Oops … Compare these paragraphs from a late afternoon article in the Washington Post to the breathless and wildly over-the-top coverage yesterday on CNN (itals added)…
Several thousand Pakistani army troops have surrounded between 150 and 400 tribal fighters and foreign Islamic guerrillas, some of them associated with al Qaeda, as heavy fighting continued in a remote area near the border with Afghanistan, military officials said Friday.
The intensity of the resistance encountered in the rugged hills of South Waziristan has prompted speculation by some military commanders that the tribal fighters and their foreign allies may be protecting senior al Qaeda figures such as Ayman Zawahiri, an Egyptian physician who is Osama bin Laden’s top deputy.
…
Senior Pakistan officials said that the foreign fighters include Chechens, Uzbeks and some Arabs, but they said they had no specific evidence that either bin Laden or Zawahiri was in the area.
“Most recent intelligence inputs do not support the perception that either Osama or Ayman are holed up in that vicinity,” said a senior military intelligence officer in Peshawar, the capital of the province in northwestern Pakistan that includes the semi-autonomous tribal area of South Waziristan.
“The idea is to send the strongest message yet to the al Qaeda supporters, but who knows? We may hit the jackpot in the process,” the official added.
Who knows?<$Ad$>
Anything could happen.
We don’t know he’s not there! We could hit the jackpot.
Are we in the Hindu Kush or Vegas?
Everybody ran with this story a bit yesterday. But CNN reeeeaaaaaaalllly ran with it, almost certainly because the ‘scoop’ (or, what shall we call it, maybe the null scoop?) came in an interview CNN’s Aaron Brown did with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
(Here’s a good story from the LA Times about how all the nets are hurriedly prepositioning their foreign correspondents in Pakistan because they want to be able to go 24/7 when OBL finally gets grabbed.)
This headline in today’s Daily Times, a Pakistani paper, sort of sums it up: “CNN ends up with ‘much egg on its face'”.
(Allow me a moment here to thoroughly relish South Asian English … Okay, I’m good.)
What made me suspicious about this from the start was the fact that the announcement came right on the day Powell showed up in Islamabad. Helluva coincidence. I’m sure there was a great desire on the part of the Pakistanis to show how thorough a job they are doing hunting al Qaida in the tribal areas. And perhaps this story just got a bit out of control. (What I heard from a very trusted and knowledgable source also led me to believe that CNN was getting way out ahead of the story.)
Maybe he’s there. Maybe they’ll find him tomorrow. Could be. But for the moment at least I have to agree that CNN does seem to have much egg on its face.
