Posted on 06/10/2006 8:57:01 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. officials have altered their account of the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, saying he was alive and partly conscious after bombs destroyed his hideout, and an Iraqi man raised fresh questions Saturday about the events surrounding the end of Iraq's most-wanted militant.
The man, who lived near the scene of the bombing, claimed in an interview with AP Television News to have seen U.S. soldiers beating an injured man resembling al-Zarqawi until blood flowed from the man's nose.
When asked about the man's allegations, military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said he would check. In Washington, Pentagon spokesman Jeffrey Gordon said Saturday he was unaware of the claim.
The Iraqi, identified as Mohammed Ahmed, claimed that residents put the man in an ambulance before U.S. forces arrived. The American military team then pulled the man from the ambulance and beat him, Ahmed said. He gave a similar account to The Washington Post.
No other witnesses have come forward to corroborate the account of a man resembling al-Zarqawi being beaten. U.S. officials have only said al-Zarqawi mumbled and tried to roll off a stretcher before dying.
On Friday, the military said al-Zarqawi survived the dropping of two 500-pound bombs on his hideout. The bombs tore a huge crater in the date palm forest where the house was nestled just outside Baqouba, northwest of Baghdad.
Iraqi police reached the scene first, and found the 39-year-old al-Zarqawi alive.
"He mumbled something, but it was indistinguishable and it was very short," Caldwell, a spokesman for U.S.-led forces in Iraq, said Friday.
Iraqi police pulled al-Zarqawi from the flattened home and placed him on a makeshift stretcher. U.S. troops arrived, saw that al-Zarqawi was conscious and tried to provide medical treatment, the spokesman said.
"He obviously had some kind of visual recognition of who they were because he attempted to roll off the stretcher, as I am told, and get away, realizing it was the U.S. military," Caldwell told Pentagon reporters via videoconference from Baghdad.
Al-Zarqawi "attempted to, sort of, turn away off the stretcher," he said. "Everybody re-secured him back onto the stretcher, but he died almost immediately thereafter from the wounds he'd received from this airstrike."
Caldwell has not mentioned any other physical interaction between U.S. troops and al-Zarqawi.
But Ahmed told AP Television News that a bearded man was still alive and was lying next to an irrigation canal. He claimed that U.S. troops wrapped a traditional Arab robe, known as a dishdasha, over the bearded man's head and beat him. His account could not be independently verified.
AP footage of the date palm grove showed debris — concrete blocks, shoes and sandals — scattered over a wide area around a large crater. Date palms were ripped from their roots around the blast site.
So much blood covered al-Zarqawi's body that U.S. forces cleaned him up before taking photographs.
"Despite the fact that this person actually had no regard for human life, we were not going to treat him in the same manner," Caldwell said.
The airstrike killed two other men and three women who were in the house, but only al-Zarqawi and his spiritual adviser have been positively identified, he said.
From a helicopter hovering above, a wide swath of destruction could be seen. The debris around the site included a women's slip and other pieces of clothing. Charred dresses, torn blankets, thin sponge mattresses and pillows were in the crater itself.
The debris of concrete blocks and twisted metal reinforcement bars included a pillow with a floral pattern, sandals and a foam mattress with the covering torn off. A cooling unit and part of a washing machine also were in the area.
Lt. Col. Thomas Fisher of the 1st Battalion, 68th Armored Cavalry said his men showed up at the site about five minutes after the blast and cordoned it off. He said they had a patrol in the area already.
"We didn't know it was Zarqawi, we just knew it was a time-sensitive target," he said at the scene early Saturday. "We suspected who it was."
Caldwell also said experts told him it is not unheard of for people to survive a blast of that magnitude. He said he did not know if al-Zarqawi was inside or outside the house when the bombs struck.
"Well, what we had found, as with anything, first reports are not always fully accurate as we continue the debriefings. But we were not aware yesterday that, in fact, Zarqawi was alive when U.S. forces arrived on the site," Caldwell said.
His recounting of the aftermath of the airstrike could not be independently verified. The Iraqi government confirmed only that Iraqi forces were first on the scene, followed by the Americans.
For three years, al-Zarqawi orchestrated horrific acts of violence guided by his extremist vision of jihad, or holy war — first against the U.S. soldiers he considered occupiers of Arab lands, then against the Shiites he considered infidels.
And God bless any Special Ops guy that may have used his rifle butt to take fisnish the job.
The Ass. Press interviewed an insurgent claiming to be a "witness" and are just passing his propaganda on to their comrades living in America so it can be used against the troops and President Bush.
Oops. I forgot the part about removing his eyelids permanently as well. That is very important.
" The American military team then pulled the man from the ambulance"
That ambulance sure got there in a hurry. Pure BS!
Yup. I know there are people who might say "Hey...isn't that pretty extreme? He is dead, isn't that enough?"
And I say, "No. Did you watch the way they removed poor Nick Berg's head with a dull knife while he screamed in terror? I made myself watch it, and that I why I have moral clarity about why we are in Iraq."
