Since it is unreasonable to expect Baghdad hotel-bound corporate media hacks to report anything beyond what is read from a Pentagon script inside the Green Zone, most Americans remain unaware of details implicating the Iraqi National Guard in the bombing. According to reports appearing on the humanitarian Iraqi League organization’s Iraqi Rabita website and translated into English by the Iraqi blogger Baghdad Dweller (see original Arabic here and here), at least two witnesses saw “unusual activities by the ING [Iraqi National Guard] in the area around the mosque.” Two mosque guards reported four men in ING uniforms had blindfolded them and planted explosives. A second witness, Muhammad al-Samarrai, the owner of an internet cafe in the area, was told to stay in his store and not leave the area. From 11 pm until 6:30 am, ten minutes before two bombs were detonated, the area surrounding the mosque was patrolled by “joint forces of Iraqi ING and Americans,” according to al-Samarrai.

In addition to apparently facilitating the mosque bombing, Iraqi National Guard troops provided assistance to “more than a dozen masked Shia gunmen” attacking the Sunni al-Quds mosque in western Baghdad in the wake of the Samarra attack, according to the Times Online. In addition, “gunmen arrived [at the Maakel prison in Basra] in a fleet of cars and showed documents which claimed that they were from the Interior Ministry… and lynched at least eleven Sunni inmates, among them at least two Egyptians.”

Last month, according to the Washington Post, the Iraqi Interior Ministry was implicated in the operation of death squads targeting Sunnis. Moreover, according to John Pike, an expert on classified military budgets, as cited by Robert Dreyfuss in an article for the American Prospect, a 2004 Iraqi appropriation bill contained $3 billion for paramilitary units. The “bulk of the covert money” went to “support U.S. efforts to create a lethal, and revenge-minded, Iraqi security force” and also “an Iraqi secret police staffed mainly by gunmen associated with members of the puppet Iraqi Governing Council,” thus revealing the situation in Iraq is not precisely as the hand-fed corporate media would have us believe.

Of course, two eye witnesses should not be considered conclusive evidence the Pentagon puppet Iraqi National Guard is behind the mosque bombings in Samarra. However, when added to the wealth of evidence from various sources detailing the existence of a Anglo-American “counterinsurgency” program in Iraq (including the now largely forgotten and never referenced by the corporate media story of two British covert operatives caught red-handed in terrorist behavior last September) the incident should at least stir a modicum of suspicion.

Naturally, any such suspicion will go duly unnoticed by the corporate media, already in the process of blaming the “al-Qaeda movement,” as James Jeffrey of the State Department characterized the perpetrators, and in the process leading the media down the preferred path, discouraging for now the absurd idea, as suggested by at least one member of the slavish corporate press, that Iran was somehow behind the bombing of the mosque containing the entombed bodies of two revered spiritual leaders of Shia Islam. “I think we should focus on al-Qaeda at this point,” Jeffrey declared. “There are plenty of reasons to focus on Iran on other issues,” for instance Iran’s illusory nuclear weapon program, dispelled some time ago by the International Atomic Energy Agency.