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A replay of the section of the prepared piece that was shown on TSR yesterday, followed by a brief comment from Michael. They apparently hope to show the full piece tonight on AC360.
JOHN
ROBERTS: Top secret files from al Qaeda in Iraq
revealing that the group's extreme brutality may have
led to its own unraveling.
The papers and never seen before execution videos
fell into civilian hands after fighters started
switches sides. A warning that some of the images
that you're about to see are disturbing.
CNN's Michael Ware has this exclusive report from
Baghdad.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MICHAEL WARE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): al
Qaeda gunmen brought this man here to die. Staged for
maximum impact, he's to be executed on this busy
market street. We don't know why; the al Qaeda
members who recorded this tape offer no explanation.
But the anticipation is agonizing, leading to a
moment we cannot show you.
A punishment for betraying al Qaeda or for breaking
their strict version of Islamic law. Either way, it
was public executions like this that would help lead
to the unraveling of al Qaeda in Iraq. And al Qaeda
knew it. Its leaders recognized their greatest threat
was not the U.S. military, but the men in the crowds
who witnessed the slaughters and who would eventually
turn against them.
In fact, in this secret memo three years ago, a
senior al Qaeda leader warned against a backlash for
the public executions. They were being carried out,
he wrote, "in the wrong way, in a semi-public way, so
a lot of families are threatening revenge and this is
now a dangerous intelligence situation."
But it took U.S. intelligence more than a year to
understand al Qaeda's weakness. Most of these men
were once insurgents or al Qaeda themselves. Now
they're on the U.S. government payroll, assassinating
al Qaeda and patrolling the streets. And it was one
of these U.S.- backed militias, as unforgiving as
this one, who overran an al Qaeda headquarters. They
discovered computer hard drives with thousands of
documents and hours upon hours of videotape and
passed them all on to the U.S. military and to CNN.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
WARE: And from those documents, John, we learned that
as opposed to what some in Washington would have you
believe, al Qaeda in Iraq is homegrown. It's lead by
Iraqis. And the foreign fighters that you hear talked
about by some in the administration are really just
cannon fodder being used as suicide bombers. This is
an Iraqi organization which the documents also
revealed have spies inside U.S. bases. There's even
architectural schematics for a U.S. bunker to be
built on an American base -- John.
JOHN ROBERTS, CNN ANCHOR: Revealing new insight there
for us this morning. Michael Ware in Baghdad.
Michael, thanks.
And you can see Michael Ware's entire exclusive
report on "AC 360" tonight, 10:00 Eastern.