http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110003148
BY JAMES TARANTO
Monday, March 3, 2003 3:29 p.m. EST
Weapons of Mass Distraction?
The claim that liberating Iraq is a "distraction" or a "diversion" from the war against al Qaeda now has a simple, three-word refutation: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Pakistani authorities working with the CIA nabbed KSM, al Qaeda's No. 3 man, on Saturday. The FBI's "Most Wanted Terrorist" page for Mohammed now has a red "Located" banner running across the photos of the man Time magazine calls al Qaeda's "chief military planner--and perhaps the world's most dangerous terrorist operative."
According to Time magazine, KSM was arrested "at a house in Rawalpindi owned by a retired 75-year-old microbiologist." Why is a microbiologist hanging out with a terrorist who would no doubt dearly love to get his hands on biological weapons? It turns out the microbiologist's son, Ahmed Abdul Qadus, was arrested along with KSM, and the Associated Press connects the dots:
Qadus' father, Abdul Qadus, is a prominent microbiologist who worked in Africa for the World Health Organization for many years before retiring, [Pakistani Interior Ministry spokesman Iftikhar] Khanum said. The 42-year-old Qadus, however, could not hold down a job and had lived at home with his parents his entire life, she said.
Qadus' mother, Mahlaqa, is a local leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, one of the main hardline religious parties in Pakistan. The family speculated the arrest was a political ploy to discredit her and the party, which is part of an ultraconservative coalition that came in third in last year's parliamentary elections, largely on the strength of a virulently anti-American platform.
So here we have a scientist who worked for a U.N. agency whose wife is a radical Islamist politician, whose son is a suspected terrorist, and who plays host to a man who may be the world's worst terrorist. We can't help but wonder why the elder Qadus wasn't taken in for questioning too.
KSM, incidentally, seems to have been involved in just about every attack against America for the past decade. Notes Time:
He presumably helped kinsman Ramzi Yousef bomb the World Trade Center in 1993. He hatched plots, never carried out, to bring down U.S. airliners over the Pacific and to assassinate President Clinton and the Pope. He may well have masterminded--officials aren't sure yet--the deadly assault on the U.S.S. Cole off Yemen and the U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa. Accomplices told Pakistani police that Mohammed slashed the throat of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl a year ago. And everyone agrees on his culpability for one other crime: directing the 9/11 attacks in New York City and Washington, the worst terrorist acts in history.
Mohammed certainly sounds like a pivotal figure, if not the pivotal figure, in al Qaeda. While it's true, as de Gaulle observed, that the graveyards are full of indispensable men, we can't help but wonder if all the talk we've heard about al Qaeda's vast armies of jihadis isn't a bit overhyped.
Pix Fisk Fisk
Anti-American polemicist Robert Fisk thinks the capture of KSM is a hoax. Here's an example of why Fisk says you can't trust anything America says:
The waters--and deep they are--were also muddied by the White House's claim that four men executed in an attack by a missile-firing pilotless drone in Yemen last year were "among Al Qaeda's top 20 leaders."
Whether they were numbers 2 to 5 or 17 to 20, no one at the Pentagon or White House could say. So how can we trust their word that Mohammed is a "mastermind?"
