The biggest story not covered in my lifetime.

Well, I've Googled and I've looked in Factiva, and haven't found a single mainstream U.S. news source which has a single mention of this. Zero coverage. And this is beyond odd.

Benazir Bhutto, the former Prime Minister of Pakistan and leader of the flawed-but-ultimately-democratic opposition in that country, was assassinated earlier this year. Who was ultimately behind the act, we may never know. We do know that the government, led by her adversary, is using the event as an excuse to target a warlord. Now this guy may have been guilty up to his ears, or maybe he wasn't. But in the labyrinthine world of Pakistani politics, nothing is really what it seems, so it seems.

But you know what is really odd is that a few weeks before her murder, Bhutto gave a prescient interview to Sir David Frost, formerly of the BBC, but now doing a show for Al Jazeera in English. The date was Nov. 2, 2007. The occasion was the previous attempt on her life, and she was discussing -- in astonishingly cool-headed terms -- the various parties who would try to kill her.

LINK to the video

Frost asks (about the 3:50 mark) if anyone knows who was responsible for the assassination attempt, and if reports were true that she had arranged for a letter to be delivered to President Musharraf in the event of her murder. She confirmed that she had written to Gen. Musharraf. The letter named various people in the goverment who might be behind organizing various terror-linked groups to have her killed.

Said Bhutto: "I sent back a letter saying that while these groups may be used, I thought it was more important to go after the people who supported them, who organized them, who could possibly be the financers or the organizers of the finance for those groups..."

Eerie, to be sure, but here's the real barn-burner: Frost asks her if the three people named were members of, or associated with the government. Bhutto says yes, then (at the 6:00 mark):

"One of them is a very key figure in security. He's a former military officer... He also had dealins with Omar Sheikh (ph.), the man who murdered Osama bin Laden. Now I know..."

TO RECAP: The former head of state of Pakistan, and the then-current leader of one of the political parties, said clear as day that Osama bin Laden had been murdered.

The BBC ran the interview, too, on its Website. But somehow, felt that the claim about bin Laden's murder should be omitted from the replay. You can see the two videos back-to-back here:

LINK to the "back to back" video

The fact that there has been no coverage in the media of this issue is not merely odd, it's dereliction.

All I found was a mention in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, a letter to the editor of the Hattiesburg American (located in Mississippi) and a tut-tut item in the "Day and Night" briefs column of the UK's Daily Express, chiding Sir David Frost for failing to follow up on the HUGE bombshell that Bhutto had just fed him. Thankfully, the Express reported the BBC's explanation for the edit:

A BBC spokeswoman confirms: "During the interview Ms Bhutto made an allegation that Osama Bin Laden had been murdered by Omar Sheikh.

This claim was so unexpected that it seemed most likely that she had mis-spoken and had intended to say that Omar Sheikh was the man who murdered US journalist Daniel Pearl, not Osama Bin Laden.

"A decision was therefore taken to edit out the reference. With the benefit of hindsight the interview should have been reproduced in full or not used at all." Alas, following her assassination last month, we'll never know if Bhutto meant what she said or not.

Well, I guess that's that, then, right? Nice and tidy. Oh, nevermind. The briefs column then immediately dives into a story about George Harrison stashing away old Beatles costumes. Nicely done, Express. Looks like you bungled the story, too.

Look, the issue isn't whether she's right or not. This should have been a fundamental fact mentioned in EVERY SINGLE STORY about Bhutto's assasination. The mere fact that someone of such importance even uttered such a claim -- that the words passed over her lips even once -- should be worldwide news. It deserves a great deal of digging and follow-up from teams of energetic reporters.

But it can start with one reporter. In any paper.