An add was placed in the newspapers recently purporting to reproduce a letter written (Click here to see the letter) by Benazir Bhutto in 1990 to a Mr Peter Galbraith suggesting that the government of the time should be brought down, military aid stopped and Indian Army encouraged to engage the Pakistani army at the border amongst other things. I was waiting for PPP’s response because I had a feeling there was something fishy about the whole thing. Having read the response, which was expected to be a denial, it makes a lot more sense than the original letter. The PPP’s response is copied below:
PPP denounces smear campaign of Mohtarma Bhutto
Decides to take legal action against plotters
Islamabad November 14, 2007: Pakistan Peoples Party has denounced the smear campaign of character assassination through newspaper adverts today against the Party Chairperson Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto as “dying kicks of the Jehadi remnants of Zia era”.
In a statement today spokesperson for the Chairperson PPP former Senator Farhatullah Babar said that the letter alleged to have been written by Mohtarma Bhutto was forged in 1990 by elements in agencies. The forgery behind it has been exposed from the following, he said.
1. Mohtarma Bhutto has never used letterheads titled “Mrs. Benazir Bhutto”.
2. The name was deliberately misspelled as GAILBRAITH in the letter to evade legal action just in case Mr Peter Galbraith challenged it.
3. In September 1990, the date of the forged letter, the purported addressee Peter Galbraith was a senior advisor to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1979 to 1993) and not in the NDI as stated in the forged letter.
4. The letter is full of grotesque grammatical mistakes that are unimaginable from the office of Chairperson PPP.
The publication of a forged letter after nearly two decades shows how the moving finger that has engineered elections in the past is at it again, he said.
These elements had also cobbled together an anti PPP alliance IJI using money stolen from the banks, he recalled.
He said that it was curious that the ad was printed even though, contrary to the normal practice, the name of the advertising company that designed the advert was not mentioned.
Senator Farhatullah Babar said that the Party had credible information that the secret hands behind the campaign financed the advert from the public funds at the disposal of Information Ministry and paid at commercial rates.
“The dirty brigade playing dirty tricks at public expense must be punished; they will be”
The Party has decided to take legal action against all those involved in planning, executing and financing this smear campaign, he said.
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