Oh

You know, in 2000, Our Leader was elected simply by the vote of five people; the other votes, at the end of the day, didn't matter.

In Pakistan in 2007, a rout of its rulers was possibly avoided by the vote of one or two.

So what's the big difference?

The 1963 assassination of JFK resulted in the Warren commission report and a whole industry claiming it was a whitewash, that it was covering up something.

In 2007 and beyond, the Pakis have gone straight to claims of whitewash with government claims constantly shifting, constantly being proven to be, well, lies.

Truly, our ally is little less of a democracy than the good old USA! As such, I suppose there's no need to worry about its WMDs.

Today's episode of "Whu' Happn'd?":

The police chief of the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi prevented doctors from performing an autopsy on the corpse of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, according to a lawyer on the hospital's board.

The dramatic new revelation emerged as new videotape showed a gunman in close proximity to Bhutto in the moments before her assassination, and a surgeon said he'd felt pressure to conform to the government's official story on Bhutto's killing.

Pakistan's interior minister had previously said that Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari, had requested the autopsy not be performed.

"Even if the family of a murder victim refuses to allow the autopsy, no investigation can be completed if doctors do not perform the autopsy and conclusively find the cause of death," Athar Minallah, a top lawyer and a member of Rawalpindi General Hospital where Bhutto was taken after the attack said in an article by Times of India. "The doctors were worried that their initial report, which did not determine the definite cause of death, is being politically twisted."

The decision was taken despite the fact a post-mortem examination is required under Pakistani law in the cases of murder.

Doctors performed an "external" post mortem and distributed cropped images of Bhutto's skull to reporters. Under the official story, Bhutto was killed by the sunroof of her armored LandCruiser after a bomb went off when she was standing up to wave to a crowd.

In an open letter Monday, Minallah released the doctors' notes.

"In the letter," according to CNN, "Minallah said the doctors 'suggested to the officials to perform an autopsy,' but that Rawalpindi police chief Aziz Saud "did not agree." He noted that under the law, police investigators have 'exclusive responsibility' in deciding to have an autopsy."

Minallah told CNN he was voicing his concerns because doctors didn't feel they could speak out, saying they were "threatened."

"They are government servants who cannot speak -- I am not," he told the network, saying the failure to perform an autopsy has fueled "a perception that there is some kind of cover-up, though I might not believe in that theory."

The medical report of Bhutto's death identified a wound of several centimeters above her left ear, with no foreign body felt. Pakistan's interior ministry says they are open to exhuming the body; Bhutto's husband opposes the move, saying he doesn't trust the government.

The police meddling at the hospital would not mark the first time officers' actions have come into question regarding Bhutto's assassination. At the rally where she was killed Thursday, police abandoned their posts before the attack by a gunman and suicide bomber. The scene of the attack was also hosed down within an hour, destroying untold amounts of potential evidence.

Link.

But wait, there's more!

The day she was assassinated last Thursday, Benazir Bhutto had planned to reveal new evidence alleging the involvement of Pakistan's intelligence agencies in rigging the country's upcoming elections, an aide said Monday.

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.

The ISI had no official comment. However, an agency official, speaking only on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak on the subject, dismissed the allegations as "a lot of talk but not much substance."

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."

According to Lashari, the document includes information on a "safe house" allegedly being run by the ISI in a central neighborhood of Islamabad, the alleged headquarters of the rigging operation.

It names as the head of the unit a brigadier general recently retired from the ISI, who was secretly assigned to run the rigging operation, Lashari said. It charges that he was working in tandem with the head of a civilian intelligence agency. Before her return to Pakistan, Bhutto, in a letter to Musharraf, had named the intelligence official as one of the men she accused of plotting to kill her.

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.

Link.