Disinformation — not to mention outright forgery — have already played critical supporting roles in the Iraq tragedy. Is it unreasonable to suspect they’ve returned to the stage again?
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October 15, 2005
WB: Letter Opener
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PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS IN GUERRILLA WARFARE (pdf)
PSYOP quote: “Established citizens …(sic), [foreign and domestic], will be recruited initially as ‘Social Crusaders’ in typically ‘innocuous’ movements in the area of operations. When their ‘involvement’ with the clandestine organization is revealed to them, this supplies the psychological pressure to use them as ‘inside cadres’ in groups to which they already belong or of which they can be members.”
On the other hand, Tom Hayden reminds us that the media’s tendency to divide Iraqis in two — good and bad — obscures the overwhelming hostility to the American presence in the country.
“From its beginning,” he writes, “this war has been one of perception. Perhaps the media elites, whose collaboration with the Pentagon gave public justification during the 2003 invasion, now worry that if they report that a majority of the Iraqis we are supposedly ‘saving from terrorism’ are actually calling for our departure, any remaining support for the war will collapse.”
Prospice tibi – ut Gallia, tu quoque in tres partes dividaris.
Watch out – you might end up divided into three parts, like Gaul.
Qui bono? (Who benefits?)
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 15 2005 7:36 utc | 2
US troops ‘starve Iraqi citizens’
A senior United Nations official has accused US-led coalition troops of depriving Iraqi civilians of food and water in breach of humanitarian law.
Human rights investigator Jean Ziegler said they had driven people out of insurgent strongholds that were about to be attacked by cutting supplies.
Mr Ziegler, a Swiss-born sociologist, said such tactics were in breach of international law.
A US military spokesman in Baghdad denied the allegations.
“A drama is taking place in total silence in Iraq, where the coalition’s occupying forces are using hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population,” Mr Ziegler told a press conference.
He said coalition forces were using “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.”
“This is a flagrant violation of international law,” he added.
Oh lord how much longer? It was something like that which HST cried out when he felt he couldn’t endure another moment of a Nixon presidency.
In this case though it is how much longer are gullible people going to swallow the horseshit which is pushed into their wide open orifices minute by prolix minute?
It’s not just BushCo. In fact some of us probably feel that Rovian horseshit is doing the world a favor long term as surely no one could keep believing that for too long.
The consumerist crap as well. My kids are in their early teens and when they were babes I turned a blind eye to the incessant marketing of useless crap at them.
I thought that eventually they would catch on. That if I tried to get them to see they were being used by these cold fuckers they would do what I would have done at their age. Namely feel if Dad is so passionately against this there must be something interesting in it.
Anyway they have consumed their way from Thomas the Tank Engine to Harry Potter.
From Playstation 1 to I-pods.
Meanwhile I’ve been ripping my hair out and suggesting that surely it would be simpler to pull a wad of $20 notes outta the local hole in the wall, tear them up and leave them strewn from asshole to breakfast about the joint.
“Nah that doesn’t sound like much fun” they would say. (Note to self. Sarcasm doesn’t cut it with kids)
Anyway the signs are there the kids are waking up to the burn. It wasn’t anything I did unless suggesting that they have a go at working sometimes to get a feel for controlling their own resources IS what did it.
The thing is if my pubescents can do it why is it taking the sheeple so long?
It is not only depressing it’s downright incredible to believe that people can continue to go lapping up this garbage when nothing good has ever come from it.
I think it will end. Public perception is a pendulum and ‘tipping point’ or whatever the spinners call it must have been reached.
The irony is that the great students of public perception like Karl Rove seem to have missed all the signals.
It is vital that the whole unseemly bandwagon of paid liars and shabby grifters is thrown outta the crib.
If BushCo get the flick but the corporate clamor creators stay behind nothing will really change. The bagmen will shovel together another coupla hundred mill and go shopping for a new candidate for ’08. We can be sure that whoever they find will have none of ‘W’s “negatives”.
But they will have negatives just different ones.
In no time someone hiding in the basement of a conservative thinktank will be attempting to forge a letter. They will have been selected for their combination of ideology, synchophancy and blind ambition so it is unlikely that these forgers will have better skills/knowledge of their subject that the manufacturers of the Zarquawi letter.
But sheeple will wake up and have a drovers breakfast ( a quick piss and a look around) the penny will drop and these lies will get the same short shrift from the sheeple as they do from everyone else.
