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| FAKE.
But, whodunit?
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I see the conservative warblogs are on yet another anti-media jihad, so it looks like the US soldier hostage hoax needs to be revisited. To recap, the story of the US soldier hostage was broken by the AP under Robert Reid’s byline from Baghdad. Reid reported:
Feb 1, 3:03 PM (ET)By ROBERT H. REID
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – Iraqi militants claimed in a Web statement Tuesday to have taken an American soldier hostage and threatened to behead him in 72 hours unless the Americans release Iraqi prisoners. The U.S. military said it was investigating, but the claim’s authenticity could not be immediately confirmed.
The posting, on a Web site that frequently carried militants’ statements, included a photo of what that statement said was an American soldier, wearing desert fatigues and seated on a concrete floor with his hands tied behind his back. The figure in the photo appeared stiff and expressionless, and the photo’s authenticity could not be confirmed.
Almost instantaneously, the story was “debunked” by…who else….Matt Drudge. Drudge’s splashy title for his scoop, GI JOE: MILITANTS TAKE ‘TOY’ HOSTAGE; IRAQI WEBSITE WAS CLIP ART, was fortunately quickly picked up by bloggers, because it was eclipsed by the Pope’s hospitalization (screen shot here.) The interesting thing about Drudge’s scoop is the claim about “clip art.” In not one news report will you find that allegation. I looked at the time and wondered where he got that bit of information, but assumed it would eventually be written up somewhere as the story developed. It never was. So, where did Drudge get it? If anyone has any idea, email me and I’ll post a correction.
So, why the warblogger flogging of a story that most commenters wrote off as an example of how idiotic the Iraqi jihadis are? Clearly, discrediting and ridiculing the jihadis was at least one purpose of the hoax. On that aspect, Antiwar.com reader “DK” identifies the most likely source of the hoax:
Having served in a military intelligence unit, I can tell you that this is most likely a “psy-ops” mission designed to undermine the credibility of the resistance. The chance of such an idea coming to the mind of Iraqis is very slim…even slimmer is the chance that one of these brand-new toys could be found in war-torn Iraq.
The media has been duped yet again. The “psy-ops” boys are chuckling in their underground bunkers.
Drudge’s singular “clipart” claim is yet another clue that DK is right, as is the fact that the AP’s Robert Reid, a veteran Middle East correspondent who has covered Iraq since 2002, was taken in, which raises the question of who could plausibly feed a fake story to Robert Reid. The warbloggers and Conservative noisemakers clearly want the impression to be that Reid was given the story by jihadis, thus implying, in keeping with one of their favorite themes, that the press is in bed with jihadi elements of the Iraqi resistance. We can thank Drudge’s blundering headline for showing that to be false, because if the website was “clipart” then it wasn’t a real jihadi website, now was it? It was a fake website and the question is whose fake website? If a fake website was put up, using clipart, it would then stand to reason that Reid was given his tip-off by the US military, which monitors jihadi websites, and was also provided a translation of the fake “statement” that accompanied the picture. The fake jihadi website probably existed just long enough to convince Reid that his source had evidence for his story and then it was pulled off the web before it could be examined in any detail. The mistake was made when it was leaked to Drudge who emphasized the media dupes falling for the fake story angle and triumphantly posting his clipart claim, which almost ruined the story’s usefulness for the next phase. But for the few blogs which reproduced his headline verbatim and google cache, the slip-up would have disapeared.
Along with advancing the notion of the press being in bed with the resistance, the conservative jihad against the press aims to create enough noise to discredit selected “bad news” from Iraq, as well as whip up some manufactured outrage on their scandal du jour, which, if successful, will take out Eason Jordan of CNN. The noise machine run by the War Party is in full swing on this issue. Here’s a major conservative noisemaker tying it all together, with a little help from conservative propaganda tool Jack Kelly:
I though I was the only one who noticed that the fake hostage story, the alleged terrorist downing of a British C-130 transport, and the Eason Jordan controversy were related…
Jack Kelly, in The Toledo Blade The Pittsburgh Post Gazette , ties them altogether and notes ironically that the media has become a PR firm for terrorist organizations.
It’s also interesting that the terrorists turned to the news media to recover lost momentum. Journalists who fell for these hoaxes may merely be idiots, and their silence about the implications of the hoaxes may simply be the by product of embarrassment. But the Web logger Shannon Love (Chicago Boyz) wonders:
“Why were the major media so quick to disseminate pictures of an action figure as a genuine hostage photo?” More to the point, why are major media so quick to disseminate anything that a terrorist group, or purported terrorist group, releases? … For the terrorist, it is like being given millions of dollars in free advertising.“
The story is why the story behind the failings at the AP and CNN is not being told anywhere except the blogosphere.
Emphasis above is mine. Read through the Who’s Who of warblogging conservatives’ comments here, and it is striking how they all hit exactly the same note.
All who value liberty should raise their voice in opposition to the demonstrated fascistic mentality of this conservative brownshirt lynch mob before they go any further in establishing the Police Statopia they crave, for which the destruction of the press is but one step.
Hot on the heels of 
