As Bush, reading once again from a neocon script, this time at the Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina, insists “al-Qaeda in Iraq” is a threat not only to the occupation of Iraq but grade schoolers at home, it is useful to revisit Nick Possum. “Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a real Zarqawi. Nobody is willing to tell what really happened to him, but at some point before the invasion of Iraq he vanished from the real world and entered the twilight zone of black operations to become a symbol of evil and a master of disguise. Nowadays he hides out in the CIA complex at Langley, Virginia, a basement in Baghdad’s Green Zone, an office in Kuwait … or maybe all three,” Possum wrote on June 1, 2005.

“In a half-hour speech clearly aimed at his Democratic critics,” and anybody else who dares question the murder of more than 750,000 Iraqis since March, 2003, “Mr. Bush said that those who argued that the affiliated group, called Al Qaeda in Iraq or AQI, was a local group with local objectives, and not a serious threat to Americans at home, were seriously misinformed,” reports the New York Times. “It’s hard to argue that Al Qaeda in Iraq is separate from bin Laden’s Al Qaeda when the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq took an oath of allegiance to Osama bin Laden,” the commander guy declared, referring to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the supposedly dead leader of “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” now AQI for short.

It appears this nonsense is working—at least a little. According to “recent opinion polls, the president has had some recent success in making a case to voters for continuing the war in Iraq. He has insisted both that success is possible and that failure would be catastrophic, in part because Al Qaeda in Iraq might then turn its attentions elsewhere,” for instance a day care in Killdeer, North Dakota.

Chalk it up to an incessant barrage of propaganda—characterized as a “surge of facts,” according to White House communications director Kevin Sullivan—entering the corporate media news cycle and competing with the arrest of yet another drunken and drug addicted Hollywood starlet. The decider and commander guy’s speech before a captive audience of soldiers, Sullivan insisted, “was devised as a ’surge of facts’ meant to push back against critics who say Bush is trying rebuild support for the war by drawing links between the Iraq group and the one led by bin Laden. But Democratic lawmakers quickly accused Bush of overstating those links to provide a rationale for the continued American presence in Iraq.” Of course, the neocons and their slavish handmaiden, the corporate media, cannot prove the existence of “al-Qaeda” in Iraq or anywhere else. “In his speech, Bush did not try to debunk the fact—repeated by Reid—that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia did not exist until after the U.S. invasion in 2003 and had flourished since.” It is as likely the public relations facade of “Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia” was created by the Pentagon.

Back in early 2006, Reuters carried a report indicating the “Zarqawi threat” was “magnified” in order to “leverage [a] xenophobia response,” not only on the part of the Iraqi resistance but here at home. “Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will—made him more important than he really is, in some ways,” Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq, told a U.S. Army meeting in the summer of 2005.

The military’s propaganda program, according to the Washington Post, was “largely been aimed at Iraqis, but seems to have spilled over into the U.S. media. One briefing slide about U.S. ’strategic communications’ in Iraq, prepared for Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describes the ‘home audience’ as one of six major targets of the American side of the war…. An internal document produced by U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, states that ‘the Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date,’” Michel Chossudovsky notes. “Counterterrorism and war propaganda are intertwined. The propaganda apparatus feeds disinformation into the news chain. The objective is to present the terror groups as “enemies of America.” responsible for countless atrocities in Iraq and around the World. The underlying objective is to galvanize public opinion in support of America’s Middle East war agenda.”

US military-intelligence has created it own terrorist organizations. In turn, it has developed a cohesive multibillion dollar counterterrorism program “to go after” these terrorist organizations. To reach its foreign policy objectives, the images of terrorism in the Iraqi war theater must remain vivid in the minds of the citizens, who are constantly reminded of the terrorist threat. The Iraqi resistance movement is described as terrorists led by Zarqawi.

The propaganda campaign using the Western media, presents the portraits of the leaders behind the terror network. In other words, at the level of what constitutes an “advertising” campaign, “it gives a face to terror.”

The “war on terrorism” rests on the creation of one or more evil bogeymen, the terror leaders, Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, et al, whose names and photos are presented ad nauseam in daily news reports. Without Zarqawi and bin Laden, the “war on terrorism” would lose its raison d’être. The main casus belli is to wage a ” war on terrorism”.

Indeed, the latest neocon effort to frighten the public with yet another fallacious “advertising campaign” is a half-baked effort riddled with obvious holes. “Current and former intelligence officials say the Bush Administration’s National Intelligence Estimate regarding terrorist threats to the United States does not provide evidence to support its assertions and may have inflated the domestic threat posed by the Lebanese political and military group Hezbollah, perhaps because it receives financial support from Iran,” reports Larisa Alexandrovna. “An individual close to the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research told Raw Story the document’s assertions are not backed up by empirical or external evidence even in the classified version. In addition, this official explained, the information lacks context and does not prioritize threats.” Intelligence officers “asserted that the report was sloppy and lacked supporting evidence” and was “fiddled” with, a neocon trademark.

But never mind. Our commander guy is reading from a neocon script and if you question it you “don’t know shit,” as Bill Gallagher reported a previous Bush exclamation, citing Capitol Hill Blue.

Bush refers to those who protest his war as “motherf—king traitors” and he was so enraged when he heard reports about the “bullshit protectors” [worn by VFW members at a speech] that he screamed at his aides, “Tell those VFW assholes that I’ll never speak to them again if they can’t keep their members under control.”

Capitol Hill Blue has long dealt with a topic that the corporate media won’t touch—Bush’s mental fitness for the presidency and the behavior patterns associated with his addiction-damaged personality. The journal reports Bush’s doctors are trying to control his dark moods with anti-depressant drugs.

While the Busheviks have sold the myth that their man is an affable “nice guy,” the reality is that he is often vile and profane. His explosive temper is increasingly displayed. At a recent strategy session, discussing polls showing most Americans are now against the war and don’t believe Bush, he reportedly bellowed to his staff, “I’m the president and I’ll do whatever I goddamned please. They don’t know shit.”

As we know, our “addiction-damaged” commander guy recently slammed through yet another executive order—entitled Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization (or unending destruction and misery) Efforts in Iraq—this time threatening the Fifth Amendment rights of Americans. Bush’s latest executive order “is a stunning assertion of executive power that creates a Sword of Damocles over anyone opposed to the war or otherwise who might come under the umbrage of the president,” constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein told WorldNetDaily. Fein insists the executive order is “so sweeping and broad that it permits the president to threaten virtually anybody who opposes our policy in Iraq.”

Maybe even wishy-washy Democrats.