And the plot thickens.............. One report has the AL Quada operative already dead!! I have no idea what the truth is but think that all the possibilities should be thrown on the table to view.
atimes.com
Khalid capture: Truths and half truths
By B Raman
United States officials and the army of so-called counter-terrorism experts which sprang up after September 11 are projecting Khalid Shaikh Mohammad as the Field Marshal Montgomery or General Patton of al-Qaeda. But his case is getting more and more complex and mystifying - just like the earlier case involving the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, a US journalist, last year.
Remember the case of Pearl? Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) claimed to have solved the case, without recovering the body, and prosecuted Sheikh Omar and his accomplices. The court was told that they were the only plotters who deserved to be convicted and sentenced to death.
Even as the trial was midway through, Pakistani security agencies, while investigating another case, fell on a group of some other terrorists belonging to the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (International). During interrogation, they surprised the Pakistani and US intelligence agencies by claiming that it was they who had killed Pearl. They led the police to a spot on the outskirts of Karachi where the remains of Pearl were found buried. Forensic tests confirmed them to be those of Pearl, and they were subsequently handed over to his widow.
Under Pakistani law, when a confession made by a suspect leads to some material recovery, such as a murder weapon or a body, there is an automatic presumption that the entire confession is correct. So, if the Pakistani and US agencies had followed the due process of law, they should have withdrawn the Pearl case from the court, reinvestigated it and submitted a fresh charge sheet.
They did nothing of the sort. Instead, they kept away from the court the information about the recovery of the remains of Pearl and the arrests of new suspects. When the defense counsel for Sheikh Omar asked the court to take cognizance of the media reports in this regard and order a reinvestigation, it declined to do so. It sentenced Sheikh Omar to death and the other accused to life imprisonment. The appeals filed by them have not yet been disposed of because Pakistani officials have not yet been able to sort out the confusion created by the recovery of the remains of Pearl on information provided by some terrorists who had not been prosecuted in the case.
On March 1, a joint team of ISI and US intelligence agents raided a house in Rawalpindi in an area where many retired officers of the army and the ISI live, and arrested three persons, one of them a Pakistani. One of the arrested persons was identified as Khalid, and he was handed over to the US intelligence officials who flew him to the US naval base on Diego Garcia, where a secret detention center has been functioning since March last year, away from the prying eyes of the media and international human rights organizations.
US officials and the Arthur Koestlers of the war on terrorism went to town with fanciful accounts of what a great catch it was, what a spectacular success for the US and Pakistani agencies, etc. One ex-Central Intelligence Agency official even claimed that it was the greatest arrest ever made in the fight against terrorism since World War II. Khalid was made into a legend just as they had made Osama bin Laden into one after September 11. They had earlier projected bin Laden as if he was one of those innumerable gods in Hindu mythology with 10 heads, 20 arms and 20 legs, present anywhere and everywhere. A similar god was created in the personage of Khalid.
But even as this legend was filling up media space, the Pakistani authorities did an amazing volte face within 24 hours and denied that Khalid had been taken out of Pakistan. He was, they said, being interrogated in Pakistani territory by Pakistani officials. Faisal Saleh Hayat, Pakistan's Interior Minister, even denied that the US had requested his extradition. He added that Khalid would first be tried in Pakistan for offenses in which he was suspected before considering his extradition. He made the confusion worse by saying that since Khalid is a Kuwaiti national, if he were extradited at all it would be to Kuwait and not to the US.
Why this confusion? No credible answer is available. As generally happens, there is speculation galore in Pakistan, uncorroborated by evidence. Among such speculations are:
When the Americans took Khalid to Diego Garcia, they realized that there had been a wrong identification. They handed him back to the ISI and asked it to handle the mess as best as it could.
An official of the ISI brought to the notice of his seniors that after the encounter in Karachi on September 11, 2002, in which Ramzi Binalshibh was captured, the officer in charge of that raid submitted a report to the headquarters claiming to have killed Khalid and buried his body without informing the Americans about it (See A chilling inheritance of terror, Asia Times Online, October 30, 2002).
The defense counsel of Sheikh Omar has drawn the attention of the appeals court to reports in the foreign media that it was Khalid who masterminded the kidnapping and murder of Pearl, and pointed out that handing him over to the US without trying him in Pakistan vitiated the case against his client.
Pakistani officials have further tied themselves in knots by stating that Khalid is in their custody. If so, his friends and relatives are entitled to move a writ of habeas corpus for producing him before a court. Officials of the Jamaat-e-Islami have already announced their intention to do so, and the ISI has been trying frantically to pressurize them not to do so.
The Pakistani Supreme Court, while pronouncing judgement in a different case on March 3, has added to the confusion by ruling that al-Qaeda is not a terrorist organization under Pakistani laws since the Musharraf government has not so far declared it to be so. On August 14, 2001, President General Pervez Musharraf declared the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and the Shi'ite extremist Sipah Mohammad as terrorist organizations.
On January 15, 2002, he added the Lashkar-e-Toiba, the Jaish-e-Mohammad, the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, the Tehrik Jaffria Pakistan and an organization active in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas to this list. But, till today, he has not declared al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami as terrorist organizations. The Supreme Court has ruled that al-Qaeda could not be called a terrorist organization in Pakistan until the government issued a notification under the Anti Terrorist Act of 1997 to declare it to be so.
What has been happening in Pakistan would make a good case study of how not to wage a war on terrorism.
B Raman is Additional Secretary (ret), Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India, and presently director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai; former member of the National Security Advisory Board of the Government of India. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com. He was also head of the counter-terrorism division of the Research & Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency, from 1988 to August, 1994. |
