There were rumors floating around* today to the effect that Osama bin Laden had been captured: think that it might have been based on this story?
Captured Insurgent Said Linked to al-Qaida
By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military WriterWASHINGTON – U.S. forces in Iraq (news – web sites) captured a leader of the insurgency who is believed to be a close associate of Abu Musab Zarqawi, described by some as a key link between the al-Qaida terrorist network and toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (news – web sites), a senior American official said Friday.
U.S. troops captured Husam al-Yemeni last Thursday, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. He is described by U.S. officials as the leader of an insurgency cell in Fallujah, west of Baghdad.
The official said al-Yemeni is the highest-level member of Ansar al-Islam captured so far. That is a group comprising mainly ethnic Kurds from northern Iraq with alleged al-Qaida ties.
Alas, there’s no confirmation, and I just tossed off a mini-lecture in comments about not taking seriously anonymous sources, so take the elements of this particular story with heavy grains of salt – but even if false you can see how this might have morphed further into a OBL capture rumor, so there you go.
Moe
*Yes, a Forbes article is not a rumor. Let me explain to you how my weekday blogging experience works.
I cannot access TypePad or the comments section of this blog while at work – a blessing, really, as otherwise I’d never get anything done – so I have to settle for looking for interesting stuff and making notes of it. Said notes go on post-it notes that go into my pockets. At night, I pull out the Post-It notes, decypher whatever it was that I wrote on them and come up with entries. I’m sure that I don’t have to point out the flaws in this system, but it’s what I have work with.
So… if I, say, forget to write down where precisely I saw the rumor, I have to go find it on my own – with varying results of success…
FYI, Die Welt was reporting the story on their crawl and apparently their email feed last night. Dunno if that’s where you first saw it…
“Dunno if that’s where you first saw it…”
Now that I think of it, sorta-kinda; I remember that there was a blog that was being all “We don’t normally publish this stuff without confirmation, but we’re going to do it this time”, and I think that it might have referred to this article in passing…
Gee, how long do you think it will be before one of the usual suspects accuses the Bush Administration of timing the capture to distract attention from the Plame grand jury and David Kay’s comments?
The ultimate conspiracy theory: OBL has been frozen by Halliburton and will be unfrozen just before Halloween to sing “I’m A Little Teapot” in front of GWB while he delivers his last pre-election speech announcing victory over Al-Queda and a broadening of the War Against Terror.