Reply #5: Aren't these two different stories?

[stillcool]

they both source the same General Bergner. Other than that I don't see the connection. The Times writer of the second piece Michael R. Gordon seems to be another Judith Miller type according to Glenn Greenwald at Salon:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/07/02/gordon/index.html?source=rss

US arrests Al-Qaeda in Iraq's link to bin Laden
Wed Jul 18, 6:51 AM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070718/wl_mideast_afp/iraqunrestqaedaus_070718105139
BAGHDAD (AFP) - US forces have arrested the most senior Iraqi member of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and believe he is a go-between between the group's foreign leaders and Osama bin Laden, a military spokesman said Wednesday.
Brigadier General Kevin Bergner said Khaled al-Mashhadani had told his US interrogators that the supposed Iraqi leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq was ficticious and a front for the group's Egyptian chief, Abu Ayyub al-Masri.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070718/wl_mideast_afp/iraqunrestqaedaus_07071810513

Leader of Al Qaeda group in Iraq was fictional, U.S. military says
By Michael R. Gordon
Published: July 18, 2007

BAGHDAD: For more than a year, the leader of one the most notorious insurgent groups in Iraq was said to be a mysterious Iraqi named Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi.

As the titular head of the Islamic State in Iraq, an organization publicly backed by Al Qaeda, Baghdadi issued a steady stream of incendiary pronouncements. Despite claims by Iraqi officials that he had been killed in May, Baghdadi appeared to have persevered unscathed.

On Wednesday, a senior American military spokesman provided a new explanation for Baghdadi's ability to escape attack: He never existed.

Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, the chief American military spokesman, said the elusive Baghdadi was actually a fictional character whose audio-taped declarations were provided by an elderly actor named Abu Adullah al-Naima.

The ruse, Bergner said, was devised by Abu Ayub al-Masri, the Egyptian-born leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who was trying to mask the dominant role that foreigners play in that insurgent organization

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/18/africa/iraq.php