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May 07, 2005
Is it Anas al-Liby or Abu Faraj al-Libbi?
The Times Online is reporting that the big Al-Qaeda catch last week may well be a small fish.
The capture of a supposed Al-Qaeda kingpin by Pakistani agents last week was hailed by President George W Bush as “a critical victory in the war on terror”. According to European intelligence experts, however, 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 organisation.
Abu Faraj al-Libbi was not on the FBI most wanted list nor on the list of the State Department's “rewards for justice” program. But it may be another case of mistaken identity,
Another Libyan is on the FBI list — Anas al-Liby, who is wanted over the 1998 East African embassy bombings — and some believe the Americans may have initially confused the two. 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.
It will be interesting to see how all this pans out. Will the liberal Bush bashing US press pick it up?
Update: May 8, 2005
As far as I can see this story has not been picked up by any of the mainstream media in the US. However, Eschaton, The Primate Journal, and Really Not Worth Achieving and The Light Of Reason among the blogs did get it.
Posted by DuaneSmith at May 7, 2005 09:15 PM | Read more on Current Events |
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Hey, came from your trackback.
TIME Magazine has a story with conflicting reports on al-Libbi. This is the only other mention in the news as far as I know.
"According to an Islamabad intelligence source, the burqa-clad fugitive arrested by the Pakistani commandos last week was not al-Libbi but a local Pakistani militant. Al-Libbi, the source says, had been seized a few weeks earlier, but his arrest was hushed up so agents could pursue unsuspecting collaborators. U.S. counterterrorism sources insist on the official version. "We not only believe, we know it happened this week," a U.S. official told TIME."
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1058999,00.html
Posted by: Mandrillus Sphinx at May 8, 2005 12:03 PM
Thanks, after reading the Time story, I have a somewhat different view of what happened. The part of the article you quote seems to give a third account of how this came about. By this, it to me appears that al Libbi was already in custody when al Liby was captured. That is if al Libbi was captured at all. I'm not sure if the remainder of the Times article is about Libbi or Liby or the two conflated.
Posted by: Duane at May 8, 2005 01:05 PM
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