And just in from Juan Cole at JuanCole.com: A case of misidentification?
You may remember thePakistani barber who protested his picture being displayed as one of al-Qaeda's main man operatives. Now, Professor Cole posits: western confusion with the complexity of Arab names may be behind al-Libbi's meteoric promotion within the mythical terror organization.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/
south_asia/4512885.stm
Kurt Nimmo
May 08, 2005
As it turns out, the “Al-Qaeda kingpin” Faraj al-Libbi is a nobody in the illusory world of al-Qaeda terrorism, according to a story in the Sunday Times today. European intelligence experts are scratching their heads at Bush’s pronouncement the arrest of al-Libbi is a “a critical victory in the war on terror.” 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 organization.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Abu_Faraj_al-Libbi
Moreover, al-Libbi was not included in the State Department’s “rewards for justice,” as reported widely in the corporate media (and mentioned here yesterday). I speculated that the Libyan has nothing to do with al-Qaeda and was set-up by the Pakistanis to take a fall in a plot to assassinate Pervez Musharraf. It appears this is closer to the truth than all the nonsense appearing in the corporate press here in the United States. “The only operations in which he is known to have been involved are two attempts to assassinate Pervez Musharraf,” write Christina Lamb and Mohammad Shehzad Islamabad for the Sunday Times. “He was never more than a regional facilitator between Al-Qaeda and local Pakistani Islamic groups.”
Lamb and Islamabad speculate on the hype surrounding al-Libbi’s arrest: “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.” It should be noted that the United States and Pakistan worked together in the 1980s to create what they would ultimately call “al-Qaeda.”
So important was the continued existence of a spook-created Islamic terror network (generically called “al-Qaeda” for propaganda purposes), Pakistan “secretly ran a major training camp” in Afghanistan in the 1990s (one of several camps constructed with CIA money), according to US intelligence documents. Pakistani agents “encouraged, facilitated and often escorted Arabs from the Middle East into Afghanistan,” well after the Soviets were defeated and had departed. (See Frankenstein the CIA created). It is well-known (outside of the corporate media) that this Islamic terror network was put to use in the Balkans and elsewhere (see U.S. supported al-Qaeda cells during Balkan Wars by Isabel Vincent, National Post).
Aftab Khan Sherpao, Pakistan’s interior minister, attempted to put the best face on the revelation that al-Libbi is a nobody by stating that his capture “will have made [Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri] very apprehensive. Whether big fry or small fry, they’re on the run, I can tell you that.”
And they will be on the run forever because the United States and Pakistan have a vested interest in not apprehending terrorists (it will be difficult to catch Osama because he is dead) and making sure terrorists (those retained by the CIA-ISI) pose an open-ended threat for the indeterminable future (or for a least a generation or two, as Cheney tells us). So long as terrorism—devised, organized, and unleashed by the CIA (remember, the Afghan mujihadeen operation was declared to be the CIA’s most successful in its long and sordid history)—is useful in scaring the dickens out of gullible Americans, and can be used to pick their pockets and dismantle their civil liberties, it will remain viable bedtime story, even if the “terrorists” they apprehend are nothing more than al-Qaeda wannabes or coffee gofers and copy boys, as a source quoted by the Sundays Times indicates al-Libbi was.
In the meantime, expect the Bush echo chamber, otherwise known as the corporate media, to drop the al-Libbi story like a hot potato, or at least shift it to the back pages. Expect, as well, the average American consumer, who has the memory of a person suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, to forget about al-Libbi in record time, while remarkably retaining the impression that Bush and Crew are “making progress” in the bogus war against a manufactured terrorism.
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/
timeline/people/musharraf.jpg
May 07, 2005
Authorities in Pakistan have arrested “18 people thought to be part of the terrorist network of Abu Faraj al-Libbi,” who is billed as numero tres in the big bad al-Qaeda “network,” according to CNN. “In the course of the effort to seize the people, agents learned some of those detained were planning to assassinate President Pervez Musharraf, the officials said.” Abu Faraj al-Libbi was arrested earlier this week in Mardan, a town 30 miles north of Peshawar, after doing something no serious terrorist would do—he attempted to make a call on his cell phone. “A military intelligence agent said on condition of anonymity that Pakistani authorities received a tip after U.S. agents intercepted a cell phone call al-Libbi had made,” reports the Associated Press. It would seem the feared Osama bin Laden is scraping the bottom of the barrel in his search for holy warriors.
“It was only through the interrogation of a number of suspects—arrested between January and August last year—that the Pakistani authorities started taking note of [al-Libbi’s] presence in the [al-Qaeda] hierarchy,” explains the BBC. “Every time we interrogate a militant linked to al-Qaeda, al-Libbi’s name pops up,” a Pakistani security official told the BBC. So important was the capture of al-Libbi, he figured prominently on a poster of “Most Wanted Terrorists” in Pakistan and a 20m rupees ($340,000) bounty was placed on his head (the U.S. subsequently offered $1 million), not exactly a small chunk of change in Pakistan where more than 30 percent of the population survives on less than a dollar a day. Considering this, and the fact al-Libbi should have been relatively easy to spot due to the fact his face is disfigured by a skin disorder (luecoderma), the Libyan remained free to serve as Osama’s “international operations planner,” or so we are told.
So-called “president” Musharraf (after a “bloodless” coup in 1999, Musharraf held a “referendum” and declared himself “president,” even though the majority of Pakistani political groups boycotted and voter turnout was less than 30 percent) “directly blamed [al-Libbi] for financing and supervising two attempts on his life in December 2003″ in Rawalpindi. Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, contradicting his boss, denied “that security forces have foiled another planned attack on the life of President General Pervez Musharraf,” according to an item appearing today on Pakistan Link. It should also be noted that Mushtaq Ahmed (a former Pakistani air force official), said to be an al-Libbi associate (and thus al-Qaeda) involved in the alleged Musharraf assassination plan and re-captured on May 5, had mysteriously escaped from prison after receiving a death sentence handed down for the earlier Musharraf assassination plot (this would be something like John Hinckley escaping from St. Elizabeth’s Mental Hospital and attempting to shoot Reagan again).
Is it possible al-Libbi and Ahmed have little if anything to do with al-Qaeda and are instead involved with an effort to get rid of Musharraf? “Musharraf has major problems in the form of rebellion in Sindh, Balochistan and now we also hear in Pakistani Punjab,” writes Balaji Reddy for the India Daily. “He has done everything to shut the mouth of democratic opposition,” behavior obviously not uncharacteristic for a military dictator who fancies himself democratically elected. Although Indians complaining about Pakistanis should be taken with a grain of salt, the theory holds up under scrutiny, especially considering “Pakistan has been a key U.S. ally in the war on terrorism and the hunt for bin Laden,” as CNN puts it, a hunt that is more public relations stunt than an actual sincere effort to get rid of al-Qaeda and Bin Laden, a man Bush told us some time ago no longer concerns him. Instead, al-Libbi is the terrorist du jour in the shadow of Bin Laden, a victory for the home team (in a media sense, anyway), and his capture serves both Bush and Musharraf, the latter who needs all the traction he can gain as millions of Pakistanis desperately attempt to get rid of him.
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