For instance: on January 19, 2005, the CNN International website carried the headline: “Wave of suicide blasts kills at least 25.” The text declared:
In 90 minutes, four suicide car bombings Wednesday killed at least 25 Iraqis in and around Baghdad, the U.S. military said.
The terrorist network led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has ties to al-Qaeda, claimed responsibility for the bombings in postings on several Islamist Web sites.1
The next day that news had changed. According to Andrew Marshall, writing from Baghdad, for Scotsman.com, only three of the four car bombs were being “claimed” by al-Zarqawi.2 Both CNN and the Scotsman insisted that al-Zarqawi and al-Qaeda were “linked” – yet the proof of that assertion to date has only been “postings” on “Islamic” or “insurgent” websites.
On January 14, 2005, Ellen Knickmeyer, writing for the Associated Press, reported that the assassination of the Shiite politician, Mahmoud Finjan, had been claimed by Ansar al-Islam “on a website used by insurgents.” On January 16, 2005 a Reuters piece featured on ABC News Online stated that Ansar al-Islam had denied killing the politician!3 Then on January 20, Gareth Smyth's piece, “Ansar Wages War on 'Heretical' Iraq,”4 posted on FinancialTimes.com, repeated that Ansar had claimed responsibility! Will the real Ansar al-Islam please stand up!
These reported Internet claims are by their very nature unverifiable.1Anyone can post anything on the Internet, claiming to represent anyone or anything. Rarely if ever is there follow-up by the media as to what is true or false about the claims they report. The reports themselves are conspicuous for their vagueness: what is “an insurgent website” or a “website used by Islamists”? Inconsistencies such as those in our examples are typical and unexamined. Thus, it wouldn't be an overstatement to say such claims are essentially useless in determining the facts of any particular case.
What they do manage to create, however, is a general impression of “mayhem” caused by conveniently elusive, unconventional, “terrorist” enemies. This is especially true because most individuals reading news reports will not follow each claim to the end to ferret out contradictions or even retractions. The general impression is useful enough for the Bush administration and its imperial press in reinforcing the sense that we are fighting not Iraqis who are simply resisting occupation, but rather “fanatics” who revel in beheadings on chat-rooms at “jihad-in-iraq.org.” A deeper question still is whether or not some website or other that claims to be speaking in the name of Islamism or Ba'athism actually does so. “Black flag” or “false flag” operations – those carried out by one side in a conflict while pretending to be the other side – have been with us for decades. They have a well-documented history – just ask the CIA or the Mossad.2 They are all the more effective in view of the increasingly prominent role of the Internet as a source of information.3 It also goes direct to the “customer”: while the old methods of claiming responsibility for terrorist acts involved phone calls or letters to journalists and police, the Internet warfare of today is a handy form of direct selling.
Thus in this global war for “hearts and minds” we have to remember, especially as regards the Internet, that potential “black flags” are going up every day, not always the work of the parties whom they claim to represent, or even the work of those directly involved in the conflict. There are third parties out there with vested interests, so our question must always be: who gains?
Al-Zarqawi: “Terminator” or Wizard of Oz?
For the first couple of years after 9/11, the world was bombarded, day and night with one name: Osama Bin Laden. He was apparently running Islamic terror campaigns all over the world, in spite of the fact that he is known to have serious kidney problems and require dialysis twice a week (not easy, one suspects, in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan). However, in the first part of 2004, Osama began to take something of a backseat in the media's “terrorist popularity stakes” to a new terror chief, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. As the war in Iraq has widened and deepened, the column inches being devoted to al-Zarqawi have risen exponentially, while those of Bin Laden have declined dramatically. Scott Taylor, a former U.S. soldier and editor of Esprit de Corps magazine, emphasized al-Zarqawi's role as publicity front-runner for the terror war's “central front”:
The U.S.'s singular failure to apprehend the elusive al-Zarqawi has proven a major embarrassment for the U.S.-led forces, and in recent weeks he has become the symbolic figurehead for the Iraqi resistance – at least in the American media reports” (emphasis mine).1
What do we know about al-Zarqawi? He is Jordanian (though Judith S. Yaphe, a Senior Fellow for the Middle East at the Institute for National Strategic Studies in Washington, D.C., refers to him as “allegedly a Jordanian Islamic extremist”2). He is a Muslim terrorist with an evident penchant for chopping off the heads of infidels. He also appears to be an Arab “Scarlet Pimpernel” – “they seek him here, they seek him there” – who aspires to join the Texas Chain Saw Massacre crowd. As a journalist for New York's Newsday, Mohammad Bazzi, put it last year, “The Jordanian-born militant has achieved mythic status as a master of disguise and escape.”3 There's no doubt that he's right, though emphasis needs to be put on the word “mythic” – the adjective derived from the word “myth” – as we will see shortly.