“It will happen.” “It will happen!” he says petulantly stamping his feet and sloping out the door.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Oct 15 2005 8:10 utc | 4
I can’t speak for the reliability or validity of the following website, but I have run across this story on several sites as of yesterday:
UNITED STATES CAUGHT IN IRAQ CAR-BOMBING?
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 15 2005 8:49 utc | 5
I note that MSM types are worried that blogworld “conspiracy theories” will become conventional wisdom before the lumbering official media can “debunk” the fallacies. To me that seems an implicit admission that the fortress is crumbling under the attack of the ants and mosquitoes. Billmon has never wanted (I believe) to be classed with the “conspiracy theorists”, but the post being discussed here has all the healthy paranoia of an
honest citizen trapped at a sleazy carnival booth. Moreover, just in time to improve America’s security we get just what we need. It seems that the only significant target that these folks succeed in gulling is the American public.
Conspiracy theorists, wear your tin-hats like a badge of honor!
A few years down the line even Richard Cohen will be able to explain why you were right while he was “misled”.
Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Oct 15 2005 9:15 utc | 7
What the US needs is a good bunch of new Jesse James and Billy the Kid and the Dalton Bros. etc.
The Pinkertons are in charge but what happened to the outlaws?
Even the gangs have been brainwashed into killing each other for miserable drug turfs (or recycling themselves into rap stars) instead of going where the money is, ie: the rich.
Even in the area of crime, the US is a disappointment. Definitely fin d’empire.
Posted by: Lupin | Oct 15 2005 9:19 utc | 8
Debs: “a drover’s breakfast” that nails it. Makes we wonder what it is a drover.
Good to hear some success with the young. We easily write them off but I see some interesting signs, although the apparent lack of curiosity is notable.
Maybe they simply notice things as background that we see are new enlightenments. And it really bugs me how good they are with computers and video games.
Oh, and the letter. We are hearing about what someone has decided we should hear about, otherwise why is it in the news?
Great story headlined Thursday on the CNN International website, I think it was Abbas of Syria commenting on the US failure to do anything worthwhile in Iraq. Interviewed by former CNN USA star Amanpour.
Clicked over to CNN US to check if the story was there — of course not.
Who cares if the letter is original? It is bullshit on its face, it was on the freaking news.
I wonder if we have anybody who has been over there recently, to Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia. I have met a few people who have but not recently. What is it really like?
Posted by: jonku | Oct 15 2005 9:26 utc | 9
The reliance on and hyping up of amateurish fakes is really quite bewildering. Fake letters, fake documents, fake videos, all of them so shoddy that any half-wit not blinded by group-think immediately smells a rat.
No blood streams from Nick Berg’s head, and his keepers are obviously fat and white, not skinny and Arab. Bin Laden’s nose undergoes the most catastrophic plastic surgery ever. A look alike for Abdul Al-Omari postures in a red bandanna with a gun…Letters are signed by people who are no longer officials; descriptions of aluminum tubes are just made up; the weirdest wording is used, the paper is probably even the wrong size!
What does it all mean?
1) We live in a world where practically everything is fake, but only notice it sometimes.
2) The fakes are not intended to pass as real, they are only intended to fool sheeples, everyone else knows what is really going on. That is why the fakes are so blatant, just in case someone who counts might actually be fooled!
3) The PTB hold back from producing real fakes in some instances, as being caught would be baad. We don’t perceive the competent fakes. (Or only some of us do some of the time, not enough to matter.)
4) There is a small but highly lucrative cottage industry in these fakes, and the PTB takes them seriously, through warped wishful thinking. Semi convinced themselves, they seek to convince others.
It all seems designed for a high-school play or D series TV, where there is little money for props, and one has to rely on bits of paper, a lot of exiting stage left, a few cobbled-up pictures, and looong speeches to get the plot across!
—
Yeah, Hannah, and the Honorable RGiap said he didn’t like what smacked of conspiracy theories (not his exact words) and then came out and said Kelly was murdered.
And so he was, by the men in black (I kid you not) who were down by the river.
Posted by: Noisette | Oct 15 2005 9:37 utc | 10
it was on the freaking news
I read Juan Cole’s assessment the other day, and I note Billmon’s “suspicion” – but for the rest of us – we just automatically assume anything propagated from America/Britain is a pack of lies unless it can be proven otherwise.
Liars, bastards.
