Yesterday, the NY Post ran a story saying that 40% of the suicide bombers dispatched by Al-Zarqawi were Saudis and only about 9% were Iraqis. That seemed a pretty remarkable claim since with most suicide bombings, there isn't enough of the attacker left to fill a Mason jar, much less make a positive ID.
How'd they determine this? The info came from the SITE Institute, a post 9-11 org founded to track terrorist networks and featuring an Iraqi-born head named Rita Katz. It seems to have done lots of work for the US government -- including with Richard Clarke -- and is quoted widely in the media. So how'd they back it up? Simply by looking at a Martyrs' List posted on the web by Zarqawi to commemorate killers. An "analysis" was done of 107 names listed. Since that list included their backgrounds, the "analysis" involved adding up the ones from Saudi Arabia, etc.
A couple points: the list is hardly comprehensive and surely it occured to someone at the SITE Institute that Iraqi-born martyrs would be far less likely to have their names listed on the web for all the world to see. That would invite reprisals from the government, soldiers storming into the homes of their families, reprisals from Shiite radicals, preemptive arrests of siblings to forestall further suicide bombings from a family that produced one, job loss for the parents, etc. etc. So their analysis should have said that in a list Zarqawi chose to post on the web, very few listed were Iraqis for obvious reasons such as....
Instead, expect this misleading bit of info to be repeated by the Limbaughs of the world as proof that the Iraqi insurgency is a sham and really just the actions of foreign actions. (Agents from Saudi Arabia, the ally we coddle, one might add.)
Don't expect them to acknowledge the LA Times article today that acknowledges early suicide bombers came from outside Iraq, but that things have changed. Suicide bombings -- unpopular at first among Iraqis -- have exploded. In other words, not many were done before and many of those were foreigners. Now they're a lot more common and Iraqis are leading the way.
In April, there were 69 suicide bombings, more than the entire year preceding the handover in June 2004. Yesterday, three suicide bombers killed at least 20. The US commander of multinational forces admitted that the axiom that all suicide bombers were foreigners may not be the case.
But others refuse to see this.
"There is no evidence this is being done by Iraqis," said U.S. Maj. Gen. John DeFreitas III, intelligence chief for the multinational mission that has about 150,000 troops in Iraq. "In every case we've seen, the driver has been a foreigner."But whatever the dominance in this one tactic, even coalition officials acknowledge that the Iraqi insurgency is in fact an Iraqi insurgency.
Coalition officials acknowledge, however, that the numbers show an Iraqi-dominated insurgency. Fewer than 5% of those killed or captured were foreigners, one official noted. He also described the influx from abroad as making up a "very, very small part" of the estimated 12,000 to 20,000 insurgents.Now someone tell Rush.
