“But before the American-led invasion, Saddam’s government may never have known he was there. The reason: he used an alias and was there under what one U.S. intelligence official calls a ‘false cover.’ No evidence has been found showing senior Iraqi officials were even aware of his presence, according to two counterterrorism analysts familiar with the classified CIA study who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.” I’m not sure how you check into a hospital in a totalitarian country using an alias, but never mind—as a nation of bovine-like consumers of corporate media fairy tales, spun by nameless “counterterrorism analysts” at the CIA, a sprawling spook agency with a documented stock and trade in fantastic lies, details are irrelevant.

Isikoff and Hosenball, as final stage craftsman of fantastic lies of state, repeat the undocumented existence of al-Zarqawi. Isikoff and Hosenball tell us “there is no question that [al-Zarqawi] is in Iraq now—orchestrating many of the deadly suicide bombings and attacks on American soldiers.” In fact, there are plenty of questions about the presence of al-Zarqawi in Iraq—and indeed his very existence—but we shouldn’t expect the corporate media, handmaiden of the neolib globalists, to remind us of this troublesome fact. As revealed in the UK Telegraph and elsewhere, the US military admits it has relied on “a series of botched and often tawdry dealings with unreliable sources” in order to perpetuate the al-Zarqawi myth. “We were basically paying up to $10,000 a time to opportunists, criminals and chancers who passed off fiction and supposition about Zarqawi as cast-iron fact, making him out as the linchpin of just about every attack in Iraq,” an American military intelligence told the Telegraph. “Back home this stuff was gratefully received and formed the basis of policy decisions. We needed a villain, someone identifiable for the public to latch on to, and we got one.”

It appears only gullible Americans and Brits believe the scary al-Zarqawi campfire story. Iraqis are more discerning and apparently intelligent, more than likely because “al-Zarqawi”—in other words, American and British intelligence operatives, a few caught recently with explosives and donning Arab garb—is perpetuating violence and Sunni-versus-Shia hatred in their country. Many “Iraqis believe the Jordanian militant does not even exist and is merely a phantom created by the Americans to sow unrest in the country,” reports the Associated Press. “Similar disbelief greeted Britain’s explanation that its soldiers, arrested in southern Iraq disguised as Arabs, were on an undercover hunt for terrorists. Instead, some Iraqis argue the soldiers were out to kill Shi’ite Muslims and blame the murders on Sunnis in hopes of sparking civil war.” In fact, as the Iraqis realize, this is basically the desideratum of fake al-Zarqawi attacks—the long-held plan to break up not only Iraq along ethnic and tribal lines, but the whole of the Arab Middle East. Call it divide and rule on steroids.

Of course, the Arabs can’t get away with saying such things, not without follow-up salvos of snobbish derision. “Such conspiracy theories are common among Arabs and may seem laughable to outsiders,” the Associated Press is compelled to add. “But in Iraq, where rulers from British colonists to Saddam Hussein regularly played one ethnic group against the other, imagined plots can seem reasonable—a fact that may have dire consequences for US efforts to build a stable Iraqi government.” Certainly, such “conspiracy theories” and “imagined plots” have a strong foundation in reality, a concept alien to the residents of Bushzarro world, including corporate media stenographers, taking their cues from neocons and nameless “counterterrorism analysts” at the CIA.

Iraqis have more or less rebelled against foreign domination since Gertrude Bell, a low level British diplomat, sketched out the borders of Iraq on tracing paper in 1921. The “improbable and unnatural union” of three ethnically divided former Ottoman provinces, writes Ted Thornton, imposed on Mesopotamian Arabs by the Brits, inevitably resulted in “three Kurdish uprisings in the north between 1922 and 1932 and a rebellion in the south between 1935 and 1936. Between 1921 and 1958, more than fifty governments came into power, frequently, beginning in 1936, on the wings of military coups. This would lead to a tradition of ’strongman’ rulers such as Saddam Hussein in the later decades of the twentieth century.”

Understanding well their own history better than amnesiac Americans ever will—many if not most unable to even find Iraq on a map—the Iraqis will continue to believe “conspiracy theories” and “imagined plots” about the intentions of foreign invaders and occupiers. Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball may revise the official story somewhat—Saddam did not know al-Zarqawi was in-country, as Bush and Powell had previously exclaimed (based, of course, on what we are told was erroneous intelligence), and were merely strangers in the night—but the central fantasy story remains, even if it lacks crucial documentary evidence, not that Americans digesting doctrinal sound-bites need such.