Commentary
Zarqawi the scourge defeated, Osama not wanted for 9/11?
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor


Jun 16, 2006, 00:27

As everyone and his brother, including Jordanian intelligence, rushes in to claim a piece of the Zarqawi kill, his fellow Afghanistan-Mujihadeen and super-star terror-meister, Osama bin Laden, fades into Not Wanted by FBI for 9/11 status, that is, the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, according to an article by Enver Masud. What?

What’s going on here? I thought that’s why Bush declared The War on Terror in the first place and went to Afghanistan to “smoke him out.” But hey, what do I know, what do we know? We only live here.

In fact, Masud writes, “The FBI page states: "Usama Bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 7, 1998, bombings of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. These attacks killed over 200 people. In addition, Bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world." What, first the FBI suppressed the warnings he and his boys were about to make the hit,” according to whistleblowers Kathleen Rowley and agent Robert Wright to name a few, and now the Federal Bureau of Instigation is retracting his being the central bogeyman of 9/11 and TWOT?. Did anybody tell Bush? Check if he’s operating on the old or new scenario.

Osama must be a wreck, wherever he is. He’s busted down to a non-entity and here’s Zarqawi coverage up the whazoo. In fact, Rex Tomb (love the name) of the FBI’s public affairs unit is said to have said, “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama (he says Usama, I say Osama, let’s call the whole thing off), Bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.” What? No hard evidence?

I feel like the comic Lawrence Black, screaming “Then what the fuck did you send an army there for and blow up a country and kill thousands of Afghans and American soldiers? Was it really all about securing territory for the Unocal pipelines and kicking the Taliban out of the way? I mean all those bearded beauties are crawling back and the dope production is back up . . . arrrgh!!!”

Excuse me. Then, who is the Number One Suspect for 9/11? Don’t tell me you, too, think that it could be Dick Cheney and George Bush? After Osama or along with him, they’re the ones most mentioned, along with Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld, General Richard Myers and General Ralph Eberhart, the unholy group of conspirators.

And don’t tell me you’re going to knock down Osama’s bounty next (25 million bucks, right?), so you don’t have to shell that out. Hey, the guy might even be dead, and somebody’s doing his voice for the cassettes, maybe the chubby guy from the first tape. Meanwhile, Zarqawi’s reward still stands at $25 million, right? Oh boy, I’d love to follow the money on that baby to some finks in his organization, or the Jordanian network, or the CIA Easter Bunny. Never know.

I mean Osama was the MVP of terrorists. Now, there’s no hard evidence connecting him. Is that why you were trying to hang it on Moussaoui, even though he was in jail at the time and couldn’t fly a plane. But the FBI did turn down some 70 requests from Agent Samet, who arrested Moussaoui for immigration violations, when he wanted to look into the latter’s laptop and such and build a case against him. Then, all of a sudden, a big 180, Moussaoui’s on trial, gets life in the Scorch House, and narrowly misses the Big Needle. Wow, what a movie!

I mean, Zarqawi didn’t do 9/11, did he? You’re not going to pin that on him too? Because I read Michael Chossudovsky’s “Who was Abu Musab al Zarqawi” and it seems the CIA built quite a mythic dosier on Zarqawi offenses. So, you know you FBI/CIA guys and gals could find a few more documents. As Chossudovsky stated, “The evidence suggests, however, that Zarqawi was part of a Pentagon disinformation campaign launched in 2003, which was initially intended to justify the US led invasion of Iraq. This central role of Zarqawi as an instrument of war propaganda was recently confirmed by leaked military documents revealed by the Washington Post.

”The Pentagon had set up a ‘Zarqawi program.’ Military documents confirm that the role of Zarqawi had been deliberately ‘magnified’ with a view to galvanizing public support for the US-UK led ‘war on terrorism’ . . ."

And so on, among many other scams, excuse me, intelligence data this gives Zarqawi almost as many bogeyman points as Osama, and actually more now. O’s priors can’t stack up to A-Z’s present rap sheet. No way. All we need is baseball cards on them for trading.

But back to agent Tomb’s fascinating report from Masud’s article. Tomb says, “In the months leading up to the September 11, 2001, attack, it is reported the Taliban ‘outlined various ways bin Laden could be dealt with. He could be turned over to the EU, killed by the Taliban, or made available as a target for Cruise missiles.’ The Bush administration did not accept the Taliban's offer.’” Why not?

"On September 20, 2001," according to the Guardian, "the Taliban offered to hand Osama bin Laden to a neutral Islamic country for trial if the US presented them with evidence that he was responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington. The US rejected the offer." Why?

