Ilyas Kashmiri: Not as Dead as Previously Thought?

The Long War Journal, citing reporting by the Daily Times of Pakistan, reports that senior al-Qa'ida leader Ilyas Kashmiri recently met with Hakeemullah Mehsud in North Waziristan.  This is significant because -- for those who don't remember -- U.S. intelligence officials claimed that Kashmiri was killed in a Predator strike in Pakistan on June 3, 2011. 

Well, damn!

As I noted at the time, Kashmiri's death was (or would have been) significant given his effectiveness as an operational commander and the importance of taking out al-Qa'ida's broader network in addition to killing bin Laden. 

Sadly, it turns out Ilyas Kashmiri was only mostly dead, and as Miracle Max can attest, "There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead!"

Bin Laden's Wives Charged . . .

. . . with violating Pakistan's immigration laws.  No, really.

Speaking of Social Media . . .

I am not on Twitter in any way, shape, or form, but apparently while I was linking to the State Department's social media manhunt on March 31, two human rights groups were launching an online campaign against Lord's Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony that went viral, and the groups' video was viewed roughly 17 million times (8 million on Vimeo, 9 million on YouTube) as of yesterday afternoon.  Kony is the target of an ongoing manhunt in which 100 U.S. Special Forces troops are advising and assisting Ugandan and other local forces conducting operations against the LRA, a campaign I've blogged about before.

Despite the success of the Twitter campaign in raising awareness, there are some dissenting voices regarding the campaign.  In the AP story above, London School of Economics professor Tim Allen questions the long-term significance of capturing Kony:

Even if Kony is removed tomorrow the problems are not going to go away.  There is a chronic wide-spread failure of governance in parts of Central Africa.  This is a part of the world in which hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people have been killed since the late 1990s in ongoing wars, and the Lord's Resistance Army and Joseph Kony himself is responsible for very, very few of those deaths.

Similarly, on Foreign Policy.com, Michael Wilkerson notes the video's inaccuracies, and says "it is unclear how millions of well-meaning but misinformed people are going to help deal with the more complicated reality" of Uganda's problems.  Writing in the Toronto Globe and Mail, Salvator Cusimano and Sima Atri agree, arguing that "the Kony 2012 campaign's stated goals are simplistic at best and misleading at worst," and reaching a conclusion similar to my finding in Wanted Dead or Alive that "silencing one man doesn't silence the movement behind him."

Again, nobody is saying Kony isn't an evil man, and that he shouldn't face justice as soon as possible, whether before the International Criminal Court or at the business end of a rifle.  But is is far from clear that his apprehension will significantly affect the humanitarian nightmares springing from Central Africa's wars.

LRA Commander Joseph Kony: An evil man and quickly catching up to Ashton Kutcher on Twitter.

Social Networking and Manhunting

I missed this last week, but the invaluable Noah Shachtman reported at Wired.com's Danger Room about a State Department-sponsored competition that basically consists of using social media to track down five "fugitives" in a worldwide manhunt.  The reward/prize is $5,000 for finding the fugitive within twelve hours of the release of his/her photo on March 31 in one of five international cities: New York, London, Washington, Stockholm, and Bratislava (wait . . . Bratislava?!?  Huh?). 

As regular readers of this blog well know, I'm nowhere near tech-savvy enough to be of much use in this competition.  But if anybody in the greater DC-area is going to form a team, I'd be very interested in hearing about how you plan on approaching the search.

Michael Yon, incidentally, wrote on geotags and social networking back in December 2010, a post which Glenn "Instapundit Reynolds linked to under the title "How to Get Tracked Down and Killed." 

Osama bin Laden is in Maryland?!?

Well, at least his body is, according to a theory expounded in internal Stratfor emails published by WikiLeaks.

According to the emails (obtained via hacker group Anonymous), Stratfor's vice president believed the Saudi's corpse was not buried at sea as reported, but rather transferred to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda, Maryland. 

Why would the Obama administration do this, you ask?  Well, Stratfor executives offer no explanation, but say that "The US Govt needs to make body pics available like the MX's do, with OBL's pants pulled down, to shout down the lunatics like Alex Jones and Glenn Beck."

Yeah, because they're the conspiracy theorists here . . .

Note: I strongly condemn both 9/11 conspiracists such as Alex Jones and Wikileaks, but will never criticize Anonymous because I'm deathly afraid they'll screw with the iTunes playlists I've spent years meticulously constructing.

Today in Manhunting History -- March 4, 1905: "Hooray for Geronimo!"

In the years after his 1886 surrender, Geronimo began the transformation from monster to legend. During the relocation to Fort Sill crowds gathered at whistle-stops to cheer the celebrated warrior. Geronimo responded with savvy pragmatism, selling his block-lettered autograph for 25 cents a copy. With special permission from the War Department, Geronimo was allowed to travel as a side-show attraction. He attended the Omaha and Buffalo expositions (and was at the Pan-American Exposition in 1901 when President McKinley was assassinated) and the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. He spent a year with a “Wild West” show, and cashed in on his reputation by selling souvenir bows and arrows, autographed pictures of himself, even the buttons off his coat.

At the request of Theodore Roosevelt, Geronimo was brought to Washington to ride in the President’s inaugural parade on March 4, 1905 along with chieftains from other tribes. As Geronimo galloped down Pennyslvania Avenue, people in the dense crowd hollered “Hooray for Geronimo!” and tossed their hats in the air.

Geronimo (2nd from right) passing in review at Teddy Roosevelt Inauguration on March 4, 1905

Saif al-Adel Captured! (Or Not)

Yesterday, as I was preparing to board a plane to Boston for a book talk at MIT, I caught a glimpse of a BBC headline proclaiming that senior al-Qa'ida commander Saif al-Adel had been arrested after taking a plane from Pakistan back to his native Egypt.
I was unable to get to a computer for the rest of the day, and was surprised that I didn't see a headline about the capture of the terror network's former military commander in any of the bars I occupied while waiting for my flight delays to end.

Finally, this morning I was greeted by the news that the arrest may have been a case of mistaken identity, and that Egyptian authorities likely had arrested the wrong man.

Well, it did seem a little odd that al-Adel, a former Egyptian Army colonel with a $5 million bounty on his head, would be so foolish as to fly from Pakistan to Egypt under what U.S. officials believe to be his real name, Mohammed Ibrahim Makkawi. 

Saif al-Adel: Apparently, not a complete idiot after all.