CNN keeps showing, on a continuous feed, poignant footage of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, just minutes before her assassination. Bhutto was shot just moments after giving a speech at a large rally in Rawalpindi, where according to news reports the security was good because it was handled by her own party.

The revolving loop shows Bhutto walking from the rally to a waiting vehicle, clutching her white scarf with one hand and smilingly waving or shaking hands with the other. People are milling around her, evidently connected to or part of the rally event itself; no sign of anything wrong. She is escorted warmly into the vehicle, people part away from its path, and it begins rolling away.

Very shortly afterward -- within, as said, minutes -- she is shot twice, according to one of her chief security people. Presumably immediately after the shooting, the shooter reportedly detonates a bomb, killing 22 people at last count along with himself, and wounding scores of others. Odds are slim to none that none of the graver event was caught by a camera somewhere.

When will the public be allowed to see the complete footage? This question is neither rhetorical nor morbid sensationalizing.

If President Bush is going to announce to the world -- echoed by Rudith Giuliani -- that Bhutto's assassination was the work of "terrorists," and then use that action as the rationale for funneling yet more U.S. billions to Pervez Musharraf, the American public has a right to know the full story.

For what it's worth, CNN is pretty much working overtime, not to say feverishly right now, to rehabilitate Musharraf and to prop up his respectability. A reporter with experience in Pakistan says that Pakistanis are burning pictures and signs of Musharraf in the streets across Pakistan -- not because Musharraf had anything to do with the event, you understand; they are simply taking out their anger on the most visible signs of authority.

CNN also interviewed Arnaud de Borchgrave, of the Washington Times and also an early investor in Stratesec (Securacom), the security contractor where presidential brother Marvin Bush sat on the board of directors through most of the 1990s. De Borchgrave, said to be a friend of Bhutto's, emphasized the violence of Pakistan and the multiplicity of assassinations and assassination threats, including those against Musharraf himself.

All true enough, as far as it goes -- but given the immediate history of internecine rivalry, enmity, and jockeying for power which has frequently resulted in direct violence of the most deadly sort, even at the highest levels of government, one must question easy assumptions about 'extremists' in the Bhutto assassination.

Without jumping to the opposite conclusion -- or any conclusion -- a rational analyst would have to bear in mind the immediate political consequences of past assassinations, including that of Pakistan President Zia ul-Haq in 1988. Musharraf himself took power with a military coup d'etat. Cui bono?

At present, the anger in the streets strongly suggests that most Pakistanis do not view Bhutto's assassination as the work of a few bad apples. The perspective of people on the ground in the country itself might be as useful as that of commentators brought in by cable.