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Posted on Thursday 19 July 2007

Please note the dates of these articles about the infamous Abu Omar al-Baghdadi:

By NIBRAS KAZIMI
February 8, 2007

Abu Omar al-Baghdadi made his grand entrance onto the jihadist stage on October 12, 2006, and since then he’s delivered two very important speeches — the more recent one came out last week — and has taken credit for much of the spectacular outbreaks of violence in Iraq of late, yet he still can’t get his name in print on the pages of the New York Times. Why are the editors and reporters of that paper not telling their readers anything about Iraq’s top terrorist?

Abu Omar al-Baghdadi is Al Qaeda’s guy in Iraq, and nowadays, the Sunni insurgency is being whittled down to Al Qaeda’s activity in Iraq. It’s that simple, and he’s that important.

So why isn’t the Times writing that? I think the answer has something to do with what seems, to my eyes, to be a determined campaign to keep the American people from knowing the nature of the enemy in Iraq because identifying this enemy as Al Qaeda casts the debate about the war in a whole different light.
 

POSTED: 12:24 a.m. EST, March 10, 2007

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, leader of the militant group Islamic State of Iraq, was arrested Friday in western Baghdad, the Iraqi Interior Ministry said.

The al Qaeda-affiliated group last week posted a video on the Web that showed the execution of a group of Interior Ministry workers they allegedly kidnapped.

One Web site that typically carries the group’s messages said the men were killed to retaliate for the alleged rape of a Sunni woman by police, whose ranks are made up largely of Shiite members.

A high-ranking Interior Ministry official said al-Baghdadi was arrested a few hours after the Iraqi army initiated an operation in a village in the Abu Ghraib district.

A number of al-Baghdadi’s aides were also arrested, the official said. Neither the Iraqi police nor multinational forces were involved in the operation.

Al-Qaeda Down
May 3, 2007 1:48 AM

Iraqi authorities announced that the leader of al-Qaeda’s political front organization the Islamic State of Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, was killed in the Ghazaliya district in western Baghdad this morning. Later in the morning, US officials identified the killed militant as Muharib Abdul-Latif al-Jubouri, al-Qaeda’s “information minister.” There’s speculation whether it’s the same individual
 
The man known as Abu Omar Baghdadi is an actor and the group a front for Al Qaeda in Iraq, the military says.
July 19, 2007

BAGHDAD — In March, he was declared captured. In May, he was declared killed, and his purported corpse was displayed on state-run TV. But on Wednesday, Abu Omar Baghdadi, the supposed leader of an Al Qaeda-affiliated group in Iraq, was declared nonexistent by U.S. military officials, who said he was a fictional character created to give an Iraqi face to a foreign-run terrorist organization.

An Iraqi actor has been used to read statements attributed to Baghdadi, who since October has been identified as the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq group, said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner.

Bergner said the new information came from a man captured July 4, described as the highest-ranking Iraqi within the Islamic State of Iraq.

He said the detainee, identified as Khalid Abdul Fatah Daud Mahmoud Mashadani, has served as a propaganda chief in the organization, a Sunni Muslim insurgent group that swears allegiance to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda.

According to Bergner, Mashadani helped create Islamic State of Iraq as a "virtual organization" that exists in cyberspace and is essentially a pseudonym for Al Qaeda in Iraq, another group that claims ties to Bin Laden. The front organization was aimed at making Iraqis believe that Al Qaeda in Iraq is a nationalistic group, even though it is led by an Egyptian and has few Iraqis among its leaders, Bergner said at a news conference.

"The Islamic State of Iraq is the latest effort by Al Qaeda to market itself and its goal of imposing a Taliban-like state on the Iraqi people," Bergner said.

It makes one wonder if there’s any sanity left in the place called Iraq [which may or may not even exist]. emptywheel comments, "Here’s our shameless propaganda chief, claiming that their shameless propaganda chief invented a bogeyman that we could then say we had captured. Because it’s not like we’ve invented such bogeymans for our own use, nuh uh, not us. And conveniently, this little hall of mirrors ends up right back where BushCo would like to have us, with the claim that Al Qaeda in Iraq is Al Qaeda is the War on Terror is the never-ending war is the big bogeyman no one seems to care about anymore."

In all this madness, I found the first article in the New York Sun the most interesting. The New York Sun is slamming the New York Times for not mentioning a [maybe  fictitious] character because they think the New York Times doesn’t want to admit that al Qaeda is running the insurgencey in Iraq.

What I think is that this war has gotten too crazy and I don’t want our children to be exposed to it any more. Bring them home…

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