Smear Campaigns

The astonishing ineptness of the various smear campaigns and forgeries promulgated by the pro-war propagandists during the Iraqi invasion has been astonishing. Or perhaps disinformation campaigns were always this bad, but knowledge and access to the documents was more restricted? That Israeli intelligence produced the astonishingly inept Iraq-Niger-Uranium forgeries that was endorsed by Bush and used to convince the Congress to assent to the invasion is one thing, but now I read that the CSM is retracting its story that the dissenting British politician George Galloway was in the pay of Saddam Hussein. Apparently, the documents’ forged nature is now “almost certain”. So it seems that during the hectic early days of the US occupation, some advance black bag military intelligence operations team (either UK, US, or both) prepared these forgeries and then planted them within reams of situated, context-sensitive regular Iraqi documents, and then arranged for them to be “found” and “spooned” to willing and pliable conservative journalists eager for a “scoop”.

At the time I was spam bombed by excited war fanboys repeatedly sending me “proof” that Galloway (and by extension, one presumes, all dissenters) were in the actual or nominal pay of Saddam Hussein. And of course, Fox “News” was quick to denounce, well, pretty much everyone…

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 rightwing 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 measure, 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.

Earlier here.