Selling the War -- The Plot Unravels

Politics International Politics
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Watch

"Four years ago on May 1, President Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln wearing a flight suit and delivered a speech in front of a giant “Mission Accomplished” banner. He was hailed by media stars as a “breathtaking” example of presidential leadership in toppling Saddam Hussein. Despite profound questions over the failure to locate weapons of mass destruction and the increasing violence in Baghdad, many in the press confirmed the White House’s claim that the war was won. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews declared, “We’re all neo-cons now;” NPR’s Bob Edwards said, “The war in Iraq is essentially over;” and Fortune magazine’s Jeff Birnbaum said, “It is amazing how thorough the victory in Iraq really was in the broadest context.”

How did the mainstream press get it so wrong? How did the evidence disputing the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the link between Saddam Hussein to 9-11 continue to go largely unreported? “What the conservative media did was easy to fathom; they had been cheerleaders for the White House from the beginning and were simply continuing to rally the public behind the President — no questions asked. How mainstream journalists suspended skepticism and scrutiny remains an issue of significance that the media has not satisfactorily explored,” says Moyers. “How the administration marketed the war to the American people has been well covered, but critical questions remain: How and why did the press buy it, and what does it say about the role of journalists in helping the public sort out fact from propaganda?”

Here’s your medal back. I’m not keeping quiet anymore . . .

"Tenet – whom Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian award, in December 2004 – said he does not know exactly who leaked his comment, but that “it’s the most despicable thing that ever happened to me.”

He said the most difficult part was continuing to hear senior administration officials such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice refer to his comment as though they had to hear him “say ‘slam dunk’ to go to war with Iraq.”

“You listen to that and they never let it go. I mean, I became campaign talk. I was a talking point. ‘Look at the idiot (who) told us and we decided to go to war.’ Well, let’s not be so disingenuous,” Tenet said.

“Let’s everybody just get up and tell the truth. Tell the American people what really happened,” he said."

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Great documentation of the failure of the press. Well worth watching.

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no, i don’t think there was a press failure here. the press did exactly what was required or expected of them.

the moral and ethical failure came in the bush administration’s selective leaking and twisting of words. again. scooter libby, anyone?

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Oh. I haven’t watched your video yet, though I look forward to doing so. But I expected something else. I thought this thread would be about the phony stories the government concocted about Pat Tilman (the NFL player turned soldier who was inadvertenly killed by his own men, then the subject of an intentionally fabricated hero killed by enemy forces story) and the female soldier who was captured while riding in a truck, and became the subject of another intentionally fabricated hero story, both of which have made big news lately.

[quote]Truth, it is famously said, is the first casualty of war. And thus it has been for two of the most celebrated official heroes of America’s campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One was Pat Tillman, the pro-football star who gave up the NFL’s riches to serve, and ultimately die for, his country. The other was a young woman from West Virginia whose capture and rescue in the early days of the Iraq conflict inspired the TV drama-documentary Saving Jessica Lynch. Now, however, the two stories have returned to haunt the Pentagon. Both stand revealed as propaganda operations in which the truth was deliberately distorted to inspire a country and allay public doubts about the righteousness of the cause. For the US military they have become a colossal embarrassment. . . [/quote]
belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/ … 486744.ece

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is it just my faulty recollection, or has there never before been a white house that has lied, deceived, twisted, spun, fabricated, misconstrued, etc, so much in the full light of pubic scrutiny, AND gotten away with it?

americans, take heed. democracy works: you generally elect people who resemble yourselves the most. fortunately next time there is not a Bush family member running. only a clinton! perhaps the new dynasty. but if The Gubernator gets his way, we may see a scion of the kennedy clan (this time standing on the other side of the political fence) ensconced once again

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Oh for the love of God. I cannot believe that I am reading this nonsense. You have a press that is 90 percent Democrat what? giving Bush a free rein to walk all over them? They have consistently been against the effort in Iraq, they have consistently painted the worst possible image of both George Bush and his policies and now you have some butt munch coming out and saying that the Bush administration tricked these media figures into supporting his policies? Really, this is the LIMIT. This nonsense has become unendurable. The press also have studiously failed to report that both the Butler and Duelfer reports pointed to Saddam as a credible threat even though he did not have wmds. They pointed out that he had every intention of restarting these programs with the collapse of sanctions so with or without them, he was the THREAT that Bush said he was. Oh really. This is getting to be TOO much. People like you deserve to be put into a gulag. Unfortunately, for all the hew and cry over Bush being a Hitler, a Stalin, a Fascist, he will as usual be out of office in early 2009 with no stolen elections or power grabs and you the idiots of the West will be pissing and moaning about some other equally nonsensical issue. Where’s Darwin when you need him? IF there were true justice, stupidity and irresponsible slandermongering like this would be rewarded with citizenship in the relevant countries, say, Nigeria? Zaire? Pakistan?

