Was al Zarqawi Real or a CIA Creation?
by James Buchanan
If you have a tendency to watch the news unquestioningly, you probably think that al Zarqawi was a real person and that he was killed in a recent air attack. He was mentioned dozens if not hundreds of times in the last three years and somehow our military could not find this man even though we occupied all of Iraq and found a deck of Iraqi bigshots including Saddam himself. How much proof of his existence do we really have? Most details of his alleged existence were fed to the media by the Pentagon. Mysterious couriers (who could easily have been CIA operatives) would drop off messages to al Jazeera supposedly from the mystery man. The Pentagon has now announced his death and that he had been identified by his DNA. (By the way, where exactly did the Pentagon get al Zarqawi’s DNA?)
A writer on one website asks “Do you believe that there is actually such a person as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? Or has he been ‘created’ by the Pentagon to distract from the fact that Iraq is a massive failure? When we were being pushed into this illegal war, the administration made a big deal about the so-called ‘link’ between Saddam and Al Qaeda validating it with the statement that al-Zarqawi was fitted with an artificial leg in Baghdad and lived and worked in Al Qaeda training camps in the northern Kurdish areas. However, the newly redesigned al-Zarqawi doesn’t seem to have a bum leg. Even some FOX News guests have attempted to explain away this obvious discrepancy. A 17-page letter, purportedly intercepted last year from a deal Al Qaeda courier and allegedly written by al-Zarqawi, has still not been verified by certified document examiners. Yet the media treats it as if it was thoroughly and publicly vetted. Last April, just prior to the first Fallujah stand-off, independent reporter Dahr Jamail reported that the average Iraqi didn’t believe in the existence of al-Zarqawi.”
We should all remember that Bush went to war while dishonestly implying that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. In reality, Hussein would not return correspondence to al Qaeda because he saw them as a threat to his authority. Dick Cheney later claimed that the attempts by al Qaeda to contact Hussein were “proof” of a relationship. By the same logic, any American man could claim that he had a relationship with a supermodel simply by writing her letters even if she never responds. By creating an al Qaeda leader, whom Saddam was allegedly, knowingly harboring, Bush is trying to invent an Iraq-al Qaeda link, which none of our intelligence agencies had known about before the war.
Another skeptical writer on another website notes “The real Zarqawi is long dead, but a literate, tall fellow with two legs and no tattoos on his arms has been created by US military intelligence as a straw man to justify everything about the Iraq war. However, a rogue group has hijacked the US Zarqawi identity and is responsible for the beheadings — an inspiration to copycats and future groups to do the same. An analysis of the audio messages delivered by the four different “Zarqawis” indicates (this) scenario to be the most likely, given the distinctly American and non-Arabic expressions and themes in the various statements.”
One important thing to remember is that our government has been paying money to spread lies for at least four years. One article notes “In a move worrying some United States defence officials, the Pentagon is developing a major covert news and disinformation campaign… The plan is being developed by the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), a recently created unit funded from an extra $US10 billion of emergency funds voted by Congress to the Pentagon after the September 11 terrorist attacks… The blueprint for the new propaganda offensive is being studied by the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and by Pentagon lawyers, and has not yet been formally approved by President George W. Bush.”
Was al Zarqawi just a bogeyman invented by the CIA? Was the announcement of his death intended to offset yet another embarrassing event in Iraq –namely the war crime at Haditha? Only one thing is absolutely certain: Our government lies to us. The frequency and severity of the laws are seldom officially acknowledged until years or decades afterwards. While many lies involve broken campaign promises, the more serious lies (such as the ones that lead to war) should bring the full force of the law against both the President and his cabinet. A regime that disturbs the peace of the world and wastes the lives of American soldiers in quagmires like Iraq belongs in prison, not the White House.