I have posted a scanned copy of the Pakistan People's Party report on election rigging, Another Stain on the Face of Democracy. This is apparently the report that Benazir Bhutto was planning to give to a visiting U.S. Congressional delegation the evening that she was murdered. The version I have is only 47 pages long, whereas press reports speak of 160 pages. I will post more as I receive it.
Cheers for Senator Biden for criticizing the administration's approval of the sale of 18 Lockheed F-16 fighters to the Pakistan military just at its credibility has sunk to an all-time low.
I have written more about this at Informed Comment Global Affairs and also discussed it with Scott Horton of Harpers. Below the fold I provide the report's summary and some background that is also in the longer posts.
From the report:
The Master Plan of Rigging 2008 Elections Unveiled
The administration has planned to rig the Elections in the following manner:
1. Where an opposing candidate is strong in an area, they have planned to create a conflict at the polling station, even killing people if necessary, to stop polls for at least 3 - 4 hours. The polling stations will be granted extended opening of thirty minutes which will not be made up for the time lost.
2. Where they collect and secure the ballot box at the end of the polling day, the place will be broken into and ballots will not be stolen but thrown on the floor so they will have solid basis to call for a re-count during which process they will add the votes for their candidates.
3. 90 percent of the equipment that the USA gave the government of Pakitan to fight terrorism is being used to monitor and to keep a check on their political opponents especially the PPP. All of our communications as well as that of other major leaders in other parties are compromised by them. They listen to our conversations up to a mile away and intercept our communications.
4. The regime has asked government-sponsored candidates to give names of their security guards and local thugs to enroll them into the police for three days on election duty. These also include ex-Army personnel. They will be used to fire at voter's stations and drive voters away so that ballots can be stuffed.
5. Election officials are still being changed/transferred.
6. Military Intelligence sits in the offices of returning officers, police officials and other elections officials.
7. Election agents with voters' lists are being asked to give tampered lists to presiding officers.
8. Election being stitched up.
Both the Guardian and the Times of London have reported that, the evening of her assassination, Benazir Bhutto was to present to visiting U.S. Senators and Congressional representatives a report on preparations being made to rig the elections. Declan Walsh of the Guardian:
Bhutto had obtained details of an Islamabad safe house run by the country's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency from where it intended to manipulate the poll, said Sarfraz Khan Lashari, an official on her party's 10-member election monitoring cell. The ISI-led operation would rig the vote in favour of President Pervez Musharraf's Pakistan Muslim League-Q party through ballot stuffing in constituencies across Sindh and Punjab provinces, he said. The ISI has a long history of meddling with elections in Pakistan, usually in the interest of the country's military establishment.
In 1990 the ISI received 140m rupees (£1.1m at current values) to rig national elections, according to supreme court testimony by the then chief of army staff, General Mirza Aslam Beg.
There is no ISI spokesman but a government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, denied the claims. "How can you run an election rigging campaign from a safe house? There is a lot of talk about the ISI but not much substance," he said.
The PPP claims to have identified the safe house, the location of which is given in a smaller document "of much greater sensitivity." According to Jeremy Page for the Times:
The second report, which Ms Bhutto did not plan to release to the media, alleged that the ISI was using some of the $10 billion (£5 billion) in US military aid that Pakistan has received since 2001 to run a covert election operation from a safe house in G5, a central district of Islamabad, [Lashari] said.
"The report was done by some people who we’ve got in the services. They directly dealt with Benazir Bhutto," [Lashari] continued, adding that Ms Bhutto was planning to share the contents of the report with the British Ambassador as well as the US lawmakers.