21st Century Wire says…
For years, the CIA were able to keep Osama bin Laden alive through a stack of VHS tapes made during the 1990’s and early 2000’s, despite the fact he had been dead for some time. Other video tapes presented by the ‘intelligence community’ and aired on US and global media were in fact fakes.
In addition to the inflatable bin Ladens, we also had the amazing avatar of terror, famously lionized to by President George W. Bush as “al Qaeda’s No. 2 Guy”, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a made-to-order “myth” who was the initial product of faulty US intelligence (go figure), but was later adopted by the Pentagon as a rallying cry for US soldiers in desperate need of motivation, and also because it suited U.S. government political objectives in establishing Iraq as the primary front in the War on Terror. Amazingly, the US had claimed to ‘kill’ Al-Zarqawi on at least four separate occasions. Director Clint Eastwood helped to carry on the Al-Zarqawi myth by recasting the avatar in the plot of his latest Hollywood war blockbuster, American Sniper.
And so carrying on with that grand tradition, we present to you the latest avatar – the illusive theocrat, philosopher king, and evil leader of ISIS.
Once again, your reality, brought to you by Hollywood…
TERROR AVATAR: Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi.
Having noted that voter angst has been riled, propagandized, and fear-mongered to the point at which the most pressing priority for Congress is to ‘fix’ terrorism, it is perhaps not entirely surprising that we discover – deep down in the archives – that giving the public someone to ‘hate’ as opposed to something may have been an entire fiction.
As The New York Times exposed in 2007, Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi, the titular head of the Islamic State, according to Brigadier General Kevin Bergner – the chief American military spokesman at the time – never existed (and was actually a fictional character whose audio-taped declarations were provided by an elderly actor named Abu Adullah al-Naima).
Via The New York Times (2007),
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.
The ploy was to invent Baghdadi, a figure whose very name establishes his Iraqi pedigree, install him as the head of a front organization called the Islamic State of Iraq and then arrange for Masri to swear allegiance to him. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, sought to reinforce the deception by referring to Baghdadi in his video and Internet statements.
The evidence for the American assertions, Bergner announced at a news briefing, was provided by an Iraqi insurgent: Khalid Abdul Fatah Daud Mahmud al-Mashadani, who was said to have been captured by American forces in Mosul on July 4.
According to Bergner, Mashadani is the most senior Iraqi operative in Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. He got his start in the Ansar al-Sunna insurgent group before joining Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia more than two years ago, and became the group’s “media emir” for all of Iraq. Bergner said that Mashadani was also an intermediary between Masri in Iraq and bin Laden and Zawahiri, whom the Americans assert support and guide their Iraqi affiliate.
“Mashadani confirms that al-Masri and the foreign leaders with whom he surrounds himself, not Iraqis, made the operational decisions” for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, Bergner said.
***
Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official and a Middle East expert, said that experts had long wondered whether Baghdadi actually existed. “There has been a question mark about this,” he said.
Nonetheless, Riedel suggested that the disclosures made Wednesday might not be the final word on Baghdadi and the leaders of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Even Mashadani’s assertions, Riedel said, might be a cover story to protect a leader who does in fact exist.
“First, they say we have killed him,” Riedel said, referring to the statements by some Iraqi government officials. “Then we heard him after his death and now they are saying he never existed. That suggests that our intelligence on Al Qaeda in Iraq is not what we want it to be.”
American military spokesmen insist they have gotten to the truth on ‘Baghdadi.’ Mashadani, they say, provided his account because he resented the role of foreign leaders in Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. They say he has not repudiated the organization.
Ironman 3 anyone?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8mrZ1kGCfo
So he was a ghost back then…. is he a ghost again, a propaganda test-tube baby designed purely to put a face on ISIS and the biggest bogeyman of the current global anti-terrorist mania, so necessary to boost global QE in lieu of a world war (for now)?
READ MORE ISIS NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire ISIS Files
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