The Seattle Times : : Bush Hails Capture Of bin Laden General
We caught Al-Qaida's number three man! (Amazingly, just in time for Tony Blair's election campaign..) Er, again. Again. Actually this is the fourth time, but you know, he's a big, mean, nasty top-level terrorist.
Fuck, we mean guy who makes coffee. But... um.. look! Social Security! Lookat the monkey!
Fuck, we mean guy who makes coffee. But... um.. look! Social Security! Lookat the monkey!
posted by Management at 3:08 AM
5 Comments:
The Sunday Times - World
May 08, 2005
Captured Al-Qaeda kingpin is case of ‘mistaken identity’
Christina Lamb and Mohammad Shehzad Islamabad
THE capture of a supposed Al-Qaeda kingpin by Pakistani agents last week was hailed by President George W Bush as “a critical victory in the war on terror”. According to European intelligence experts, however, Abu Faraj al-Libbi was not the terrorists’ third in command, as claimed, but a middle-ranker derided by one source as “among the flotsam and jetsam” of the organisation.
Al-Libbi’s arrest in Pakistan, announced last Wednesday, was described in the United States as “a major breakthrough” in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.
Bush called him a “top general” and “a major facilitator and chief planner for the Al- Qaeda network”. Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, said he was “a very important figure”. Yet the backslapping in Washington and Islamabad has astonished European terrorism experts, who point out that the Libyan was neither on the FBI’s most wanted list, nor on that of the State Department “rewards for justice” programme.
Another Libyan is on the FBI list — Anas al-Liby, who is wanted over the 1998 East African embassy bombings — and some believe the Americans may have initially confused the two. When The Sunday Times contacted a senior FBI counter-terrorism official for information about the importance of the detained man, he sent material on al-Liby, the wrong man.
“Al-Libbi is just a ‘middle-level’ leader,” said Jean-Charles Brisard, a French intelligence investigator and leading expert on terrorism finance. “Pakistan and US authorities have completely overestimated his role and importance. He was never more than a regional facilitator between Al-Qaeda and local Pakistani Islamic groups.”
According to Brisard, the arrested man lacks the global reach of Al-Qaeda leaders such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s number two, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, or Anas al-Liby.
Although British intelligence has evidence of telephone calls between al-Libbi and operatives in the UK, he is not believed to be Al-Qaeda’s commander of operations in Europe, as reported.
The only operations in which he is known to have been involved are two attempts to assassinate Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, in 2003. Last year he was named Pakistan’s most wanted man with a $350,000 (£185,000) price on his head.
No European or American intelligence expert contacted last week had heard of al-Libbi until a Pakistani intelligence report last year claimed he had taken over as head of operations after Khalid Shaikh Mohammad’s arrest. A former close associate of Bin Laden now living in London laughed: “What I remember of him is he used to make the coffee and do the photocopying.”
What is known is that al-Libbi moved from Libya to Pakistan in the mid-1980s before joining the jihad in Afghanistan. He married a Pakistani woman and is said to specialise in maps and diagrams. He is thought to have joined Bin Laden in Sudan with other Libyan nationals in about 1992 and to have become Al-Qaeda’s co-ordinator with home-grown Pakistani terrorist groups after 9/11.
Some believe al-Libbi’s significance has been cynically hyped by two countries that want to distract attention from their lack of progress in capturing Bin Laden, who has now been on the run for almost four years.
Even a senior FBI official admitted that al-Libbi’s “influence and position have been overstated”. But this weekend the Pakistani government was sticking to the line that al-Libbi was the third most important person in the Al-Qaeda network.
One American official tried to explain the absence of al-Libbi’s name on the wanted list by saying: “We did not want him to know he was wanted.”
Whatever his importance, al-Libbi is the sixth Al-Qaeda figure to have been caught in Pakistan, suggesting that the country is now the organisation’s centre of operations. The interior minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao, conceded that Bin Laden and his deputy might be hiding in a Pakistani city.
“But the capture of al-Libbi will have made them very apprehensive. Whether big fry or small fry, they’re on the run, I can tell you that.”
