bitchlab wrote:
I suppose they have to make it look credible and lying to soldiers and their families are hardly new. And man, do I want to believe this is infowar.
Well, it is: Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt: "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date." Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi: Jordanian Painted As Foreign Threat To Iraq's Stability By Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, April 10, 2006; Page A01 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/09/AR2006040900890.html The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The documents state that the U.S. campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners. U.S. authorities claim some success with that effort, noting that some tribal Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists. For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign. [Sidebar: Two slides from a briefing prepared for Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describe a U.S. military propaganda campaign that was intended to highlight the role of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist, in the Iraqi insurgency. By emphasizing his foreign origin, the "psychological operations" effort sought to play on a perceived Iraqi dislike of foreigners and so split the insurgency.] The military's propaganda program largely has been aimed at Iraqis, but seems to have spilled over into the U.S. media. One briefing slide about U.S. "strategic communications" in Iraq, prepared for Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describes the "home audience" as one of six major targets of the American side of the war. That slide, created by Casey's subordinates, does not specifically state that U.S. citizens were being targeted by the effort, but other sections of the briefings indicate that there were direct military efforts to use the U.S. media to affect views of the war. One slide in the same briefing, for example, noted that a "selective leak" about Zarqawi was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter based in Baghdad. Filkins's resulting article, about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004. Leaks to reporters from U.S. officials in Iraq are common, but official evidence of a propaganda operation using an American reporter is rare. .....It is difficult to determine how much has been spent on the Zarqawi campaign, which began two years ago and is believed to be ongoing. U.S. propaganda efforts in Iraq in 2004 cost $24 million, but that included extensive building of offices and residences for troops involved, as well as radio broadcasts and distribution of thousands of leaflets with Zarqawi's face on them, said the officer speaking on background. The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military documents. "Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response," one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed three methods: "Media operations," "Special Ops (626)" (a reference to Task Force 626, an elite U.S. military unit assigned primarily to hunt in Iraq for senior officials in Hussein's government) and "PSYOP," the U.S. military term for propaganda work. One internal briefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, said that Kimmitt had concluded that, "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date." #33# And if you need further hilarity, just read this story about 'father-and-son-attend-terrorist-training-camp': SACRAMENTO Hazy case against Lodi man Prosecution rests -- evidence murkier than first described Demian Bulwa, Chronicle Staff Writer Wednesday, March 29, 2006 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/03/29/LODI.TMP <...> At the center of the prosecution's case is Pakistani American informant Naseem Khan, who was working at a fast-food outlet and convenience store in Bend, Ore., when the FBI came to him weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The agents asked whether he was involved in money laundering for a charity called the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, which authorities suspected of funneling money to the Palestinian group Hamas, according to trial testimony. Khan, 32, denied having anything to do with the charity, but volunteered to agents that while living in Lodi in 1999, he had seen al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, at the Lodi mosque. Khan later told agents he had seen two other men on the FBI's list of most wanted terrorists in and around Lodi, an assertion that several terrorism experts regarded as unlikely. By December 2001, Khan testified, he was working for the FBI in Lodi in a terrorism investigation that would eventually earn him more than $225,000 in salary and expenses. His code name: "Wildcat." <...> Ya know, the saying: "you just can't make this stuff up!", is wrong... You Can!!! Leigh http://leighm.wordpress.com/
