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If I were there, it's what I would have said. It's specific, but strangely so: It's summarizing, as if after the fact. I think he's wrong; not that he's lying, just that he's doing what eye witnesses have always done, remembering what he believed he saw and not what he actually saw. Try this narrative.
I hear loud noises that I identify as gunshots. I see Bhutto quickly move downwards into the car; abductive reasoning says I was right, they were gunshots, and adds that the bullets caused her rapid downward movement into the car--it's my fear, it's the shooter's goal, so it's what my mind suspects at once, and it's compatible with the facts (not entailed by the facts, an important distinction). When she's taken out of the car, her face is intact--so I figure that a high-velocity bullet didn't go into her skull (after all, no part of her head splattered onto the car roof). However, there's a lot of blood on her neck and her clothing, and blood on the car seat and the floor. Her neck and torso were exposed. I've already suspected she was shot, and believe that was confirmed. There were two shots fired. I could say, "She was shot either in the neck by one bullet, in the chest by one bullet, in the neck by two bullets, in the chest by two bullets, or in both the neck and the chest." I simply don't know--I haven't seen the bullet wounds in her chest, now have I? If I say she was just in the neck or chest I might be too specific. So I'm sloppy: "She was shot in the neck and chest", treating "neck and chest" as sort of a single body part. There are times when "or" can mean "and," and "and" can be intended in such a non-committal way that if it turns out to be "or" there's no falsehood involved. Language is not always precise like we want it to be.
Note the implied timeline: It's important. If the shots rang out, and just a couple of seconds later the bomb went off, then the bomb could have caused the concussion as she was ducking or being pulled down into the car by her bodyguards. (That's what the official report implies: to partially discredit it somebody needs to transcribe the timeline from a videotape and show that the bomb blast happened after she would have been back in the car.) On the other hand, the bomb would immediately attract everybody's attention: Who's going to pay attention to a slight deflection of the course of Bhutto's head as she's ducking down/falling into the car when there's this loud "boom" and bodies are being flung about? All the bodyguards would know is that she was heading down into the car and when they looked at her after the big boom, she was unconscious and bleeding, slumped in the car: What do you think, "blunt trauma to head" or do you blame the air-borne lead that must have been whizzing around a few seconds later? The lead. It also means that nobody would have been watching *outside* the car to see the concussion happen, or if they glimpsed it their mental attention was elsewhere. Actually, reports seem to be saying that people saw her finish her "fall" or "ducking" into the car--something it's almost impossible to believe people noticed if the bomb blast went off as she was falling/ducking in. However, I'd expect people to remember seeing what experience says is a surety--we fabricate memories all the time, and eye witnesses are hideously good at remembering things they don't actually see, and misremembering things they do see, especially when the mistakes are in keeping with their expectations and biases. In any event, when attention returned to her seconds after the bomb blast, whether she was shot or concussed, she'd be slumped in the vehicle. And while it's compatible with either of two scenarios, it's most likely to be taken as confirmation the narrative already in people's minds: she was shot in the neck and/or chest.
The second scenario the official report replies is not the case: There was gunfire, she somehow returned to the cabin of the car, and sometime later there was a bomb blast. Then we might expect somebody to have noticed that she banged her head--bodyguards or admirers standing a few feet from the car. On the other hand, the head-thump might not have been salient, or memorable, since people might be looking around after the gunshots--and most seem to have concluded, whether at the time or in retrospect, that she was shot. Falling unconscious people hit their heads, and that's not memorable. Having her finish her ducking into the car with a collapse or slump would only confirm their initial assumptions.
But note there's also silence where we expect noise: If you get shot, I imagine you usually jerk or twitch. There are no reports of this, even from people near the car--and the bodyguards are quiet, while I'd expect them to say that she was limp as she began to fall or not limp as she ducked. Moreover, you'd expect those on the scene to be a bit more specific: "I saw a bullet wound in her neck when she was taken out of the car" or "when she was slumped in the seat"--but there aren't any such reports. It's unlikely that anybody would have ripped off her dress on the street to allow somebody to say, "I saw bullet wounds in her left shoulder and left side of her neck". But we still have "shot in the neck and chest" or "neck and shoulder"--the only parts visible, the only parts that could have been shot and been consistent with her face and head being pretty much intact, but with blood on her neck and clothing. And, finally, people have said there are no bullets in the body because they passed through: Has anybody considered that if the bullets came from the side and hit her chest they'd have hit the sunroof, either on their way to Bhutto or on their way out--and even if the bullets came from the front or back, if there's an exit wound in her neck or chest you'd expect blood splatter on parts of the car *other* than the sunroof handle. Those first on the scene would have seen it. Perhaps others in the thick crowd would have been hit by the bullets before they came to a rest. Yet no enterprising investigative reporter seems to have unearthed such a witness, a secondary victim, or shown that the sunroof is not intact.
In other words, I think it's likely people are reporting their inferences as observation along with actual observations, or their inference is interpreted as observation. The first eye witness accounts are exactly what you get from inference--only the narrative inference furnishes, and nothing less than inference would furnish. Until the blunt trauma cause of death was advanced, there was nothing to cause anybody to doubt the eye witnesses. With the claim of blunt trauma, you have to look and wonder if the narrative isn't a bit too pat and idealized--the marksman fires from a distance, hits her twice without anybody noticing the bullets actually hitting her or seeing exit-wound splatter, or finding the bullets either in her body or hitting one of the dense throng around the car; she falls down into the car as the bomb blast happens, but people watch her slump into the car instead of looking at the loud boomy thing; nobody says where the neck wound is, but they all know it's there; she's not said to have been stripped, but even the photographer some 30 yards away seems to advance as observation that she was shot in the chest. Too many people know things they can't know, have seen things I don't believe any reaonable person on the scene would have seen. But it forms a plausible narrative and comports with the facts known at the time: Just perfect for shaping memories and filling in gaps, something the brain loves to do, unaware that reality and what it fills in aren't always the same thing.
My usual caveat: This only means that the skull-fracture account isn't disconfirmed by initial reports, and both of the narratives are completely possible. Personally, I think the initial reports are wrong but with no dishonesty involved (however hard it may be for people to conceive of such a thing), but wouldn't be surprised to find out otherwise and that the doctors are lying. I just think eye witness error is more plausible than a cover up, perhaps because I've personally seen "eye witnesses" be even more horribly, self-assuredly wrong.
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