You might or might not be able to get it straight, but I wouldn't expect you to post anything straight here. But I'm glad to see you doing the big lie, right on cue. The article states nothing remotely like your "big lie" one liner summary. What Bush said, most recently, was:
In rebuffing calls to bring troops home from Iraq, President Bush on Thursday employed a stark and ominous defense. “The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq,” he said, “were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th, and that’s why what happens in Iraq matters to the security here at home.”
What the article says in response to this is:
Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia did not exist before the Sept. 11 attacks. The Sunni group thrived as a magnet for recruiting and a force for violence largely because of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, which brought an American occupying force of more than 100,000 troops to the heart of the Middle East, and led to a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.
The American military and American intelligence agencies characterize Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as a ruthless, mostly foreign-led group that is responsible for a disproportionately large share of the suicide car bomb attacks that have stoked sectarian violence. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior American commander in Iraq, said in an interview that he considered the group to be “the principal short-term threat to Iraq.”
But while American intelligence agencies have pointed to links between leaders of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the top leadership of the broader Qaeda group, the militant group is in many respects an Iraqi phenomenon. They believe the membership of the group is overwhelmingly Iraqi. Its financing is derived largely indigenously from kidnappings and other criminal activities. And many of its most ardent foes are close at home, namely the Shiite militias and the Iranians who are deemed to support them.
“The president wants to play on Al Qaeda because he thinks Americans understand the threat Al Qaeda poses,” said Bruce Riedel, an expert at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy and a former C.I.A. official. “But I don’t think he demonstrates that fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq precludes Al Qaeda from attacking America here tomorrow. Al Qaeda, both in Iraq and globally, thrives on the American occupation.”
As far as Bush lying, I'd say his statements have pretty much the same relation to the truth as yours do. Nowhere in the article anything remotely like "
Let me see if I get this straight: all those people in Iraq CLAIMING to be Al Qaeda, and exchanging letters and advice with Aymin al Zawahiri, and posting videos of their latest car bombs and beheadings under the name al Qaeda in Mesopotamia are not actually al Qaeda because....Bush says they are al Qaeda?" stated. That's just your own BS, not that it's any worse that any of the other BS summaries you do of any other source that's not dutifully obeisant to the war president and his hopelessly botched Iraq operation. |