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Turn down the screed, fred. The hate thread’s elsewhere.

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Case in point… Don’t you have me on ignore? Time to put me back on ignore? No need to respond to anything that I say. I know already what your opinion is. I read it on zmag.org this morning.

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How about still being shell shocked after 9/11? It would explain why abroad scrunity and scepticism were much less suspended.

No need for me to see a conservative media conspiracy at work there.

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Case in point… Don’t you have me on ignore? Time to put me back on ignore? No need to respond to anything that I say. I know already what your opinion is. I read it on zmag.org this morning.[/quote]Nice to hear you had time to read it.

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Actually, I could see someone like you reading, digesting and disgorging Zmag.org’s views. When are you ever going to think for yourself? When are you ever going to realize that the West is where the real morality is? When are you going to realize that this constant attack on Western values and Western efforts is misguided and will ultimately lead to the exact opposite kind of respect for rights, ironically ones that zmag.org claims to be oh so concerned about? This is not about whether the values of Zimbabwe, Pakistan or Venezuela are equally credible. This is about whether you think women should be equal, races should be equal, every citizen should have basic inalienable rights. There is no ethnic or gender component to it. I simply cannot fathom how intelligent people could think this way. Oh, I guess I have answered my own question. No need to respond. The ignore button is readily clickable. PLEASE use it.

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Case in point… Don’t you have me on ignore? Time to put me back on ignore? No need to respond to anything that I say. I know already what your opinion is. I read it on zmag.org this morning.[/quote]

zmag? Cute attempt at diversion, Fred. But here are 1342 news articles on the Congressional hearings looking into how the government intentionally lied about Tillman and that lady soldier, making up phony, flagwaving, patriotic Hero stories, to appease the public and distract them from the death, misery and reality.

news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=u … 1115691942

Even your Washington Times picked up the story.

[quote]An Army Ranger who was with Pat Tillman when the former football star was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan said yesterday he was told by a higher-up to conceal that information from Cpl. Tillman’s brother. . .

Kevin Tillman accused the military of “intentional falsehoods” and “deliberate and careful misrepresentations” in portraying Cpl. Tillman’s death in Afghanistan as the result of heroic engagement with the enemy instead of friendly fire.

"We believe this narrative was intended to deceive the family, but more importantly the American public," Kevin Tillman told the committee. 

"Revealing that Pat's death was a fratricide would have been yet another political disaster in a month of political disasters ... so the truth needed to be suppressed," Mr. Tillman said. 

The committee's chairman, Rep. Henry A. Waxman, California Democrat, accused the government of inventing "sensational details and stories" about Cpl. Tillman's death and the 2003 rescue of Jessica Lynch, perhaps the most famous casualties of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. . .[/quote]

washingtontimes.com/national/200 … -7563r.htm

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Bursting bubbles …

[quote]Saddam Terrorist Regime: Finding and Analysis Based on Captured Iraqi Documents.
(original posting by jveritas at - freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1823454/posts)

One thing that became very clear from many captured Iraqi documents is that most intelligence agencies, politicians, and analysts have greatly underestimated Saddam strong relations to terrorism. In fact, there is no shadow of doubt based on these documents that Saddam regime was a prime “Terrorist Regime” .

Saddam Intelligence Service Meeting with Bin Laden

Imagine that before the Iraq war, President Bush presented the nation with the irrefutable proof that Saddam regime met with Osama Bin Laden at least once if not more and the impact that this would have on the public support for the war. Only a handful of terrorist regimes in this world have contacted Bin Laden and Saddam regime was one of them. Document ISGZ-2004-009247 talks about a meeting between Saddam Intelligence Services and Osama Bin Laden in Sudan in 1995 per the authorization of Saddam Hussein himself. The document says that Bin Laden requested that Iraq allows the broadcast of speeches by some Saudi muslim cleric who is apposed to the Saudi royal family. Also the document indicates that in 1996 Bin Laden moved to Afghanistan and the Iraqi intelligence officer wrote the following: “There is still relation with him (Bin Laden) through the Sudanese side and we work in the present moment to activate this relation with him through a new channel in light of the current place where he resides.”.

Al Qaeda in Iraq before the War.

