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April
26 / 27, 2003
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Cassel
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Saul
Landau
Iraq War: a Policy of Christian and Jewish Fundamentalism
William
A. Cook
Sharon Recruits US as Mercenaries Against Syria
William
S. Lind
Now the Real War Starts
John Chuckman
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Franklin Graham's Christian Empire
David
MacMichael and Ray McGovern
Ex-CIA Analysts on WMD: Where? Find?
Plant?
Gary Leupp
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Robert
Sandels
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CounterPunch
Wire
An Open Letter to Jerry Brown on Oakland Police Violence Against
Peace Activists and Dock Workers
Mickey
Z.
Our Ba'athists
Anthony
Gancarski
Nader Plays Pullman
Scott
Handleman
The Mumia Abu-Jamal Case in Its True Colors
Claud Cockburn
Evelyn Waugh's Ear Trumpet
Poets'
Basement
Matt Simon, Sam Hamod, Hammond Guthrie and Stew Albert
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/26
April
25, 2003
David
Vest
It's Not the Oil; It's the Art!
Steven
Higgs
All About Tucker Carlson
Walt
Brasch
The Shock and Awe of American Ignorance
Alexander
Cockburn
The Decline of American Journalism:
the Case of Judy Miller
Zeynep
Toufe
A Letter to the People of Iraq from an Anti-War Activist
CounterPunch
Wire
Season of the Witch: Jeane Kirkpatrick Unbound
Hammond
Guthrie
Springtime in Iraq
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/25
Website
of the Day
Having
a Great Time, Wish You Were Here: Postcards from a War
April
24, 2003
Lois
Whitman
An Open Letter to Rumsfeld on the
Child Detainees at Guantanamo
Uri
Avnery
Abu vs. Abu: It's Not About Egos
David
Lindorff
Day Care in the Name of National Security? About Those Kids in
Camp X-Ray
John Grebe
Rev. Pat Robertson's Message in the Temple
Dokhi
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Monster.Com: Ethnic Cleansing on the Web?
CounterPunch
Wire
Israeli Army Chief Threatens Peace Activists
Sam
Hamod
Our Man in Baghdad
Annie
C. Higgins
Do You Regret Being an American?
Harold
A. Gould
Will They Hate Us Forever?
Stew Albert
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Bush's War Web Log 4/24
Website
of the Day
Muscles
Abroad
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Cassel
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Uzma
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April 29,
2003
About Those Iraqi
Intelligence Documents
Were They Planted?
By WAYNE MADSEN
After the United States and Britain were shown
to be providing bogus and plagiarized "intelligence"
documents to the UN Security Council that supposedly "proved"
Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program, the world's
media is now being fed a steady stream of captured Iraqi "intelligence"
documents from the rubble of Iraq's Mukhabarat intelligence headquarters.
The problem with these documents is that
they are being provided by the U.S. military to a few reporters
working for a very suspect newspaper, London's Daily Telegraph
(affectionately known as the Daily Torygraph" by those who
understand the paper's right-wing slant). The Telegraph's April
27 Sunday edition reported that its correspondent in Baghdad,
Inigo Gilmore, had been invited into the intelligence headquarters
by U.S. troops and miraculously "found" amid the rubble
a document indicating that Iraq invited Osama bin Laden to visit
Iraq in March 1998. Gilmore also reported that the CIA been through
the building several times before he found the document. Gilmore
added that the CIA must have "missed" the  document in their prior searches, an
astounding claim since the CIA must have been intimately familiar
with the building from their previous intelligence links with
the Mukhabarat dating from the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Moreover,
the CIA and other intelligence agencies, including Britain's
MI-6, have refuted claims of a link between Bin Laden and Iraq.
Gilmore also made it a point to declare
he was not providing propaganda for the United States, a strange
statement by someone who claims to be a seasoned Middle East
correspondent. However, it is highly possible he was providing
the propaganda for the benefit of a non-government actor, the
neo-conservative movement, which uses the Pentagon as a base
of operations, and employs deception and perception management
tactics to push its sinister agenda.
The U.S. has been quite active in inviting
Telegraph reporters into the Iraqi intelligence headquarters.
Other documents "found" by the paper's reporters "revealed"
Russian intelligence had passed intercepts of Tony Blair's phone
conversations to Iraqi intelligence, that German intelligence
offered to assist Iraqi intelligence in the lead up to the war,
that France provided Iraq with the contents of US-French diplomatic
exchanges, and that anti-war and anti-Bush Labor Party Member
of Parliament George Galloway had solicited hundreds of thousands
of dollars from Iraq, which were skimmed from the country's oil-for-food
program.
Galloway immediately smelled the rat
of a disinformation campaign when he responded to the Telegraph
about the "found" document. "Maybe it's the product
of the same forgers who forged so many other things in this whole
Iraq picture â¤| It would not be the Iraqi regime
that was forging it. It would be people like you [Telegraph journalists]
and the Government whose policies you have supported," Galloway
said.
It is amazing that the U.S. military
would be so open about letting favored journalists walk freely
about the Mukhabarat building when the Pentagon has clamped tight
security on the Iraqi Oil Ministry. The reason for this is obvious.
