Wag the Cat and Shoot the Dog... Or Something

Just when you thought the war in Iraq couldn't get any stranger, a high-ranking al-Qaeda figure who was first captured and then killed -- his body displayed on state-run TV -- turns out to have been a fiction.

He didn't exist.

The apparently invented character called Abu Omar al-Baghdadi was known as the head of the Islamic State of Iraq -- believed to be a front group for al-Qaeda.

He wasn't captured, as was reported previously. He wasn't killed May 1 by hostile fire from U.S. forces, as reported in a May 3 New York Times story. He wasn't even real, according to the U.S. military. More....