Illuminati News: New “al-Qaeda in Iraq” Boogieman: Abu al-Masri

o sooner did the corporate media parade gruesome photos of the freshly killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, or the person we are expected to believe was al-Zarqawi, then it set about arranging his successor, as evil Muslim boogiemen must remain front and center in the forever war against manufactured terrorism. “An Egyptian associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi claims to have succeeded him as the new leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, even though an Islamic Web site said Monday that another man was in power,” reports the Bush Ministry of Scary Campfire Stories, Fox News division. “Brig. Gen. Carter Ham said at a Pentagon news conference on Wednesday that Abu al-Masri, whose name surfaced shortly after reports of Zarqawi’s death became widespread as a successor, had claimed to be in charge of Al Qaeda in Iraq.” In short, the covert op pseudo-gang “al-Qaeda in Iraq” needs a new face, as the demonization of the resistance must continue.

According to Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, “If you had to pick somebody” as the probable new boogieman, it would be Abu al-Masri. Caldwell did not bother to tell us who would do the picking but this is of course a no-brainer—the picking was accomplished in the PSYOP unit at the Pentagon. Several candidates were bantered around the corporate media prior to al-Masri’s selection: most notably Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Iraqi, pegged as an “al-Qaeda” leader or “emir” (since he is dead, al-Iraqi was quickly removed from the candidate list) and Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi, who we are told is sort of the CEO of the Iraqi resistance (the Mujahedeen Shura Council). Obviously, for the Pentagon, al-Masri has the most attractive skillset and thus he was appointed. Now it is up to the corporate media to build him up, probably only to eventually tear him down, as al-Zarqawi (or rather his stand-in) was torn down with the help of a couple 500lb bombs.

As is usually the case when the organizational chart is shuffled, a bit of tweaking is in order. “We think that Abu Ayyub al-Masri is in fact, probably, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir [the immigrant]. They are probably one and the same,” Caldwell admitted. “Al Qaeda in Iraq’s new leader is more violent than his predecessor,” warns the Arabic daily Asharq al-Awsat. “No one gets appointed to this position without having earned the group’s trust and gained fighting experience. Perhaps Abu Hamza had traveled to Afghanistan or Bosnia to fight, or he took up armed resistance after the US military invaded Iraq. He might have carried out a number of operations famous throughout the organization,” Dr. Hani al Sibai, head of al-Maqrizi Center in London, told the newspaper.

Abu Hamza al-Muhajir’s CV fits the profile. If he did indeed travel “to Afghanistan or Bosnia to fight,” he is surely an intel asset, as both operations were run by the CIA and a smattering of other intelligence services. Although the corporate media suffers from an allergic reaction to the truth and prefers official fairy tales, it is a well-documented fact the Clinton administration, under the sway of then CIA director-designate Anthony Lake working out of the National Security Council, “helped turn Bosnia into a militant Islamic base,” thus leading to the recruitment of thousands of Mujahideen from the Muslim world, a repeat of the CIA’s Afghan operation a decade before, a fact revealed in a generally ignored congressional press release. “The evidence presented in Brendan O’Neill’s article [How we trained al-Qa’eda] in the case of Bosnia confirms that Al Qaeda is not an ‘outside enemy’ but rather a creation of the US military-intelligence apparatus. The same pattern of collaboration between the US military (and indeed NATO) and the Islamic brigades was replicated in Kosovo (1995-99) and Macedonia (2000-2001),” notes Global Research. As the CIA and Pentagon are not wont to discard successful operations—and the CIA has boasted its Afghan operation was the most successful in its long and sordid history—we can assume with a large degree of accuracy the pattern was replicated in Iraq.

Even though Hamza al-Muhajir, as his name suggests, hails from outside of Iraq, it appears the PSYOP micromanagers in the Pentagon are in the process of domesticating “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” thus attempting to taint the entire resistance as criminals of the al-Zarqawi stripe.

Eben Kaplan, a CFR “research associate,” explains:

Al-Qaeda in Iraq was already in the midst of a steady transformation at the time of Zarqawi’s death. The group was initially composed primarily of foreign fighters, but over the last several months it has begun to incorporate many more native fighters in hopes of creating an indigenous home base. “We can no longer talk about a foreign-born al-Qaeda in Iraq,” [Fawaz Gerges, a Middle East expert at Sarah Lawrence College] says. Part of the reason for this shift was many of Zarqawi’s foreign-born lieutenants had been killed off and his ability to gain new recruits was diminishing. If speculation that al-Muhajir is a foreigner is correct, it runs somewhat against this trend. As Gerges explains, “Even if you have a foreign-born leader, the rank and file of al-Qaeda in Iraq is becoming more Iraqi.”