Last June there was news of one prisoner in Iraq that was kept hidden from the Red Cross and that was not issued a tracking number – at least for several months. (If I remember correctly, this was because of an order from Rumsfeld.) He became known as “Prisoner XXX.”
Is there any recent information on what became of this prisoner and who he was? If he was high level, why wasn’t his capture highly publicized?
What are the odds that he and others will be trotted out sometime around the middle of October? The linked article mentions that there have been other “ghost prisoners.”
Anyone want a pool on the number of high ranking terrorists that will be supposedly captured in October?
I hope you’re not serious. This is an Administration which can’t keep the illegal activities at a prison in Iraq secret, which either trumped up phony evidence of WMDs in Iraq, or believed the phony evidence it was given, has been unable to cover up the fact that many of the methods of torture used on Iraqi prisoners was approved of in a memo signed by Rummy, and hasn’t been able to conceal the price gouging being done by Haliburton. (Not to mention ignored intelligence which indicated that Osama was preparing a major attack in the US a month prior to 9/11.) If they’re going to screw that kind of stuff up, then what makes you think that they’d be able to keep the capture of Osama a secret for over a year?
Additionally, it kind of shoots holes in the theory that the various “terror alerts” have been called simply to distract attention away from Kerry. After all, if Osama’s in the bag, it doesn’t matter what Kerry does, since they’ll be able to whip Osama out of their ass at the last possible second, ensuring a wave of support for Bush right before the elections.
If the administration ‘captures’ Osama just before the election, they can just as easily extract a confession that he’d been ‘planning’ various attacks, justifying any previous terror alerts.
Yeah, but why bother if you know that you’re going to produce Osama right before the election? Why not use the lack of terror alerts as proof that your administration has made the world more safer?
We can’t let the electorate become too complacent between now and then, they’ve got to be worked up.
Even though you have Osama, you want the world to think he’s still out there, planning his sinister deeds. Further terror alerts build the tension between now and October, until he’s climactically captured and the world is once again safe.
If it were true, then I’d expect the highest possible terror alert in October, Osama to be captured right in the middle of it all, and the announcement that his capture had foiled another 9-11 scale attack.
I already wondered what would happen in such a situation. And my take is that in this case, they wouldn’t have found him.
My reasonning is that according to french law and constitution, he couldn’t be extraded to the US, where he would be facing a death sentence and also possibly wouldn’t have his rights to a due process respected (Guantanamo as a precedent). Of course, he could be tried in france, since there has been french citizens killed in the WTC attack. But this would mightily piss off both the american public opinion and the US government, and would most certainly backlash in the diplomatic field. Besides, I doubt that anybody in the french governement or intelligence community is that worried about Bin Laden’s constitutionnal rights. And besides some human right activists (myself included), I doubt the french public opinion would have an issue with that, either, assuming the facts would be disclosed.
So, I would suspect that if french militaries in Afghanistan, for instance, found it, they would quickly hand him to their american colleagues. And if he turned up on french territory, he would misteriously dissapear (barring a situation where his presence would be widely known, by the medias, for instance) and found himself seated in a plane heading for the USA, in the same way the ill famed Carlos “mysteriously” ended up drugged, tied up and gagged in a plane landing in France.
To sum up, I think that if the french actually found Bin Laden, nobody would know they did. Possibly, they would demand to be given publically some credit for helping in his capture, or would discreetely negociate something in exchange.
Good reasoning as always, clairobscur. Actually this reasoning would apply to any country that signed the European Convention on Human Rights, given article 3, the very real possibility of him getting the death penalty, and the Court’s ruling that death row violated article 3.