Posted by: DM | Oct 15 2005 9:43 utc | 11
What of Iran’s nuclear program? That was not a pressing concern for the young people I met. None of them raised the issue in conversation with me. When I asked them about it, they fell into two groups… Yet both insisted with equal vehemence that an American or Israeli bombing of nuclear installations, let alone an Iraq-style invasion, would be a wholly unacceptable response to Iran’s nuclear ambitions… A perceptive local analyst reinforced the point. Who or what, he asked, could give this regime renewed popular support, especially among the young? “Only the United States!” If… whatever we do to slow down the nuclearization of Iran does not end up merely slowing down the democratization of Iran; and if, at the same time, we can find policies that help the gradual social emancipation and eventual self-liberation of Young Persia, then the long-term prospects are good. The Islamic revolution, like the French and Russian revolutions before it, has been busy devouring its own children. One day, its grandchildren will devour the revolution
Soldiers of the Hidden Imam
From the article:
How can such a regime be transformed, or, as many still prefer to say, reformed? I heard the word “reform” innumerable times as I traveled around Iran. I soon realized that it meant several different things. First, there’s an ideological debate among Islamic intellectuals, turning on what in the communist world used to be called “revisionism”–that is, attempts to revise the ideology on which the state is built. As the views of revisionists in, say, 1950s Poland were also part of a wider debate about international communism, so the views of these Iranian revisionists have significant implications for international Islam.
I was impressed by the liveliness of this debate. While many Iranians are clearly fed up with Islam being stuffed down their throats as a state religion, I found no sense that Islamic ideology is a dead issue, as, for example, communist ideology had become a dead issue in Central Europe by the 1980s. Far from it. In Khomeini’s theological capital of Qom, now home to some two hundred Islamic think tanks and institutions of higher education, I met with a research group on Islamic political philosophy. Why should Islam not be compatible with a secular, liberal democratic state, I asked, as is increasingly the case in Turkey? “Turkey is not Qom,” said Mohsen Rezvani, a young philosopher wearing the robes and turban of a mullah, to laughter around the table. Islam, Rezvani said, is “anthropologically, theologically, and epistemologically” incompatible with liberal democracy. Anthropologically, because liberal democracy is based on liberal individualism; theologically, because it excludes God from the public sphere; and epistemologically, because it is based on reason not faith. Then they handed me an issue of the Political Science Quarterly–not the American journal but their own Qom-made version. Here I read an English-language abstract of an admiring article by Rezvani about Leo Strauss.
“So you’re a neoconservative!” I teased him.
Oh no, he replied, the American neoconservatives don’t properly understand Leo Strauss.
I could see at once, even before I had the full article translated for me, what a conservative Iranian mullah would find to admire in Strauss: the insistence that there is a single truth in a classic text, and that the intentions of the author (e.g., God, in the case of the Koran) are best interpreted by a neo-Platonic intellectual vanguard (for the Koran, the Islamic jurists whose ranks Rezvani aspires to join). Yet this Wolfowitz of Qom was immediately contradicted by others at the table, citing Islamic modernists such as Abdolkarim Soroush who maintain that Islam is compatible with a secular state…
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 15 2005 11:45 utc | 12
@Jonku just got back. A drover is a cattle drover. What ppl in the US call cowboys I suppose. Drovers are the guys who move the cattle down the stock routes to town. The cow people who work on the station rather than drove are called ringers (usually the best horse handlers and breakers) Jackaroos originally the Aboriginal blokes who were pretty much pressed ganged into working on their own land for sugar, salt and flour. Jillaroos who are the Oz equivalent of cowgirls.
Since the station owners are now meant to pay wages they employ a lot less Aboriginal people and tend to use middle class kids whose parents think they need straightening out. It really straightens a 16 year old from the city out to be left in sole charge of a place about twice the size of France with nothing to get about in to check the water bores but a 20 year old Toyota landcruiser. Every year a few kids are found lying under Tojos after the last bit of shade and dessicated waiting for the boss to turn up.
But the good news is that when the locals got sacked in the early seventies when they had the gall to be want to paid, they ended up with too much time on their hands. It’s a bloody long story but the whitefellas pretty much put a stop to walkabout nomadic existence. Anyway with all of this ‘spare time’ they started looking at who really owned the land they lived on. Was it the bloke whose grandfather had come in and shot their ancestors a while back or was it them whose family had been living there for the last 10 or 20 thousand years?
I’m pleased to say that the courts are known to decide that it’s them and chase the whitefellas away.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Oct 15 2005 12:08 utc | 13
Interesting stuff , Debs
jonku- “Abbas of Syria?”, Assad? Fisk says things have really deteriorated in Iraq.
