As the good news breaks that Pakistan has arrested the Al Qaida organisation's number three honcho, I am utterly mystified by the additional information that he wasn't on the FBI's list of top ten most wanted terrorists.
Pakistani authorities captured Abu Faraj Farj al Liby a few days ago, and have now made the news public after it appears that persons unknown leaked it to Liby's associates who have mostly fled from anywhere he knew they might be.
Reuters reports that:
Pakistan says Abu Faraj Farj al Liby was the ringleader behind at least two assassination attempts against President Pervez Musharraf in December 2003.
And although he does not figure on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's "most wanted list, Liby is believed to have taken over the role of the arrested Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who allegedly masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks on U.S. cities in 2001.
"Al Liby's capture is a great success in the global war on terrorism. He is one of al Qaeda's most senior operational planners and one of the terrorist organization's top leaders," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters.
A U.S. counter-terrorism official in Washington was even more specific: "He is the third most important after bin Laden and Zawahri. It's a significant blow to the group."
So why wasn't he on the FBI's list? Is the number three mastermind, someone who organised the attempted assasination of a US ally and who took over planning attacks like 9/11 not important enough for them? I fail to understand.
UPDATE 8th May
Now I get it - it was pure and simple incompetence. The Times of London reports:
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.
It looks like the Pakistani government decided to shout the capture from the rooftops and the US authorities got al-Libbi confused with the very wanted Anas al-Liby, who is wanted over the 1998 East African embassy bombings. When The Sunday Times contacted a senior FBI counter-terrorism official for information about the importance of the detained al-Libbi, he sent material on al-Liby.
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.”
Now while I say it looks like utter incompetence, there are other possibilities. One is that "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," as the Times reports one critic saying. The other is that US authorities were sold a PR pup by Pakistan, which they incompetently believed.
It is remotely possible that Pakistan is doing the old "say one thing, do another" trick. The regime there is a relatively new "convert" to the coalition cause, and there are tens of thousands of al-Qaida trained militants in Karachi alone. It is possible that the current Pakistani dictatorship needs it's Islamic militants onside to continue to rule and is placating them as much as possible while throwing the occasional bone to the West. Certainly, whatever his importance, al-Libbi is the sixth Al-Qaeda figure to have been caught in Pakistan, suggesting that the country is now the organisation’s centre of operations. The Pakistani interior minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao, has even conceded that Bin Laden and his deputy might be hiding in a Pakistani city.
It brings a mind to ponder, doesn't it? The simplest explanation though is that I was wrong to say the FBI were incompetent in not having this guy on their wanted list - the White House was incompetent in not checking with their own and ally's intelligence outfits before they crowed this one from the rooftops.
Proves they rush to what they want to be true no matter what the intelligence agencies say, though, doesn't it?
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