THE federal government has moved for the inclusion of additional grounds in the review petition it has moved against the Supreme Court's verdict striking down the NRO and reopening the cases against all its beneficiaries, including the Swiss cases against President Asif Zardari. Though it has every right to file such a petition, there must be some substantial grounds, some legal issue which it wants agitated. After all, the petition has been filed by counsel specially engaged for this case, not the Attorney General, who will presumably be charging his full fee, which will be paid from taxpayers' money. Therefore, the federal government should not just see a lot of scrutiny of this, but should welcome it. The revised petition includes a tasteless reference to the President's murdered wife, Mrs Benazir Bhutto, and makes the plea that the Swiss cases not be reopened, because that would mean trying her too. The quality of advice tendered is worrisome enough, but more worrying to the general public is the fact that it was accepted. The court is not likely to be impressed with this piece of reasoning. That Benazir Bhutto was murdered under mysterious circumstances is true enough, but to assume that this somehow places her husband above trial for depriving the taxpaying public of huge sums does not follow, and does not justify wasting further taxpayers' money on the expense of litigation. This should have been reasonably clear to the tenderer of the advice, but it was not only tendered, it was accepted. The person benefiting the most from the government not pursuing the Swiss cases would be the President. The attempt to use taxpayers' money to defend him in cases which have not yet reached finality smacks of the same attitude which led to those cases being instituted. If Mr Zardari and his cohorts are innocent of any wrongdoing, they would welcome their day in court rather than hiding behind a dictator's arbitrary law to avoid trial.