Bush hails capture of bin Laden general
By James Rupert
Newsday
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Pakistan and the United States declared a major victory against al-Qaida yesterday with the capture of its purported No. 3 official, a Libyan named Abu Faraj al-Libbi. The arrest was "a critical victory in the war on terror," President Bush said.
Pakistan's government has said al-Libbi organized two bomb attacks against President Pervez Musharraf, and U.S. officials described him as al-Qaida's operations chief. Officials of both governments said Pakistani forces seized al-Libbi in recent days with the help of U.S. intelligence, but Pakistani authorities gave scant and partly conflicting accounts of the capture.
Bush said in Washington that "al-Libbi was a top general for [Osama] bin Laden ... a major facilitator and a chief planner for the al-Qaida network. His arrest removes a dangerous enemy who is a direct threat to America."
Intelligence officials said al-Libbi had assumed the role of operations chief after the arrest in Pakistan of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in March 2003.
"This is the most significant takedown of a senior al-Qaida leader since" Mohammed, a U.S. counterterrorism official said. Still, al-Libbi and his role in al-Qaida are little-known. His name emerged publicly as an al-Qaida leader only eight months ago.
Officials in Peshawar and Mohammed Sadiq, Pakistan's deputy ambassador in Washington, said al-Libbi was arrested in Mardan, a city 30 miles northeast of Peshawar. But other officials said he was seized in South Waziristan, a district on the border with Afghanistan about 170 miles southwest of Peshawar. Several accounts said he was arrested after a heavy gunbattle, a detail denied by the information minister, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed.
By various reports, the arrest happened as late as yesterday or as early as two weeks ago. The counterterrorism official said the seizure came a few days ago, after the CIA and Pakistan had worked on the case for "several months."
Human intelligence — meaning information from people with knowledge about al-Libbi, rather than from electronic eavesdropping — "played a critical role" in al-Libbi's capture, the official said.
Ahmed and the interior minister, Aftab Sherpao, separately met reporters to announce the arrest. At his news conference, Sherpao held up a color mug shot of al-Libbi backed up against a tiled wall, looking dour, his beard shaggy and his face mottled by a skin-pigmentation disorder.
The photo was a contrast with the one on a Pakistani "wanted" poster issued in August that first made al-Libbi a known figure. Then he wore a crisp suit and tie; his beard and hair were neatly trimmed.
In August, Ahmed said al-Libbi was one of two al-Qaida "masterminds" behind two assassination attempts against Musharraf in December 2003. The government offered a 20 million rupee ($330,000) reward for information leading to his arrest.
The other man named as a mastermind of the attacks, Amjad Hussein Farooqi, died in a shootout with police in September. Farooqi also was involved in the kidnapping and murder of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002.
Yesterday, Ahmed described al-Libbi as "the planner, as far as al-Qaida was concerned" of the bombings that narrowly missed Musharraf's motorcades. The second bombing shredded other vehicles and killed at least 15 people.
Pakistani officials voiced hope that al-Libbi's arrest would yield information to let them quickly arrest other al-Qaida activists.
In Peshawar, terrorism analysts said security forces had conducted a large raid yesterday in the Bajaur tribal district nearby, arresting several suspected militants, Pakistanis and foreigners alike.
Pakistan gave no clear sign of what will happen to al-Libbi. He faces charges arising from the assassination attempts against Musharraf. Sherpao, the interior minister, said it was too early to say whether he might be handed over to the United States for its pursuit of al-Qaida internationally.
The announcement of the arrests followed the visit in Islamabad on Monday of Gen. John Abizaid, the chief of the U.S. Central Command, and Gen. Mike Jackson, the British chief of general staff. Both were briefed on the arrest.
Newsday reporter Knut Royce contributed to this story. Information on Daniel Pearl from Reuters and on Gen. Abizaid from The Washington Post.
