Best timing ever? Or now a totally outdated cover story?(Atlantic Monthly)

[kpete]

Best timing ever? Or now a totally outdated cover story? Looks like someone over at The Atlantic Monthly has it in good with the Pentagon.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and how "a video-store clerk and small-time crook reinvented himself as America's nemesis in Iraq." Luckily, someone titled it "The Short, Violent Life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi," an especially prophetic title after the events of this morning.



The Atlantic Monthly | July/August 2006

The Short, Violent Life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

How a video-store clerk and small-time crook reinvented himself as America’s nemesis in Iraq
by Mary Anne Weaver

.....

n a cold and blustery evening in December 1989, Huthaifa Azzam, the teenage son of the legendary Jordanian-Palestinian mujahideen leader Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, went to the airport in Peshawar, Pakistan, to welcome a group of young men. All were new recruits, largely from Jordan, and they had come to fight in a fratricidal civil war in neighboring Afghanistan—an outgrowth of the CIA-financed jihad of the 1980s against the Soviet occupation there.

The men were scruffy, Huthaifa mused as he greeted them, and seemed hardly in battle-ready form. Some had just been released from prison; others were professors and sheikhs. None of them would prove worth remembering—except for a relatively short, squat man named Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalaylah.

He would later rename himself Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

article at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200607/zarqawi
via:
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlDC/magazines/greatest_news_peg_ever_38162.asp

[BrklynLiberal]

1. oops. But on the other hand, since he is "dead", it may be a keeper.

[dogday]

2. Damn, that was fast

how in the hell did they do that so quickly one has to ask?

[dipsydoodle]

3. Good timing

Will some understand he was just a small time crook, pumped up out of all proportion by El Chimpo and with a CIA financed background.