HAS TNR'S PREDICTION COME TRUE? -July Surprise

[Rose Siding]

July 29, Faisal Saleh Hayyat, Pakistan's interior minister, announced the arrest of a high-ranking Al Qaeda figure on local television. After a tense standoff in Gujrat, a city some 100 miles southeast of Islamabad, Pakistani security forces had captured the Tanzanian jihadist Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the FBI's twenty-second "Most Wanted" terrorist and a suspected conspirator in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. A proud Hayyat dubbed the arrest "another crowning success of Pakistan's security apparatus in the fight against terrorism." But it is doubtful Hayyat was really addressing his fellow Pakistanis: He made the announcement at midnight. More likely, his intended audience was half a world away--in the United States, where, in the middle of the afternoon, John Kerry was preparing to deliver his nomination speech to the Democratic National Convention.

While media coverage of the capture didn't exactly overshadow Kerry--Ghailani isn't Osama bin Laden--the announcement's timing seemed suspicious. Ghailani wasn't apprehended on July 29 at all, but rather four days earlier. Last month, The New Republic reported that the Bush administration was pressuring the Pakistanis to deliver a "high-value target" (HVT) in time for the November elections ("July Surprise?" July 19). According to an official with Pakistan's powerful Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), a White House aide told ISI chief Ehsan ul-Haq during a spring visit to Washington that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July," during the convention. When asked this week if the announcement of Ghailani's capture on July 29 confirmed tnr's reporting, National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack told the Los Angeles Times, "There is no truth to that statement."
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Though there is no policy governing how long to keep such arrests secret, standard intelligence practices dictate that the capture should not have been made public until investigators had finished with Ghailani (and the laptop and computer disks he had been captured with). Indeed, Ghailani may still talk, but some current and former American officials fear that, by broadcasting his name around the world, the Pakistanis have reduced the value of the intelligence that interrogators can extract from him. "Now, anything that he was involved in is being shredded, burned, and thrown in a river," a senior counterterrorism official told the Los Angeles Times. "We have to assume anyone affiliated with this guy is on the run ... when, usually, we can get great stuff as long as we can keep it quiet."
more..............

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040816&s=aaj081604

[Jack Rabbit]

1. My guess

The Bushies wanted more, but Ghailani is what they got.

He's important, but not big enough to blow Kerry off the front page.

Now they'll want to get Osama to blow the SwiftBoatVets off the front page.