Posted by Andreas from dtm2-t8-2.mcbone.net (62.104.210.95) on Tuesday, April 29, 2003 at 10:14AM :
Iraqi "Intelligence Documents" Likely Planted
By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer
April 29, 2003
After the United States and Britain were shown to be
providing bogus and plagiarized "intelligence" documents
to the UN Security Council that supposedly "proved"
Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program,
the world's media is now being fed a steady stream of
captured Iraqi "intelligence" documents from the rubble of
Iraq's Mukhabarat intelligence headquarters.
The problem with these documents is that they are being
provided by the U.S. military to a few reporters working
for a very suspect newspaper, London's Daily Telegraph
(affectionately known as the Daily Torygraph" by those
who understand the paper's right-wing slant).
The Telegraph's April 27 Sunday edition reported that
its correspondent in Baghdad, Inigo Gilmore, had been
invited into the intelligence headquarters by U.S. troops
and miraculously "found" amid the rubble a document
indicating that Iraq invited Osama bin Laden to visit
Iraq in March 1998.
Gilmore also reported that the CIA had been through
the building several times before he found the document.
Gilmore added that the CIA must have "missed" the
document in their prior searches, an astounding claim
since the CIA must have been intimately familiar with
the building from their previous intelligence links with
the Mukhabarat dating from the Iran-Iraq war
of the 1980s.
Moreover, the CIA and other intelligence agencies,
including Britain's MI-6, have refuted claims of a link
between bin Laden and Iraq.
Gilmore also made it a point to declare he was not
providing propaganda for the United States, a strange
statement by someone who claims to be a seasoned
Middle East correspondent.
However, it is highly possible he was providing the
propaganda for the benefit of a non-government actor,
the neo-conservative movement, which uses the
Pentagon as a base of operations, and employs
deception and perception management
tactics to push its sinister agenda.
The U.S. has been quite active in inviting Telegraph
reporters into the Iraqi intelligence headquarters.
Other documents "found" by the paper's reporters
"revealed" Russian intelligence had passed intercepts
of Tony Blair's phone conversations to Iraqi intelligence,
that German intelligence offered to assist Iraqi intelligence
in the lead up to the war, that France provided Iraq with
the contents of US-French diplomatic exchanges, and that
anti-war and anti-Bush Labor Party Member of Parliament
George Galloway had solicited hundreds of thousands of
dollars from Iraq, which were skimmed from the country's
oil-for-food program.
Galloway immediately smelled the rat of a disinformation
campaign when he responded to the Telegraph about the
"found" document. "Maybe it's the product of the same
forgers who forged so many other things in this whole
Iraq picture . . . It would not be the Iraqi regime that
was forging it. It would be people like you [Telegraph
journalists] and the Government whose policies you have
supported," Galloway said.
It is amazing that the U.S. military would be so open
about letting favored journalists walk freely about the
Mukhabarat building when the Pentagon has clamped
tight security on the Iraqi Oil Ministry. The reason for
this is obvious.
While the Mukhabarat building can be salted with phony
intelligence documents, the Oil Ministry is likely rife with
documents showing the links between Saddam Hussein
and Dick Cheney's old firm, Halliburton. The company
signed more than $73 million in contracts with Saddam's
government when Cheney was its chief executive officer.
The contracts, negotiated with two Halliburton subsidiaries
-Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co.-were
part of the UN oil-for-food program, ironically the same
program which figures prominently in the charges against
Galloway.
But unlike the charges against Galloway, the reports about
Cheney's links to Saddam Hussein's oil industry originated
with relatively more mainstream media sources, including
ABC News, The Washington Post, and
The Texas Observer.
Gilmore told the BBC that he noticed that on the
Mukhabarat documents he discovered, some
information that was "erased." The erasures were
apparently made with a combination of black marker
ink and correction fluid. He said he scraped away at
the paper with a razor and miraculously found the
name bin Laden in three places.
The standard procedure for redacting a classified
document is to only use a black indelible marker to
mask classified information.
However, the proper procedure for trying to read
through such markings is not to scrape away the ink
as if the document were a instant lottery ticket.
Toner print often bleeds through the indelible marker
ink. If one holds up such a sheet of paper at a 45
degree angle and under a bright phosphorescent light,
the lettering under the ink can be "read" because the
lettering almost appears to be "raised."
