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Anatomy
of a Lie
February 4, 2003
By punpirate
Note to the reader: The following is a synopsis of what
is commonly available from national and international news
sources on the web. I don't claim to have first-hand knowledge
of events in northeastern Iraq.
Richard Armitage has grossly over-simplified and distorted
the facts to suggest that Hussein is a direct supporter of
Al-Qaeda. A couple of recent quotes need to be deconstructed:
"It's clear that Al Qaeda is harbored to some extent in Iraq,
that there is a presence in Iraq. There are other indications
of a recent assassination of our diplomat in Amman, Mr. Foley,
that was apparently orchestrated by an Al Qaeda member who
is a resident in Baghdad." And:
"Al-Qaeda is in several locations in Iraq."
William Safire of the New York Times has served to enable
the administration's view on the matter, sometimes disingenuously,
as mentioned later.
First, the administration arguments center around a splinter
fundamentalist Kurd group in northeastern Iraq known as Ansar
al-Islam (The Supporters of Islam). It's a relatively recent
group. American news sources repeat the line that it was formed
"shortly after 9/11," while English-language Arabic news sources
often put its inception date around December, 2001. I suspect
both descriptions are true in part. What's not mentioned in
Safire's recent NYT article on Al Qaeda in Iraq is that the
group, as originally created, was likely an amalgam of three
smaller groups of local Kurdish fundamentalists (interesting,
too, that they seem to be supporters of an extreme fundamentalist
Sunni sect and are not, strictly speaking, Wahhabi Shia, the
group spawning Al Qaeda); it also seems that they are enamored
of Osama bin Laden because of 9/11--those three groups may
have found the impetus to join together because of Al-Qaeda's
9/11 attacks. Safire's sly suggestion that Al-Qaeda created
the group with Hussein's assistance is questionable, based
on news reports from over a year ago. It's much more likely
that Ansar al-Islam started as an indigenous Kurdish group,
with bin Laden as a role model, rather than as a direct leader.
It's likely also true that the group was formed in December,
2001, in this sense--it's also been reported, quite a while
ago, that an indeterminate number (reports generally say 20-30,
maybe a few more) of Taliban/Al-Qaeda fighters fled western
Afghanistan in November and December, 2001, through northern
Iran, and hooked up with this strange bunch in Kurdistan.
If Al-Qaeda sent money and arms to support their members there,
it would be easy to assume that Ansar al-Islam was an Al-Qaeda
cell, and certainly, Westerners might come to the errant conclusion
that Ansar al-Islam was the creation of Al-Qaeda because of
that. But, the reports going back to winter, 2001, don't say
that. Ansar al-Islam was its own creator, not Al-Qaeda.
The other curious thing is that both Safire and Armitage
are putting a huge amount of stock in Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi
being the all-purpose Al-Qaeda leader connecting the murder
of Laurence Foley in Amman and Hussein and Ansar al-Islam.
Curious, because the earliest reports and follow-up reporting
on Foley's assassination make no mention of al-Zarqawi (although
Jordanian news sources do say that two Al-Qaeda members were
detained), nor is he mentioned in the early reports of the
existence of Ansar al-Islam. Certainly, Zarqawi cannot be
considered as either the leader of Ansar al-Islam or the originator
of that group as an Al-Qaeda terrorist cell. He is, however,
the person mentioned by Armitage as being treated in Iraq,
after purportedly being injured in the fighting in Afghanistan.
What Armitage does not say, in this regard, is that Baghdad
is a fairly common place in the Middle East for medical treatment.
In fact, the leader mentioned in more than one early report
on Ansar al-Islam is someone named Mullah Krekier (spelled
in some news reports as Mula Kreker). What's even more odd
is that there is a later Dutch news story saying that Krekier
was arrested at the airport in Amsterdam between flights,
coming from Iraq to his home--in Oslo (!), and was presumably
deported to Norway afterwards. Later reports state that Krekier
is in exile in Norway, making his status with regard to terrorism
even more uncertain--Norway would likely not willingly harbor
known international terrorists.
Armitage states, and others in the Bush administration have
stated, that "Al-Qaeda is in several locations in Iraq." This
is meant to suggest that Al-Qaeda is operating freely in all
of Iraq with Hussein's blessing. Technically, the several
locations assertion is true, but the implication is not. Armitage
is talking about Ansar al-Islam, not Al-Qaeda, and the several
locations are a few small villages in the mountains on the
extreme eastern edge of Kurdistan on the Iranian border. Ansar
al-Islam has occupied and taken over a tiny sliver of Kurdistan,
and has little more than 500 fighters in the region, the largest
number of which are indigenous Kurds.
Safire's insinuation, on behalf of Armitage and the Bush
administration, is that Zarqawi was in Iraq, as its guest,
to train Ansar al-Islam in the production of chemical and
biological weapons depends heavily on Jeff Goldberg's New
Yorker article which recounts interviews of two Ansar al-Islam
fighters captured by secular Kurds. In those interviews, Goldberg
says he was told by them of al-Zarqawi and of two Iraqi Republican
Guard officers seen in the largest of the villages taken over
by Ansar al-Islam, thereby suggesting a connection between
Hussein and international terrorism. Goldberg was apparently
told that al-Zarqawi not only taught Ansar al-Islam how to
make ricin (an extremely deadly biotoxin), he was also responsible
for having that toxin delivered to Algerian terrorists in
Turkey. That, to Armitage, is the smoking gun. Safire tries
to make the connection of Ansar al-Islam and therefore Hussein,
to international terrorism by stating that the Algerians caught
in London were making ricin.
There are a couple of things wrong with this assumption,
though. It wasn't necessary to give ricin to the Algerians
in Turkey; supplying them with instructions would be sufficient.
