You have got to be kidding!

Militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was still alive when Iraqi police got to the scene of the air strikes that targeted him, the US military says. But the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq died of his wounds shortly afterwards, Major General William Caldwell said.

US planes dropped two 500lb (230kg) bombs on Zarqawi's safe house near the city of Baquba on Wednesday.

Zarqawi had tried to move off the stretcher where he had been placed by Iraqi police, Maj Gen Caldwell said.
"Everybody resecured him back onto the stretcher, but he died almost immediately thereafter from the wounds he had received from this air strike," he said.
Zarqawi had "mumbled something indistinguishable and... very short" before he died, the US spokesman said.
When US troops got there, they had made an identification of Zarqawi by distinguishing marks on his body and "some kind of visual, facial recognition", he said.

"We do not know" why he had survived the initial strike, he said.


Well, at least he's being honest and not trying to come up with some far-fetched excuse about terrorists being made of teflon or something. But seriously, I'm so glad that they used the "some kind of visual, facial recognition" technique to identify him and not the "some kind of aural, listening recognition." To think that they could have been pressing their ears up against Zarqawi's dead body for hours and still not known who he was...