'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Epistolary fraud? Almost certainly

Juan Cole's explanation of why the "Zawahiri Letter" looks like a forgery is very convincing to me. (Al-Qaeda's leadership itself has also claimed it is such.)

Juan argues that basic elements in the greetings, etc., used in the "Letter" indicate that:

Most likely it is a black psy-ops operation of the US. But it could also come from Iran, since the mistakes are those a Shiite might make when pretending to be a Sunni. Or it could come from an Iraqi Shiite group attempting to manipulate the United States.

Hey, Juan, don't forget the Brits! Remember that (1) Blair's guys have a huge presence down there in the Shiite areas of southern Iraq, and (2) British rightwingers were the author of the infamous 1924 "Zinoviev Letter" which, by apparently associating Ramsey Macdonald's Labour Party with the machinations of the Soviet Comintern, lost Labour the British General Election of that year.

The role the Zinoviev Letter played in that election has been extensively studied in Britain, including in recent years. Many Labour leaders thought the British intelligence services had been complicit in its production. But that Wikipedia entry states that a 1999 study by the British Foreign Office's chief historian found that, intelligence responsibility for the letter was "inherently unlikely."

The Wikipedia entry also noted that:

Although much of its content otherwise persuasively echoes Comintern vocabulary, the letter contains errors (such as "Executive Committee, Third Communist International" - a nonsensical title) which led many even at the time to denounce it as a hoax.

Well, who knows who the true author is this time round, of what looks very likely to have been a Zinoviev-letter-type hoax-- and also one released just before a key nationwide vote.

(Anyway, here's another important question: Has anyone in the British media found out yet what those two SAS guys were actually doing when they were barrelling around Basra, heavily armed and dressed as Arabs, and they got arrested by the Iraqi police just over three weeks ago?)

On Tuesday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (that is, Negroponte) put the text of the "Zawahiri Letter" up on its website in both Arabic and English, accesible through a portal on which this statement is made:

The United States Government has the highest confidence in the letter's authenticity.

But it is not really the US government that needs to be "convinced" of the letter's authenticity, is it?