Vol. 56, Issue 1 - Howard University School of Law

Cognitive Foreign Policypress.” 235 However, Pentagon documents listed the American “‘U.S.Home Audience’ as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.”236 Just two months after this propaganda program was exposed,Zarqawi was apparently killed in an airstrike. 237 TheWashington Post headline read: “June 8 – Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, themastermind behind hundreds of bombings, kidnappings and beheadingsin Iraq, was killed . . . .” 238There were also reportedly about a dozen groups affiliated withal-Qaeda in Iraq. 239 Bush responded to reporters: “The reason I keepinsisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam andal-Qaeda [is] because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda.” 240 On another occasion, when the president addressed prewarclaims about al-Qaeda and Iraq, he maintained that it was “Ansaral-Islam, which is an al-Qaeda affiliate—I would call [that] al-Qaeda—was active in Iraq before the war—hence, a terrorist tie withIraq . . . .” 241 In July 2007, and responding contemporaneous to congressionaldemands for U.S. troops to be brought home, Bush remarked:“The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraqwere the ones who attacked us in American on September 11th, and235. Ricks, supra note 233.236. Id.Abu Musab al-Zarqawi . . . is ‘more myth than man,’ according to American militaryintelligence agents in Iraq.Several sources said the importance of Zarqawi, blamed for many of the mostspectacular acts of violence in Iraq, has been exaggerated by flawed intelligence andthe Bush administration’s desire to find “a villain” for the post-invasion mayhem.. . .“[Intelligence officials] were basically paying up to $10,000 a time to opportunists,criminals and chancers who passed off fiction and supposition about Zarqawi as castironfact, making him out as the linchpin of just about every attack in Iraq,” the agentsaid. . .“Back home this stuff was gratefully received and formed the basis of policydecisions.”Adam Blomfield, How US Fuelled Myth of Zarqawi the Mastermind, TELEGRAPH (Oct. 4, 2004),http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/1473309/How-US-fuelled-myth-of-Zarqawi-the-mastermind.html.237. Ellen Knickmeyer & Jonathan Finer, Insurgent Leader Al-Zarqawi Killed in Iraq,WASH. POST, June 8, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/08/AR2006060800114_pf.html.238. Id.239. Arsalan M. Suleman, Strategic Planning for Combating Terrorism: A Critical Examination,5 CARDOZO PUB. L. POL’Y & ETHICS 567, 591 (2007).240. Bush Insists Iraq, al Qaeda Had ‘Relationship,’ supra note 163.241. Primetime, President Bush Interview (ABC News television broadcast Dec. 16, 2003),available at http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=131912&page=6; see also Fox News Sunday,Condoleezza Rice (Fox News television broadcast Sept. 7, 2003), available at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,96651,00.html#ixzz20vviZGTc (“I think that the evidentiary basishere is not so strong. But we are getting pieces of evidence, certainly, that al-Qaeda is interestedin Iraq . . . .”).2012] 41