If so many seemingly intelligent people were fooled about Iraq's WMDs...

...why should I now believe some one or two legged guy named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has turned into some unstoppable terra threat that can strike in any place at any time when these same seemingly intelligent people tell me to?

Are we getting our Abu Musab al-Zarqawi intelligence from the same folks who gave us the "Winnebago's Of Death" by any chance?

Just who is it that is pushing this Abu Musab al-Zarqawi story? The CIA? The FBI? The media? The Pentagon? The White House? Does anyone know?

Shouldn't we be asking these questions?

Don

and they lied about everything they supposedly knew, then I would assume they know nothing now and are just continuing to spew their lies in order to keep us living in fear and at each other's throats.

and used to keep the fear up to "support the war on terror"?

It's official. That happens to be my take on it. Al Zarquawi is either a pastiche of different people or a fiction.......IMHO.

... indeed, real. Verified independently by journalists. That doesn't mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that he's behind all the insurgency, or that he's still alive--or that he's as chummy with bin Laden as the government is making him out to be.

Wish I had the link at hand, but I read an article about him several months ago, reviewing his history. He was (is) a Palestinian who grew up in Jordan. As with some Palestinians in Jordan, al-Zarqawi is not his real name. It is an alias based on the town he came from originally.

He was, for the most part, a common criminal from his teenage years into adulthood and spent much of his time before the age of 30 in jail. The author of the article had interviewed people with whom al-Zarqawi had been in jail, and they described him as semi-literate, but a real zealot about the Quran. He would pretty much bully people in prison until they agreed to sit and listen to him lecture on scripture. Most described him as very intimidating, physically.

Prior to his latest fame, he was in Afghanistan in the `80s, fighting the Soviets with little US assistance (one suspects the Pakistani ISI was funding him with money received from Saudi Arabia), and some accounts have it that he and bin Laden were not on very good terms then and generally avoided each other. The training camp al-Zarqawi started was mostly populated by fellow Palestinians.

After Afghanistan, he returned to Jordan, where his Palestinian group gained notice after killing a USAID diplomat, because they believed him to be CIA. Until the run-up to the Iraq invasion, that was the only thing that al-Zarqawi was wanted for--he was not known to be involved in any terrorism or to be directly linked to al-Qaeda.

Is he crazy enough to be involved in terrorism? Certainly. Is it likely he's behind all of what's happening in Iraq? Nope. The curious thing is that when the video of Nicky Berg's beheading appeared, there were some who doubted it could have been al-Zarqawi that did the grisly deed. To some, the person's accent was wrong, but others noted that Zarqawi has some very identifiable features, one being a jailhouse tattoo of four green dots on the back of his right hand. Those did not appear in the video. Perhaps he became progressively more fanatically religious over time and had them removed, since Muslims are not supposed to have tattoos. Or, perhaps, it wasn't him at all.

So, alive or dead? One-legged or not? He's definitely still a mystery, and a convenient one for the US.

after allt he branding these liars have done

and told them that Saddam had some cookies in the cookie jar. Look at these crumbs, he said. Democrats said, Yes, we see the evidence. George said, we need to go in and take his cookie jar because if we don't, he will be a threat to give those cookies to all his terrorist friends. Yes, said the Democrats, we must go in and take him out. You have shown us proof that he has those dangerous cookies. But George lied. He got the cookies down at the Safeway store.