Noisette- all of the above, esp.#2.
Would you like something for the weekend, sir?
Al-Qaeda’s barber arrested in Iraq
Posted by: Sweeny Todd | Oct 15 2005 15:08 utc | 15
The terror spin cycle is getting shorter.
In a post entitled Terror Marketing 101: Bush, Pre$$titutes & The Three Exposures Rule we looked at the sophisticated persuasion tactics employed by the administration to market Bush and we argued that it wouldn’t be possible without the complicity of the media.
“The Bush p.r. team makes full use of the three exposures rule: Three or more of the following in rapid succession: a Bush speech, a Bush radio address, a terror alert, a Blair speech echoing Bush, a 9/11-related event or ceremony, a Justice Dept. presser announcing the disruption of a domestic terror cell, a Pentagon presser announcing the capture of yet another terrorist ‘mastermind’ or an Al Qaeda #2, a cable special on terrorism, etc. It’s the classic marketing principle of exposing people to a message at least three times before it sinks in.”
It takes a complicit and credulous press for this technique to work. Now, the Bush marketing team and their Pre$$titute friends have handed us another terror trifecta: Bush’s “major” speech on Thursday (which turned out to be a lame rehash of his usual tripe), a full-blown terror freak-out in New York (which turned out to be a hoax), and now a preposterous letter to a terrorist ‘mastermind’ from an Al Qaeda “number 2.”
Sure enough, days after the first two parts of the trifecta collapsed, there are already doubts about the third, i.e. the intra-terrorist letter.
The rapid debunking of Bush’s most recent terror propaganda effort, coupled with Thursday’s bungled ‘troop teleconference’ signals a new and welcome trend: the radical abridgment of the Bush/terror spin cycle. What used to take months and years is now taking days and weeks…
Posted by: lonesomeG | Oct 15 2005 15:15 utc | 16
More on that letter: US cannot explain suspicious Zawahri letter passage
The July 9 dated letter, which U.S. officials say was written by al Qaeda’s second in command, Ayman al-Zawahri, appears near its close to urge the Iraq insurgent leader to send greetings to himself if visiting the Iraqi city of Falluja.
“My greetings to all the loved ones and please give me news of Karem and the rest of the folks I know,” says an unedited English translation posted at http://www.dni.gov, the office Web site of U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte.
“And especially, by God, if by chance you’re going to Falluja, send greetings to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” it states.
…
A spokesman for Negroponte, who is the U.S. director of national intelligence, or DNI, acknowledged the greetings passage was confusing but said the intelligence community was confident the letter was addressed to Zarqawi by Zawahri.
“We don’t know what to make of it (the passage). It’s unclear,” the Negroponte spokesman said.
“But we are absolutely confident that it was intended for Mr. Zarqawi, based on a review by multiple agencies over a protracted period of time.”
Thanks, Malooga. Assad of Syria is who I meant. There was some hard criticism quoted on CNN Int’l (can’t find it) but also the Amanpour interview is here, where he says
This administration is not interested in making peace. We are interested in a more stable Iraq. They only talk about a stable Iraq but the mistakes they make everyday give the opposite result. This is the difference between Syria and the United States. So should we support more mistakes? This is the question. They should be more specific.
Posted by: jonku | Oct 15 2005 18:12 utc | 18
The ‘terror’ is 90% synthetic.
poll of polls. from Pollkatz:
Link
They capitalised on 9/11 but then…orange terra alerts don’t quite hack it.
Posted by: Noisette | Oct 15 2005 18:12 utc | 19
It’s a sad day for our country when the leaders of three of our staunchest enemies, Venezuela, Cuba, and Syria make far more sense than our own leader. Their speeches are all quite good. Chavez is actually far better than that–he reads Chomsky and doesn’t bullshit people with pathetic propaganda.
The saddest part is how ignorant and out of touch with reality our populace is, that they cannot read a text critically or understand how the world works. They cannot even make decisions in their best financial interests! Now that is dumb. But that’s how our leaders want things. No ignoramous left behind; jump on the F.U.D. bus; we’ll screw y’all, equal oppertunity-like.
lonesomeG- over the years that Bush has held the office of prez, I’ve gone from thinking..could be fake but might be real..who knows…
to hearing about the NY Subway threat and thinking I could be fairly certain that was a fake.
…and the “false alarm” was laid off on some unnamed Iraqi source… uh…did they phone Chalabi and ask him to make a prank call?
Posted by: fauxreal | Oct 16 2005 1:36 utc | 21