The headline alone from the Jan. 19 issue of The New York Times is enough to make a cynic like me scratch my head in mock-incredulity. “C.I.A. Sees Qaeda Link in the Death of Bhutto.” Boy, I didn’t see that one coming. The C.I.A. thinks terrorists with Al Qaeda ties are behind the assassination rather than the Pakistani government? How do you say “foregone conclusion” in Urdu?

All right, enough insinuating. I find the C.I.A.’s conclusion to be yet another piece of self-serving American counterterrorism intelligence. Support for Bush’s war on terror has dwindled in the twilight of his presidency and he now desperately needs to make some sort of progress to keep his administration from going down in history as one of military ineptitude.

Bush has left the Middle East less stable than he found it and now he must find something to suggest that the effort should continue after he leaves office. It’s no wonder that the C.I.A. was chomping at the bit to conduct a unilateral investigation into the Pakistani presidential candidate’s assassination on Dec. 27.

The C.I.A. can justify military action against terrorist camps in Pakistan by simply stating that Pakistani militant leader Baitullah Mehsud was involved in the assassination. It doesn’t matter whether we citizens believe the C.I.A.

If a journalist said that terrorists were responsible for Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, those conclusions would mean nothing without proof to back them up. However, by keeping the details of the investigation classified, the C.I.A. does not have to provide any proof, but can continue serving the Bush administration’s needs.

Let me clarify. This investigation should have been the responsibility of an international cooperative; conducted by nations that have no ulterior motives in the region. The conclusions of that cooperative should then have been opened to international review. At least then the United States would not have been the first to declare a culprit.

I agree that there is more than adequate reason to doubt the Pakistani government’s official report on the assassination, especially with Bhutto’s opposition, Pervez Musharraf, still in office as Pakistani president.

However, the C.I.A.’s insistence on conducting an investigation without international support is indicative of the same audacity that has the United States stagnating in Iraq after almost five years. Now the nations of the world are forced to either accept the C.I.A.’s conclusions or conduct their own investigations, as the British are doing. The Iraq debacle proved to the world that American intelligence agencies can’t be trusted with an investigation in which they have any level of political investment. I hope that we do not take significant military action in Pakistan based on this investigation. I highly doubt that we will (with the Congress focused so heavily on the economy and the White House trying desperately to make the Bush legacy on foreign policy into a silk purse).

With our national debt and our energy crisis, our generation will soon find itself in the position of asking considerable favors from nations whose input we have ignored for decades. Our audacity in matters such as the investigation into Bhutto’s assassination will be our undoing when we are no longer the world’s most powerful nation.

Tell Sean what you think of the federal government’s investigatory practices at [email protected]