Osama Bin Remembered

Glenn Greenwald on the recent shift by the CheneyBush administration shift in terminology, from insurgents (arguably freedom fighters seeking to liberate their lands from foreign occupation) to al-Qaeda.

McClatchy reports on shift in Iraq propaganda

[Snip ...]

All of this seems based upon the premise that for the last four years, we have had a strategy of simply leaving "Al Qaeda" in peace, just letting them be. But now, we have a new Commander, Gen. David G. Petraeus, who has dramatically embraced a bold, innovative, new strategy: "Let's get Al Qaeda." That, in turn, is what accounts for the rhetorical shift.

But that explanation is just ridiculous on its face, particularly in light of how many times we have heard in the past that we have Al Qaeda on the run in Iraq, that we have disrupted its ability to operate, that we have decapitated its leadership, through all of our highly successful offensive Iraqi actions against them. And that is to say nothing of the truly laughable notion that we are able to identify dead bodies as belonging to "Al Qaeda members" ("68 Al Qaeda militants killed!").
More importantly, all of this depends upon an underhanded and deceitful conflation of (a) the Iraqi Sunnis who decided to call themselves "Al Qaeda in Iraq" as they battled against the U.S. occupation of their country, and (b) the "Al Qaeda" led by Osama bin Laden which flew planes into U.S. buildings on 9/11.

In every way that matters, those two entities are universes apart. But for obvious reasons, the political consequences of equating them are enormous. To conflate them is, as I said on Saturday, misleading and propagandistic in the extreme.

For one article after the next to bolster that conflation is so journalistically irresponsible that it is hard to put into words.

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