Copyright
Libyan is 4th Al-Qaida No. 3 captured so far
Sunday, May 08, 2005
By Paul Haven, The Associated Press
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- A Libyan seized in Pakistan last week was the fourth purported No. 3 leader of al-Qaida killed or captured since the Sept. 11 attacks, but the global dragnet has yet to reach up the terror group's hierarchy to the main prizes -- Osama bin Laden and his right-hand man, Ayman Zawahiri.
Pakistani and U.S. officials hope that the arrest of Abu Farraj Libbi after a shootout in a graveyard Monday may change that. At least five other al-Qaida suspects have been detained in Pakistan over the past week, intelligence officials say.
If anyone knows the whereabouts of bin Laden, they say, it ought to be Libbi, who is said to have been a close confidant since the early 1990s, even before the Saudi millionaire set up al-Qaida.
Pakistani Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said authorities were "on the right track" to capture bin Laden, and others in the government echoed that sentiment.
A senior intelligence officer told The Associated Press on Thursday that Libbi had been in frequent contact with bin Laden and Zawahiri in recent months and that Pakistani interrogators were grilling him on the terror chief's whereabouts.
"Only two questions are being asked, over and over and in different shifts: 'Where is bin Laden?' and 'What were your plans?' " said the Pakistani official, who has intimate knowledge of the interrogation and agreed to discuss it only if his name were not revealed.
But some terrorism analysts doubt that U.S. and Pakistani agents will get the answers they seek. "Even if this man does give some information, the chances are that bin Laden's protectors would have already taken precautions to whisk their leader to a safer place," said Paul Wilkinson, chairman of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
There are also questions whether Libbi or anyone else is really al-Qaida's "No. 3" man. "He's definitely close to the leadership, but I'm not happy with the No. 3 designation," said Wilkinson. "I think it is unlikely there is a numerical hierarchy after al-Zawahiri, who is most certainly the deputy."
Official optimism that bin Laden's days are numbered has been voiced before, only to vanish like the al-Qaida chief himself.
He is still believed hiding in the rugged mountains that divide Pakistan and Afghanistan. With the exception of a few audio and video threats to unleash more carnage, bin Laden and his deputy lie low, and that might be the secret to eluding the largest manhunt in history.
Their underlings, presumably more involved in the day-to-day managing of the terror network, have not done as well:
The first man dubbed al-Qaida's No. 3, Mohammed Atef, was killed by a U.S. airstrike on Kabul in November 2001 as the Taliban regime crumbled in Afghanistan.
Abu Zubaydah, the next to assume the role, was captured March 28, 2002, in the eastern city of Faisalabad. The Saudi-born Palestinian survived gunshot wounds in the stomach, groin and leg, and has been in U.S. custody ever since.
Zubaydah's replacement, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was arrested in Rawalpindi, near the Pakistani capital, on March 1, 2003. He also is in U.S. custody.
Ramzi Binalshibh, another top bin Laden deputy, was arrested in the southern city of Karachi on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Libbi is said to have assumed a wider role in al-Qaida since Mohammed's capture. U.S. counterterrorism officials say Libbi is believed to have coordinated the movement of fighters and other logistical and planning activities for operations in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Europe and beyond.
A Pakistani military intelligence agent said officials tracked down Libbi after U.S. agents intercepted a mobile phone call he made. They zeroed in on his suspected location and waited, with some agents disguised in all-enveloping women's burqas.
Witnesses told the AP that Pakistani agents ambushed Libbi and another man as they rode a motorbike across a cemetery on the outskirts of Mardan, in the country's conservative northwest. The other man was arrested on the spot, but Libbi fled to a nearby guest house, where he tried to hide, the witnesses said.
"I am a jihadi. Police are after me!" Bakht Munir quoted Libbi as saying, moments before commandos subdued him with tear gas. The Libyan was clutching a mobile phone as he was led away, tears streaming down his face, Munir said.
Bin Laden is unlikely to make the same mistake. If he is communicating at all, it is likely through messages carried on muleback and passed through a dizzying network of couriers.
