Thursday, June 8, 2006

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi Dead?

al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia decapitated? Finally!
Mike Scheuer was a CIA agent for 22 years - six of them as head of the agency's Osama bin Laden unit - until he resigned in 2004.

Scheuer has maintained all along that Bush deliberately passed up repeated opportunities to kill Zarqawi before the un-provoked, unnecessary and largely unilateral invasion and occupation of Iraq (UULUIOI) in March 2003.

Scheuer has stated that during 2002, the Bush Administration received detailed intelligence about Zarqawi's training camp in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Mr Bush had Zarqawi in his sights almost every day for a year before the invasion of Iraq and he didn't shoot because they were wining and dining the French in an effort to get them to assist us in the invasion of Iraq.

Almost every day we sent a package to the White House that had overhead imagery of the house he was staying in. It was a terrorist training camp . . . experimenting with ricin and anthrax . . . any collateral damage there would have been terrorists.
If Scheuer is right, the UULUIOI would not have been necessary to get where we are today!

13 comments:

  1. Conservative blogger, Eunomia, reinforces my point:
    ... in addition to the Iraq-terrorism connection being spurious and not credible, attacking Iraq was taking us away from the proper fight against al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Here we have the obsession with Iraq dramatically and adversely affecting that fight. Letting Zarqawi get away is notable because it was allegedly Zarqawi who represented the link between al-Qaeda and Iraq, because he was loosely affiliated with bin Laden and was in northern Iraq (outside of Hussein's effective control, of course, but why get hung up on detail?).

    Viewed in a cynical way, one could say that Bush did not want to eliminate Zarqawi so that he would not have eliminated the only extremely remote connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq. That is to say, striking at the remotely al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic terrorists in Kurdistan did not require the full-scale invasion of Iraq, and Mr. Bush clearly must have known that in 2002; Ansar al-Islam was based well north of the (illegal) no-fly zone boundary, which would have made striking at the base in conjunction with Kurdish forces or on our own just one more military operation in the undeclared air war against Iraq. Since Hussein did not sponsor or support Ansar al-Islam (Kurdish Islamists not being his cup of tea for all kinds of obvious reasons), the invasion of Iraq was not only a distraction from genuine antiterrorist efforts but actually precluded them in this case. That Zarqawi has since returned to haunt the occupation of Iraq with bloody mayhem is an ugly piece of poetic justice that damns (again) the pre-war judgement of this administration as hopelessly fixated on attacking Iraq.

    But however you want to slice the pre-war questions, the reality is that the man whom the government blames for the spectacular murderous car bombings and many of the anti-Shi'ite terrorist attacks in Iraq could have been killed and his organisation disrupted in 2002 and Mr. Bush chose to attack the Iraqi state rather than actual Islamic terrorists when he had the chance. Let Mr. Bush publicly defend that decision.

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  2. Well, our skilled and dedicated armed forces have stopped Zarqawi's clock, but Osama's Clock is still running and shows 1,731 days 14 hours, 13 minutes, and 51 seconds.

    Speaking of running, Bush is cutting and running from Afghanistan.

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  3. Joe Lauria puts it another way:
    ...But what is getting lost in the media and the government's euphoria is that it was the incredibly misguided US invasion that rose Zarqawi to prominence. It transformed him from a virtual nobody in Islamist extremist circles into a leader of their movement.

    It gave him an open field to perpetrate his heinous crimes. So for the US military and Bush to keep beating their chests is dead wrong. Their actions created him, and then they had to take him down. In the meantime, this butcher killed hundreds of innocent Iraqis and foreigners.

    ... were there no invasion of Iraq, Zarqawi would still be the petty, obscure thug he was before March 2003.

    Huffington Post

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  4. The neocon's have, once again, overlooked something. The head of the snake may have been cut off but two more will grow to replace it. My vacation will not get here soon enough.

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  5. These nasty people grow like mold on cheese.

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  6. Seems you folks are grasping at straws that grow shorter and shorter every week.

    It amazes me that your powers of self deception grow ever stronger, even in the face of overwhelming reality.

    Too bad you can't join in with your countrymen, Iraqis and lovers of TRUE peace and justice for even one day.

    I realize this statement won't make a dent in that universe of fog which you use to protect yourselves from accountability for your words and false beliefs.

    But at least let it not be said that no one bothered to make the attempt.

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  7. Brother Michael, there are fewer and fewer of "your countrymen" with you every day.

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  8. Nice try Mikesamerica. Now be a good boy and get back into your superhero comic book.

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  9. Hey brother Mike,
    What is the reason of the day for us being in Iraq?
    Finding the "slam dunk" WMD's?
    Building Democracy in a country that is being held together by string and bubblegum?
    Or fighting terrorists over there so we don't fight them over here?
    How about you guys pick a reason and stick with it man. But its hard to stick with one when they are all lies.

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  10. I really don't have a big problem with the most of you who were duped to this war because of the wrong information and lies, but surely there are limits, and mike'samerica is it. In what sort of bunker might he be living? Certainly it must have thick enough walls to blog all the sounds and sights to make it impossible for him to form informed conclutions.

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  11. I really don't have a big problem with the most of you who were duped to this war....

    Yeah Pekka,
    They got me once but it just really pissed me off. I'm just a simple country boy.

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  12. Everyone has heard of 'mission creep'. Right? But now it seems we are afflicted with 'rationale creep'. And now, the penultimate rationale for staying in Iraq until Bush leaves the White House is to prevent a civil war.

    Everyone got that??

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