Pakistan's opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, left, stands up from the door of her armored car and chants as Pakistani riot police block her from entering the residence of Pakistan's Chief Supreme Court Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry on Saturday in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Islamabad, Pakistan ? Pakistan eased its crackdown on opponents Saturday, releasing opposition leader Benazir Bhutto from house arrest and saying it will lift a state of emergency within a month. But the government blocked a meeting between the deposed Supreme Court justice and Bhutto, who pledged to lead a 185-mile protest march.

President Bush called President Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s promises “positive steps,” throwing U.S. support firmly behind the Pakistani leader in the fight against Islamic militants.

Bhutto, apparently unbowed by her brief detention, said she would defy Musharraf’s ban on public gatherings and lead supporters on a march from the eastern city of Lahore to Islamabad on Tuesday.

“When the masses combine, the sound of their steps will suppress the sound of military boots,” Bhutto, a former prime minister, told about 100 journalists protesting a new media clampdown.

Musharraf insists he called the week-old emergency to help fight Islamic extremists who control swathes of territory near the Afghan border. But the main targets of his subsequent crackdown in this nation of 160 million people have been his most outspoken critics, including the increasingly independent courts and media.

Thousands of people have been arrested, TV news stations taken off air, and judges removed. On Saturday, three reporters from Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper were ordered to leave Pakistan for an editorial in the paper that used an expletive in an allusion to Musharraf, said Deputy Information Minister Tariq Azim.

A heavy security cordon around Bhutto’s Islamabad villa kept her under house arrest for 24 hours, but she was allowed to leave Saturday morning, meeting first with party colleagues and then addressing the journalists’ protest.

But dozens of helmeted police blocked her white, bulletproof Land Cruiser when she tried to visit Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, the independent-minded chief justice who was removed from his post following Musharraf’s state of emergency.

Attorney General Malik Mohammed Qayyum told The Associated Press on Saturday that the state of emergency would “end within one month.” He provided no further details and would not say when a formal announcement might come.

Addressing supporters through a loudspeaker on Saturday, Bhutto said Taliban and al-Qaida-linked militants were gaining ground in the country’s turbulent northwest, near the Afghan border. She also said Musharraf’s military-led government was about to crumble.

“This government is standing on its last foot,” she said, as dozens of supporters scuffled briefly with police. “This government is going to go.”