State Dept: Of course we know where Hafiz Mohammad Saeed is

The State Department went to lengths today to explain why it issued a $10 million bounty for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) founder Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, only to have Saeed appear in public and mock the United States for it.

On Monday, Saeed became only the fifth wanted criminal to warrant the top-dollar bounty in the State Department’s Rewards for Justice Program. "Saeed is suspected of masterminding numerous terrorist attacks, including the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which resulted in the deaths of 166 people, including six American citizens," the State Department says in its reward notice.

In response, Saeed held a Wednesday press conference in Pakistan to make fun of the bounty.

"I am here, I am visible. America should give that reward money to me," he said. "I will be in Lahore tomorrow. America can contact me whenever it wants to."

At Wednesday State Department press briefing, Spokesman Mark Toner explained that of course the U.S. government knows where Saeed is … and that wasn’t the point of the bounty.

"Just to clarify, the $10 million is for information not about his location but information that leads to an arrest or conviction. And this is information that could withstand judicial scrutiny. So I think what’s important here is we’re not seeking this guy’s location," Toner said. "We all know where he is. Every journalist in Pakistan and in the region knows how to find him. But we’re looking for information that can be usable to convict him in a court of law."

Reporters at the briefing pointed out that Saeed has already been indicted in India so presumably the Indians have plenty of evidence to convict him.

"Look, I think we’re trying to, you know, get information that can be used to put this gentleman behind bars," Toner said. "There is information, there’s intelligence that, you know, is not necessarily usable in a court of law."

The Pakistani Foreign Ministry said Wednesday it needed "concrete evidence" before the Pakistani government would move to arrest Saeed. Toner said such evidence is exactly what the bounty is meant to elicit and should not be an irritant in the already troubled U.S.-Pakistan relationship.

"This is about a process in and of itself, separate and apart from our ongoing bilateral relations with Pakistan," he said.

Outside experts doubt that this separation is either clear or tenable.

"This adds more fire to a relationship that can be called severely dysfunctional," said Bruce Riedel, a former senior National Security Council official now at the Brookings Institution. "I assume the administration believes this bounty will put more pressure on the government of Pakistan to do something about it. It ratchets up the pressure on LeT a little bit. It ratchets up the pressure on the U.S.-Pakistan relationship more."

Saeed deserved the bounty due to his role in the 2008 Mumbai bombings and various other terrorist activities, Reidel said, and the bounty is part of a steady stream of actions against Saeed that included a U.N. special designation in 2008 and a Treasury Department sanctions designation in 2010.

The Pakistani government isn’t likely to hand over Saeed any time soon, however, so the administration has added yet another point of contention to an already contentious relationship.

"The next time the director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence travels to Washington, the U.S. official now have the obligation to raise this will them. I hope the administration has a plan for what happens when the Pakistanis say no," Riedel said, referring to Pakistan’s top intelligence agency, the ISI.

The State Department maintains that the timing of the bounty, more than three and a half years after the Mumbai attack, was simply the result of the bureaucratic process. Riedel isn’t so sure. He pointed out that new information about Saeed’s links to al Qaeda was discovered in the material retrieved from Osama bin Laden‘s Abbottabad hideout.

Saeed’s ties to the al Qaeda leader go back decades. Bin Laden helped fund the creation of LeT in the 1980s. On the Friday after bin Laden was killed, Saeed gave a very public eulogy praising him.

"If the administration is going to be putting out more of the Abbottabad material, if one of the things they found was more linkage between Saeed and bin Laden, it’s quite plausible and that may have been the spark that pushed them over the edge regarding the bounty," Riedel said. "Like everybody else, I’m waiting to see what their plan is for the day after."