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Sunday, November 20, 2005

Elaph Arab Website: Z-Man Eliminated

It is, according to our print overlords, the thankless and unending duty of we unedited and not-fact-checked bloggers to pass on and amplify misinformation, so I am thereby obligated to publish this rumor: Zarqawi may be dead and cavorting with the concubines as we speak. Reports began with the generally-unreliable Debka and Ynet. That the Jerusalem Post picked it up makes one feel somewhat better, but there is, of course, the unfortunate fact that this same rumor has reared its head precisely nine hundred times before.

UPDATE: AP gives the half-nod! This could be a watershed moment.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - U.S. forces sealed off a house in the northern city of Mosul where eight suspected al-Qaida members died in a gunfight — some by their own hand to avoid capture. A U.S. official said Sunday that efforts were under way to determine if terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was among the dead.

UPDATE: The Reuters version is more pessimistic.

UPDATE: Given news that one of the world’s sickest terrorists might have finally been killed (Or, as some reports are indicating, he may have committed suicide in his usual cowardice), the Associated Press wants us to feel bad for Zarqawi. He was, according to one terrorist source, tortured while in Jordanian custody. The article even includes the the standard “[he] did not show a violent nature” line. Stories like these from the AP often precipitate New York Times ‘news analysis’ front-pagers, which in this instance would probably attempt to make the point that the United States shouldn’t engage in coercive interrogation because such a reputation would, as they’ll assume it did here as regards Jordan, make the worst terrorists more likely to kill themselves before capture.

Anything to make a win a loss.

(…via Speed of Thought)

MORE: OSM has a round-up of commentary here. They linked this post, and I just want to make clear that the Associated Press in reporting Zarqawi’s having been tortured—a tenuous claim at best, because the sole source is a convicted terrorist who certainly has his own grudges—isn’t necessarily making excuses for Zarqawi, but is certainly opening the door to those who would turn a significant military and propaganda win into a political issue. And the timing is highly suspect, being that the dispatch on torture was not time-sensitive and was released only once news of Zarqawi’s supposed death started surfacing. Why AP saw those two news items as fundamentally commingled I can only conjecture and, as is the bloggers’ wont, I did.

Posted on November 20, 2005 03:03 PM. Permalink