While the Mukhabarat building can be salted with phony intelligence
documents, the Oil Ministry is likely rife with documents showing
the links between Saddam Hussein and Dick Cheney's old firm,
Halliburton. The company signed more than $73 million in contracts
with Saddam's government when Cheney was its Chief Executive
Officer. The contracts, negotiated with two Halliburton subsidiaries
-- Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co. -- were part of
the UN oil-for-food program, ironically the same program which
figures prominently in the charges against Galloway. But unlike
the charges against Galloway, the reports about Cheney's links
to Saddam Hussein's oil industry originated with relatively more
main stream media sources, including ABC News, The Washington
Post, and The Texas Observer.
Gilmore told the BBC that he noticed
that on the Mukhabarat documents he discovered, some information
that was "erased." The erasures were apparently made
with a combination of black marker ink and correction fluid.
He said he scraped away at the paper with a razor and miraculously
found the name Bin Laden in three places. The standard procedure
for redacting a classified document is to only use a black indelible
marker to mask classified information. However, the proper procedure
for trying to read through such markings is not to scrape away
the ink as if the document were a instant lottery ticket. Toner
print often bleeds through the indelible marker ink. If one holds
up such a sheet of paper at a 45 degree angle and under a bright
phosphorescent light, the lettering under the ink can be "read"
because the lettering almost appears to be "raised."
If a razor blade were used to scrape away the markings, the indelible
ink and the toner ink would be obliterated. Gilmore's claims
appear to be spurious.
It was not long before the Iraqi-Al Qaeda
"smoking gun" document was reported around the world.
America's right-wing propaganda channel, Fox News, featured the
"found" document on its lead story on its Fox Sunday
News program. Fox anchorman Tony Snow asked the ethically-tainted
Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi about the document.
Chalabi responded, saying the document provided enough information
that Saddam Hussein was knowledgeable about the September 11
attacks on the United States, a canard that has been rejected
by intelligence agencies around the world. However, for those
who forged or doctored the document it was mission accomplished.
To understand the process in disseminating
such propaganda masked as news, it is important to understand
the relationship between The Daily Telegraph and its parent company,
the Hollinger Corporation, which is owned by British citizen
and former Canadian, Conrad Black. Hollinger, like Rupert Murdoch's
News Corporation, is a mega-media company that spins right-wing
propaganda around the world through 379 newspapers, including
the Jerusalem Post. Tom Rose, the publisher of the Jerusalem
Post, is a major supporter of Ariel Sharon's Likud Party and
is a favorite guest on the right-wing talk shows on Clear Channel
radio stations, including that of G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate
infamy. Clear Channel, headquartered in Dallas, is owned by close
Bush supporters and one-time business partners. To add to the
spider's web, one of Rose's Jerusalem Post directors is Richard
Perle, a member of Donald Rumsfeld's advisory board.
The "smoking gun" document
on Galloway was further played up on Fox News Sunday. William
Kristol, an ally of Perle and a dean of the neo-conservatives,
and Fox's Brit Hume, a right-wing ideologue who masquerades as
a reporter, said the documents implicating Galloway in accepting
money from Saddam Hussein was the "tip of the iceberg."
They then suggested that French President Jacques Chirac, other
Western politicians, and Arab journalists working for such networks
as Al Jazeera, would soon be "outed" by further Iraqi
intelligence documents. For good mesaure, Fox also announced
that Galloway may have given classified satellite imagery to
Al Qaeda. As is so often the case, the Fox News panelists provided
no evidence for their slanderous claims.
Welcome to the new digital and satellite
age McCarthyism. Phony documents are "dropped" into
the hands of a right-wing London newspaper owned by Conrad Black.
They are amplified by Black's other holdings, including the Jerusalem
Post and Chicago Sun-Times. The story is then picked up by the
worldwide television outlets of News Corporation, Time Warner,
Disney, and General Electric and echoed on the right-wing radio
talk shows of Clear Channel and Viacom. Political careers are
damaged or destroyed. There is no right of rebuttal for the accused.
They are guilty as charged by a whipped up public that gets its
information from the Orwellian telescreens of the corporate media.
The media operating in concert with political
vermin to whip up popular opinion to stamp out criticism is nothing
new. It was practiced by Joseph Goebbels quite effectively in
Nazi Germany. It was a British-born actor named Peter Finch who
so eloquently and prophetically warned us about the sorry state
of today's media. In Paddy Chayefsky's excellent movie, "Network,"
Finch plays UBS TV news anchormen Howard Beale. When UBS's entertainment
division decides to fire Beale because of low ratings, he begins
to rant and rave on the air. He is then given his own television
entertainment show, "The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves."
The most famous scene in the movie is when Beale exhorts his
viewers to go their windows and yell, "I'm mad as hell,
and I'm not going to take it anymore." We should all be
mad as hell about the propaganda in the newspapers and on the
airwaves; George Bush and Tony Blair; Rupert Murdoch and Conrad
Black; Clear Channel and Viacom; the neo-conservative think tank
bottom feeders; Rumsfeld and his circle of Pentagon ghouls such
as Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Newt Gingrich; and the religious
fundamentalists who give aid and succor to America's war machine.
To paraphrase Howard Beale, "We should not take them anymore!"
Wayne Madsen
is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and columnist.
He wrote the introduction to Forbidden
Truth.
Madsen can be reached at: WMadsen777@aol.com
Yesterday's
Features
Elaine
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