Home > Abu Musab al-Zarqawi Does London
International Attack-Terrorism UK
Actually, I am surprised it took this long: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi-the stuff of legend and ambiguous news reports based on third-hand information and wild supposition-is responsible for the London attacks last week. “Investigators in London are probing whether Iraqi explosives-possibly provided by Al-Qaeda’s top agent in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi-were used in last week’s terror bombings,” reports Yahoo News. “Al-Zarqawi is a potential source since there’s an unlimited amount of explosives and munitions in Iraq that he controls,” yet another unspecified U.S. official told Time magazine. “It’s just a matter of getting it out of Iraq and to the right people.”
Nobody knows if al-Zarqawi actually did it-same as they don’t know anything else about the mercurial terrorist-but it makes sense to blame him the same way he is blamed for poison attacks in Europe, releasing a chemical cloud in Amman, 700 plus murders in Iraq during the occupation, the Canal Hotel bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad (killing the UN Secretary-general’s special Iraqi envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello), and various sundry murders, including Laurence Foley, a senior U.S. diplomat working for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Jordan, and the beheading of American-Israeli dual citizen Nicholas Berg. It should be noted there is absolutely no evidence al-Zarqawi had anything to do with any of the above incidents and he is associated with them due to the careless use of adjectives such as “purportedly” and “possibly” habitually employed by the corporate media based on nonsense uttered by “anonymous” and “unnamed” administration officials and other such dissimulators and con artists.
Ministry of Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff added fuel to the Abu did it fire by stating he is “concerned about” a possible al-Zarqawi link to the London bombings. “I want to withhold judgment. We haven’t seen any definitive indication of that. It’s something we obviously want to look to, we’re concerned about,” he told ABC. In other words, al-Zarqawi will become the prime suspect in the bombings and another addition will be added to al-Zarqawi’s notorious Goldstein-like colophon, none of it able to stand-up in a court of law, not that Bush and crew even want to capture al-Zarqawi (impossible since he is dead) and usher him into a courtroom. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is serving quite well as an official hobgoblin and dutiful paradigm of the now stereotypical Muslim terrorist, the reason we will be engaged in an “endless war” against Muslim baddies, as Bruce Hoffman of the RAND Corp. (an American “think tank” formed to provide research and analysis to the U.S. military) sees it. “We know that Zarqawi is a very dangerous and evil terrorist, and there’s no question he’s done things in Iraq which are about as bad as you can do,” said Chertoff. Actually there is no evidence al-Zarqawi has done anything but no sense upsetting the myth-making apple cart.
“Reflecting back, one cannot help but wonder if al-Zarqawi was used as a lure to trap the Americans into taking this action” in Iraq, explains Scott Ritter. “On the surface, the al-Zarqawi organization seems too good to be true. A single Jordanian male is suddenly running an organization that operates in sophisticated cells throughout Iraq. No one man could logically accomplish this.” But logic does not figure in the al-Zarqawi myth anymore than it does in the Emmanuel Goldstein myth in Orwell’s Oceania. Instead, the purpose of al-Zarqawi is to engender widespread fear of Muslims and rally the masses behind the concept of forever war directed against Islam. Chertoff was careful to note there is not a shred of evidence linking the phantom al-Zarqawi to anything, let alone the London terrorist bombings. Even so, from this point onward, the folkloric al-Zarqawi will be unquestionably linked to the carnage in London.
http://kurtnimmo.com/blog/?p=813
Related:
Tomgram: Dahr Jamail on the Zarqawi Phenomenon
Just in the last few days, according to USA Today, a "propaganda video purportedly made by al-Qaeda-linked terror suspect Abu Musab al-Zarqawi" has been released showing suicide attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq supposedly inspired by or ordered by him. Since George Bush first mentioned him in October 2002 in a speech in Cincinnati as proof of an al-Qaeda presence in Iraq, and so of Saddam Hussein’s essential al-Qaeda-ness, Zarqawi has moved ever more front and center as Iraq’s main terrorist threat. He now has an enormous bounty on his head and is cited regularly by the President as well as other administration officials as our enemy of enemies in that land, proof positive that Iraq is "the central theater in the war on terror." In the U.S., he has come to personify the war in Iraq, his presence both a kind of instant why-we-fight explanation for our being there and a living justification for everything we are doing there.
