Do a google on "Salman Pak" and "Iraqi Troops in US Uniforms" follow the trail using Foxnews... Stories from government sources are reported... a few days later their stories are debunked as lies.... yet the misinformation propaganda message is out... and part of every neocon's programming... and some how becomes... the conventional wisdom...
All you conservatives are just NEOCON BOTs. LOL
Pretty darn interesting...
Transforming Language to Market the 'Big Lie'
Ansar al-Salam
The propaganda artists selected a small Kurdish splinter group called Ansar al-Salam and elevated it into an organized group of Al Qaeda "terrorists" who were "said to be" controlled by Saddam Hussein and "believed to be" producing ricin, a deadly biotoxin.
Since Ansar al-Salam was formed shortly after 9/11, "it was tied to bin Laden." Because a single source claimed to have seen Republican Guard officers in the region, "it was tied to Saddam Hussein."
"This was part of the 'big lie' to tie Iraq to 9/11," Gardiner wrote. "The 'terrorist' connection took many other forms, many forms but the truth. I don't see evidenced they cherished the truth."
Operation TELIC
In the first days of the invasion, a US Marine Corps spokesman made a prophetic statement: "The first image of the war will define the conflict."
The attempts to control those "first images" were of overriding interest to the coalition's ministries of propaganda. Because it was believed that the city of Basrah would quickly fall to the coalition troops, the "Battle of Basrah" was heavily scripted long before the first soldiers even entered Iraq.
Marines were given food packets to hand out to Basrah children. Journalists were to be bused to the newly captured city and TV crews were to be flown in to film the "liberated" citizens welcoming coalition soldiers with smiles and flowers. The UK had expected to lead the attack on Basrah but, over Blair's objections, the US insisted on giving this plum assignment to the US Marines. Gardiner's sources in Britain told him that the sole reason was that the US "wanted to have their forces lead the victory into Basrah."
When the residents of Basrah refused to be "liberated," the carefully planned media event evaporated in a hail of gunfire.
"It was about image," Gardiner marvels. "So much effort and money on image."
Salman Pak
In a widely publicized September 12, 2002 briefing paper entitled, "Decade of Deception," the White House described "a highly secret terrorist training facility in Iraq known as Salman Pak, where both Iraqis and non-Iraqi Arabs receive training on hijacking planes and trains, planting explosives in cities, sabotage, and assassinations."
"This facility became a major part of the strategic influence marketing effort," Gardiner writes. Yet, in the invasions aftermath, the Pentgon offered no "compelling evidence" that such a site existed.
In his February 3 presentation to the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell flashed a photo of an Ansar al-Salam "poison factory" in northern Iraq. In September 3, seven months after Powell's presentation, an Los Angeles Times reporter managed to reach the "poison factory," which he described as "a small cinderblock building bearing brown granules and ammonia-like scents." When the Times had the material tested, the granules turned out to be a commercial rat poison.
US Lied about Attacks on Iraq's Power Grid
Secretary Powell claimed that Iraq possessed mobile trucks designed to produce biological weapons. When invading forces located the trucks it turned out they were actually designed to produce hydrogen for surveillance balloons and Iraq had bought the trucks from the Britain.
When the capital city of Baghdad was blacked out by a power failure during the April bombardment, Pentagon spokesperson Victoria "Tori" Clarke rushed to assure the world that "We did not have the power grid as a target. That was not us."
The facts would subsequently show that the US had targeted portions of the power grid. In the North, a special operations team staged an attack on the Hadithah Dam on April 1 or 2. Human Rights Watch documented at least two attacks on the power grid south of Baghdad "along Highway 6 [that] included a Tomahawk [missile] strike using carbon fibers."
The use of a sophisticated carbon-fiber weapons is significant since the deployment of these specialized devices required prior approval from Washington.
American's Heroic Hostage
In an episode that recalled the creation of the "Old Shoe, the fictitious hero concocted by Robert deNiro's ace "perception manager" in the film "Wag the Dog," Washington's propaganda artists literally brought someone back from the dead.
