So the CIA or some American spooky group allegedly plucks this Egyptian terrorist and terrorist recruiter named Abu Omar off the streets of Milan, and flies him to Egypt where his treatment has been less than civil. Now an Italian judge has issued warrants for the arrest of the 13-man CIA team. This is worrisome, and IÂ’ll tell you why in another post. But first, this important message:

What was Abu Omar doing?

“When he disappeared, he was under investigation in Italy for suspected ties to terrorism, including recruiting militants for Iraq.”

Â…was grabbed off a Milan street on Feb. 17, 2003 and stuffed into a white van.

In other words, here’s a guy recruiting Islamic “militants” for Iraq a month before we invaded. No wonder it was so important to snatch him! We needed to know what he knew. And we had to stop him from doing what he was doing.

Anyway, as if you needed more evidence of the fact, here’s another pre-war link between the “secular” Saddam and religious Islamic terrorism. And it’s also more evidence that the Iraqi insurgency was part of their original battle plan—to fall back and win through attrition what they could never win through open battle.

IÂ’m tucking away a note on blogging, news aggregators, and the wire services after the jump, since I figure not everyone will care as much about that sort of thing.
Memeorandum.com is a useful service that aggregates the stories major blogs are talking about and updates the list hourly. It does so by counting links to a particular article or blogpost from an (arbitrary but I think reasonably representative) sample of major blogs. It's very good (even if you don't have a blog) for spotlighting hot stories, and I check it once or twice a day. As I write this, the version of this story getting linked on Memeorandum is the AP version in the NYT.

But I found this story through Drudge, and he links the Reuters version of the story. The Reuters story mentions the Iraq tidbit; the AP version does not. (Neither story says which group Abu O was with; AP just says he belonged to “an Islamic terrorist group”.) But the blogs are chasing the AP version.

You might notice I did the same thing on my “medical” marijuana post below. Different hard-news sources reported different facts that, pieced together, show just how removed from the medical marijuana movement’s goals these criminal enterprises actually are.

Blog swarms are fun but thereÂ’s often extra information available to a patient blogger willing to sift through different primary reports before piling on. The flip side of this is that relying too much on aggregators (like Drudge or Fark or Memeorandum or Technorati) or other bloggers can just increase the echo chamber effect as eight million people give their take on exactly the same story. Without considering these different sources, the bias or omissions of a single story can be magnified throughout the Immedia.

Posted by: seedubya at 03:39 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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