For his article, Bazzi spoke to Dana Ahmad Majid, the Head of Security of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, who said of al-Zarqawi:
He can move around any number of Iraqi areas. He can change his appearance, he can change his papers. He could be moving around alone without any problem. Al-Zarqawi is a single man, and it is always extremely difficult to capture a single person.1
One can almost sense the breathless excitement of Majid in relating this stuff. Yet anyone who has traveled in that part of the world knows that story telling is a way of life, and stories will be told to anyone who wants or needs to hear them. If you are an Iraqi puppet-government official, you are likely to know that the Western media will want claims that things are going stupendously well and there is progress in all fields, along with lurid descriptions of just how bad the “bad guys” really are. While the claims of “progress” fall by the wayside almost immediately after they are spouted – the mortars and machinegun fire being all too “realistic” – the “lurid descriptions” live on, growing by day and night into monstrous fantasy beyond anything that Stephen Spielberg ever captured on screen. Since it is well known that the Kurdish clans around Barzani and Talabani have been playing fast and loose for decades with all the players in the region-America, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, and Iran – it wouldn't be a stretch to surmise that they have also developed their own cottage industry: spinning yarns.
During the second American assault on Fallujah, Aljazeera.net correspondent Roshan Muhammed Salih interviewed Abdel Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief of the London-based, Arab-language daily Al-Quds al-Arabi. Atwan is a “name” in the Arab journalistic world, the way Robert Fisk and Seymour Hersh are in the English-speaking world. His statements are not easily dismissed. Asked about al-Zarqawi, he replied: “There is no real proof that he is alive. If he is supposedly moving around freely in Iraq, why haven't Iraqis spoken about him? He cannot be that difficult to recognize with his wooden leg.”2 So our terrorist acrobat, doing his impressions of Harry Houdini on a never-ending tour of Iraq, has a wooden leg! Who would have guessed, based solely on the “investigative journalism” of our intrepid media?
Doesn't Majid, the Kurdish “Patriot,” know this? No doubt he does, but he is canvassed by hacks for outlandish al-Zarqawi headlines that will inspire “shock and awe” at home, and not for dull, factual accounts. And the Bush administration? They know it too. After all, who sent al-Zarqawi, bin Laden, and the rest of the so-called “Afghan Arabs” to Afghanistan in the 1980s? The Guardian's Sunday Observer for February 2, 2003, details for the incredulous where poor old Abu picked up his wooden leg.1 For those more inclined to believe an Arab or Islamic source, there is the informative comment of Shei
kh Naem Kassem, the No. 2 in Hezbollah, offered during the course of his October 2004 interview in Beirut, Lebanon, with the Arab-French online news source, Arab Monitor. In reply to the question, “Is the al-Zarqawi phenomenon a consequence of Western political policy?” Mr. Kassem states: “He is a man who has escaped Western government control [as] happened in the past with other Mujahideen in Afghanistan. They were allied with the Americans, then they parted ways.”2
Some deny that the ways have parted, believing rather that the phantoms of Bin Laden and al-Zarqawi actually serve U.S. policy by providing “justification” for intervention, or “revulsion” to grisly beheadings for those – now a decided majority in America – who are not sure that they want to “stay the course.” Scheuer even says it's “fair to conclude that the United States of America remains Bin Laden's only indispensable ally.”3 Why? Because “Bin Laden” and “al-Zarqawi” do things and say things that allow the Bush Gang to point to “Islamic barbarism,” thereby fireproofing their quest for “perpetual war for perpetual peace.”
