The al-Zarqawi myth

* xymphora: "The al-Zarqawi myth appears to be another manifestation of the American myth that al-Qaeda is behind the series of terrorist attacks in the ‘long war’ that continues to (barely) sustain the Bush Administration. If there is to be some sort of phony Shi’ite terrorist attack on the United States, they won’t be able to blame it on Sunni al-Qaeda, so the shift away from al-Zarqawi may eventually have domestic American implications."

* greg mitchell weighs in on the zarqawi letter/NYT story. He notes the Safire wrote an op-ed on the letter - if i'm not mistaken, that op-ed was the only time Safire even hyper-linked (if memory serves, he linked to the Weakly Std article)

* xymphora: " Is al Qaeda a hoax? The British are now concluding that there was no al Qaeda connection to the July 7 London bombings. This follows on the findings by the Spanish government that there was no al Qaeda connection to the Madrid bombings, the inability of the German courts to convict anybody in connection with the September 11 attacks (the Germans are rightfully suspicious of the evidence given to them by the CIA, statements of 'Ramzi Binalshibh' and 'Khalid Shaikh Mohammed', two guys who may very well have never been in American custody given the suspicious accounts of their respective captures), and the fact that 'Atta' was in Brooklyn in early 2000 and thus could not have been a part of the infamous al Qaeda 'Hamburg cell'. If you consider that the initial Osama bin Laden statement was an uncategorical denial of any involvement in the plot, the connection between terrorism and al Qaeda starts to look very suspect."

* emptywheel:

"Re: the NIE, I've been listening to former Senator Graham's book on terrorism and dodgy intelligence. And he is quite clear in his opinion about the NIE. The chronology he describes is something like:

• He, Durbin, and Levin request the NIE
• Tenet is shocked, because he hasn't even thought of doing it, in spite of the fact that the NIE is always the basis for big decisions
• They get an NIE in record time, although Tenet refuses to include certain aspects that the Dems requested, including details on the consequences of war in Iraq
• They compare the classified and unclassified versions of the document and realize the unclassified (with its bells and whistles) could not have been done in the short time period in which it took to do the NIE

In short, the unclassified "NIE" was not an NIE at all, it was a talking point document produced before the classified NIE.
[...]
In short, Walpole's job was to make sure the classified NIE looked like the precursor to the unclassified one."

mon dieu