Juan Cole, echoing BoomanTribune’s BooMan and Catnip, writes this morning:
The question is whether Bush played politics with terror around the time of the Democratic National Convention in late July, 2004. Jim Lobe reminded us at the time that ‘ The New Republic weekly quoted Pakistani intelligence officials as saying the White House had asked them to announce the arrest or killing of any “high-value [al-Qaeda] target” any time between July 26 and 28, the first three days of the Democratic Convention. At the time, former CIA officer Robert Baer said … “To keep these guys off-balance, a lot of this stuff should be kept in secret. You get no benefit from announcing an arrest like this.”
In response to White House pressure, the Pakistanis [made an arrest] announced during the Democratic National Convention … (Read all of Cole’s analysis.)
Is there nothing that Bushco won’t stoop to. This is truly despicable. A shocking abuse of power.
Let’s see the pundits concentrate on this angle. As if.
It does help that Cole has picked up the story, snice he’s so widely read and respected, and a frequent guest on “respectable” programs.
I think the fact that ABC’s own story (astonishingly) omits the very facts that makes the story important in the first place, (namely that this guy Khan was serving our interests as a mole), doesn’t bode well for the idea that any of the millionaire mannequin pundits in the MSM will dare to refer to this salient fact.
This is the article on this that appeared in a Pakistani newspaper here.
Blowing the cover of our only clandestine source inside the al Qaeda network is, to me, one more clear sign that the Bush regime has no intention of “winning” this supposed “War on Terror”. Indeed, this unconscionable act of self-sabotage seems only to support the idea that their goal is perpetual war for the forseeable future
Everything we see that is a shocking abuse of power is done with the (usually successful) intention of getting even more power.
What was most troubling (I don’t mean that in a negative way) about Democracy Now! this morning was that Norman Solomon’s role was to REMIND the audience that the Democrats have their own history of obfuscation and lies in terms of military activities… Amy Goodman even played a clip of Wesley Clark defending a bombing in Bosnia … that section of the transcript isn’t up yet.
Cole may echo our comments, but it’s only insofar as the details of the actual growing scandal go. He doesn’t appear to be as skeptical of all of this as I am – preferring to just throw it out there and see what sticks. I’m a bit surprised, actually.
Spaghetti journalism!
It seems that the British raid, prompted by the Bush administration leak of the name of an Al-Qaeda mole, may not have been the same raid in which Sadique Khan, one of the London terror suspects, escaped.
According to the French newspaper, Liberation, Sadique Khan escaped from a British raid conducted in March 2004:
According to the French intelligence services, the London suicide bombers belonged to the same network as the Britons of Pakistani origin who were partially arrested in Great Britain in March 2004. So Nicholas Sarkozy, French interior minister explained yesterday in Bruxelles at the EU council meeting. “It seems that part of that team were arrested in spring 2004…” The bombers, according to the french minister, weren’t amongst those arrested at the time.
Out of “the 13 presumed terrorists identified by the British only 8 were arrested and 5 escaped. The arrests were part of an operation which recovered 600kg of explosives,” said the senior French police officer, who yesterday revealed to Libération the fact that amongst the five who escaped from the operation was Mohammed Kahn, one of the alleged suicide bombers who struck on the London Underground. This Briton of Pakistani descent has been on the list of Scotland Yard’s “targets” for the last 15 months, only with a different age and a different first name – Kayoun instead of Sidique, but “it’s the same man” who gave the police the slip.
http://www.rmfr.com/archives/2005/07/index.html#000255
The arrest of Naeem Noor Khan, the Al-Qaeda mole, did not take place until July 13, 2004. If this article is accurate (and I think it may not be…will update later on why), it would rebut the theory that the Bush leak contributed to the escape of any of the London bombers.
An anonymous friend said, about Catnip’s piece on this, there’s a reason why it’s called the ABCIA.
I’ve never heard the network being called that before. What does that suggest? Thanks.