"We are al Qaeda. You will be assimilated!"

It's truly amasing how easily one becomes al Qaeda nowadays.

In fact, it hardly takes any effort to become "friends of al Qaeda":

Sheikh Sattar, whose tribe is notorious for highway banditry, is also building a personal militia, loyal not to the Iraqi government but only to him. Other tribes — even those who want no truck with terrorists — complain they are being forced to kowtow to him. Those who refuse risk being branded as friends of al-Qaeda and tossed in jail, or worse.

Say the wrong word to the wrong person, and maybe someone will nominiate you for membership ... and premature termination.

One easy route to full membership in this august organisation is simply to be dead. Or to be around the dead. Here's an example of heresy: Using the "A-word" ("alleged") in an article.

And now we have "al Qaeda" training camps for kids in Iraq:

Videos seized from suspected members of al-Qaeda in Iraq show children being trained as fighters for the group, Iraqi and US military officials have said.

Footage from the videos, which appear to show boys as young as 10 wearing masks while carrying weapons, was presented to reporters on Wednesday.

"Al-Qaeda in Iraq wants to poison the next generation of Iraqis," Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, a US military spokesman, said during the presentation of the footage.

"It is offering children as the new generation of mujahedeen [fighters]."

[emphasis added]

How's this story played by the mainstream media? Even the relatively sceptical Manchester Guardian has this:

American forces in Baghdad yesterday warned of a "disturbing trend in the use and exploitation of children by al-Qaida in Iraq", after discovering videos showing young boys being trained in kidnapping and assassination.

The discovery came as the US revealed to the Guardian that coalition forces are currently holding approximately 600 juvenile detainees between the ages of 13 and 17. It is not known how many juveniles are being held by the Iraqi authorities.

In US detention facilities in Iraq, the young detainees undergo a programme of rehabilitation, including access to basic education, skills and religious lessons from moderate imams and mullahs.

In Baghdad yesterday, Rear Admiral Gregory Smith told reporters that five videos had been discovered during a raid on a suspected al-Qaida safe house in the town of Khan Bani Saad in the volatile Diyala province north-east of Baghdad. In one of the videos about 20 boys, many as young as 11 years old, are seen wearing ski masks and bristling with pistols, assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. In some cases their guns appear to be larger than the youngsters carrying them.

The videos were most probably part of a propaganda effort by al-Qaida to recruit and train young people across Iraq, he added. "There are families out there where the adult male is in al-Qaida and the child is growing up in that environment. They constantly refer to them as the new generation of mujahideen," he said.

The date stamp on one of the videos, the contents of which could not be verified, suggested it was taken last summer, but neither the location of the video nor the identity of the children involved is known, Smith said.

[emphasis added]

But if "al Qaeda in Iraq" is this supposedly foreign force and not some domestic insurgency or resistance to occupation or subjugation, where'd they get the children? Oh, right. Silly me. They got kidnapped, and are then being trained to fight (and die) against their will....

Anyone remember the Office of Special Plans? How about the baby incubators in Kuwait? Or the Salman Pak nonsense (but for a contrary [albeit completely ignerrent] opinion, see here) prior to the Iraq war?

As long as we're fighting the horrible "al Qaeda" which murdered thousands of people on 9/11, the maladministration hopes you won't take too much umbrage at the fact that we're still killing Iraqis in Iraq, holding thousands of people in a country supposedly sovereign and safe, and we must obviously be "winning the war". So we need the "al Qaeda in Iraq" to be in Iraq (and even to stay there, even though we've "all but eliminated" them); if there hadn't been someone to take up that banner after our invasion, we'd have had to invent them. It's like the existence of Satan; without some little "Loki" to stir up trouble, there wouldn't be any Eyyy-vulll in this world since it would all then be Gawd's doing and of necessity, "good"....

Here's another voice in the wilderness on this topic of the necessity of the existence of Sata... -- ummm, sorry, "al Qaeda"....