Posted by Andreas from dtm2-t8-2.mcbone.net (62.104.210.95) on Tuesday, April 29, 2003 at 10:15AM :
In Reply to: Iraqi "Intell Documents" Likely Pla 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."
+++ .... Likely Planted
-- Andreas
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