'Terror Boss' Moves Up Ladder as U.S. Sees Fit

posted by NYC on Tuesday March 04, @02:10PM

From Chicago Sun-Times:

March 4, 2003

By Debra Pickett, Sun-Times Columnist

A month after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush released a list of the world's most-wanted terrorists. There were 22 names on it. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was No. 22.

And the list wasn't alphabetical.

But, sometime between then and early Saturday morning, when Mohammed was captured in Pakistan, the U.S. government identified Mohammed as the mastermind behind the al-Qaida plot.

Continued.

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Osama bin Laden, we're now told, is pretty much a figurehead: It's Mohammed who made things happen. Over the past 2-1/2 years, he's climbed from last place to a photo finish for No. 1 on the most-wanted list.

The cynical view on this is that Mohammed is still the relatively small fish we were first told he was, but the news of his arrest is being hyped because the Bush administration needs a victory in the war on terrorism before going to war in Iraq.

The merely skeptical view is that we are clueless about how al-Qaida really works.

When Mohammed's name first made international news, he was described as an accomplice to Ramzi Yousef, the convicted mastermind behind the first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993. In retrospect, that might have been Mohammed's stint in the terrorist-mastermind internship program.

In the first intelligence reports following the 2001 attacks, Mohammed was named as an "al-Qaida operative," a couple of levels down the organizational chart from bin Laden's top deputy, Egyptian doctor Ayman Zawahiri, al-Qaida military commander Mohammed Atef and security chief Saif al-Adil. Those were the big fish.

Mohammed's name came up again when officials began to speculate about how al-Qaida might be reorganizing in the wake of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. With bin Laden apparently on the run, and periodically presumed to be dead, it seemed to make sense that an operational guy, with a lower profile, might step in to run things. Mohammed seemed to be that guy. He was described as "al-Qaida's engineer," a nerdy, uncharismatic sort, a middle manager who'd probably never get the key to the executive washroom, no matter how much he sucked up to the boss.

Then, in the summer of 2002, things started to change.

News reports quoted U.S. officials as saying that Mohammed was like the "Forrest Gump of al-Qaida." His name and fingerprints seemed to be everywhere. He'd been involved in all of al-Qaida's major attacks. But no one had noticed. The class nerd has a way of fading into the background.

Around the same time, the government started to release intelligence information it had gathered from "various sources," which, we all understood, included alleged al-Qaida members being held at Guantanamo Bay and other, undisclosed, locations. Abu Zubeida, who was described as a top bin Laden lieutenant when he was captured in Pakistan last year, is widely assumed to be one of those sources. He's apparently the first person to have told U.S. officials that Mohammed was the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

Here in Illinois, we've learned a little something about the reliability of jailhouse witnesses. It's not clear that U.S. intelligence officers have come to the same understanding. Soon after their first interrogations of Zubeida, the government offered a $25 million reward for Mohammed's capture.

Forrest Gump had become an official terrorist mastermind.

For the first time in his long al-Qaida career, he appeared on al-Jazeera TV, the CNN of the Arab world. His bosses were nowhere to be found. Mohammed had replaced bin Laden as the face of al-Qaida. He'd also replaced the Rev. Jesse Jackson as the world's most famous North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University alumnus.

Mohammed's star fell, briefly, when a raid in Karachi, Pakistan, last September netted Ramzi bin al-Shibh. When we captured him, President Bush announced that bin al-Shibh was "one of the chief planners and organizers" of the Sept. 11 attacks. Then, like Zubeida before him, this alleged big shot apparently told intelligence officers that no, he wasn't very important within al-Qaida; it was really Mohammed they wanted.

Now, we have him. But no one seems to be breathing any great sighs of relief. We don't feel any safer. We're just waiting for the next revision to the most-wanted list.

It seems that every time we capture one of these guys, we insist that he's the one we wanted all along. Then, he points a finger at Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. So you have to wonder who Mohammed himself will blame.

A cynic might guess that he'd modestly decline to take credit and, instead, tell us, finally, who was truly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks:

Saddam Hussein.

http://www.suntimes.com/output/pickett/cst-nws-pickett04.html

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