At 8:34 PM +0000 11/3/04, POPBITCH wrote:

>> Hardline Honeyz 2 << Al Zarqawi: the unusual suspect

Mysterious Jordanian celebrity executioner Abu Musab Al Zarqawi is a huge hit with lovers of Hardline Honeyz. With a $25m price tag on his head, al Zarqawi shot to fame as the star of "Sheik Abu Musab Al Zarqawi slaughters an American infidel with his own hands", a video showing the death of Iraq hostage Nicholas Berg. But is Al Zarqawi for real?

A Jordanian of that name did fight in Afganistan in the 80s and in Kurdish Iraq in the 90s, with a group called Ansar al-Islam, but no more was heard of him until Colin Powell's famous warmongering speech to the UN named him as the link between Saddam and Osama. Since then Al Zarqawi has become a mythic bogeyman blamed for almost every real or imagined terrorist threat.

*Suddenly he was al-Qaeda's bioterrorism expert and head of terror camps in Saddam-era Iraq; he'd never previously been linked to either. * US intelligence experts say Berg's executioner clearly didn't have a Jordanian accent. * Iraqi insurgents claimed Al Zarqawi was dead, and all new captured operatives from Ansar al-Islam say they've never laid eyes on him. * CIA said he only had one leg after an operation in Baghdad, but since the executioner in the video clearly had two they now say, er, he has two after all.

So... Al Zarqawi: he's the new Keyser Sose.

-- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'