Moreover, why would the Algerians in London be making
ricin, if they'd been given it by al-Zarqawi in Turkey, as
Safire clearly intends to suggest? It was stated in this fashion
to imply that this was a manufactured biotoxin, that it was
a valuable commodity, and therefore constituted a link between
Hussein and international terrorism.
That's the second thing wrong with Safire's assumption. There's
no need to "manufacture" ricin. In fact, it's being produced
in billions of places around the world right now, with the
help of sun, water and soil. It's a principal protein in the
bean of the castor bean plant. It's a common ornamental plant
in many American gardens. The entire plant is toxic, but the
greatest concentration of toxin is in the castor bean.
All that's necessary to deliver ricin is to cold-press the
oil out of the bean and grind the remainder finely enough
for ingestion with food. Extracting and concentrating ricin
from the castor bean is a simple solvent process. The extraction
process is, in fact, so simple that no training in organic
chemistry is necessary and requires nothing more than a commonly
available and unregulated solvent. Weaponizing ricin extract
(creating a powder capable of being aerosolized for inhalation)
is even simpler. And for the terrorist's purposes, the quantity
of beans required is exceedingly small. Thoroughly extracted,
one single bean of perhaps 3 grams contains enough ricin to
kill roughly fifty people, administered directly. (It's also
interesting to note that the last planned terrorist use of
ricin against U.S. targets was by a right-wing extremist group
in Minnesota in 1991.)
In this regard, Safire also wishes to draw connections in
such a way as to imply that Hussein is funding Al-Qaeda through
Ansar al-Islam to develop chemical and biological weapons,
such as ricin, for export to international terrorist groups.
This is quite absurd, since the processes for extracting and
weaponizing ricin are simple. The greater issue for Hussein
would be how to extract it on a large, industrial scale for
military use, a task of which neither al-Zarqawi nor Ansar
al-Islam would have had no contributory knowledge. In fact,
UNSCOM inspectors found an Iraqi scientist, before they left
Iraq in 1998, with notes on ricin production, more than three
years before the advent of Ansar al-Islam.
While there are reports of Iraq planting "thousands of acres
of castor bean plants," it must be said that the plant has
other uses. Castor bean oil is a lesser organic substitute
for synthetic lubricating oils. It has the fairly unique property
of its viscosity increasing with temperature, making it suitable
for high-temperature lubricating. Additionally, ricin is being
contemplated for use in cancer tumor therapy. This is not
to say that Hussein's intention for all those castor bean
plants is benign. Rather, it's meant to suggest that there
are other uses for the plants, and that whatever the Bush
administration is saying about Hussein's support for Al-Qaeda
for the purposes of the production and export of biotoxins
is pure drivel, and that the story has been put into the form
it has taken in U.S. press accounts constitutes a cynical
belief in the stupidity of the American people.
Safire, in his role as de facto administration spokesman,
is also being disingenuous about the intelligence community's
failure to acknowledge Ansar al-Islam. He says that it is
their "deep denial" of 9/11-related failures that prevents
them from seeing Ansar al-Islam as a terrorist link to Hussein.
In fact, other reports say that U.S. intelligence is aware
of Ansar al-Islam and that it considers them not significant
enough of a threat to warrant a military strike on them. In
these days of indiscriminate bombing of almost anyone foreign
and brown-skinned, that's truly insignificant.
Safire also lumps both Iran and Iraq together as funders
of Ansar al-Islam, although there is no direct evidence of
funding from either government. Iran goes so far in their
denial as to say that they consider Ansar al-Islam a threat
to their security. That assertion of funding probably comes
from the Goldberg interviews, and Goldberg himself doesn't
speculate on what manner of interrogation those prisoners
might have received before he arrived in Kurdistan.
So, the likely connections between Al-Qaeda and Iraq are
local to Iraq and incidental, and are more properly, connections
between Ansar al-Islam and Iraq. Hussein is undoubtedly aware
of the group, and may be supplying them with a small measure
of support, but only because they are in conflict with independence-minded
secular Kurds, and making life more difficult for secular
Kurds fits into Hussein's plans to keep Iraq intact, and in
that way, the association between Hussien and Ansar al-Islam
can be very likely thought of as mutual interests internal
to Iraq, rather than as an external terrorist threat promoted
by Iraq.
All these accounts, taken together, constitute the anatomy
of a lie orchestrated and leaked by the Bush administration
and willingly repeated by some in the U.S. press for the express
purpose of furthering war, that Hussein has direct links to
international terrorism.
It's a lie for Richard Armitage to say that Al-Qaeda is in
several locations in Iraq when all the evidence points to
a wild bunch of bin Laden wannabes occupying a few villages
on the extreme border of Iraq near Iran, who have no resources
for attack on the U.S.
It's a lie for Armitage to suggest, and for William Safire
to repeat, that Hussein is exporting international terrorism
through Ansar al-Islam's purported production of ricin and
distribution of that substance to Algerian terrorists.
It's a wild leap of the imagination for the Bush administration
to suggest that Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi is the lynchpin of Iraqi
efforts toward international terrorism because he was treated
for a leg injury in Baghdad, and that a "man with a limp"
was seen in Ansar al-Islam-held territory. Zarqawi is probably
an extreme undesirable, but he's not the link between Iraq
and 9/11.
It's downright stupid of the Bush administration to assert,
most lately, that Iraqi spies and provocateurs are responsible
for anti-war demonstrations in the U.S. More likely, we're
all coming to the conclusion that Bush and his bunch are the
real terrorists.
Maybe, just maybe, Bush and his boys are simply stupid liars,
and think, erroneously, that the rest of America and the world
are even stupider than they. That's a pretty good premise
on which to begin any debate of the administration's reasons
for this impending senseless war.
punpirate is a New Mexico writer who just reads the news.
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