Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi ~ Blogosphere discusses Washing Post propaganda....

he U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The documents state that the U.S. campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners. U.S. authorities claim some success with that effort, noting that some tribal Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists.

For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.

Some senior intelligence officers believe Zarqawi's role may have been overemphasized by the propaganda campaign, which has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, Internet postings and at least one leak to an American journalist. Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last summer.

In 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," said.....

Now the Blogospher (From Powerline )e:

April 11, 2006
U.S. unfair to Zarqawi, says the Washington Post

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I was too busy yesterday to get to this story in the Washington Post. The headline states, "Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi -- Jordanian Painted As Foreign Threat to Iraq's Stability." The first paragraph states:

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See Link for additional comments....

The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

This is the Post at its worst, trying to portray perfectly legitimate action by our government in a bad light. The U.S. should be emphasizing Zarqawi's role in Iraq by "painting" him for what he is -- a "foreign threat to Iraq's stability." We should be doing so in order to drive a wedge between Zarqawi's crew and Iraqis who may be hostile to the U.S. but who are also hostile to foreign terrorists. As the Post grudgingly acknowledges, some tribal insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists. Every time Iraqis attack Zarqawi loyalists or provide information about their whereabouts, our troops become safer. Thus, it would be scandalous for the U.S. military not to stress Zarqawi's role and his status as a foreigner.

But, astonishingly, the Post seems scandalized that we're engaged in a "propaganda campaign" against Zarqawi. To give the scandal legs, it informs us right out of the box that "some military intelligence officials believe that [the military] may have overstated [Zarqawi's] importance." (emphasis added). The Post goes on to identify one intelligence officer who says that, although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers." (It's not clear whether this means the actual number of bombing attacks or the actual number of terrorist-insurgents). The same official also opines that "former regime types and their friends," not Zarqawi, represent the real long-term threat in Iraq. But the Post eventually admits that the significance of Zarqawi is the subject of a "running argument among specialists in Iraq."

So here's the situation: (1) Zarqawi, a foreign terrorist, indisputably is conducting deadly bombing attacks, (2) there's disagreement about his precise level of activity and overall significance, (3) playing up his role is reasonably calculated to create deadly conflict among Iraqi terrorist-insurgents. Under these circumstances, should the U.S. "play up" Zarqawi's role or give him the benefit of the doubt? Unless one is on Zarqawi's side or is suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome, the question answers itself.

But there's a larger issue for the Post -- the military's "propaganda campaign" may have (stop reading if you're highly sensitive) "spilled over into the U.S. media." Yet the Post does not claim that information provided to the U.S. media overstated Zarqawi's role. In the instance it cites, the military "leaked" a letter purportedly from Zarqawi boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq. Again, no one disputes that Zarqawi is responsible for such attacks. So unless one thinks it's somehow improper to provide the media with facts that may make Americans see that our enemies in Iraq include important foreign terrorists, it's difficult to find a scandal here either.

Nonetheless, any hope that the Post might forgive our military for supportable utterances designed to help it defeat Zarqawi in Iraq went out the window once it appeared that similar utterances might cause Americans to view the war as related to the fight against terrorism.

UPDATE: There they go again. Now our propagandists say that more than 90 percent of the suicide attacks in Iraq are carried out by fighters recruited, trained and equipped by Zarqawi. Does the Post have a basis for believing otherwise? If not, it's difficult to see how the military is overstating Zarqawi's importance.

Posted by Paul at 02:25 PM

April 12, 2006
More deception from the Washington Post

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While the Washington Post frets about a U.S. military "propaganda campaign" against Zarqawi that consists of spreading true information reasonably calculated to save American lives, the Post conducts a propaganda campaign against the administration that's based on distortion. The latest instance is today's story on the Bush administration's statements that certain Iraqi trailers were biological laboratories. As Ed Morrissey shows, the Post's report is highly deceptive. While trumpeting the fact that a team of experts concluded after the invasion that, contrary to the administration's claim, the trailers were not bio labs, it does not reveal until a dozen paragraphs later that two other teams of experts reached a contrary conclusion. Thus, the view of the team that the Post highlights appears to have been a minority view at the time the administration referred to the trailers as bio labs.

Posted by Paul at 08:41 AM

From the Captain's Quarters:

April 12, 2006
The Minority Report

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The Washington Post runs a deceptive and dishonest report about the evaluation of the Iraqi trailers that had been identified as biological weapons labs prior to the invasion in March 2003. Their front-page story announces breathlessly that the Bush administration ignored the findings of a team of experts who concluded that the trailers could not have acted as portable bioweapons platforms prior to a Bush announcement of exactly the opposite -- but below the fold, they tell a different story.

Let's take a look at the lead first:

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."
The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.
A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now -- had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement.

Sounds damning, and if that was the only report on the trailers, it certainly would be. What the Post neglects to mention in its sensationalist zeal is that this was one of several teams that investigated the trailers, and the totality of their evaluations came to a different conclusion that that of the leakers who supplied this story. Skip down to the 12th paragraph, which is when Joby Warrick finally gets around to providing the context:

Intelligence analysts involved in high-level discussions about the trailers noted that the technical team was among several groups that analyzed the suspected mobile labs throughout the spring and summer of 2003. Two teams of military experts who viewed the trailers soon after their discovery concluded that the facilities were weapons labs, a finding that strongly influenced views of intelligence officials in Washington, the analysts said. "It was hotly debated, and there were experts making arguments on both sides," said one former senior official who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.

The Pentagon didn't send one team of experts to review the trailers; they sent three, presumably to get a diverse analysis of the evidence, especially since the pre-war intel on WMD had come up remarkably short. That sounds like a prudent strategy to me, having competing teams research the same equipment and evidence to develop independent analyses to present to the Pentagon. They did so, and two of the three teams provided conclusions that fit the pre-war intel, while one did not.

So where's the issue? It turns out that the minority report was the correct analysis after all, of course, but at the time Bush spoke it was just that -- a minority report. To put it in advertising terms, two out of three inspectors agreed that the trailers were part of Saddam's WMD effort. The Pentagon relied on that majority opinion, as did the administration, and no one can argue that doing so constituted either an intent to deceive or even an unreasonable decision at the time.

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This is a rather pathetic and transparent example of how the news media stages information so as to be most damaging to an administration they don't like.

And from the Confederate Yankee Blog:

Well, the Smell is Certainly Biological...April 12, 2006

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The actual facts are that a single team of nine civilian experts wrote a "unanimous" report that was only unanimous within their one group, while two military teams of experts reached the conclusion that these were bioweapons labs. By careful and I believe willful deceit, the Post would seem to purposefully imply that all experts examining the suspected bio-weapons trailers unanimously came to the conclusion that these trailers were not used to manufacture bio-weapons, and that the Administration blatantly lied in the face of the evidence. The actual facts are that this was not only a not a unanimous report, but that the "unanimous" report of the one team was actually a minority view overall.

This is willful misrepresentation of the facts by Joby Warrick and the editors of the Washington Post in a page one story. There were indeed varied interpretations of the suitability of these trailers to manufacture bio-weapons, yet the Post article purposefully decived its readers to lend weight and column inches to the minority viewpoint that was not unanimous as they suggested.

This appears to be a specific, calculated deception of a national newspaper’s readership. The Washington Post must be held accountable. Posted by Confederate Yankee at April 12, 2006 02:08 AM | TrackBack

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