Terrorism, Lies, and Videotapes

Terrorism, Lies, and Videotapes. Earlier this month, it was reported that a Pentagon psychological warfare (psyop) unit purposely hyped the threat posed in Iraq by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi. It was also revealed that a 17-page letter written by Zarqawi to Osama bin Laden in 2004 and selectively leaked to a New York Times reporter in Baghdad. The contents of the letter was featured on page one of the Times on Feb. 9, 2004. In the letter to Bin Laden, “Zarqawi” said that if democracy took root in Iraq, it would suffocate the terrorists. On April 10, 2006, President Bush cited the 2004 Zarqawi letter in a speech before Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). This was after it was revealed in the Washington Post that same morning that the Pentagon had hyped the Zarqawi threat and that its psyop team may have even written the Zarqawi letter to Bin Laden as a feint to justify a continued U.S. military presence in Iraq. It was reported that there were Kurdish fingerprints on the supposed Zarqawi letter. The Kurds see every day of U.S. military presence as helping them in their goal of achieving an independent state. It now appears that the Zarqawi letter to Bin Laden was every bit as phony as the Niger uranium documents. Bush used the Zarqawi and Niger fraudulent documents in his public statements.

The Post’s information came from a briefing Joint Chiefs of Staff psyop officer Col. Derek Harvey told a meeting in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in 2005. According to a transcript of the meeting, Harvey said, “Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will — made him more important than he really is, in some ways . . . The long-term threat is not Zarqawi or religious extremists, but these former regime types and their friends.” In addition to an Iraqi audience for the Pentagon disinformation campaign, documents from the Kansas meeting indicated that another target was the “U.S. Home Audience.” The psyops were part of a U.S. Special Operations Command program called “trans-regional” media operations. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the media spokesman in Baghdad, called the Zarqawi Psyop campaign “the most successful information campaign to date.”

Yesterday, a video showing a heavy set man purporting to be Zarqawi surfaced on the Internet. Previously, Zarqawi issued his statements on audio tape. However, U.S. authorities have circulated photos of Zarqawi, but that person is much slimmer than the Zarqawi seen yesterday. The Zarqawi videotape follows by two days the release of another Osama Bin Laden audio tape. Quickly and suspiciously, “U.S. intelligence” sources concluded the Bin Laden tape was authentic. Conveniently for certain neocon quarters, the Bin Laden tape called for support for Hamas and Sudan. Hamas and Sudan rejected “Bin Laden’s” offer of support.

The neocon media immediately jumped on both the Bin Laden and Zarqawi tapes to shake the terrorist tree at the same time George W. Bush’s polling numbers began approaching those of Richard Nixon during Watergate. Amid all the other lies and phony and fabricated evidence of the Bush administration in pushing the war in Iraq and the “Al Qaeda” threat, the media continues to accept prime facie everything that emanates from the neocon propaganda boiler rooms in Washington, London, and Baghdad.

Today, Bush appointed Fox News pundit Tony Snow as his new Press Secretary. This may be part of a strategy to further combine White House propaganda operations with the broadcast capabilities of Rupert Murdoch’s global media network. If Snow continues the policies of Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan in not granting White House Press Corps dean Helen Thomas the traditional courtesy of the first question — expect even more stonewalling and obfuscation, albeit with a Snow “happy face,” by a White House eager to prevent a routing at the November polls at all costs. Bush and his team are clearly hoping that the White House Press Corps will go easy on someone they’ve socialized with at innumerable galas and political fetes.

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