Salim Assassination Was 'Inside Job'

MSNBC | May 18 2004

The following is an excerpt from the transcript of 'Countdown with Keith Olbermann', aired on MSNBC.

In Iraq, political decisions are not yet made by polls nor at them. There they are still in the French revolution stage of representative government. A senior U.S. official tells NBC News that it may very well have been a, quote, “inside job” that led to the assassination, this morning, of the president of the Iraqi governing council.

Izzedine Salim was among nine Iraqis killed when a suicide bomber detonated a vehicle at a checkpoint outside coalition headquarters in central Baghdad. The U.S. source says the fear is someone inside that interim Iraqi government tipped off the assassins about his movements of Salim.

This afternoon a group itself the “Arab Resistance Movement” claimed responsibility for the murder of a man it had called a “traitor and mercenary.” But, General Mark Kimmitt said that the car bomb had the classic hallmarks of the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to whom one Web site attributed the murder of the American freelance contractor, Nick Berg.