Big Mitch gets one right

In Class of ’71 reads the news, I set forth my reasons for being skeptical about what the government tells us. In particular, I urged a skeptical attitude toward the headline, “U.S. military believes al Qaeda has missing soldiers.”

Here’s what I said,

What evidence is there that it was al Qaeda in Iraq that kidnapped our soldiers? If there were any at all, I would expect that the government and its stenographers would be less mealy-mouthed in its description of the perpetrators than “al Qaeda or others associated with the militant group.”

I want to know what is the relationship of al Qaeda in Iraq to the group of Saudis that attacked our country on September 11, 2001. Do they take their orders from Osama Bin Laden? Do they have ambitions beyond the establishment of a Sunni Islamic government in Iraq? How do we know?

Today, the Boston Globe carried an article entitled “GOP rivals embrace unproven Iraq-9/11 tie.” Quoting Michael Scheuer , the CIA's former chief of operations against bin Laden in the late 1990s, and others, the Globe reports:

Al Qaeda in Iraq is not overseen by bin Laden.
...
[T]he enemy the military calls "Al Qaeda Iraq" is a combination of Iraqi jihadists and an unknown number of fighters from countries throughout the Middle East. "AQI" came together after the US invasion. And while there is evidence that AQI members coordinate attacks among themselves, there is little evidence that they coordinate closely with bin Laden.

The take-away message from the article is that the G.O.P. candidates are intentionally conflating the war in Iraq with our response to the threat of Islamic terrorists, in the deceitfull tradition established by King George the Incompetent.

“… and tell ’em Big Mitch sent ya!”