Why does Bush (and many others) always call suicide bombers cowards? I hardly think killing yourself is particularly cowardly.

IIRC, Bill Maher was fired for making that exact point.

That’s because he was only allowed to say the Politically Incorrect things his bosses approved.

The Truth is still largely off limits.

Ms. Bhutto was Musharaf’s principal rival. She opposed him, his generals, and his country’s religious extremists, with whom Musharaf is in uneasy alliance. The assassination occured in Rawalpindi, tightly controlled by the Pakistani army. As in the death of JFK, Musharaf and those agencies of government charged with investigating this murder are those primarily in charge of maintaining state security. Consequently, they have the most to lose by accurately disclosing what went wrong and how they failed, regardless of conspiracy theories, regardless of how credible or far fetched those may be.

The White House has a considerable investment in maintaining Musharaf as its client (though some say he is the puppet pulling his masater’s strings). This murder was expected and, presumably, numerous measures were taken to guard against it, since its destabilizing effects are happening before our eyes.

Given Pakistan’s nuclear capability and its role in Mr. Bush’s Middle Eastern aspirations, we should learn here what the CIA knew and when it knew it. Almost certainly it was aiding Musharaf with electronic intel to protect himself against threats, which he would have interpreted to mean his political rivals as well as violent criminals.

While we publicly and privately grieve for the individuals involved and consider how events in Pakistan could affect their and our security, we should not use this predictable event as another excuse to clamp down on our civil liberties, to raid our treasury and to resort to even more violence in order to relieve our fears or stoke our adolescent leaders’ hearts.

If, and a big if, the US was playing it straight with Bhutto, it was a huge gamble… Pakistani Intelligence IS al quaeda, the army is hugely ympathetic also… no way it would work, even if it was played straight. Easily penetrated by status quo interests in that region. She never had a chance.

Google “ISI and 9-11″ — The Pakistan Inter-Service-Intelligence created and sponsored both Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Shortly before the 9-11 attacks, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh transfered $100,000 to 9-11 Ringleader Mohamed Atta — at the behest of ISI Chief Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmad, according to the Times of India.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO206A.html

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/qfisi.html

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KUP209A.html

Pakistan’s ISI ‘Fully Involved’ in 9/11

http://www.worldthreats.com/As…..209-11.htm

Osama bin Laden’s principal Pakistani adviser before Sept. 11, 2001, was retired Gen. Hamid Gul, a former ISI chief who, since the 2001 attacks, is “strategic adviser” to the coalition of six politico-religious parties that governs two of Pakistan’s four provinces. Known as MMA, the coalition also occupies 20 percent of the seats in the federal assembly in Islamabad.

…

Gen. Gul worked closely with the CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan when he was ISI chief. He was “mildly” fundamentalist in those days, he explained after Sept. 11, and indifferent to the United States. But he became passionately anti-American after the United States turned its back on Afghanistan following the 1989 Soviet withdrawal and began punishing Pakistan with economic and military sanctions for its secret nuclear buildup.

A ranking CIA official, speaking anonymously, said the agency considered Gen. Gul “the most dangerous man” in Pakistan. A senior Pakistani political leader, also on condition of anonymity, said, “I have reason to believe Hamid Gul was Osama bin Laden’s master planner.”

The report received by the Sept. 11 Commission from the anonymous, well-connected Pakistani source, said: “The core issue of instability and violence in South Asia is the character, activities and persistence of the militarized Islamist fundamentalist state in Pakistan. No cure for this canker can be arrived at through any strategy of negotiations, support and financial aid to the military regime, or by a ‘regulated’ transition to ‘democracy.’”

The confidential report continued: “The imprints of every major act of international Islamist terrorism invariably passes through Pakistan, right from September 11 — where virtually all the participants had trained, resided or met in, coordinated with, or received funding from or through Pakistan — to major acts of terrorism across South Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as major networks of terror that have been discovered in Europe.

“Pakistan has harvested an enormous price for its apparent ‘cooperation’ with the U.S., and in this it has combined deception and blackmail — including nuclear blackmail — to secure a continuous stream of concessions. Its conduct is little different from that of North Korea, which has in the past chosen the nuclear path to secure incremental aid from Western donors. A pattern of sustained nuclear blackmail has consistently been at the heart of Pakistan’s case for concessions, aid and a heightened threshold of international tolerance for its sponsorship and support of Islamist terrorism.

“To understand how this works, it is useful to conceive of Pakistan’s ISI as a state acting as terrorist traffickers, complaining that, if it does not receive the extraordinary dispensations and indulgences that it seeks, it will, in effect, ‘implode,’ and in the process do extraordinary harm.

This is the same footage where they had “RESCUE” emblazoned on their backs.

Who knows, there may be a number of reasons for this,

I don’t suppose that it has anything to do with the fact that English is one of the official languages in Pakistan?