Josh Marshall:

This isn't a Thanksgiving Day question exactly, but a question on Thanksgiving Day nonetheless.

What do we know exactly about Abu Musab Zarqawi?

The liberal blogger and "60 Minutes" collaborator is questioning the conventional wisdom that Zarqawi is a terror mastermind with deep Iraq roots:

But it is hard not to see this information in the light of the fairly constant tendency through the War on Terror to build up varous Terrorist Masterminds, who become the focus of most or all news reportage, then trail off into nothing. Not infrequently, they have an uncanny resemblance to characters out of 1984. And with Zarqawi particularly there is a welter of contradictory and often difficult-to-credit information about him that invites further suspicion.

For a number of reasons, he posits, "building up Zarqawi into the Iraq's al Qaida boss must be tempting" for the Bush Administration.

So, he wants to know if the intersecting needs of President Bush and the bloodthirsty maniac, Zarqawi, may be leading to the creation of a galloping ghost of a terrorist - a man whose myth is bigger than his reality.

Well, here's the reality:

Zarqawi has sworn allegience to Osama bin Laden, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's right-hand man, has written a long treatise to Zarqawi that has clearly established their coordinated efforts at terror.

As early as March 24, 2002 - months before President Bush took to the U.N. podium and demanded Iraq come into compliance with Security Council demands - The New York Times portrayed Zarqawi as a Middle East terror mastermind operating on bin Laden's behalf. That story (in The Times' firewall-protected archive), cited Israeli intelligence as saying Zarqawi had escaped to Iran (not Iraq), and was pulling the strings on a series of terror attacks and planning.

Ten and a half months later, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, in his address to the U.N., spent much of his time detailing Zarqawi's importance to bin Laden's network and work in Iraq:

When our coalition ousted the Taliban, the Zarqaqi network helped establish another poison and explosive training center camp. And this camp is located in northeastern Iraq...

Those helping to run this camp are Zarqawi lieutenants operating in northern Kurdish areas outside Saddam Hussein's controlled Iraq. But Baghdad has an agent in the most senior levels of the radical organization, Ansar al-Islam, that controls this corner of Iraq. In 2000 this agent offered Al Qaida safe haven in the region. After we swept Al Qaida from Afghanistan, some of its members accepted this safe haven. They remain their today.

Zarqawi's activities are not confined to this small corner of north east Iraq. He traveled to Baghdad in May 2002 for medical treatment, staying in the capital of Iraq for two months while he recuperated to fight another day...

Foreign intelligence services, Powell noted, tied Zarqawi's network to poison-developing cells in France and England - cells which have been broken up. And, importantly, Powell noted at the time that men involved in the 2002 assassination of State Department official Lawrence Foley in Jordan said they received their funding, training and support from Zarqawi's network.

How do we know Powell was right about Zarqawi, even if his presentation was flawed in other respects? Well, for starters, Zarqawi is in Iraq now, leading terrorist action against the Iraqi democracy efforts. And, secondly, his communications with bin Laden and al-Zawahiri.

Powell said that Zarqawi was in Iraq, reporting to bin Laden. And that's exactly what the evidence shows.

Israeli intelligence, according to The Times' piece, named Zarqawi early on as a bin Laden-associated terror mastermind. That's what the evidence shows.

The only arguments that these facts might not be true come from conspiracy theories from the likes of Juan Cole, in addition to a year-old story out of Newsday that Marshall links to which voices "skepticism" that Zarqawi is who everyone says he is.

This is where it now stands: with the U.S. killing or capturing terrorists in Iraq by the hundreds, with the insurgency in Iraq starting to run the white flag up the pole, with a new constitution guiding free elections for a permanent government in Iraq, and with major victories ready to be credited to the Bush Administration, panic is setting in in certain quarters.

And that is leading to the first seeds of the next big question Bush opponents could very well be asking: How do we even know al Qaeda was such a big threat to the U.S., anyway?

(Marshall says in his Zarqawi post: "...I'm curious-bordering-on-suspicious about just what we know about Zarqawi, how much specific information we have about who he is and what attacks he may be responsible for.")

Zarqawi denial? Perhaps. But, if so, can 9-11 denial be far off?