[Media-watch] FW:Was 'mastermind' really captured

[david Miller]

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From: "The SNAFU Principle" <snafu.principle at verizon.net>
Reply-To: media-squatters at yahoogroups.com
More war spin:


  TheStar.com - Was 'mastermind' really captured?
        Ftrom Toronto Star: March 3, 2003
        Mar. 3, 2003. 05:09 AM




        Was 'mastermind' really captured?


        ROBERT FISK
        SPECIAL TO THE STAR

        In the theatre of the absurd into which America's hunt for Al Qaeda
so often descends, the "arrest" - the quotation marks are all too
necessary - of Khaled Shaikh Mohammed is nearer the Gilbert and Sullivan end
of the repertory.

        First, Mohammed was arrested in a joint raid by the CIA and
Pakistani agents near Islamabad and spirited out of the country to an
"undisclosed location." "The man who masterminded the September 11th
attacks," was how the United States billed this latest "victory" in the "war
against terror" (again, quotation marks are obligatory). Then the Pakistanis
announced that he hadn't been taken out of Pakistan at all. Then a Pakistani
police official expressed his ignorance of any such arrest.

        And then, a Taliban "source" - this means the real Taliban but
"source" is supposed to cover the fact that the old Afghan regime still
exists - claimed that Mohammed "is still with us and in our protection and
we challenge the United States to prove their claim."

        By this stage, it looked like a case of the "whoops" school of
journalism: a good story that just might be totally untrue.

        Not least because the last post known to be held by the Kuwaiti with
a Pakistani passport was media adviser to the marriage of Osama bin Laden's
son in Kandahar in January, 2001. Then there was the slow revelation that
the man whose arrest was described by White House spokesman Ari Fleischer as
"a wonderful blow to inflict on Al Qaeda," had been handed over to Pakistani
authorities (if indeed he had been handed over) by the ISI, the Pakistani
Interservices Intelligence - for whom Mohammed used to work.

        Like the man accused of arranging the murder of Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl, Mohammed was an ISI asset; indeed, anyone who is
"handed over" by the ISI these days is almost certainly a former (or
present) employee of the Pakistani agency whose control of Taliban
operatives amazed even the Pakistani government during the years before
2001.

        Pearl, it should be remembered, arranged his fatal assignation in
Karachi on a mobile phone from an ISI office in the city.

        True, Mohammed is the uncle of the 1993 World Trade Center
conspirator Ramzi Youssef and a brother of an Al Qaeda operative. True,
another brother was killed in a bomb explosion in Pakistan - he was
allegedly making the bomb at the time. But claims that he was the Sept. 11
"mastermind" - "it's hard to overstate how significant this is," the ever
loquacious Fleischer informed the world yesterday - are still unprovable.
Hitherto, the nearest to a "mastermind" anyone got was Mounir al-Motassadeq,
who was jailed in Germany last month as an accessory to mass murder.

        The waters - and deep they are - were also muddied by the White
House's claim that four men executed in an attack by a missile-firing
pilotless drone in Yemen last year were "among Al Qaeda's top 20 leaders."

        Whether they were numbers 2 to 5 or 17 to 20, no one at the Pentagon
or White House could say. So how can we trust their word that Mohammed is a
"mastermind?"

        Of course, it may all turn out to be true. We may be provided with
the proof the Taliban demand. Or Mohammed may be kept in Pakistani custody
until another "mastermind" can be found.

        Or it may just be that reports of the "arrest" of the likes of
Mohammed is useful to Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf when he's just angered the
Americans by criticizing any U.S. military attack on Iraq, or when
Pakistan's new regional government in the North West Frontier province has
just instituted Taliban-style laws in Peshawar.

        All in all - as far as Mohammed's arrest and deportation and then
his non-deportation are concerned - when constabulary duty is to be done, a
policeman's lot is not a happy one. Especially if he belongs to the ISI.

        COPYRIGHT: THE INDEPENDENT


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