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News :: International Relations |
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A Breakthrough In The War On Terror? I'll Believe It When We See Some Evidence |
Current rating: 0 |
by Robert Fisk
(No verified email address) |
03 Mar 2003
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In the theatre of the absurd into which America's hunt for al-Qa'ida so often descends, the "arrest" - the quotation marks are all too necessary - of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is nearer the Gilbert and Sullivan end of the repertory. |
In the theatre of the absurd into which America's hunt for al-Qa'ida so often descends, the "arrest" the quotation marks are all too necessary of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is nearer the Gilbert and Sullivan end of the repertory.
First, Mr 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 11 attacks" was how the US 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 Mr Mohammed "is still with us and in our protection and we challenge the US 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 untrue.
Not least because the last post known to be held by the former Kuwaiti with a Pakistani passport was media adviser to the marriage of Osama bin Laden's son in Kandahar in January of 2001. Then there was the slow revelation that the man whose supposed arrest was described by Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, as "a wonderful blow to inflict on al-Qa'ida" had been handed over to the Pakistani authorities (if indeed he had been handed over) by the ISI, the Pakistani Interservices Intelligence for whom Mr Mohammed used to work.
Like the man accused of arranging the murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, Mr 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. Mr Pearl, it should be remembered, arranged his fatal assignation in Karachi on a mobile phone from an ISI office.
True, Mr Mohammed is the uncle of the 1993 World Trade Center conspirator Ramzi Yousef and a brother of an al-Qa'ida 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 11 September "mastermind" "It's hard to overstate how significant this is," the ever loquacious Mr Fleischer told 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 deep waters were also muddied by the White House's claim that four men executed in an attack by a missile-firing pilotless drone aircraft in Yemen last year were "among al-Qa'ida'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 the authorities' word that Mr 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 Mr Mohammed may be kept in Pakistani custody until another "mastermind" can be discovered. Or it may be that reports of the "arrest" of the likes of Mr Mohammed are very useful to General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's President, when he's just angered the Americans by criticizing any US 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 Mr Mohammed's arrest and deportation and then his non-deportation are concerned when constabulary duty's to be done, a policeman's lot is not a happy one. Especially if he belongs to the ISI.
© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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See also:
http://www.independent.co.uk/
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Comments
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More Interesting Spin On This |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
04 Mar 2003
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http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2003/03/1579620.php |
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Re: A Breakthrough In The War On Terror? I'll Believe It When We See Some Evidence |
by TEd
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
04 Mar 2003
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Of course, these are all zionist lies, like 9/11. That's clearly John Belushi in the photograph, who was brought back from the dead using the CIA's mind-control rays.
You people are pathetic. |
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The Plot Thickens |
by via TPR/ML
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
04 Mar 2003
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From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation website:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s796172.htm
Sunday, March 2, 2003. Posted: 23:00:30 (AEDT)
Pakistani's family shocked by Al Qaeda arrest
The sister of a Pakistani arrested in a swoop that authorities say also netted the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks has said he was the only man present at the time of the raid and had no ties to any extremist group.
Pakistani authorities said on Saturday local time they had arrested three Al Qaeda suspects in an early morning raid on a house in the city of Rawalpindi near Islamabad.
Those held included Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks, and 41-year-old Pakistani Ahmed Quddus, they said.
An intelligence source said the third man was an Egyptian national, but gave no details.
However, members of Quddus's family said he was the only person arrested in a raid by 20 to 25 security men armed with Kalashnikov rifles on their house in Westridge, a middle-class area of Rawalpindi at 22:30 GMT Friday.
"My brother was the only man in the house when the raid took place," his sister Qudsia Khanum said.
"He was taken away while his wife and kids were herded into a room and locked in.
"They didn't even know when they took him... or where.
"My brother has never been involved in any bad things.
"Actually, he's a bit slow, he's not very clever, so I can't even begin to imagine that he could be involved with any terrorist organisation.
"He does not have any links with any terrorist organisation.
"They're saying such strange things about him in the press.
"He's been living in the neighbourhood for 15 years and everyone knows him to be a placid person," she said.
Ms Qudsia said her mother was a district administrator of Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan's largest Islamic political party, and her father a retired microbiologist who used to work for the United Nations and had lived abroad.
She said he was in Lahore for a wedding at the time of the raid.
"He's a heart patient so we had to break the news gently to him," she said.
Computer seized
Ahmed's cousin Omar Khan, a medical doctor, said the security men took away a computer when they searched the house.
Some analysts questioned whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had actually been arrested on Saturday and speculated he may have been held for some time.
"I think he was arrested several months ago in the shootout in Karachi," one expert on Pakistan who declined to be identified said, referring to a gunbattle in September in the southern port city that netted another Al Qaeda figure, Ahmed Omar Abdel Rahman, known as Binalshibh.
Mohammed was reported to have narrowly evaded capture in that battle, when Karachi police identified him as a man hit by a police sniper.
But a suspected militant later denied this.
Another terror expert said several weeks ago he believed Mohammed had been arrested and that he expected the news would be only be made public when it was in the interests of the United States and Pakistan.
The first analyst said the arrest could make Islamic militants even more wary of the Pakistani Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) that they had considered an ally when the country was backing the Taliban in Afghanistan before September 11.
"Those who think they have ISI protection will stop feeling that comfort level," he said.
Pakistani officials said on Sunday local time that Mohammed had been handed over to US custody soon after his arrest.
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Raided Family Of Microbiologist Denies Official Version Of Al-Qaida Arrests |
by Rory McCarthy
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
04 Mar 2003
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The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0%2C3604%2C906384%2C00.html
Rory McCarthy in Rawalpindi
Monday March 3, 2003
US and Pakistani officials were last night questioning Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected architect of the September 11 attacks and al-Qaida kingpin arrested in a dramatic swoop over the weekend.
His arrest was hailed by officials in Washington as a significant blow to Osama bin Laden's network. "That's fantastic," George Bush told his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, when she passed on the news.
Other US officials were even more effusive. "This is a very huge event. This is the equivalent of the liberation of Paris during the second world war," Porter Goss, a Florida Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said.
Mohammed was captured in a raid on a private house on Saturday in Rawalpindi. Pakistani intelligence service agents were initially believed to have handed him straight over to US officials.
He was said to have been flown out of the country to an undisclosed location.
However this was denied by the Pakistani government which insisted he was still in their hands and was being jointly questioned.
Yesterday the Khan family who live at the two-storey grey house at 18a Nisar Road, where officials say they found Mohammed, gave a very different account of the raid.
Dr Abdul Quddus Khan, 78, a retired microbiologist who runs a respected cardiology institute lives at the house with his wife Mahlaqa, their son Ahmed, 42, his wife and their two young children. Dr Khan and his wife were at a wedding in Lahore on Friday.
At 3am on Saturday a squad of around 20 armed police and intelligence officers kicked open the door and burst into the house. They dragged away Ahmed and held his wife and children at gunpoint for an hour as they ransacked the house, according to Ahmed's sister Qudsia.
"They left clothes and books strewn on the floor and took a bundle of dollar bills which were locked in a cupboard," she said. "The bedrooms were turned upside down, one door upstairs was broken and they took the new computer," she said.
At no point, the family say, was Mohammed or any other man in the house. The agents did not even ask about them. "The only people in the house were my brother, his wife and their kids," Qudsia said. "I have absolutely no idea why the police came here."
Officials at Pakistan's interior ministry insist they found Mohammed and one other Arab al-Qaida suspect in the house and arrested them at the same time as Ahmed was detained. Yet the family and their supporters challenge the official account and say Mohammed must have been arrested in another raid at another time.
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