If a razor blade were used to scrape away the markings,
the indelible ink and the toner ink would be obliterated.
Gilmore's claims appear to be spurious.
It was not long before the Iraqi-al Qaeda "smoking gun"
document was reported around the world. America's
right-wing propaganda channel, Fox News, featured the
"found" document on its lead story on its Fox Sunday
News program.
Fox anchorman Tony Snow asked the ethically-tainted
Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi about the
document.
Chalabi responded, saying the document provided enough
information that Saddam Hussein was knowledgeable about
the September 11 attacks on the United States, a canard
that has been rejected by intelligence agencies around the
world. However, for those who forged or doctored the
document it was mission accomplished.
To understand the process in disseminating such propaganda
masked as news, it is important to understand the relationship
between The Daily Telegraph and its parent company, the
Hollinger Corporation, which is owned by British subject and
former Canadian Conrad Black.
Hollinger. Like Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation,
Hollinger is a mega-media company that spins right-wing
propaganda around the world through 379 newspapers,
including the Jerusalem Post.
Tom Rose, the publisher of the Jerusalem Post, is a major
supporter of Ariel Sharon's Likud Party and is a favorite
guest on the right-wing talk shows on Clear Channel radio
stations, including that of G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate
infamy. Clear Channel, headquartered in Dallas, is owned
by close Bush supporters and one-time business partners.
To add to the spider's web, one of Rose's Jerusalem Post
directors is Richard Perle, a member of Donald Rumsfeld's
advisory board.
The "smoking gun" document on Galloway was further
played up on Fox News Sunday.
William Kristol, an ally of Perle and a dean of the neo-
conservatives, and Fox's Brit Hume, a right-wing ideologue
who masquerades as a reporter, said the documents
implicating Galloway in accepting money from Saddam
Hussein was the "tip of the iceberg."
[My comment: Perle and Kristol are both signatories
to documents of the ultra-right wing think tank known
as Project for a New American Century, that seems
to be providing the script for the current unilateralist
multifront US expansion.]
They then suggested that French President Jacques Chirac,
other Western politicians, and Arab journalists working for
such networks as Al Jazeera, would soon be "outed" by
further Iraqi intelligence documents.
For good mesaure, Fox also announced that Galloway
may have given classified satellite imagery to al Qaeda.
As is so often the case, the Fox News panelists provided
no evidence for their slanderous claims.
Welcome to the new digital and satellite age McCarthyism.
Phony documents are "dropped" into the hands of a
right-wing London newspaper owned by Conrad Black.
They are amplified by Black's other holdings, including
the Jerusalem Post and Chicago Sun-Times.
The story is then picked up by the worldwide television
outlets of News Corporation, Time Warner, Disney, and
General Electric and echoed on the right-wing radio talk
shows of Clear Channel and Viacom. Political careers
are damaged or destroyed.
There is no right of rebuttal for the accused. They are
guilty as charged by a whipped up public that gets its
information from the Orwellian telescreens of the
corporate media.
The media operating in concert with political vermin
to whip up popular opinion to stamp out criticism is
nothing new. It was practiced by Joseph Goebbels
quite effectively in Nazi Germany.
It was a British-born actor named Peter Finch who
so eloquently and prophetically warned us about the
sorry state of today's media. In Paddy Chayefsky's
excellent movie, "Network," Finch plays UBS TV
news anchorman Howard Beale. When UBS's
entertainment division decides to fire Beale because
of low ratings, he begins to rant and rave on the air.
He is then given his own television entertainment show,
"The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves." The most famous
scene in the movie is when Beale exhorts his viewers
to go their windows and yell, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm
not going to take it anymore."
We should all be mad as hell about the propaganda in
the newspapers and on the airwaves; George Bush and
Tony Blair; Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black; Clear
Channel and Viacom; the neo-conservative think tank
bottom feeders; Rumsfeld and his circle of Pentagon
ghouls such as Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Newt
Gingrich; and the religious fundamentalists who give
aid and succor to America's war machine.
To paraphrase Howard Beale, "We should not
take them anymore!"
Wayne Madsen is a Washington-based investigative
journalist and columnist. He is a co-author of the
forthcoming book, "America's Nightmare:
The Presidency of George Bush II."
-- Andreas
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