Zarqawi has indeed been a strange phenomenon of the ongoing war. Sometimes he seems to be everywhere at once in that country, blamed for (or, through jihadist websites, taking credit for) everything from the latest IED attacks on U.S. troops to mortar barrages against U.S. bases, suicide car-bomb assaults on Shiite civilian targets, kidnappings, beheadings, even a string of bombings stretching from Morocco to Turkey in 2003, not to speak of the resistance of whole Iraqi cities to the American occupation, If it happens and it’s horrific, he seems to be the one responsible. His name has more or less replaced Saddam’s and Osama Bin Laden’s as the enemy of choice for the United States. He is a literal whirling dervish of an enemy. His lieutenants or aides fall constantly into American hands; he is reportedly at every hotspot all over Iraq — or not in Iraq at all. His organization seems to take credit for just about every attack, every suicide bomb, every explosion in the country. The search for Zarqawi has become an — if not the — organizing theme of the American war in Iraq. At one point recently, the blogger Billmon posted the following set of typical Zarqawi headlines:
June 16, 2005: U.S. Says It Has Captured Al Qaeda Leader for Mosul Area
June 5, 2005: Militant linked to Zarqawi arrested
May 25, 2005: Top aide to al-Zarqawi arrested north of Baghdad
May 25, 2005: US: al-Zarqawi aides arrested
May 9, 2005: Gains seen after new arrest of al-Zarqawi aide
April 19, 2005: Iraqi Security Forces Capture Two Zarqawi Associates
March 9, 2005: A Zarqawi cell "prince", six others captured in Baquba
And he suggested the following template for the basic we-almost-got-Zarqawi story in our press, a kind of Iraqi variant on America’s Most Wanted:
[Iraqi/US/US and Iraqi] forces have [nabbed/captured/ arrested] [a/one/two] [senior/middle/] [figure(s)/operations chief(s)/terrorist operative(s)] of [Jordanian/al-Qaeda-linked/Iraq’s most wanted] terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi.
And yet, as far as anyone can tell, Zarqawi’s actual organization or network is, at best, modest in nature and no one writing about it or him even really knows whether the man is alive or dead, in or out of Iraq. A look at basic press accounts of Zarqawi finds them filled to the brim with words like "purportedly," "allegedly," "claims," and "the CIA believes with a high degree of confidence." And the unnamed sources who tell us what is supposedly known about Zarqawi are invariably anonymous "American officials" or "intelligence officials," the same people who once assured us that he had a leg amputated in one of Saddam’s Baghdad hospitals. (He is now believed to be two-legged.)
How to put together this conveniently satanic figure — capable of personalizing all the horrors of Iraq in a single monstrous body and bringing them home to the American public in a way that the Bush administration has found convenient — with what little is known about a possibly not-too-bright small-town thug is a curious challenge. Independent journalist Dahr Jamail, who wrote for Tomdispatch (among other places) from Baghdad and then came home for a break, is now back in the Middle East and, from Amman, Jordan, he went on his own search for the truth behind the Zarqawi phenomenon. Tom
The Zarqawi Phenomenon
By Dahr Jamail
A remarkable proportion of the violence taking place in Iraq is regularly credited to the Jordanian Ahmad al-Khalayleh, better known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and his organization Al Qaeda in Iraq. Sometimes it seems no car bomb goes off, no ambush occurs that isn’t claimed in his name or attributed to him by the Bush administration. Bush and his top officials have, in fact, made good use of him, lifting his reputed feats of terrorism to epic, even mythic, proportions (much aided by various mainstream media outlets). Given that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has now been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be based upon administration lies and manipulations, I had begun to wonder if the vaunted Zarqawi even existed.
Continue reading here:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=4481
Big, Bad Abu Musab al-Zarqawi: The creation of a myth
Is it time to ‘dispose’ of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? Has he ‘outlived’ his usefulness?