Osama dead?

We are interested in news outside Santa Fe, though we don't pretend to be able to cover it and, so, we don't broadcast much if any of it from our local newsroom. We rely on BBC for that.

But a mention by Air America's Thom Hartmann of a Benazir Bhutto interview by David Frost got our attention. So we researched it.

Frost does BBC interviews and has a program on Al Jazeera English television. He talked with Bhutto after she survived a November 2007 assassination attempt. In the interview she makes an incredible claim -- that Osama bin Laden was murdered and she knew who did it.

We took a look at the video that Al Jazeera posted on its section on You Tube (yes, they are legitimate Al Jazeera videos). Then we compared it with a version of that same interview posted by the BBC on the BBC News website. BBC cut out the mention of Osama's murder and the name of the person Bhutto said murdered Osama.

Why? We'll try to find someone at BBC to answer that question, if we can.

Meanwhile, here's a typewritten transcipt of Bhutto's statement on Al Jazeera. We have underlined the sentence that did not appear in the BBC version:

Frost: These three people you mentioned, were they members of or associated with the government?

Bhutto: Yes, well one of them is a very key figure in security. He's a former military officer. He's someone who has had dealings with (she names a name and a group whom we could not understand the names of) who was in an Indian jail for decapitating three British tourists and three American tourists. And he also had dealings with Omar Sheikh, the man who murdered Osama bin Laden. Now I know having dealings with people does not necessarily mean having direct evidence....

Compare the two videos yourself.

The reference begins at 6:00 minutes into the Al Jazeera video.

The reference begins 5:00 minutes into the BBC video.