here's partial of that online interview with Michael Ware:
ANDREW DENTON: Your ability to get close up to groups that others can't is quite extraordinary and you describe this as 'gumshoe journalism' - you're basically on the ground with the Iraqis, earning their trust. How do you do that?
MICHAEL WARE: Well, it's pretty difficult, as you can imagine. I've been here in Iraq for just over 18 months now. I arrived before the war and then was here through all the conflict. And then as soon as the first phase, as I call it, of the war finished - the actual invasion - I quickly turned my attentions to the second phase which we're in now, the insurgency and the occupation.
Now, I started off very simply with the 'bad guys' as people from the West and certainly Fox News likes to call them. In the beginning they were just ragtag groups - you, me, a cousin, Ahmed, we go out, we shoot at a passing American convoy and feel a lot better for it. So, I started just hooking up with these guys, talking to them individually. Over time, they started to get their act together and they formed into groups, then that group would join another group and then suddenly there'd be a structure and it would grow and there'd be commanders. And I just kept in touch and followed them as they progressed, so it's taken well over a year and it's had some moments, I can tell you.
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Now that's hardy being embedded with "al-Qaida"!
But here is much enlightening truth about the myth of Al-qaida and how the west is manipulating the war on terror with 'al-qaida...from TomPain.com article.
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We now know that Al Qaeda had nothing to do with the London bombings in July 2005. This is the conclusion of the British government's official inquiry report leaked to the British press on April 9.
We now also know that the U.S. military is deliberately misleading Iraqis, Americans and the rest of the world about the extent of Al Qaeda's involvement in the Iraqi insurgency. This was reported in The Washington Post on April 10, on the basis of internal military documents seen by that newspaper.
What do these revelations tell us about the arguments of President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Blair that in Al Qaeda the "Free World" faces a threat comparable to that of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, a world-wide terrorist network which seeks to build a radical Islamist empire over half the world?
That they are threadbare, to say the least. But also that they are cynical, misleading and self serving.
The London bombings, it turns out, were the work of four alienated British Muslims, with no links to "international terrorist networks", who had learned how to make bombs by trawling the Internet. They had been radicalized and motivated, according to the report, by British foreign policies in the Muslim world—a view Tony Blair has consistently sought to undermine and discredit. The role of the alleged "Al Qaeda mastermind in Iraq," Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, we are now told, was cynically misrepresented and exaggerated by the U.S. military's propaganda units in an effort to discredit and divide the Iraqi insurgency and to provide a retrospective justification for the Iraq war by suggesting a link between Iraq and 9/11.
Wherever in the world Al Qaeda crops up, its appearance has often been uncannily convenient for the local authorities—dictators, warlords, occupation forces and elected governments alike. And often the precise nature of the Al Qaeda connection turns out, on close examination, to be tenuous or non-existent. But by that time the message has gone out and sunk in: "Al Qaeda was here".
It's almost certain that as the United States ratchets up the pressure on Iran in the coming months the non-issue of Tehran 's "links" with Al Qaeda will come to the fore. In fact the groundwork is already being laid. Blair, no less, said ominously in a speech last month that although "the conventional view is that Iran is hostile to Al Qaeda: we know from our own history of conflict that, under the pressure of battle, alliances shift and change." So as the confrontation with Iran builds, watch out for leaked reports from anonymous security officials about dastardly Iranian-Al Qaeda conspiracies.
Stripped of exaggeration, romanticism, demonization and myth making, the picture of Al Qaeda which has emerged from the trial in the United States of Zacarias Moussaoui is of a fractious organisation that has been a magnet for bewildered martyrdom-seeking fantasists. At least this has a ring of truth to it.
more here:
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/04/12/the_al_qaeda_myth.php
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