Al Qaeda Capture: Mistaken Identity?
Amidst much fanfare last week, President Bush announced the capture of Abu Faraj al-Libbi, supposedly a very senior al Qaeda leader in Pakistan who might lead us to Osama. The BBC picked it up here.
Now it turns out, the capture may have been just another Emily Littella moment. The Sunday Times of London reports that European counter-terrorism experts believe Bush and Rice got it wrong, and confused al-Libbi with another much more senior al Qaeda leader named Anas al-Liby, who is thought to be a mastermind of the 1998 US embassy bombings in East Africa. al-Liby has not been captured.
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.”
There's more:
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.”
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.
Other international news agencies report that the interrogaton of al-Libbi is not going well--despite being administered a "truth serum" and being subjected to "phyiscal pressure."
officials said al-Libbi, believed to be Al Qaeda’s number three, has defied efforts to make him reveal valuable information about its senior hierarchy, despite coming under “physical pressure” to do so.
This isn't the first case of alleged mistaken identity. The Independent published this account of a case involving Omar Deghayes who claims he was tortured, blinded and more at Guantanamo because American and Pakistani interrogators mistook him for someone else. There's also Khaled el-Masri, the German shoe salesman and "ghost detainee" that Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice ordered released.
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