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THE INSIDE HISTORY OF THE ISRAEL
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true measure of the Lobby's power, the Christisons' 8-page dossier,
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Nobody's going to morn the death of
Al Zarqawi, me included, but there are some important questions
about how and why he died that need asking.
From the available reports
on the incident, it seems clear that the U.S. knew exactly where
he was, and had plenty of troops surrounding the building before
they called in an airstrike and dropped (depending on the story)
one or two 500-1b. bombs directly on him.
It seems like they really wanted
to kill him, not capture him. There is even a witness report
that when they discovered he was not dead, his US captors beat
him and made sure he died of his "wounds." Whether
or not that report is correct, the bombing itself was certainly
meant to kill him.
Now that's mighty curious when
you think about it (which not many in the mainstream media are
bothering to do).
Vengeance may be sweet, but
when you have the chance to catch the leader of a gang and get
the kind of information about his followers that you could never
hope to get any other way, you're giving up an awful lot when
you blow him up. If I were a GI, a Marine, or an Iraqi Shi'ia,
I'd have been much happier if he were now a captive and experiencing
the tender mercies of his interrogators. who might be learning
where the others are who keep trying to blow me up with IEDs
and suicide bombs.
I remember thinking, and writing,
the same thing when the U.S., early in this occupation, had Saddam
Hussein's two sons trapped in a building and, instead of waiting
them out and capturing them, with all the information they surely
had about the whereabouts of the old man and of the organization
of the Baathist resistance, the military blew up their house
with rockets and bombs.
In Zarqawi's case, killing
him with bombs meant, incidentally, the killing of an innocent
little girl, aged 5-7 according to reports, and her mother and
father. It could be that her parents were not so innocent (in
which case sais la non vie), though we don't know that--they
may have been pressured into letting him stay in their home--but
the little girl who died to satisfy America's bloodlust was an
innocent.
Remember, this was done on
orders of an administration that claims to believe every life
is precious.
So let's get this straight:
there was no justification for bombing that house. The U.S. military
had Zarqawi in a perfect trap. He was surrounded. There was nowhere
to run. There was a predator drone monitoring the site from above
in case he tried to slip away.
So why did they kill him?
My guess is that it's the same
reason they killed Saddam's two sons: The U.S. is not particularly
anxious to have these guys talking about what they know about
the U.S. in Iraq.
In the Saddam boys' case, they
might have told tales of U.S. assistance to their father. At
a minimum, they might have made it clear that there were no weapons
of mass destruction, and at the point they were caught, the administration
was still funding a desperate search to find anything (there
is even talk that they may have been considering hiding something
so they could find it).
In Zarqawi's case, there is
speculation that he was something of an American creation. Certainly
the U.S. left him alone before the war and during the war's early
stages, when he and his gang or terrorist thugs were operating
out of northern Iraq under the protection of the U.S. no-fly
zone.
At the least, we can say that
the Pentagon and the administration (because the decision about
how to handle Zarqawi was surely made at the very top by The
Decider and his advisers) made a stupid decision in killing him,
rather than capturing him. If we think more suspiciously, there
may have been method to the administration's madness.
They don't want these kinds
of guys talking about what they know.
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