John Pilger, a journalist who frequently comes up with both arguments and facts that no one else in the journalistic trade knows (or perhaps wants to know), took on the flurry of mainstream-media reports claiming that “the 'insurgents' are led by sinister foreigners of the kind that behead people,” such as al-Zarqawi “said to be al-Qaeda's 'top operative' in Iraq.”1 It is what the Americans say routinely, he noted, and “it is also Blair's latest lie to Parliament.” The irony is
that the foreigners in Iraq are overwhelmingly American and, by all indications, loathed. These indications come from apparently credible polling organizations, one of which estimates that of 2,700 attacks every month by the resistance, six can be credited to the infamous al-Zarqawi.2
Besides, there are serious doubts about the relationship claimed between Osama and al-Zarqawi anyway. Judith Yaphe noted in her Daily Star report, “al-Zarqawi's current relationship with Osama Bin Laden is not known,” and terrorism experts describe him “more as a rival than as a follower of the al-Qaeda leader.”3 So whether they are friends and colleagues or enemies and rivals depends, laughably, on which “terrorism expert” you consult.
Pilger further exposes the al-Zarqawi myth by referring to a letter written by the Fallujah Shura Council – which governed the city until the second American assault – to Kofi Annan at the UN on October 14, 2004. It said:
In Fallujah [Americans] have created a new vague target: al-Zarqawi. Almost a year has elapsed since they created this new pretext, and whenever they destroy houses, mosques, restaurants, and kill women and children, they said: “We have launched a successful operation against al-Zarqawi.” The people of Fallujah assure you that this person, if he exists, is not in Fallujah … and we have no links to any groups supporting inhuman behaviour. We appeal to you to urge the UN (to prevent) the new massacre which the Americans and the puppet government are planning to start soon in Fallujah, as well as in many parts of the country.4
While cynics and neocons will surely dismiss all this as lies, the open-minded will note from the foregoing that the Fallujans were not even sure that al-Zarqawi existed,1 and if he had, they would have turned him over to the Americans. No doubt they would have done so mainly because they wouldn't have wanted their homes and businesses destroyed, but also because they disliked the al-Zarqawi “tactics,” loathed in a country marinated in real religious toleration after decades of Ba'athist rule. But, as Pilger says, “not a word of this was reported in the mainstream media in Britain and America.”
For those inclined to doubt the Fallujan's professed disapproval of “inhuman behavior,” numerous reports exist to confirm it. One was filed by an Associated Press reporter, indicating that “[s]igns are growing of hostility between secular Iraqi insurgents and Muslim extremists fighting under the banner of al-Qaeda.”2 It continued to say, revealingly, that “Ramadi's insurgents argue that al-Qaeda fighters are giving the resistance a bad name and demand they stop kidnappings and targeting civilians … “(emphasis mine). In the mainly Sunni Azamiyah district of Baghdad, “another insurgency hotbed,” the article also said, “residents have repeatedly brought down from walls and streetlight poles the black banners of al-Qaeda in Iraq.” Another report from the Washington Post noted that over 1,000 Sunni clerics and political and tribal leaders, during a May 2005 meeting, issued a statement supporting the “legitimate right” of Iraqis to “[resist] the occupier” but condemning “all terrorist acts that target civilians, no matter the reason.”3
With newspaper headlines regularly blaring that “X number of Iraqis died today,” many people assume that civilians are routinely and indiscriminately targeted by any and all parties resisting occupation in Iraq. A careful read of most of these reports, however, indicates that “the civilians” involved are most often members of the Iraqi security forces – people regarded by the resistance as legitimate military targets because of their collaborating with the occupation. Such killings are a horrible fact of life, but they are typically found in all 20th-century warfare involving occupation forces and those collaborating with them, perhaps most memorably in Nazi-occupied Europe. Innocent people may be killed, but they are no more therefore targets than the innocent are the targets of U.S. air strikes on Iraqi cities. How else to explain the statements denouncing attacks on civilians from Iraqis who otherwise maintain that resistance is legitimate? And how else to explain the reporting from Amariyah where it was detailed that resistance forces overtly attempted to avoid targeting civilians? “Where fighting took place,” a report from the Baghdad Sunni neighborhood read, “it was intense.” According to residents there, “insurgents shot in the air along residential streets, warning people to stay inside, then fought the [U.S.-backed] Iraqi forces.”1
