Zarqawi death PR stunt

$25 million PR stunt

Everybody better off now.
Very little collateral damage (woman, kid, few brown guys, Hey! .. )


It is beyond belief that the face of anyone inside a shack hit by two (2) 500 bombs could have survived in the shape Zarqawi was shown in on TV. Those bombs leave craters. The photos show utter devastation.

What were the GMC trucks doing at the house before the bombs struck?

Quote Dexter Filkins et al, “How Surveillance and Betrayals Led to a Hunt’s End.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/09/world/middleeast/09raid.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 8 —Muhammad Ismael, a 40-year-old Iraqi taxi driver, was standing outside his home in the tiny village of Hibhib on Wednesday evening when something unusual caught his eye. …Three GMC trucks, each with blackened windows, rumbled past his home and toward the little house in a nearby grove of date palms that for more than three years had stood abandoned. "It was something very strange," Mr. Ismael said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "That house is always empty.”
………”Back in Hibhib, Mr. Ismael again noticed something strange. Of the three GMC trucks that had pulled up to the house in the date palm grove, only two stayed. One of them drove away and never came back. .. Whether the departing GMC contained the source who tipped off the Americans about Mr. Zarqawi's location is unknown.”


This is about as close as a reporter can go, it seems to me, in trying to get across a counter-story message. Massive preparations had been undertaken:

“In Hibhib, Mr. Ismael, the taxi driver, said American soldiers began swarming the town, seemingly coming from nowhere, with some soldiers sliding down ropes dropped from Black Hawk helicopters. His account largely tracked with the one offered by the American military. ..The entire village was seized"
“For the first time, American officials believed they had located Mr. Zarqawi with absolute certainty. "There was 100 percent confirmation," General Caldwell said.”


The news media then swarms over the connections between governments and agencies, reconstructing a trail that doesn’t look very certain at all, but who cares, now? All that is for public tittilation and conspiracy buffs to chew on. The officials are keeping mum on exactly how they knew he was in there. After all, the question of who gets to split the $25 million is on the line, and that ain’t chump change. Could some faction ‘friendly’ with the donors have been holding the fugitive all along?

Filkins’ article, on Thursday, flatly states: “Mr. Zarqawi was dead by the time American commandos got to the house, General Caldwell said.” But today, all over Cable news networks, Caldwell is flatly stating that Zarqawi was alive when they got to him, but died immediately thereafter. (Thus, they can prove that the Iraqi’s, who somehow managed to get there first, didn’t killed him, which would enrage many Arabs . After they have craped him out of the rubble, miraculously alive and intact – which the Americans then do not have to explain.

Final note, for now: the LA Times notes that “One photo displayed by the military was time-marked 6:17 and the other 10:31. Officials said that the time on the first photo, which would have been within minutes of when they said the bombs were dropped, was incorrect.” But if the time-mark is incorrect, it must have been tampered with, such things don’t just happen, and leads to Who? And why? and what’s the cover-up?

And does anyone remember what was dominating the news the day before yesterday?

Watch out. Tomorrow’s a’comin ‘atcha.