It could be a partial truth. Giving CPR to someone can look to the uneducated like a beating. Sometimes modern medical interventions can be a little disconcerting to witness. It's not like it is on TV.
My sentiments exactly.
In the video, supposedly from the scene immediately after the bombing, I can't see palm tree one, but the video of the house clearly shows it totally surrounded by them..although the footage of the bombing is grainy at best, I also failed to see another house anywhere in the video where this "witness" could have been living..
You left out the leftist apologists in this country. But all in all you sorta captured my thoughts.
For some reason the mental image of a 260lb Delta Operator dropping elbows Ultimate Fighter style onto al-Zarqawi doesn't exactly bring a tear to my eye.
| ABC News: Zarqawi may have been killed [Confirmed DEAD by NBC] Now breaking on MSNBC & CNN |
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| Posted by TomGuy to StJacques On News/Activism 06/08/2006 7:45:39 AM CDT · 1,994 of 3,100 Mil Conf: talking of Zarqawi's body --- so he didn't survive the bombing.  Ut o... Mil Conf speaker just said body of woman and child were found. Libs will be hollering about atrocities. |
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Journalist for the Wall Street Journal, killed in Pakistan by Muslim extremists.
Pearl's captors made a video, titled The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl.
The video made its way to the Pakistani government and the U.S. government, and eventually it leaked onto the Internet through a Jihadist site. It consists of a Pearl monologue describing his Jewish upbringing, his family's involvement with the creation of the Israeli state, and his feelings regarding the current controversy. His monologue is presented in edited sound bites; at times he appears relaxed and his speech is natural, but during other parts he is tense and his speech sounds forced. Most of what he says is not terribly controversial, and notably he does not claim to be a spy for the U.S. or Israel.
According to published reports, when Daniel Pearl's throat was first slashed, a technical error caused it not to be captured on film. In the video Pearl's corpse is shown naked from the waist up, laying on a blanket; a man's arm is holding his head forward so that his cut neck cannot be seen. With the knife in his other hand, the man proceeds to cut deeper into Pearl's neck, from the back to the front. There is little blood. The man holding the knife is now strongly believed to have been Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, then the chief of military operations for al Qaeda.
The remaining 90 seconds of the video consist of a list of demands scrolling by, superimposed over a picture of Pearl's severed head being held by the hair. Among the list is a demand for delivery of American F-16's paid for but never received by the Pakistani government.
Transcript of the English text on the video:
NATIONAL MOVEMENT FOR THE RESTORATION OF PAKISTAN SOVEREIGNTY (NMRPS)
We still demand the following:
- The immediate release of U.S held prisoners in Guantinamo Bay [sic], Cuba. - The return of Pakistani prisoners to Pakistan. - The immediate end of U.S presence in Pakistan. - The delivery of F-16 planes that pakistan had paid for and never recieved [sic].
We asure [sic] Americans that they shall never be safe on the Muslim Land of Pakistan. And if our demands are not met this scene shall be repeated again and again....
Three suspects were caught after the Federal Bureau of Investigation traced emails announcing the kidnapping back to the laptop which sent them. The suspects were members of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Pakistani terrorist group with ties to al Qaeda, whose membership is closely linked to both Khalid Shaikh and his nephew, Ramzi Yousef. The group is also linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist operating in Iraq who has since made the videotaped beheading his personal trademark. The Pearl killing was notable for kicking off an industry boom in terrorist snuff films that continues to this day.
Timeline 10 Oct 1963 Daniel Pearl born, Princeton NJ. 1985 B.A. Communications, Stanford University. 1990 Joins the staff of the Wall Street Journal. 1999 Marries journalist Mariane Van Neyenhoff. 23 Jan 2002 Kidnapped, Karachi Pakistan. 21 Feb 2002 Videotape received by Pakistani government indicating Pearl has been killed. On the tape: "Yes I am a Jew and my Father was a Jew." Then his throat is cut. 22 Apr 2002 Trial of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, Salman Saqib, and Sheikh Mohammed Adeel begins. 16 May 2002 Daniel Pearl's body recovered in Karachi, Pakistan. 23 May 2002 The Federal Bureau of Investigation orders an ISP to remove the Daniel Pearl video from its servers, citing an obscenity law passed in 1996. Such behavior is an undisputable attempt at intimidation, as obscenity obviously does not apply to such a video. After some bad publicity, the FBI backed off its baseless claim.
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/journalists/daniel-pearl/pearl-gun.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/journalists/daniel-pearl/&h=279&w=275&sz=20&tbnid=rKM6iZdrJFomGM:&tbnh=109&tbnw=107&hl=en&start=22&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dnicholas%2Bberg%26start%3D20%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26sa%3DN
I understood US MEDICS tried to save his ugly arse. If you have ever seen a trauma team work to save a critically injured patient, it just might look like a beating from a distance.
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