Seventy-five percent of what? Bush claimed in the first debate that 75% of Osama’s people “have been brought to justice.” Did he really mean Osama bin Laden’s terrorists or was he talking about the Iraqi playing cards? As far as security experts know — unlike the celebrated Saddam henchmen — no one can be sure of how many al Qaeda leaders exist. According to The American Prospect Karen Goldberg, director of the Center of Law and Security, and Stephen Holmes, both of NYU, the estimate in 2001 was 22 suspects; Ashcroft has since upped it to 27 as of now. From this total only three have been captured or killed — 11%, not 75%. The American Prospect authors point out that perhaps the president meant not the leadership but 75% of the terrorists that were known to be trained in Afghanistan before 9/11, in which case it would be 2,000 captured or killed in Afghanistan out of 20,000 militants.
However, most of the 20,000 probably left before the assault to do their dirty work elsewhere. For the sake of argument, conjecture that 5,000 remained to do battle with the US Special Forces and the Northern Alliance, 2 out of 5 is not too bad. Because intelligence was so weak, no one can verify how many actually took to the hills or the Pakistan bordering mountains. The sticky point of this is that to toss off a statistic without any semblance of verification is bogus politics just to give the impression that the situation is well in hand and al Qaeda is under control.
Frankly, the president cannot refrain from including al Qaeda body counts from Iraq’s; after all, they are all the same to him, even though it is apparent that al Qaeda and affiliates have countless cells round the globe.
Copyright © 2004 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: October 26, 2004.
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