Lt. Commander Scott Speicher had been shot down during the first Gulf War in 1991. In an attempt to generate sympathy and support for Bush's pre-emptive war, "intelligence sources" began circulating a bizarre new story to the US media. In what Gardiner called "a pattern typical of created stories," these unnamed sources started a rumor that Commander Speicher had not only survived but that he had somehow spent the past decade trapped in an Iraqi prison.
Iraqi officials vehemently denied that they were holding Speicher or, for that matter, any Americans. When asked about the Iraqi denial at a press conference, Rumsfeld's response was calculatingly oblique. "I don't believe much the regime puts out," Rumsfeld stated.
In Gardiner's estimation, Rumsfeld's answer "was too clever not to have been formulated to leave the impression that [Speicher] was alive."
Gardiner was troubled by Rumsfeld's apparent disinterest in the truth but, as a former military officer, there was another question that bothered Gardiner even more. "Why didn't [Rumsfeld] consider what he was doing to Speicher's family?"
On January 11, 2001, Speicher's status was changed from KIA (Killed in Action) to MIA (Missing in Action). As the invasion forces gathered in the Middle East, Speicher's status was changed once more, to "captured." Navy officials who contacted ABC News reported that they had been pressured to make this change.
In January, "intelligence officials" continued to leak information to the media that suggested Speicher was still alive. In April, the secretive ministry of propaganda leaked a report that his initials had been found on the wall of a cell in Iraq. Gardiner found this leak particularly strange since "Military POW recovery personnel are very careful about releasing information that would cause false hope in families." The release of such information would also, obviously, endanger the captives.
Long after Baghdad fell and the media's attention had been drawn to the fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction, a reporter thought to ask Rumsfeld about America's lost hero. The secretary replied vaguely that there was "nothing turned up thus far that I could elaborate on that would be appropriate." On July 16, a Washington Times investigation belatedly concluded that there was "no evidence" Speicher had survived or had been held captive in Iraq.
Chemical Cluster Bombs
On March 10, administration officials attempted to discredit Hans Blix and UNMOVIC, the UN weapons inspection program. Administration officials told the Boston Globe that "Blix did not give details... of the possible existence of a cluster bomb that could deliver deadly poisons."
Presidential spokesperson Ari Fleischer claimed that the US was "aware of UNMOVIC's discovery of Iraqi production of munitions capable of dispensing both chemical and biological weapons." Videotape was released allegedly showing the Iraqis testing a cluster bomb for dispersing chemical weapons.
"The chemical cluster bomb story certainly didn't linger," Gardiner wrote. "It was around only a couple of days, but it still served its purpose at the time."
Few newspaper readers or TV watchers realized that there was never any evidence that Iraq had such technologically complex weapons. Indeed, the Pentagon had dismissed the possibility of Iraq ever developing these weapons during the first Gulf War.
Iraq's Planned Computer Attack on America
An alarming White House paper presented by Paul Wolfowitz before a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations warned that Iraqi engineers were preparing a vast attack on the country's computer networks.
The warning came from a single source who claimed that Iraq's Intelligence Service was working with the Babylon Software Company to break into US computers, steal documents and spread viruses. There were no such attacks. There was no such program.
Iraqi Troops in US Uniforms
On March 7, White House Deputy Director of Communications Jim Wilkinson, described as "a senior US official," released a story about Iraq's alleged acquisition of US and UK military uniforms "identical down to the last detail." Wilkinson claimed Iraqis in US camouflage were planning to commit battlefield atrocities to cast discredit on coalition troops.
On March 26, Pentagon spokesperson Victoria "Tori" Clarke embellished the story. Clarke told reporters that "we knew they were acquiring uniforms that looked like US and UK uniforms. And the reporting was ... [that Saddam Hussein would] give them to the thugs, as I call them, to go out, carry out reprisals against the Iraqi people, and try to blame it on coalition forces."
Two days later, Rumsfeld added a new twist, claiming that Saddam Hussein's troops planned to don UK an US uniforms "to try to fool regular Iraqi soldiers into surrendering to them and then execute them as an example for others."
There were never any reports of Iraq attempting such stunts. In his report, Gardiner concludes: "The way it was put by Jim Wilkinson (a name that keeps appearing in these questionable stories), it seems to fit a pattern of pre-blaming Iraq. It has the feel of being a created story."
