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Media Matters: On Fox News Sunday, Hume falsely asserted that Al Qaeda in Iraq 'was there before we got there'
Summary: On Fox News Sunday, Brit Hume asked Juan Williams, "Who are we fighting there [in Iraq] now, Juan?" then answered his own question: "Al Qaeda in Iraq. They were there before we got there, and they're there now." In fact, U.S. military and intelligence officials have reportedly stated that Al Qaeda in Iraq didn't exist before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, didn't pledge its loyalty to Osama bin Laden until October 2004, and isn't controlled by bin Laden or his top aides.
 That's a pretty distorted picture Media Matters is drawing. It's intentionally distorted, of course, aimed at people who don't pay attention.
Let us take a few moments to drift back in time, to those thrilling days of yesteryear, before Zark changed the name of Tawhid wal Jihad to al-Qaeda in Iraq. Al-Tawhid, as those of us who have been looking at things besides Britney's caesarean scar know, was Zark's personal terror organization, originally established to overthrow the Jordanian monarchy and replace it with a caliphate or something. And sonofagun but al-Tawhid was also an integral part of Ansar al-Islam. We, on this very website, watched as Ansar al-Islam devolved from its earlier incarnation, Jund al-Islam, which in its turn had been planted in the hills of Beverly Kurdistan in September, 2001, which some of us consider a significant date. Jund al-Islam's al-Qaeda controller was none other than Abu Zubaydah, the second of a string of Qaeda Numbah Threes to fall on hard times.
Zark was at that time maintaining al-Tawhid as distinct from al-Qaeda. The first reference I can find to it on Rantburg is from April, 2002, when the Germans arrested 11 al-Tawhid members plotting attacks on U.S. and Israeli targets within their country. Abu Qatadah, al-Qaeda's "ambassador in Europe" was described as the group's spiritual guide. He and Zark were the organization's co-founders.
Zark's day job, when he wasn't heading his own international terror organization, was as a camp commander in Afghanistan - near Herat, if I remember correctly. That was, of course, an al-Qaeda camp. But, really, other than those few things, there's not that much evidence connecting the Iraq organization with al-Qaeda. |
| But, but.... Richard Perle! PNAC! |
Further, the 9-11 Commission found "no evidence" that contacts between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda "developed into a collaborative operational relationship" before the Iraq invasion.
| Apparently they either didn't look too closely at Sammy's relationship with Ansar al-Islam or they rather legalistically didn't consider Ansar al-Islam to be al-Qaeda associated; at the time it wasn't, quite, functioning rather as an allied element, like GSPC, and being made up of several other elements besides al-Tawhid. |
On the September 9 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday, following National Public Radio senior correspondent and Fox News contributor Juan Williams' statement that "the war in Iraq is serving as a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda, creating this group Al Qaeda in Iraq where it might not otherwise exist," Fox News Washington managing editor Brit Hume asserted: "That's the whole argument that you've heard all along: you better not go and take these people on in any way because it only stirs them up and creates more of them. I don't buy it."
| It's the "don't resist, you'll just make it worse" argument. |
Later, Hume stated, "We were also going [to Iraq] because we believed there was a terrorist connection," to which Williams replied: "And they never proved the terrorist connection, Brit."
| Two words; Salman Pak. Two more words: Abu Nidal. Need two more? Abu Abbas. A few more words? Mujaheddin e-Khalq. Palestine Liberation Front. We cold go on, you know. |
Hume then asked: "Who are we fighting there now, Juan?" and answered his own question: "Al Qaeda in Iraq. They were there before we got there, and they're there now."
| They were there before we got there. They've evolved some, and they've formed alliances with the domestic terrorist cooties. They're still the same bunch, still the same idea. |
However, contrary to Hume's claim that Al Qaeda in Iraq was "there before we got there," a June 28 McClatchy Newspapers article reported that "U.S. military and intelligence officials" say "[t]he 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," as Media Matters for America noted.
| Maybe the McClatchy Newspapers need to hire somebody who knows something about the subject. |
Media Matters has also repeatedly noted (most recently here) that the 9-11 Commission found "no evidence" that contacts between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda "developed into a collaborative operational relationship" before the 2003 invasion. Several other purported pre-war links between Iraq and Al Qaeda have also been debunked.
| Like Zark being in Baghdad prior to the outbreak of hostilities? Like Saif al-Adel being the guy in overall charge of Qaeda ops in Iraq? All this stuff is from open source, you know. |
| Katrina! Cryptkeeper Karl! Valerie Plame, martyred by a desperate and cornered rabid administration! |
Further, as Think Progress noted, a September 6 report from the Congressional Research Service stated that "most of the daily attacks [in Iraq] are carried out by Iraqi Sunni insurgents," not members of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
| Which doesn't address the question. The fact that the cannon fodder is the locals has nothing to do with who's in charge in the rarified upper echelons of the Islamic State of Iraq. Nor does it have anything to do with the alliances of that same Islamic State of Iraq. |
Posted by: Fred 2007-09-10 |
