al qaeda in the Green Zone

* re the purported alqaeda attack on the greenzone, on tuesday juancole wrote:

"Minister of Interior Bayan Jabr announced that a plot had been foiled to place hundreds of Sunni Arab troops actually loyal to the insurgency in position at the Green Zone and then to have them rush embassy offices and take diplomatic hostages. The Green Zone is a barricaded area of downtown Baghdad. There have been rumors for weeks that the Sunni Arab guerrillas were preparing to "rise up" and take the capital. This was probably the plan to which the rumor mongers were referring. Or, a more frightening thought: the rumors refer to yet another plot. Anyway, apparently the US and the new government barely dodged this bullet. It would have been horrible. But you do have the sense that with the siege of Baghdad going on, the Green Zone is becoming vulnerable and could ultimately fall."

* miguel tells me that juancole now says: "I have a contact on the ground in Baghdad who thinks it should be taken seriously; diplomatic personnel. Who knows."

* incidentally, i hardly saw the alq/Greenzone story covered at all last week - it seemed to get a lot of coverage in the US, but I didnt see it at all on the Beeb or CNNi - until this weekend, when CNNi seemed to go out of it's way to debunk the story. the final line in the CNNi report was something like "we don't have any proof that there was any such plot, but then again, we don't have any evidence that there wasn't a plot either"