You'll have to look long and hard to find any media mention of Sulaiman Abu Graith before he showed up on the front page of every American newspaper a week ago.
Since then he's morphed into a Senior Bin Laden Adviser, Terror Mastermind, Al Qaeda Mastermind... but mostly, he's become the most useful device ever for putting Al-Qaeda and Iran in the same story.
After all, it's nice to have some terrorists to pin on the Iranian terrorism sponsors, and evidence for that is notably lacking.
That's useful because the Bomb Iran crowd needs to keep alive the fiction that Al-Qaeda is a creation of the Iranian terror apparatus. It helps if you can produce headlines that make that link, even if the content of the story fails to substantiate it.
Hence, in the past week, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times and innumerable others have all provided their eager readers with fanciful speculation about the links between the Saudi-sponsored Al Qaeda, and Saudi Arabia's number one enemy, Iran.
Here's a Reuters story from a year ago that describes the Al Qaeda-Iran relationship as "fractious at best and antagonistic at worst." They even have a reference to Abu Graith in the third and forth paragraphs from the bottom. He was such a non-entity he wasn't even mentioned by name, simply referred to as "the husband of one of Bin Laden's daughters."
He is a non-entity no more. He has since become a useful pawn in the anti-Iran propaganda campaign. He gives the media big boys an excuse to print headlines that imply linkages that don't exist.
You can be sure we'll be seeing lots of those in the months to come.
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