bin Laden is alive or dead. I speak of him in the present tense because most other people do, and because that seems the way to bet. That said, I would not be terribly surprised to learn that he has been gone for some time. That said, I feel certain that if Bhutto decided to make such a bombshell revelation, she would not have done so en passant. Moreover, I think she would have mentioned the matter on other occasions, to her confidants and to her American spokesperson. Omar Sheikh, a.k.a. Saaed Sheikh, is, in my opinion, the last person who would have performed such a task.

Of course, people will always believe whatever they wish to believe.

Whodunnit? Larisa Alexandrovna suspects that the Al Qaeda-style suicide bombing was merely a cover:

She died from gun shot wounds, not the explosion it seems. Al Qaeda does not do the basic military type assassination. Al Qaeda does the maximum collateral damage hit. I am starting to wonder if the actual bombing was not a distraction from the assassination via gun-shot. So, as I have already said over and over, this is an ISI hit that may or may not have been directly ordered by Musharraf (I think it may have been... but I am speculating).

Since the time Larisa wrote these words, various media outlets have reported that bomb shrapnel, not a gunshot wound, killed Benazir Bhutto.

Spencer Ackerman has spoken to a intelligence source who argues that the likeliest suspects are neither Musharraf nor Al Qaeda but other jihadist groups in Pakistan, of which there are many, including groups "like Lashkar e-Toiba, or the Jaish e-Mohammed."

Nevertheless, the mourners at her funeral blame Musharraf and the United States:

"Shame on the killer Musharraf, shame on the killer U.S." mourners cried, as her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, accompanied the closed coffin draped with the green, red and black tricolor of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party on the funeral procession to the mausoleum in the village of Garhi Khuda Bakhsh.

Oddly, the Washington Post has published a piece today claiming that the United States -- specifically, Condi Rice -- engineered Bhutto's return to Pakistan.

"The U.S. came to understand that Bhutto was not a threat to stability, but was instead the only possible way that we could guarantee stability and keep the presidency of Musharraf intact," said Mark Siegel, who lobbied for Bhutto in Washington and witnessed much of the behind-the-scenes diplomacy.

The angry people in Pakistan who refer to Musharraf as "Bush-arraf" probably won't believe reports that Washington had come to favor a Bhutto-Musharraf power-sharing arrangement.

I still think Mehmood Ahmed -- former ISI chief and (it is said) current drug czar -- is the likeliest suspect. When in doubt, look toward the drug trade.

Bhutto herself had said that if anything happened to her, blame should go to Pervez Musharraf. (For more on this, see Joy Tomme's excellent piece here.)

Any theory of the crime must take into consideration the odd behavior of the police:

Police officers had frisked the 3,000 to 4,000 people attending Thursday's rally when they entered the park, but as the speakers from Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party droned on, the police abandoned many of their posts. As she drove out through the gate, her main protection appeared to be her own bodyguards, who wore their usual white T-shirts inscribed: "Willing to die for Benazir."

(Emphasis added.)

The precedent: Benazir Bhutto died not far from the park in Rawalpindi where the first Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated in 1951. On that occasion, gunman Saad Akbar was immediately killed by a police officer who -- many have alleged -- was in on the plot. Akbar thus never lived to describe his motives.

One doesn't have to squint too hard to see a parallel between this situation and the speculative scenario offered by Larisa Alexandrovna.

Politics: How should the Dems react? From a tactical standpoint, I would advise the candidates to accept, at least provisionally, the conventional wisdom that Al Qaeda engineered the assassination. Then the candidates should remind the public -- again and again -- that Bush allowed Osama Bin Laden to get away to Pakistan. They should also remind the public that W once said that he doesn't spend much time thinking about Osama.

That response should suffice to take the sting out of any Republican propaganda efforts.