How Big a Fish Is al-Libbi?
An important form of media bias, one that gets routinely exploited by people looking to sell a particular story in the marketplace of ideas, is what I’m going to call Prominence Bias. Or maybe we could call it the Buried Retraction Bias. (It probably has some official name I’m not aware of; if you know what it is, let me know.)
What I’m talking about is the situation you have when a particularly newsworthy story gets front page coverage for a few days, and only later, after it has fallen to page 17 (or fallen out of the media altogether) does it emerge that actually, the original story was more or less incorrect.
Now, apparently most people get their news primarily from television. Since TV news coverage typically amounts only to the reading of the current front page headlines, with a few sexy supporting visuals, this form of bias is particularly dangerous for those folks. TV simply doesn’t have room for those page 17 retractions, so TV viewers never learn about them.
Consider the case of Abu Faraj al-Libbi, the al Qaeda operative captured last week (or whenever it was) by Pakistan. I didn’t pay much attention to the story, but what I gathered from scanning headlines over my cereal was that we’d nabbed someone very high up indeed in the al Qaeda organization, with the people running Bush’s War on Terra making a big deal about how this showed we were successfully penetrating the terror network.
Cool.
But then this story comes out in the Sunday Times of London: Captured Al-Qaeda kingpin is case of ‘mistaken identity’:
The capture of a supposed Al-Qaeda kingpin by Pakistani agents last week was hailed by President George W Bush as “a critical victory in the war on terror”. According to European intelligence experts, however, Abu Faraj al-Libbi was not the terrorists’ third in command, as claimed, but a middle-ranker derided by one source as “among the flotsam and jetsam” of the organisation.
Al-Libbi’s arrest in Pakistan, announced last Wednesday, was described in the United States as “a major breakthrough” in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.
Bush called him a “top general” and “a major facilitator and chief planner for the Al-Qaeda network”. Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, said he was “a very important figure”. Yet the backslapping in Washington and Islamabad has astonished European terrorism experts, who point out that the Libyan was neither on the FBI’s most wanted list, nor on that of the State Department “rewards for justice” programme.
Another Libyan is on the FBI list – Anas al-Liby, who is wanted over the 1998 East African embassy bombings – and some believe the Americans may have initially confused the two. When The Sunday Times contacted a senior FBI counter-terrorism official for information about the importance of the detained man, he sent material on al-Liby, the wrong man.
“Al-Libbi is just a ‘middle-level’ leader,” said Jean-Charles Brisard, a French intelligence investigator and leading expert on terrorism finance. “Pakistan and US authorities have completely overestimated his role and importance. He was never more than a regional facilitator between Al-Qaeda and local Pakistani Islamic groups.”
Hm. I didn’t notice that version of the story on TV. This gets discussed in the following item from the Outside the Beltway blog: Was al-Libbi Al Qaeda’s number three?
Checking in with that bastion of staid mainstream reporting, Time magazine, we find this: Can this man help capture bin Laden?
After describing the dramatic apprehension of al-Libbi (apparently carried out by cross-dressing Pakistani counter-terrorism agents), Time had this to say:
But the arrest had barely been hailed by President Bush as a “critical victory in the war on terror” when the picture grew murky. According to an Islamabad intelligence source, the burqa-clad fugitive arrested by the Pakistani commandos last week was not al-Libbi but a local Pakistani militant. Al-Libbi, the source says, had been seized a few weeks earlier, but his arrest was hushed up so agents could pursue unsuspecting collaborators. U.S. counterterrorism sources insist on the official version. “We not only believe, we know it happened this week,” a U.S. official told TIME.
Everyone does agree that in al-Libbi, the Pakistanis have reeled in a big fish. U.S. and Pakistani sources think that al-Libbi has been in direct contact with bin Laden and al-Zawahiri and that al-Libbi was the mastermind behind two attempts to assassinate Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in December 2003. U.S. counterterrorism officials told TIME that the CIA suspects al-Libbi was involved in a terrorist plot timed to coincide with last November’s U.S. presidential election, including “training and supporting people and planning to send operatives” who could slip into the U.S. “He was a key operations guy,” says the source. “His operations weren’t confined to Afghanistan or Pakistan but extended into the West.”
So, maybe the Pakistanis actually did arrest the number three al Qaeda guy, but then they held him quietly for a while, before using the more-exciting apprehension of a lower-level guy with a similar name to help pump up the announcement?
It’s all very confusing. I guess I’m ready to go back to my simple, Fox News-style storyline now. Sorry for making things so complicated.
