Arrested “kingpin” turns out to be just a gopher
The arrest of Abu Faraj al-Libbi last week has been hailed by the Washington propaganda machine as “a critical victory in the war on terror”. Bush called him a “top general” and “a major facilitator and chief planner for the Al- Qaeda network”. Condoleezza Rice said he was “a very important figure.” Whoops and backslaps all around, because it looks like the Bush administration finally caught a break after its long streak of worsening news on global terrorism.
Except that they didn’t catch a break, because the guy’s not a major terrorist at all. He didn’t even rate a place on the FBI’s most wanted list. The Bush adminsitration is hyping his arrest because they need a big flashy arrest to distract us from an endless stream of bad news from Iraq and Afghanistan. As to al-Libbi’s absence from the FBI’s most wanted list, a conspicuous omission given that he’s supposed to be the number 3 man in Al Qaeda, the FBI explains it away, with a straight face, thus: “We did not want him to know he was wanted.”
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.”