And we thought that they already had Osama hidden away somewhere, ready for an October surprise. Could be, maybe this is just to throw us off the scent:
According to The New Republic Online, hardly a liberal periodical, the Bush administration has been putting intense pressure on President Musharraf of Pakistan to capture Osama bin Laden, Ayman Al Zawahiri and/or Mullah Mohhammed Omar.
Excerpt from “July Surprise?”, July 7, 2004, by John B. Judis, Spencer Ackerman and Massoud Ansari, from The New Republic Online.
This public pressure would be appropriate, even laudable, had it not been accompanied by an unseemly private insistence that the Pakistanis deliver these high-value targets (HVTs) before Americans go to the polls in November. The Bush administration denies it has geared the war on terrorism to the electoral calendar. “Our attitude and actions have been the same since September 11 in terms of getting high-value targets off the street, and that doesn’t change because of an election,” says National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack. But The New Republic has learned that Pakistani security officials have been told they must produce HVTs by the election. According to one source in Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), “The Pakistani government is really desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his associates after the latest pressures from the U.S. administration to deliver before the [upcoming] U.S. elections.” Introducing target dates for Al Qaeda captures is a new twist in U.S.-Pakistani counterterrorism relations–according to a recently departed intelligence official, “no timetable[s]” were discussed in 2002 or 2003–but the November election is apparently bringing a new deadline pressure to the hunt.
via News Hounds.
