Does Al-Zarqawi exist? Have U.S.-backed death squads been activated?

[JackRiddler]

Fighting the American-led invasion that has brought so much death and sorrow to Iraq is an indigenous resistance of the people. It is led by former Baath loyalists, army officers, and patriots both secular and religious. U.S. commanders have admitted that 99 percent of the insurgents are Iraqis. And it's not just a Sunni phenomenon. One of the largest anti-occupation forces, the Sadr Army, is Shiite.

A myth has been propagated, entirely within a bubble of pro-invasion media, that the resistance is actually led by some guy named Zarqawi. This fellow is supposed to be a foreign Sunni extremist, a fanatic al-Qaeda leader who hates Shiites (the Iraqi majority) and seems to mainly kill civilians at random.

The one-legged man's secret messages are curiously vulnerable to American interception. These have proven the beast's connections to Osama Bin Ladin. Despite this evident security breach, he has miraculously survived a number of bad woundings.

In short, the official U.S. government story is on its face even more ridiculous than the conspiracy theory (popular in Egypt) that Zarqawi is actually a CIA agent.

I doubt Zarqawi is a U.S. agent, simply because it seems even likelier that he is an outright invention of U.S. propaganda (at least in the form that he is fed to us). I don't know if he exists or if he is still alive, any more than I can tell which of the many bearded doubles who have appeared in the Osama videos might be the "real" Osama.

I do know that the U.S. military makes no secret of its intent to launch an "Operation Phoenix"-style solution of the insurgency. That means death squads.

Conceived and engineered by the CIA under Richard Helms, Operation Phoenix was the 1968-1970 program to round up and kill the Viet Cong "civilian infrastructure." It achieved nothing other than the summary killings of 20,000 to 50,000 South Vietnamese civilians, many of them in massacres of whole villages (the My Lai massacre was not exceptional and occurred during the high point of Phoenix; it was likely just a part of or an "excess" within the larger operation).

The follow-up came in the 1980s death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala, who were organized, armed and trained by U.S. government secret operations.

How many of the dozens of dead Iraqis now being found near "insurgent centers" (whose numbers are listed but whose identities are rarely specified in the U.S. press) are actually suspected insurgents, or insurgent "civilian leaders" massacred by U.S.-armed death squads?

I'll lay even odds that the U.S.-backed Iraqi and U.S. "special forces" death squads are already busy, all over Iraq.

[radwriter0555]

1. He's like Al CIAda and Osama Bin Laden. No one actualy SEES them, but the

bush regime sure talks about em a LOT.

[JackRiddler]

2. yep (kick)

[progressoid]

3. The theory that he is fictional isn't new

It would make sense that the propagandists would need a new villian but this needs to be investigated properly. That'll happen when pigs fly.

[Karenina]

4. Remember when Al Z was POSITIVELY ID'ed

as Nick Berg's executioner and Christine Amapour quipped while viewing the video (paraphrasing) "That is NOT a Jordanian accent I'm hearing" how she suddenly was erraaaa... "on vacation?" :rofl::rofl::rofl:

[ngGale]

5. The bionic man, Zarqawi...

who knows? I did read the Egyptian article but unlike bin Laden who one can tie to the CIA, Zarqawi seems more made up. I do remember he is Jordanian and people doubting the accent with the Nick Berg case.

[JackRiddler]

6. yep...

(kick)