Some Iraqis who support the resistance have even suggested that the indiscriminate attacks on civilians are tolerated – if not orchestrated – by forces supporting the “new” Iraq, with hopes of delegitimizing the resistance. A report filed with the New York Times by Patrick Graham, a journalist who spent an extensive amount of time with Iraqi resistance fighters, pointed out that “[o]ne very religious Iraqi fighter I got to know … [l]ike many insurgents I met … believed car bombs to be the work of Americans trying to discredit a legitimate resistance.”2 A recent article appearing in the British Guardian confirmed this point of view. According to Sami Ramadani, senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University, “Zarqawi-style sectarian violence is … condemned by Iraqis across the political spectrum, including supporters of the resistance” (emphasis mine).3 What's more, the al-Zarqawi approach is widely seen “as having had a blind eye turned to it by the occupation.” In other words, according to Ramadani, many Iraqis think the “terror” is at least tolerated by the U.S. authorities as a part of a larger strategy to “dominate Iraqis by inflaming sectarian and ethnic divisions.”4 It cannot be denied that the havoc wreaked by the likes of al-Zarqawi does in fact aid those trying to both discredit the resistance and split the bulk of the Iraqi populace off from those supporting it. While such a contention may be “dismissed by outsiders,” Ramadani says,
the record of John Negroponte, the [former] U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, of backing terror gangs in central America in the 80s has fuelled these fears, as has Seymour Hersh's reports on the Pentagon's assassination squads and enthusiasm for the “Salvador option.”1
As for the “foreign terrorist”/al-Qaeda/al-Zarqawi myth, its coup de grace came via telephone from an American marine of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. Speaking to the Pentagon press corps from Fallujah on November 15, 2004, following the assault, the Force operations officer, Col. Michael Regner, said that of the “more than 1,000 insurgents” that had been detained by U.S. forces in the city, only 20 were foreigners.2 The AP story that reported the colonel's remarks further detailed that officials of the then-Allawi-led puppet government in Iraq said that there were precisely 15 foreigners in detention in Fallujah – ten from Iran and one each from Saud
i Arabia, Sudan, Egypt, Jordan, and the last possibly being from France. This is hardly “the flood” of foreign insurgents that Allawi claimed during his visit to the United States in September 2004 when he addressed Congress. Indeed, in one interview during the visit he estimated that foreign fighters constituted 30 percent of insurgent forces.3
According to an L. A. Times report from late 2004, U.S military and intelligence officials have said that Allawi's government tended to exaggerate the number of foreign fighters in the country to obscure the fact that large numbers of its countrymen have taken up arms against the American-backed puppet regime. This theme dovetails with statements made frequently by the Bush administration claiming the presence of foreign fighters “prove” that the war in Iraq is inextricably linked to the GWOT. No doubt the officials challenging this claim do not want to be named for fear of coming into the crosshairs of neocon zealots in Washington. But Army Gen. John Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, came to their aid indirectly when he said that military estimates of the number of foreign fighters in Iraq were below 1,000. He also said that
[w]hile the foreign fighters in Iraq are a problem that have to be dealt with, I still think that the primary problem that we're dealing with is former regime elements of the ex-Ba'ath Party that are fighting against the government.1
A piece that appeared in the Australian Age implicitly confirmed the comment made by Abizaid while it simultaneously undercut the al-Zarqawi-insurgency line, saying that “American intelligence obtained through bribery may have seriously overstated the insurgency role of the most wanted fugitive in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.”2 Speaking to U.S. agents in both Fallujah and Baghdad, the reporter quoted one as saying,
Neo-Conned! Again Page 95