How the Spooks Took over the News

[laststeamtrain]

How the Spooks Took over the News
By Nick Davies, The Independent UK
Posted on February 19, 2008, Printed on February 19, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/77281/

Editor's note: This is an edited excerpt from Nick Davies' book, Flat Earth News: An Award-Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media (Chatto & Windus). Davies' book has created enormous controversy in the UK, where many of the newsmakers Davies discusses in the book have fired back with op-eds accusing Davies of relying on the same anonymous sourcing that he condemns the commercial press for using in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.

<snip>

How the Spooks Took Over the News

by Nick Davies

On the morning of 9 February 2004, The New York Times carried an exclusive and alarming story. The paper's Baghdad correspondent, Dexter Filkins, reported that US officials had obtained a 17-page letter, believed to have been written by the notorious terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi to the "inner circle" of al-Qa'ida's leadership, urging them to accept that the best way to beat US forces in Iraq was effectively to start a civil war.

The letter argued that al-Qa'ida, which is a Sunni network, should attack the Shia population of Iraq: "It is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and us. If we succeed in dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis."

Later that day, at a regular US press briefing in Baghdad, US General Mark Kimmitt dealt with a string of questions about the New York Times report: "We believe the report and the document is credible, and we take the report seriously… It is clearly a plan on the part of outsiders to come in to this country and spark civil war, create sectarian violence, try to expose fissures in this society." The story went on to news agency wires and, within 24 hours, it was running around the world.

There is very good reason to believe that that letter was a fake -- and a significant one because there is equally good reason to believe that it was one product among many from a new machinery of propaganda which has been created by the United States and its allies since the terrorist attacks of September 2001.

For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it.

<more>

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/77281/

[soothsayer]

1. Doesn't the CIA have a desk at CNN? (yes, they do!)

[Peace Patriot]

2. We had better start paying close attention to the phenomenon of the psyops "news"

--brought to us by the global corporate predator press--unless we want to be engaged in their endless corporate resource war, not just in the Middle East but also in our own hemisphere...

"The Smart Way to Beat Tyrants Like Chávez," by Donald Rumsfeld, 12/1/07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/30/AR2007113001800.html

Gee, where else have we heard this lying item of disinformation, that the democratically elected president of Venezuela is a "tyrant"?

[creeksneakers2]

3. The Zarqawi letter forgery was picked up by the Washington

Post. The Post obtained a power point presentation in which a secret propaganda office of the Pentagon bragged about being able to plant a story with a New York Times reporter on a certain date. The Post story didn't mention what was leaked to the Times so I checked it. It was the supposed "captured" letter from Zarqawi to Bin Laden that Bush used as evidence that the violence in Iraq was all caused by Al Qaeda outsiders determined to take over Iraq. Bush's whole explanation for the violence in Iraq was based on a forgery that the US either created or at least knew was a forgery.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/09/AR2006040900890_pf.html

Several other sources corroborated that the letter was a forgery, although they all gave different accounts of where the forgery came from. I'd like to find the threads from that day because there were many interesting angles, including a speech Bush made on the very day the Post story broke that included the lies about the Zarqawi letter.