Earlier today, we ran a story from ABC, “FBI: Al-Qaeda Tape to Call for Use of WMDs.”
But we, along with ABC and the FBI, were “punk’d” by a “jihad fan.”
Noah Shachtman of Wired quotes Evan Kohlmann of Counterterrorism Blog that “The intel community appears to have (once again) fallen victim to poorly researched open source news reporting,” and continues
In recent days, several fringe media organizations have published stories about a video recording posted by anonymous Al-Qaida miscreants on extremist Internet chat forums. The video consisted of a remarkably amateurish mash-up of Discovery Channel documentaries, widely published sermons by radical clerics, and stolen propaganda footage. While it is perhaps true that the video offered subtle encouragement for nuclear attacks on the United States, it featured no original content and could have been clumsily strung together with little more than two VCRs. The video was meandering, boring, and difficult to follow — and it certainly was not the product of Al-Qaida.
Thanks for calling out the “intel communithy” about this ‘news reporting’, Eric, but you’re being punked does not make you a punk.
Has it ever occured to anyone that al-Qaeda is not a real organization? That it’s a boogey man created by our intelligence agencies to keep us scared enough to support war in the middle east? That the reason “al-Qaeda” hasn’t staged any attacks in America is because too many people suspect the “intelligence agencies,” which would make it difficult for them to pull something off without getting caught?
But, but, but…we “need” a pretext for endless wars, especially for Israel. We also “need” further implementation of police states in such formerly “free” nations like the U.S. and U.K.
So Al Qaeda does indeed exist, if only as a means to an end in the fevered minds of neo-cons/ Israel lobbyists in the news media, military/industrial complex and government, which would be every “person” “working” in those areas.
The Washington Post cheerfully admitted that al-Qaeda in Iraq is a propaganda campaign.
It is difficult to determine how much has been spent on the Zarqawi campaign, which began two years ago and is believed to be ongoing. U.S. propaganda efforts in Iraq in 2004 cost $24 million, but that included extensive building of offices and residences for troops involved, as well as radio broadcasts and distribution of thousands of leaflets with Zarqawi’s face on them, said the officer speaking on background.
The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military documents. “Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response,” one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed three methods: “Media operations,” “Special Ops (626)” (a reference to Task Force 626, an elite U.S. military unit assigned primarily to hunt in Iraq for senior officials in Hussein’s government) and “PSYOP,” the U.S. military term for propaganda work.
One internal briefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, said that Kimmitt had concluded that, “The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date.”
Caught red-handed:
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/CAUGHT_RED__0923.html
The best bits from that article: In an interview with Al Jazeerah TV, the popular Iraqi leader Fattah al-Sheikh, a member of the Iraqi National Assembly and deputy official in the Basra governorate, said that police had “caught two non-Iraqis, who seem to be Britons and were in a car of the Cressida type. It was a booby-trapped car laden with ammunition and was meant to explode in the centre of the city of Basra in the popular market.” &
Rather, the US is playing a double-game to “head off†the threat of a “Shi’ite clergy-driven religious movement†– in other words, to exacerbate the deterioration of security by penetrating, manipulating and arming the terrorist insurgency. What could be the end-game of such a covert strategy? The view on-the-ground in Iraq, among both Sunnis and Shi’ites, is worth noting. Sheikh Jawad al-Kalesi, the Shi’ite Imam of the al-Kadhimiyah mosque in Baghdad, told Le Monde: “I don’t think that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi exists as such. He’s simply an invention by the occupiers to divide the people.”
AND, then you have the HIGHLY SUSPICIOUS bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samara, which George Dumbya mentioned for two or so years, every time he speech-ified. Always implying that the bombing of the Golden Mosque was Iraq’s 9/11, and a reason for us to continue to protect Iraq from “turror.”
For centuries, Sunnis have protected that mosque, which was in a primarily Sunni city but was sacred to Shiites. And yet one fine day, a band of allegedly devout Sunnis (dressed as Iraqi police officers” almost managed to blow it to smithereens? Yet the almost non-existent investigations into exactly who was responsible led nowhere
Although coincidentally (HAH!) and fortuitously for our plans to stay in Iraq for centuries/ Israel’s plans to destroy Iraq, the bombing inflamed the Sunni- Shia schism in Iraq that the neo-cons/ Zionists have been openly angling for for decades. The neo-cons/ Israel want Iraq divided, following the old British imperialist doctrine of “Divide and conquer.”
Please read the Feith/ Perle/ Wurmser 1996 manifesto called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” written for then newly elected Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
That document is a crystal ball to our future of endless wars for Israel and the military/industrial complex, and it also explains our recent past and present.
What kind of false-flag operation are the neo-crazies/ Israel’s Mossad cooking up to get the U.S. public behind an attack on Iran?
It would have to be something REALLY “special” because, thankfully, most Americans now don’t buy the 9/11 Commission report.
How many more Americans, and countless others around the world, will have to die before the Israel Lobby and the military/industrial complex are reigned in? If we don’t stop it now, the destruction wrought by the WW II Axis will have nothing on what will be destroyed by USrael in the (few remaining) years to come.
Toll free number to call Congress and demand no attack on Iran (the National Call-in Day to demand Congress to use diplomacy on Iran and not nukes is Tuesday, June 10th — you can use this same number on that day:
1-800-788-9372
As the days went by and everything was petering out, a death-threat was pronounced against Lars Vilks which quickly made things more tense. Things like these happen all the time, many artists receive threats. The difference was the sender; a supposed al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, generously promised $100,000 to whoever kills Lars Vilks ($150,000 if he is “butchered as a lamb”). The editor of the newspaper wasn’t worth as much–only $50,000. However, all we know for sure about al-Baghdadi is that there are different perceptions of who he is. Some sources claim he was a leading al-Qaeda fighter killed in May this year-three months before the publication!-while others say it’s just a name used by a rebel group in Iraq. Hence, should anyone kill Vilks or the editor, it might be hard to claim the reward. But the death-threat again Vilks was taken seriously and he was given police-protection.
A few days after the pronounced death-threats, a list of over 100 Swedish companies was published which Islamists say should be punished just for being of the same nationality as Vilks. “Take revenge,” these fanatics urged. However, when journalists rang some of these companies for a comment, they were surprised. “We have received no indications of any threat,” a spokesperson of one of the companies said. In fact, it turns out, these companies haven’t received any direct threats. The list of companies, as well as the death-threats against Vilks and the editor, all originate from one source: The Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) Institute. Founded in 2002 by Rita Katz and Josh Devon, SITE is a Zionist propaganda institute which, among other things, offers its “Monitoring Service, which provides numerous daily translations of terrorist propaganda and multimedia from primary source terrorist websites.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/larsson10182007.
Since almost all of the links here are from other propaganda outlets, it’s safe to say Antiwar.com gets “punk’d†on a daily basis. All the warnings about the Zarqawi nonsense, the crowing about “the surgeâ€, the devout insistence that the mainly Shia Baath party was exclusively Sunni, the lack of electricity and water for years somehow not being collective punishment, and especially the unctuous handwringing about how the ‘sectarian civil war’ (that had never happened before America arrived) would be worse if America left.
So that’s one mea culpa done, and a hundred thousand more to go.
The London telegraph has pulled down the story.The telegraph is neo-con controlled newspaper.
Ever wonder why all the news and media outlets use one source of information in their stories or news about terrorism, terrorists and so on?In all of their stories ,they quate Rita Katz of SITE so often.This same Katz who manges to be the first with new video or recording from the terrorists before any one else.The same that brought us the video game of the nuclear distruction of the US!