Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Syria: More Black Propaganda from the Bush Lie Factory

As a primary example of how the corporate media unquestioningly snaps up Pentagon disinformation, deliberately created as a form of psychological warfare against the American people, consider the following by Paul Garwood of the Associated Press:

The leaders of Iraq’s most notorious terrorist group recently held a secret meeting in neighboring Syria, where they plotted the recent wave of insurgent violence that has killed hundreds of people and was intended to break the postelection lull in violence...

How do Mr. Garwood and the Associated Press know this? Well, a “top U.S. military official” told him, in other words Bush’s Pentagon, the very epicenter of so many lies about Iraq and Saddam Hussein, passed the above bit of nonsense off as news to a mostly gullible American news consumer.

The Syrian meeting, possibly attended by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi himself, has led to one of the bloodiest periods since the U.S.-led invasion two years ago.

And possibly al-Zarqawi lives in a cave on the moon and the moon is made of green cheese. Adverbs describing events that may or may not have happened, according to military intelligence in the Pentagon, should not be used in articles passed off as news under the supposedly respectable masthead of the Associated Press. Does anybody remember the “credibility gap” of the Vietnam War? Or what about the Office of Special Plans, devised to pass off all manner of lies and fabrication as fact? Are we stupid enough to believe whatever the Pentagon tells us through their trusted shill, the corporate media? It would appear we do.

Last December, Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times told us the War Department (formerly known as the Defense Department) was thinking about undertaking “an official program that uses disinformation to shape perceptions abroad,” although the perceptions held by people abroad are obviously of less importance than the perceptions of the American people, who need to be tricked into supporting bombing runs, invasions, and occupations in the Islamic world. In a “modern world wired by satellite television and the Internet, any misleading information and falsehoods could easily be repeated by American news outlets,” according to Shanker and Schmitt. In fact, this “misleading information” has been foisted on the American people for decades and “misleading information and falsehoods” are designed primarily for domestic consumption.

In early 2002, the Pentagon announced its intention to set-up a “new department” with “the Orwellian title of the Office of Strategic Influence,” as the BBC reported at the time. “The most controversial suggestion is the covert planting of disinformation in foreign media, a process known as black propaganda.” Soon thereafter, the master of lies and propaganda, the Strausscon Douglas Feith (who worked for the Office of Special Plans, the Iraqi invasion lie factory), told us he planned to shut down the new office because, as Donald Rumsfeld put it, there was “inaccurate speculation” that the new office would “become involved in activities that the department has in fact not done, is not doing, and would not condone,” according to a Defense Department briefing. If you believe this, I have a slice of green cheese from the moon I would like to sell you.

“Lying as government strategy is known as black propaganda,” writes John Pilger for the Mirror. “The British invented its modern form. Josef Goebbels, the Nazis’ propaganda chief, was full of admiration for the British model. Since September 11, 2001, every attempt by black propagandists in Whitehall and Washington to justify an unprovoked attack on Iraq by linking the regime in Baghdad with al-Qaeda terrorism has failed.” Of course, this is debatable since millions of Americans believe Saddam and Osama were in cahoots, an idea completely discredited numerous times and, in fact, defies logic.

“Counterterrorism and war propaganda are intertwined. The propaganda apparatus feeds disinformation into the news chain. The terror warnings must appear to be ‘genuine’. The objective is to present the terror groups as ‘enemies of America,’” writes Michel Chossudovsky. “The underlying objective is to galvanize public opinion in support of America’s war agenda.” Thus Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an invisible terrorist with super-human qualities (described as “so secretive even some operatives who work with him do not know his identity” ), appears in Syria, a country that figures prominently on the “axis of evil” hit list, as dictated by “America’s war agenda” and its Strausscon authors. As Chossudovsky wrote last June, the al-Zarqawi myth is perpetuated by the corporate media, acting as the Bush Ministry of Disinformation:

In some cases, upon the immediate occurrence of [a] terrorist event, there is an initial report which mentions Al-Zarqawi as the possible mastermind. The report will often say (in substance): yes we think he did it, but it is not yet confirmed and there is some doubt on the identity of those behind the attack. One or two days later, CNN may come up with a definitive statement, quoting official police, military and/or intelligence sources.

In essence, this is what the Associated Press has done with the claim, attributed to an anonymous “U.S. military official,” that “leaders of Iraq’s most notorious terrorist group” have attended a confab in Syria (the unspecified accusation is that Syria condones such behavior) where “they plotted the recent wave of insurgent violence.” In conjunction with this purported meeting, we are told about “a chilling, rambling Internet audiotape purportedly by al-Zarqawi” that has “denounced Iraq’s Shiites as U.S. collaborators and said killing them is justified.” In short, as the Pentagon would have us believe, the Iraqi resistance, which they want us to believe is entirely a Sunni affair driven in part by the overplayed schism between the Shia and Sunni Islam, is primarily a religious and ethnic struggle. As the AP reports, this violence is indiscriminate, supposedly in al-Zarqawi’s words, directed against both “armed infidels” (Shi’ites) and “women and children” because the “priority is for jihad so anything that slows down jihad should be overcome.” As a now standard caveat, the AP report adds that the “tape could not immediately be authenticated,” as previous tapes (of both al-Zarqawi and Bin Laden) were never validated. Of course, authentication is unimportant because, as the Pentagon well knows, once these fanciful allegations are floated they become de facto truth for much of the American public, as did campfire story that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and worked in tandem with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to attack America on nine eleven.

Civil war (in the al-Zarqawi model) is precisely what the Bush Strausscons and the Likudites in Israel want. “An unchastened insurgency sowed devastation across Iraq Wednesday as experts here said the country is either on the verge of civil war or already in the middle of it,” Newsday reported last week. “Other experts said Iraq is on the verge of a full-scale civil war with civilians on both sides being slaughtered. Incidents in the past two weeks south of Baghdad, with apparently retaliatory killings of Sunni and Shia civilians, point in that direction, they say.” As the late Israel Shahak wrote in the preface to Oded Yinon’s A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties, the “idea that all the Arab states should be broken down, by Israel, into small units, occurs again and again in Israeli strategic thinking.” Shahak quotes Zeev Shiff, the military correspondent of Ha’aretz, as saying that the “dissolution of Iraq into a Shi’ite state, a Sunni state and the separation of the Kurdish part...” is the “best” scenario in Israel’s interest (as of 1982, well before the Zionist Strausscons had seized political power in Washington).

As the Pentagon is currently under the sway of the Bush Strausscons, as is well documented, especially by Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired USAF lieutenant colonel in the Pentagon (see her Spies in the Pentagon? and especially About Those Neocons: Thinking Again, or Just Wondering?), and their lies and prevarication are well-documented, the al-Zarqawi black propaganda one trick pony should not come as a surprise.

“The underlying objective is to galvanize public opinion in support of America’s war agenda,” Michel Chossudovsky reminds us. “To reach its foreign policy objectives, the images of terrorism must remain vivid in the minds of the citizens, who are constantly reminded of the terrorist threat. The propaganda campaign presents the portraits of the leaders behind the terror network. In other words, at the level of what constitutes an ‘advertising’ campaign, ‘it gives a face to terror.’ The ‘war on terrorism’ rests on the creation of one or more evil bogeymen, the terror leaders, Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, et al, whose names and photos are presented ad nauseam in daily news reports.”