How US fuelled myth of Zarqawi the mastermind
By Adrian Blomfield outside Fallujah
(Filed: 04/10/2004)Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist leader believed to be responsible for the abduction of Kenneth Bigley, is 'more myth than man', according to American military intelligence agents in Iraq.
Several sources said the importance of Zarqawi, blamed for many of the most spectacular acts of violence in Iraq, has been exaggerated by flawed intelligence and the Bush administration's desire to find "a villain" for the post-invasion mayhem.
Zarqawi fuels his ambition with the release of a video of the beheading of Nick Berg
US military intelligence agents in Iraq have revealed a series of botched and often tawdry dealings with unreliable sources who, in the words of one source, "told us what we wanted to hear".
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/10/04/wirq04.xmlZarqawi - Bush's man for all seasons
By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times(snip)
The making of a legendBefore January 2003, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was little known. Very few people were even aware of the one-legged ethnic Palestinian Ahmed Fadeel al-Khalayleh, born in the dreary industrial wasteland of Zarqa in Jordan, who was basically a semi-literate, tattooed, Shi'ite-hating thug.
His goal while in Jordan was to topple King Hussein. It didn't work. He became a jihadi in Afghanistan in the late 1980s against the Soviets, and after returning to Jordan in 1992 spent seven years in jail for possession of guns. In fighting in 2002 following the US-led invasion of Afghanistan to topple the Taliban, one of his legs was severely injured - and may have been, or maybe not, amputated. He then found refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan, protected by the Anglo-American enforced no-fly zone, with Ansar al-Islam, a group with a maximum of 400 fundamentalist Kurdish warriors. And he may have moved to the Sunni triangle after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003.
Zarqawi stopped being a non-entity on February 5, 2003, when he was spectacularly catapulted onto the global stage - six weeks before the start of the Iraq war - by US Secretary of State Colin Powell's weapons of mass destruction speech at the United Nations. Powell used Zarqawi to link Saddam Hussein's secular Ba'athist regime to the "Islamic terror network", and thus partly justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Asia Times Online confirmed in Amman, Jordan in February 2003 that practically nobody knew Zarqawi outside of Jordan - even though in 2002 he had been the target of a CIA disinformation campaign tying him to the theocratic regime in Tehran. But soon the Bush administration was to invest him with the aura of an "international man of mystery" - the world's most dangerous man after Osama bin Laden.
more...
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FJ15Ak02.htmlZarqawi: the Man and the Mythhttp://www.drudge.com/discuss/viewMessage.php/18564
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