"The al-Qaida leadership and those protecting them are very aware of the threat of communications being intercepted, so they have found ways around that -- using couriers and other basic methods -- that avoid the dangers of being listened to by even the most advanced type of technology," Wilkinson said.
http://bluememe.blogspot.com/2005/05/fool-me-once-shame-on-you.html
Note to mainstream media: there's this concept called credibility. The way it works is that the extent to which you give credence to what someone tells you today is based upon the truth value of things they told you yesterday. Shall I repeat that for you? Use smaller words?
If you are willing to concede that this is the first time anyone has explained this concept to you, I might be willing to give you a pass for your complete failure to apply it to date. (Well, everyone but Judith Miller, who is apparently beyond redemption. And Bob Woodward, who knew this shit cold once upon a time.)
Once you have mastered that concept, you can try this: when evaluating the likelihood that someone is blowing smoke up your collective journalistic asses, ask yourselves: how does this story serve the interests of the source of the story? You know, context. Like the WMD schtick and the Bush team's obvious desire to control Iraq's oil. And, oh, let me go out on a limb here, the amazing confluence of the capture of this Al Qaeda dude and the British elections. Not that the adorable canine Blair himself has the power to bring even third-rate terrorists to heel, but consider the possibility that the way Bush gets his favorite pooch to sit and stay is with these kinds of Persian-flavored Beggin' Bits.
Oh, I can see by the looks on your faces that I have totally lost you. Let's start over...
http://blogenlust.typepad.com/blogenlust/2005/05/you_say_al_liby.html
You Say al Liby, I say al Libbi
I share confusion with tas at Loaded Mouth over the capture of Abu Faraj Farj al Liby, the most recent #3 man in al Qaeda to be captured:
A couple of days ago, Pakistani authorities captured Abu Faraj Farj al Liby, whom I'm under the assumption is also known as Anas Al-Liby, one of the FBI's most wanted terrorists.
However, I'm not sure if they are the same person since FOXnews says, "Al-Libbi's name was not on the FBI list of most wanted terrorists." Somehow, I find the omission of bin Laden's backup righthand man from the list of the most wanted terrorists hard to believe. Both Al-Libbi/Al-Liby that was captured, and the Al-Liby I see on the FBI's list are Libyan born, and the photo the FBI has of Al-Liby bears a resemblence to the man in the photo of Al-Libbi/Al-Liby released to the press.
A big problem, and point of confusion for yours truly, lies in the custody of Al-Liby. Because, apparently, he was already captured in Afghanistan back in 2002.
Weird. I'd also add the convenient timing of his capture at a time when Bush's approval ratings are in the toilet, nothing is going right for his Administration's legislative agenda, and Iraq is blowing up (again). Funny how these people with names that are hard to remember, but sure sound scary, get caught at such politically expedient times! Not that I'm suggesting they would ever do something like that. Again.
Anyway, #3 is so our lucky number! Here is some info on other #3's (in my best Dr. Evil voice) we've captured:
* Abu Zubaida, March 28, 2002:
The reference is to Abu Zubaidah, then projected by the US intelligence agencies as the No 3 to Osama bin Laden in Al Qaeda. He was arrested by the Pakistani authorities, at the instance of US intelligence, from the house of an office-bearer of the Lashkar-e-Tayiba, a member of bin Laden's International Islamic Front at Faislabad in Pakistani Punjab on March 28 last year and flown by the FBI to the US naval base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia for interrogation. It is not known where he is kept presently.
* Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, March 1st 2003:
There have been a series of raids on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in the weeks since authorities captured Al Qaeda's No. 3 figure, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in Pakistan on March 1. Authorities have said Mohammed is giving information to U.S. interrogators and have said some of the subsequent arrests came as a result of his capture.
Saddam Hussein, December 13th, 2003:
I kid.
As John Stewart said on last night's Daily Show: "It seems like the #3 guy is sort of a raw deal in al Qaeda."
UPDATE (5/7): Tas has some more information on the al-Liby/al-Libbi connection. He thinks they are two different people, but there still remains a lot of confusion and interesting story lines. Check it out.
UPDATE (5/9): Oops. I expect a public correction, oh, about a quarter to never
Post a Comment
<< Home