Fishy about Zarqawi

I'm sure I'm not the first or only person to notice this, but at least I don't think I'm late to the party this time.

On June 9, the day after the airstrike, Army Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said this on CNN:

The first people on the scene were the Iraqi police. They had found him and put him into some kind of gurney/stretcher kind of thing, and then American coalition forces arrived immediately thereafter on-site. They immediately went to the person in the stretcher, were able to start identifying by some distinguishing marks on his body. They had some kind of visual facial recognition.

According to the person on the ground, Zarqawi attempted to, sort of, turn away off the stretcher. Everybody resecured him back onto the stretcher, but he died almost immediately thereafter from the wounds he'd received from this airstrike.

[CNN transcript, emphasis added]

You can't tell by reading a transcript, but I heard the excerpt several times on the radio, and the way he says that last bit is really strange. It sounds to me like he initially meant to end the sentence ("died almost immediately thereafter") and then there's a slight pause and he tacks on the end bit ("from the wounds...") as an afterthought.

The very first time I heard it I thought the whole thing sounded fishy. Not acknowledging until Day 2 that Zarqawi was found alive, and then doing so in an odd and strained manner, by someone who felt the need to disclaim specifically that Zarqawi died of airstrike injuries. As opposed to what, and why make the disclaimer so awkwardly and so early?

Or, to look at it another way, why sound so certain about his cause of death before the autopsy is performed? We don't know that the villagers of Hibhib didn't come in and finish the job before Americans arrived; we don't know that he didn't have a cyanide tooth.

Now there are claims bubbling up about whether Zarqawi was beaten by the Americans when they arrived (specifically, struck with a rifle butt) and the unsurprising counterclaims by Gen. Caldwell and others that such accusations are "baloney" and "propaganda". I almost think those are a noisy distraction from what still seems unusual about the case.

The autopsy report today describes Zarqawi's cause of death as crushing internal injuries, which is perfectly reasonable and makes sense given that two 500-ton bombs were dropped on him. And yet, one of the Army spokesmen (I'm not sure if it was Gen. Caldwell or medical officer Steve Jones or someone else) said something in the report about how therefore, it is understandable that Zarqawi would have no outward signs of serious injury even while his lungs and other organs were fatally damaged. Medically, I suppose that's plausible, but once again I hadn't heard anybody questioning Zarqawi's outward appearance until the Army brought it up. So why bring it up? What do they think they're pre-empting? What other causes of a pristine outward appearance are there that the Army really doesn't want us to think of or ask about?

There are quite a few possibilities, not just ominous conspiratorial ones. I think the most likely would be:

• Perhaps the Iraqi police did something to Zarqawi before the Americans arrived on-scene, which would be a political disaster regardless of whether Iraqis or Americans end up being blamed for it.
• Perhaps the Army is so paranoid about media coverage that they will tend to make this worse for themselves by trying to pre-emptively CYA against fanciful things no one else had even thought of yet, leading everyone to wonder why they thought of them.
  

I figure the MSM will be distracted by the pedestrian "beating" arguments or else will ignore the whole thing, while the blogosphere will run off on a hundred different loony conspiracy theories, so perhaps we'll never really know.