Liberals and their media keep spreading their big lies that there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq before the war but document ISGZ-2004-019920 proves them wrong. In this document dated August 2002 a lower branch of the Iraqi intelligence wrote memos to higher ups asking them about information they received from trusted sources that Al Qaeda is present in Iraq and in their letter they show the pictures of Ahmad Fadil Nazal AL Khalayla who is better known as Al Zarqawi. According to the same document the higher ups in the Iraqi intelligence agency wrote back to their subordinates and told them that they have no indication that Zarqawi and Al Qaeda are present in Iraq. The lower branch of the Iraqi intelligence seemed to be very sure of Zarqawi and Al Qaeda presence in Iraq but for obvious political reasons the higher branch quickly dismissed their findings. Moreover, simple logic dictates that Al Qaeda was present in Iraq before the war because it will be very hard if not impossible for Al Qaeda to establish their sophisticated infrastructures, recruit terrorists, find weapons supplies and hideouts, communications, safe houses, knowledge of the area, just right after the US liberated Iraq. They can only achieve these goals if they were present in Iraq long before the war started.

Saddam Regime Training Foreign Arab Terrorists

The world of islamic terrorism is not limited to Al Qaeda as liberal and their media like to tell us and Saddam terrorist regime was training “Foreign Arab Terrorists” inside Iraq since the year 2000. These “foreign Arab terrorists” stayed in Iraq after the war and have brought untold death and destruction on the Iraqi people and attacking our troops for the last 4 years. Document CMPC-2003-005935 talks about the Iraqi intelligence training the Foreign Arab terrorists, they call them the “Arab Fedayeens”, and train them on how to build improvised explosive devices or IED’s. Document ISGP-2003-00028868 in 2003 talks about training the “Foreign Arab Feedayeen (Terrorists)” on how to conduct suicide missions against the US troops. Document ISGQ-2004-00060580 contains an order from Saddam Hussein himself on April 2003 ordering to treat the “Arab Feedayeen (Terrorists)” the same way as treating the Iraqi special forces soldiers in term of wages and benefits. Document CMPC-2003-015588.pdf talks about Iraqi officials meeting in Damascus on March 2003 with The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist organization, on how to bring hundreds of Palestinian fighters (terrorists) to Iraq through Syria and how to supply them with weapons, including improvised bombs (IED) and have among them Suicide mission units.

Saddam Regime recruiting and training Iraqis for Terrorists attacks against the US interests and for attacks inside Europe.

Saddam regime was not only training “Foreign Arab Terrorists” to conduct terrorist attacks but also was recruiting and training their own Iraqi people to conduct terrorism.

Document ISGZ-2004-01894 talks about plans in May 1999 to conduct terrorist act inside Europe and elsewhere. The code name of the terrorist operations was called “Blessed July” and it was devised and planed by Uday Saddam Hussein who was in charge of Saddam Feedayeens in coordination with the Iraqi Intelligence. According to the document the Iraqi terrorists who were tasked to conduct terrorist attacks in Europe were to be based in London.

Document BIAP 2003-000654 contain an Iraqi Air Force memo dated March 2001 where they were orders to recruit from among their ranks what they call “Suicide Bombers to hit US interests”.

Conclusion

Liberals and their media has been spewing the lie that since Saddam was not involved in the 9/11 terrorists attacks then Saddam was not tied to “Terrorism”. For liberals and their media terrorism is only about Al Qaeda and all other terrorist activities by Saddam regime does not matter to them. In fact as you have seen above the documents prove that Saddam regime met with Bin Laden and that Al Qaeda and Zarqawi were present in Iraq before the war started. But equally important Saddam regime was training ‘Foreign Arab Terrorists” on all type of terrorist activities and these are the same terrorists who have been killing thousands of Iraqis and attacking our troops in the last 4 years. Saddam Hussein planned terrorist attacks in Europe and he was giving $ 25,000 to the family of each Palestinian terrorist who conduct terrorist attacks against Israel as per document ISGP-2003-00014647. Does Israel count for Liberals and their media or the Israeli blood is cheap for them?

The captured Iraqi documents proved and beyond a shadow of doubt that Saddam regime was involved in terrorist activities on a much wider scale and deeper level than anyone thought before the liberation of Iraq. President Bush absolutely made the right decision to take ”Saddam Terrorist Regime” out of power, the world, Iraq, and the US are much better off with this regime destroyed and its leaders dead or captured. Thank you President Bush and our “Brave Troops”.[/quote]
All of these Iraqi documents came from the FMSO (Foreign Military Service Office) website. Unfortunately the website was shut down in November 2006. Some have been cached and saved.

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Mother Theresa. I am responding more to Spook’s allegations that somehow the media (strange I almost wrote this as the left) has been misled by the Bush administration. I am not making an effort to discuss the Tilman case specifically.

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As usual, you’re not making any effort whatsoever.

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Actually, I think that Mother Theresa was just making a clarification about a point. He perceived my remarks as not addressing the central issue. I am merely talking about the subtext of Spook’s allegation that the media has been misled on a wider front. I think that you owe him an apology.

Good signature. I could not have done a better job of providing you with one myself. Know thyself said Socrates and you clearly do.

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How about still being shell shocked after 9/11? It would explain why abroad scrunity and scepticism were much less suspended.

