About $500 million in unaccounted funds from Saddam Hussein's former regime is being used to finance a growing insurgency in Iraq, a U.S. military intelligence official said Friday. ...This, via the South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Ft. Lauderdale), is how AP's article from the same day (and drawn from a briefing from what appears to have been the same Pentagon official) begins:
The top finding is that the United States believes about a half-billion dollars that once belonged to the former Iraqi government, along with funds from individuals and religious groups in Saudi Arabia, is being funneled through Syria and used to fund insurgents.
Iraq's new security forces are heavily infiltrated by insurgents, and the guerrilla groups have access to almost unlimited money to pay for deadly attacks, according to a U.S. defense official who provided new details on the evolution of the rebels.That is, CNN focused on "Saddam's money" being funneled into Iraq while AP described bucks coming from "sympathizers" outside the country. Saddam Hussein is not mentioned in the AP account - nor is the infiltration of insurgents into security forces mentioned by CNN.
A significant part of the insurgents' money is coming from sympathizers in Saudi Arabia, and the Saudi government is neglecting the problem, said the official....
Money is flowing into Iraq through Syria, the official said.
In both cases, it comes from a diffuse network of supporters, funneled through charities, tribal relations, and businesses - not necessarily the same funding networks that transfer money to al-Qaida from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, but following a similar model, the official said.
Now, the main thrust of both stories is that Pentagon intelligence - which proved so very reliable before the war - is revealing foreign involvement in the Iraqi insurgency. Even though that involvement comes in the form of money rather than fighters, the assessment can serve an agenda favored by the Shrub team, which is to blame the resistance on "foreigners." Still, it's interesting to note how differently the two news agencies played it.
And there are more differences. For example, the CNN report quotes the official as saying other intelligence findings include
- evidence that criminals, as opposed to those with political motivations, have conducted 80% of recent attacks;
- that elements of the Baath Party are "coming together" to disrupt the government and fund insurgents; and
- that capturing or killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would stop or slow insurgent activity significantly.
Now on the first of those, I'd say (and I mean this as a serious question) what does the word "criminal" mean? What's the definition? While there have been reports of ransoms paid in some of the kidnappings, the demands have not been for money. In the bombings and shootings there have not been robberies or looting. So what does "criminal" mean in this context? Or is it that "get the hell out of Iraq" does not, in the Pentagon's mind, constitute a political motivation?
On the second, before I'd take it seriously I want to hear a direct acknowledgement that this means that the earlier assertions in the immediate wake of the capture of Baghdad that the resistance was just Baathist "dead-enders" was flat out wrong. And then I'd want to know why in light of that I should believe this now. And why I should be surprised.
And on the third, I'd say get a flaming grip: Another of your own findings was "the absence of any unifying elements between [I assume they meant among] 50 widely dispersed cells around the country." So why do you insist on the fantasy of a single mastermind pulling everyone else's strings?
But meanwhile, the AP story, while not going into those claims, raises a point the CNN story completely omits: If the tale of the money trail is true, it provides
new evidence that the Iraqi resistance has gained support in the Arab world.In fairness, it must be said that the CNN story does not overlook the element of popularity. Indeed, its mention of it comes in what would have to be fairly regarded as a devastating fact that if justice were done would have been the centerpiece of the whole story:
"The overall resistance in Iraq is popular and is getting more popular in the Arab world," said Vince Cannistraro, a former counterterrorism chief for the Central Intelligence Agency.
"Some foreign fighters are coming in, but more of concern is the numbers of Iraqis picking up the fight," the official said.That bears repeating. According to our own estimate, we have now captured or killed more than the total number of insurgents there were when we started - and the result is that there are now twice as many more of them than there were in the first place.
He added that the insurgency is growing, as show by the fact that the U.S.-led coalition appears to have captured or killed more insurgents than the original estimate - 5,000 to 7,000 - and there are still about 12,000 out there.
A very odd measure by which to claim progress.
But getting back to the different approaches of the articles, some people of late have accused CNN of becoming the Bush-Cheney '04 Network, trying to out-Fox Fox in pursuit of that audience. I have to admit that I haven't found CNN any less reliable than any of the other mainstream news outlets (Fox of course excepted), although there are sources I trust more than American ones, including Reuters and AFP.
Then again, I haven't been parsing every item to find traces of pro-this or anti-that bias. Still, in this case the treatments are so different that I have to think that either they came from completely separate and divergent briefings or that CNN deliberately plucked out the point that could link the Iraqi resistance to Saddam Hussein, a possibility perhaps more likely to discredit it in the eyes of Americans than almost anything else short of a direct connection to al-Qaeda.
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