Yeah, sorry about that; the actual information was another click or two away. Thanks, RTFirefly!
No prob. FWIW, I think Will Bunch (who I’m a big fan of) semi-blew it on that one; his links didn’t actually support the ‘amputated’ part. But fortunately, I’d just been reading that Atlantic article just yesterday.
Nitpick: he wasn’t “Abu Zarqawi”, he was “Abu Mus`ab al-Zarqawi” or just “al-Zarqawi”. “Abu” is not a separate given name in Arabic. It means “the father of” or “the one related to” and always precedes the given name of the person’s firstborn child, or the name of some thing or concept associated with him.
“Abu Musab" means "the father of Musab”, and can’t be abbreviated to just “Abu”. Not without sounding dorkish and ignorant. It’s as wrong as talking about an English knight named, say, “Sir Arthur Sullivan” and calling him “Sir Sullivan” instead of “Sir Arthur”. Dork dork dorkified in the last degree.
Huh. I had never heard of the amputation thing before the silly article in the OP. Learn something new (and wrong) every day.
No prob. The bullshit was coming so thick and fast then - Saddam had drone aircraft to spray bio/chem weapons, he had troops with American and British uniforms (hey, we can foil that one by Not Invading), he was tossing people into giant shredders, all sortsa stuff that mostly (including all of these) turned out to be false - that it would’ve been easy to miss this one false claim about Zarqawi in the confusion.
[digression]
Someday, someone will go back and catalog every Bush Administration statement about Iraq from “Axis of Evil” through “Mission Accomplished” as truth, lie, or unknown. I don’t think they’ll come off too well, especially considering that even those were lies.
[/digression]