BY JONATHAN VALANIA Ok, so the header is a tad inflammatory, but hang on: I can prove this to you. Ahem. So, let’s look at the above screengrab of the front page of KYW’s website. Leader of al Qaeda in Iraq captured? Oh, well, that sounds like good news, right? Wait, it gets better. Beneath that it says “he told interrogators that Osama Bin Laden’s inner circle wields considerable influence over the Iraqi group.” Holy mackerel! That’s exactly what the President has been saying! God bless America!
But wait.
Oh, snap! It says right here the president has actually been whitewashing oversimplifying Iraq for political gain:
Bush called al Qaida in Iraq the perpetrator of the worst violence racking that country and said it was the same group that had carried out the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington.
U.S. military and intelligence officials, however, say that Iraqis with ties to al Qaida are only a small
fraction of the threat to American troops. The group known as al Qaida in Iraq didn’t exist before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, didn’t pledge its loyalty to al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden until October 2004 and isn’t controlled by bin Laden or his top aides.
Bush’s references to al Qaida came just days after Republican Sens. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and George Voinovich of Ohio broke with Bush over his Iraq strategy and joined calls to begin an American withdrawal.
“The only way they think they can rally people is by blaming al Qaida,” said Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center who’s critical of the administration’s strategy.
Well, isn’t that interesting? Gee, I wonder how KYW knows what al Qaeda dude said to his interrogators? Let’s take a look *click* oh, it’s a wire story from the Associated Press, that’s also run here, and here and here and here and here. The right-wing bloggers are already cackling over their cauldrons about this. The nut of the story, the screaming lede that’s running everywhere without question is that THE PRESIDENT WAS RIGHT, 9/11 IS IRAQ, AND IRAQ IS 9/11! And we know this because a captured terrorist reportedly told his interrogators under God knows what kind of duress, and then the Army issued a press release and an AP stringer named Bassem Mroue reported it as stone cold fact despite no independent corroboration.
Frankly, we are not sure who we trust less: Khaled Abdul-Fattah Dawoud Mahmoud al-Mashhadani or the U.S. military command which has at every turn — from Jessica Lynch to Pat Tillman, from Abu Ghraib to Haditha — put the White House’s political agenda ahead of accomplishing the “mission” or ensuring the safety of our men and women in uniform. It always seems like the truth is the first casualty with those guys and I take no pleasure in saying that. No doubt this latest headline will give the Movement To Save The War some breathing room, the president will never have to face the shameful consequences of his blind and arrogant warmongering while in office, and maybe even the Pentagon will get its wish and ‘surge the surge’, sending even more American men and women into the abattoir of Iraq. Shame on you, Fourth Estate. Shame.