You might think your government works for you. You might imagine that its purpose is the safety and security of you, your family and all other Americans. You might still believe that the only people our military targets are evil terrorists and dictators who threaten the peace of the world. If you do, though, its only because you, ordinary John and Jane Doe American citizen, have been the target of the most massive disinformation campaign ever conducted by our military at the behest of our so-called President.
You see, YOU ARE THE REAL ENEMY targeted for deception, and they have been lying to you for quite some time now:
The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
A disinformation campaign directed at you. And you. And you. And 300 plus million other you’s from sea to shining sea.
Because in any military operation you always target your deadliest enemy, the one that can do the most harm to your mission, with a campaign to distort the truth, to confuse and mislead that enemy into making critical mistakes. And the fact that all of us have been spun, have been the subject of military psy-ops, have been lied to repeatedly by our political and military leaders tells us everything we need to know about who they consider to be the most dangerous foe to their mission in Iraq:
We, the American people.
More after the break . . .
Some senior intelligence officers believe Zarqawi’s role may have been overemphasized by the propaganda campaign, which has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, Internet postings and at least one leak to an American journalist. Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain “a very small part of the actual numbers,” Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last summer.
In a transcript of the meeting, Harvey said, “Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will — made him more important than he really is, in some ways.” […]
The military’s propaganda program largely has been aimed at Iraqis, but seems to have spilled over into the U.S. media. One briefing slide about U.S. “strategic communications” in Iraq, prepared for Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describes the “home audience” as one of six major targets of the American side of the war.
That slide, created by Casey’s subordinates, does not specifically state that U.S. citizens were being targeted by the effort, but other sections of the briefings indicate that there were direct military efforts to use the U.S. media to affect views of the war. One slide in the same briefing, for example, noted that a “selective leak” about Zarqawi was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter based in Baghdad. Filkins’s resulting article, about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004.
These WaPo reporters are pussyfooting around the truth here, perhaps because they consider the truth to be too unpalatable for their readership to bear. Think: no Iraqi in their right mind would accept that Zarqawi is the mastermind behind the insurgency. They know better. Only us poor dumb Americans, lied to by our leaders and by a cowed and lazy press corps would ever fall for that whopper. And my how so many of us have fallen.
Go to any right wing website or just peruse the letters to the editor in your local paper. See how many of them believe with a passion that we are fighting Al Qaida in Iraq, that Saddam and Osama were the best of best buddies before 9/11, and that the legendary Zarqawi, Al Qaida mastermind and evil genius, is the source of all our troubles in Iraq (well, that and the liberal media). Far too many of them for my comfort.
And why do they believe these patent falsehoods? Why do so many still insist Saddam had something to do with 9/11? In great part because Americans have always been the largest target of the Bush regime’s propaganda efforts. Propaganda efforts run out of the Pentagon against the very people our military is sworn to protect: You and me.
We are our country’s biggest enemy in George Bush’s Endless War on Terror.