“On September 23, 2001, the BBC reported that four of the hijack 'suspects' -- Waleed Al Shehri, Abdulaziz Al Omari, Saeed Alghamdi, and possibly Khalid Al Midhar -- were alive, and that FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged ‘the identity of several of the suicide hijackers is in doubt.’" I remember.

“Bin Laden, in a September 28, 2001, interview with the Pakistani newspaper Ummat, is reported to have said: ‘I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States.’" I remember that too.

“Skeptics dismiss the video tape ‘found in a house in Jalalabad,’ Afghanistan, which allegedly shows Bin Laden confessing to the September 11 attacks. In a December 20, 2001, broadcast by German TV channel Das Erste, "two independent translators and an expert on oriental studies found the White House's translation not only to be inaccurate, but manipulative." What a crew.

“FBI Director Robert Mueller, in a speech at the Commonwealth Club on April 19, 2002, said: ‘In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper -- either here in the United States, or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere -- that mentioned any aspect of the September 11 plot.’" Are these mixed signals or what? And . . .

“The evidence against Bin Laden, promised by Secretary of State Colin Powell on September 23, 2001, has yet to be made available to the public.” Beautiful.

But “Bin Laden is the 'prime suspect' in the September 11 attacks, said President Bush on September 17, 2001, and he pledged to capture him "dead or alive."

So who or what are you going to believe? “You say Usama and I say Osama, Bush says he's guilty and Mueller says well maybe; Usama, Osama. he’s guilty, oh maybe, let’s call the whole thing off. What do you say, folks? How about a little leveling, what with the disinformation programs, the information programs, the truth, the untruth. How much crap can they throw at us?

Even the fact that Zarqawi looked like he died in a prizefight, not from two 500-pound bombs dropped on his house -- baddabing, badaboom, even that looks bogus. And the stories changed quicker than a bad decision in an angry Las Vegas ring. In fact, Chossudovsky picked up a story from AP, "More Holes in the Official Story on Zarqawi’s Death," in which an Iraqi eyewitness, identified as Mohammed, said residents put a bearded man, who he felt closely resembled Zarqawi, in an ambulance before US forces arrived. He said the man was found lying next to an irrigation canal.

"He was still alive. We put him in the ambulance, but when the Americans arrived they took him out of the ambulance, they beat him on his stomach and wrapped his head with his dishdasha [traditional Arab robe], then they stomped on his stomach and his chest until he died and blood came out of his nose,’ Mohammed said, without saying how he knew the man was dead.” And so on. You say you nursed him, he says you stomped him; let’s call the whole thing off. Would that we could, from 911 on, from Afghanistan on, from Iraq on. And now what, from Iran on?

You say for power, we say for weapons, you say nuculur, we say schmuclear, let’s call the whole thing off. Call it off, before it even begins and the wheel of violence, death and absurdity turns again in the scorched earth of the Middle East, rolling over men, women, and children, armies, entire civilizations, in search of oil, the West’s unslakable thirst for oil. And change the script that the people of the Middle East are forever doomed to be our petro Gunga Dins [Indian water boy/man for British colonial regiment], as per Rudyard Kipling’s poem, then a blockbuster racist movie from George Stevens in 1938, the year of my birth.

And so, reader, what do I leave you with but confusion, complete and utter confusion? The story of a Jordanian street kid raised in poverty, pressed into fundamentalism, then the Afghanistan war with Russia, vetted into “insurgency,” “terrorism,” “brutality,” etc., all the words you’ve been seeing and will continue to see from our self-righteous press, which does not consider our analogous behaviors.

And so this Jordanian street kid finds his end in a scene from the 21st Century production of The War on Terror, co-starring his billionaire-bred colleague, Osama bin Laden, slipped from the family lap of luxury, with a cool $50 million, to join the Mujihadeen in 1979 for the CIA. The Prince and the Pauper fully trained by the CIA for their jobs, exchanging rolls, outpacing each other, replacing each other, just two guys from the desert 'hood.

AND NOW, only to be followed by another, a man whose name, according to the June 13 New York Times, appeared on the jihadi Web site ,Al Hesba, a man named Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, another fiction or fact, another hard to spell and pronounce name, another shadow from the faceless crowd, who will pick up the gun, the grenade, the blade, and so on, an “Islamic militant who has traveled beyond his own country to fight for his faith.” Terrific.

“He is not an Iraqi—that is my first impression,’ said the Iraqi national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, adding that he had not heard of Mr. Muhajir.’” Ah, but soon, one way or the other, the whole world will hear of him, n’est pas. So cut! Print! Shift the lights, move the trucks. One hour break. Then, roll the camera . . . annnnnnd . . . ACTION! War on Terror, The Sequel!