A
Breakthrough in the War on Terror?
I'll
Believe it When We See the Evidence
by
Robert Fisk
Dissident Voice
March 3, 2003
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 Centre 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 criticising 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.
Robert Fisk is an award
winning foreign correspondent for The
Independent (UK), where this article first
appeared. He is the author of Pity Thy Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon (The
Nation Books, 2002 edition)