I guess I would have to vote for the conspiracy theory since I remember this story well from over a year ago.

This is kind of like the revelation of "secret" spying by the NSA on American citizens. The writer had this information for over a year, but saw a pressing need to publish it today, coincidentially 10 days before his book comes out.

Either that or, just like at Tora Bora, we were mistaken in allowing the indigneous assets control over the operation.

Damn.

---

Tom Demerly
The Tri Shop.com

Oh never mind I thought you were referring to Clinton who had Bin Laden offered to him but said we didn't have the legal grounds to take him.

Well, we can't expect our military or the Iraqi military to be perfect, can we? They're already "getting it" over there. Getting it real good.

Absent Zarqawi somehow being in cahoots with the Iraqi security forces that detained him, my feeling is that if the Iraqis couldn't recognize him, how would U.S. soldiers be able to? This is not a knock on the soldiers at all, but on Juan Cole's blog he raised the point of whether the average U.S. soldier would be capable of distinguishing between an Iraqi, Saudi, Jordanian, etc. based on appearance, accent, dialect and whatnot. I think that's a pretty valid point myself...

---

f/k/a mclamb6

This is a very old story. By my memory it happened in Falluja, long before we had the city under control. Zarqawi's escape presumably had everything to do with complicity of the local police forces.

I don't understand how this old story is news. But then I don't see how a one year old story about the monitoring of international phone calls, which I always assumed whet on anyway, winds up as news ten days before a book dealing with the subject is released.

I guess that is just me. Just because it is being edited by the same people that edited Richard Clarke's book, and is being published by an arm of Viacom, is no reason to expect it will be the centerpiece of a future 60 Minutes show either. Ha, ha.

Actually, if you read the article, it explicitly mentions the information is a year old. The reason it was being reported was because an Iraqi official gave an interview that was broadcast on Friday in which he mentioned that Zarqawi was in custody and released in the Fallujah area. So if you feel the need, you can go on with your tin hat media theories, but it doesn't fly in this story.

---

f/k/a mclamb6

Explain to me again how that is news then. If an Iraqi official gave an interview that mentioned that the Americans were great friends of the Iraqi people, would that be news too?

I thought had something to do with being new, or so many here explain all the time.

I wasn't aware that reporters determined the date their work is published in a newspaper. I always thought it was people like the editor and the publisher who did that. Learn something new every day. Thanks, Art.

---

----------------------------------
"Go yell at an M&M"

My point precisely. Your initial post asked if the stories were "conspiracies" by the NY Times and others. My response was that relative to the timing of the stories, the answer was, more or less, yes.