No need for me to see a conservative media conspiracy at work there.[/quote]

I agree games. But surely some in the press weren’t buying it. I imagine they were buried in the dark nether sections of the papers though.

The real shame is that the press reacted no better than the great unwashed did. Kneejerk support, followed by kneejerk complaints.

They were shameless, and with CNN and Fox News leading the cause now, they’ve seen that being shameless gets you big numbers. Yahonk!

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Yeah, yeah, it’s all someone’s else fault, like the media. What’s new?

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[quote=“TainanCowboy”]Bursting bubbles …

[quote]Saddam Terrorist Regime: Finding and Analysis Based on Captured Iraqi Documents.
(original posting by jveritas at - freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1823454/posts)[/quote]

[/quote]

TC, Free Republic is not a credible news source. I don’t even know that you could call it a news source. It’s a discussion forum. Using someones post from there, and quoting it as if it’s news is no different than taking someones words here on f.com and quoting them as news.

As for the author of that quote, he says that the site they’re from in no longer up, and that he downloaded and saved the documents before it went down. And you expect us to believe that they are true.

If you can provide another link to the same documents that’s posted on a credible site, people might pay attention to what they say. As they stand now, there’s no way of knowing whether they are true or not, no way of knowing whether they even came from the FMSO site.

I thought you of all people would know better than that.

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A accurate comment…but perhaps not as intended.

[quote] Let’s Smear Some Marines for the Cause

April 27, 2007: There is now evidence that backs the Marines charged with killing civilians at Haditha in Iraq. If true, the new evidence would indicate that al Qaeda carried out another successful information operation that not only diverted resources into an investigation, but also provided some anti-war politicians ammunition to not only claim crimes had been committed, but that there had been a cover-up.

The initial Haditha investigations uncovered some apparent discrepancies in the Marines’ stories, and a criminal investigation by NCIS was launched. This led to some criminal charges being filed earlier this year. Now, some of the charges have been dismissed, and it is beginning to look like the accusations of a massacre may be untrue, making it look like the story may end up to be more a case of the media getting it wrong. If so, this would not be the first time.

In 2005, Newsweek reported that guards at Guantanamo Bay flushed a Koran down a toilet, triggering riots that led to a number of injuries and deaths throughout the Moslem world. There was just one problem with the report: Newsweek got it wrong. Investigations reported that there were very few incidents of mishandling, most of which were unintentional. The Koran had been flushed down a toilet – by Moslem detainees at Guantanamo Bay, not by the guards. The damage, though, was done – not only because record was never corrected, but because it probably aided al Qaeda’s recruiting efforts.

Earlier that year, the claims were about torture at the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, most notably in a speech by Senator Richard Durbin on the Senate floor. The Department of Defense investigated, and determined that no torture had occurred. In fact, some of the incidents where the line was crossed came about due to provocation by detainees under interrogation (one incident involved an interrogator smearing a detainee with red ink after the detainee spat on her). Again, the results of the investigation, got nowhere near the coverage of the initial allegations.

The 2002 Battle of Jenin was another incident portrayed as a massacre by the Palestinians. The resulting investigations from the United Nations found no evidence of a massacre involving hundreds of dead (as claimed by various reports from Palestinian sources and echoed by human rights groups and the press). Instead, the total number of casualties was 52, the majority of whom were combatants, not civilians. Again, the results of the investigation failed to get the same level of coverage the lurid claims of a massacre.

In this day and age, it doesn’t take long for a misleading story to spread out. The comments by Senator Durbin were promulgated across the world in a matter of hours, and al Jazeera featured them prominently. The same was also true of Newsweek’s story claiming a Koran had been flushed by guards at Guantanamo Bay. In both cases, the charges were investigated. In both cases, the claims proved to have little, if any, bearing to what really happened. The claims of torture were found to be generally unfounded, and in the few cases where lines were crossed, corrective action had been taken, in some cases immediately (one such case involved an interrogator who smeared a detainee with red ink after that detainee spat on her). Worse, the lies were already spread around by the time the truth was determined and not reported. In the case of the Koran-flushing, lives were lost.

The media mistakes are becoming all too frequent to dismiss at this point. One such mistake might be innocent. But this has been “mistake” after “mistake”, all of which have made the United States look bad. Worse, favorable stories have apparently been spiked. There also was a story for Time magazine about the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment by an embedded reporter that was rewritten by editors in New York because the original submission made the American troops look “too heroic”. Several reports from Iraq have also been questioned by bloggers, adding to the controversy. It seems the troops don’t get a break from the same press which is willing to run the latest claims from human rights groups and anti-war activists without question – even when past claims have been shown to be off base. – Harold C. Hutchison (haroldc.hutchison@gmail.com)
strategypage.com/htmw/htiw/a … 70427.aspx[/quote]