My Finger is on the Trigger..

The Pakistani government quickly diagnosed the death of Benazir Bhutto, as "accidental/hit-her-head" and then moved to offer a made-for-tv-movie telephone conversation record putatively intercepted by ever-vigilant Pakistani Intelligence Officials (who did nothing to prevent the actual attack). Think carefully about the conclusions that are supposed to be drawn: are you supposed to have a warm, fuzzy feeling in your gut about the fact that governments now monitor your phone calls without your consent? I suppose you think of yourself as a conservative - I guess you're happy to realize that you're paying some government official every time you talk to your mom now. And the second conclusion? That Al Qaeda killed Benazir Butto? That one deserves even more thought.

Benazir was taken out by an assassin's bomb - she had been fired at and then the bomber blew himself up. The blast blew her forward into a lever on her sunroof and cracked her skull open. Although there are reports that shots were fired at her, and that the assassin had a handgun trained on her before he detonated himself - the final autopsy shows blunt force trauma as the cause of death. Definitely a hit by an assassin, possibly a terrorist.

The problem is that Al Qaeda doesn't specialize in this kind of work. They are infrastructure guys. They hit buildings and battleships. A political figure is a bad trade - how does the removal of one talking head, change an economy?

A political hit takes out only a single person and it is supposed to change the electorate and the general election climate. It is , as terrorism goes, a bad deal. For example, how many democrats do you think can be murdered that will keep the current status quo of a lobbyist free-for-all, alive and well - in DC? And the best one of all - what if someone Murdered George W. Bush ... President Cheney... give me a break.

Osama Bin Laden wrote, immediately after the 911 hit - "The quickest way to destroy a country is to destroy its economy". OBL likely lives in Pakistan, and despite the Bush Administrations well publicized (they have spent more money on advertising than all of the previous administrations combined) advances against them on behalf of Pervez Musharraf, Al Qaeda is still Headquartered in Peshawar, and no doubt happily ensconced. This Pakistani location gives them the benefit of a blurred borderline where the Former Soviet Union is bleeding suitcase nukes and radical islamic scientists are hard at work reading the operating manuals and trying to figure out which button turns off the GPS. Al Qaeda is pouring resources into their next big attack, commonly sequenced five years apart (for example, the first time they hit the trade towers, to the second, or from the "Cole" to the first hit on the towers.. or 911 to... hmm... right about now..)

Use of military power against terrorist target(s) echo hollow here in the assasination of Butto, as anywhere. The concept that you can bomb the village where the assassin lives is laughable. The closest we ever came was when Bill Clinton had a hellfire missile locked on him at a training camp in Afghanistan. Unlike the successful maneuver against the car bomber headed for the 2000 times square ball drop, this time Bill chose not to pull the trigger. He felt that a military attack was not appropriate. Woops. Ah, but then again it doesn't matter how many drones are in the air - Bin Laden is going to be located by a spy. And his time will come again.

What do you think President of the United States of America will do, when it becomes her turn to take out OBL Again? Will her administration squeal on the spies working for her administration?

Do you think she will catch Bin Laden?