A Daily Telegraph exclusive, long on innuendo but positively spartan in details, starts with a leaked Christmas letter from British spy officials to former Libyan Foreign Minister Musa Kusa, in which they admit to releasing a Libyan dissident who they eventually rearrested as a terrorist funder. Naturally, since this is the Daily Telegraph we’re talking about, this quickly became all about Iran.
Iran, you say? Yes. See, the released dissident/terrorist, Ismail Kamoka, was funding a bunch of terrorist groups (which are not named), and also went to Iran to fund a group (not named), and some of those groups were “linked to al-Qaeda.”
Bam… we have an article about Iran’s “al-Qaeda” connections.
Except the huge lack of details betrays a number of things. The Telegraph claims to have seen secret documents unseen by anyone else in the media – why no specifics? Ismail Kamoka was named in several media outlets days ago, this sudden “Iran connection” is brand new and comes with no information.
There are two possible conclusions we can reach: either these many, many secret documents have no names (unlikely), or the organizations with links to al-Qaeda (Sunni militant factions) would make the narrative even more nonsensical than it already is.
One popular Iran-based “al-Qaeda linked” terrorist organization leaps immediately to mind, and that is Jundallah. Given the group’s history takes it through unseemly ties with both al-Qaeda and the Bush Administration, and its only constant over that period is terrorist attacks against the Iranian government, it is clear why, if Jundallah was the phantom terror group they would go unnamed: it would be absurd to accuse Iran of “al-Qaeda ties” because a US-backed terrorist organization likes to launch attacks inside their borders.
Never heard of them
The reason is, is that it is yellow journalism.
You have to love this type of journalism, its like Monday morning chit chat around the water cooler.