I've been doing some Nexis searches on Al-Libbi's past and how often he was referred to as the third in command of al-Qa'ida before 5/2/05. I had to stop after a couple hours because, honestly, it isn't worth continuing the search for information that just doesn't exist. Querying just the major papers for "Al-Libbi" and "third" in the text of any article from 1/1/1998 to 5/2/2005, I find a grand total of 2 matches. Nixing "third" from my search increases my matches to 10.
But if I search for articles with the word "Osama" in them from the same time period, Nexis fetches over a 1000 matches.
Maybe that isn't fair. After all, I am searching articles for Osama references after 9/11. So how to we gauge the importantance of Osama and compare it with Al-Libbi?
Well, try this on for size: Searching major papers from 1/1/1994 to 1/1/1999 for "bin laden" also fetches over 1000 results.
"But tas! You're forgetting about the Bin Laden Group in Saudi Arabia!" Fine. I'll use the same time frame to search for articles containing the words "bin laden" and "osama"... I still get more than 1000 results.
Al-Libbi doesn't fetch a tenth of that at a later time frame, yet we're supposed to believe that he was some high powered "general" in al-Qa'ida? Please.
We deserve an apology from the Bush administration for telling us a lie, and from the media for not even bothering to do some simple fact checking on this. I would expect every reporter to have access to the same Nexis database I'm using. It's pretty simple to plug in a few searches and find out the truth. This kind of shoddy reporting is ridiculous, especially when the MSM continues to demand that we as bloggers improve our journalistic standards. Maybe the "journalists" should get their own house in order, first.