Twirp : Terrorist Wahabi Islamic Republic Pakistan 2

[acharya]

<b>‘US had abandoned Benazir’</b>

* US journalist says Benazir had become a vessel of democratic ideals
* Musharraf’s telephone warning was ‘like a Mafia threat’

Daily Times Monitor

LAHORE: Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto had become “a real vessel of democratic ideals” in the region but was abandoned by the United States because it “had chosen illegitimate power over spoken principle”, American Journalist Ron Suskind said in an interview on Saturday.

Suskind has published a telephone conversation between Benazir and President Pervez Musharraf in his new book – The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism – that raised questions about the ties between the two leaders.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist told Democracy Now radio he had spent a lot of time with Benazir for six months before she died.

“I’ve been talking about these democratic values my whole life, but finally, just in the last month, I’m really starting to understand their power,” he quoted Benazir as telling him in Quetta “just before she died”. But she soon realised “she has essentially been abandoned because the US has chosen illegitimate power over spoken principle”, he said.

“Frankly, my success and his failure are now the same things. There’s not going to be coexistence. It’s putting the United States in a choice position. They’ve got to choose. And clearly, they’ve chosen Musharraf over me,” Suskind quoted Benazir, adding that she could have “turned the tide in that whole region”.

“I’ve got two enemies, of course, who have been in an unholy alliance—dictatorial power, messianic radicalism—for many years, and I have no protection. Why? Because Dick Cheney won’t make the phone call.

“Why? Explain it to me, the idea that they assured me Cheney would make the call to Musharraf simply to say, ‘You’re the dictator, make sure she is protected. She has to make it to election day. If she doesn’t, we’re going to hold you responsible.’”

‘Mafia threat’: To a question about a telephone conversation published in his book in which Musharraf told Benazir her safety “is based on the state of our relationship”, he said: “It’s all but a—like a Mafia threat. And this is something that the United States, frankly, deep down understands, too. They let this process unfold. And ultimately, folks around [Benazir] Bhutto now are saying that she was abandoned by America”.