LIES, DAMN LIES, AND THE STORIES PLANTED BY INTELLIGENCE SERVICES

Epimenedes | 28.04.2003 12:13

Funny how these significant packages of documents keep being found by the intrepid journalists of the Telegraph, the Toronto Star, San Francisco Examiner-- I mean, what are we paying the intelligence services for?

The following is mostly culled from www.whatreallyhappened.com
whose compiler is responsible for spotting the pattern:

You may have heard over the weekend about the "proof" discovered in the ruins of Iraq's intelligence agency that Saddam Hussein had a link to Al-Qaeda

Well, here's a funny problem, or coincidence if you prefer to interpret it that way---

4/27/03 First paragraph of the London Telegraph version of the story "Iraqi intelligence documents discovered in Baghdad by The Telegraph..."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/04/27/walq27.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/04/27/ixnewstop.html

4/27/03 First paragraph of the Toronto Star version of the story "Top-secret Iraqi intelligence documents, unearthed by the Toronto Star in the bombed-out ..."

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1051359175040&call_pageid=968332188492&col=968793972154

4/27/03 Sunday Telegraph: "No, OUR guy found the documents!!!"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2979405.stm

4/27/03 San Francisco Chronicle: "No, WE found them!!!!!!!

"The handwritten notes were found in a red notebook by a Chronicle reporter among hundreds of documents scattered around a ransacked first-floor office in the headquarters of the Mukhabarat's surveillance department ...." (yeah right)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/04/27/MN99456.DTL

4/27/03 ABC: "No, WE found them, the rest of you bugger off!"

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/World/iraq_documents030416.html

So, who found the documents? Or were there so many copies left around that every newspaper found a set?

4/27/03 And the Sunday Times reported that its own journalists had found documents in the Iraqi foreign ministry that indicate that France gave Saddam Hussein's regime regular reports on its dealings with American officials. "

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&ncid=716&e=4&u=/ap/20030427/ap_on_re_mi_ea/britain_iraq_al_qaida

Strange thing how the CIA just isn't enough on its game to dig for documents itself, and somehow mysteriously the press finds its way to packages of stuff that have useful propaganda value!

Epimenedes

Comments

Hide the following 9 comments

media watch

28.04.2003 14:21

This type of action is getting too overt and easy to spot.

What I'd like to see is a systematic database to which we could contribute and watch in real time. The database would be of all the media sources onto which watchers like us could contribute plant spottings.

A moderator would be needed to select which stories to watch, and we'd then spot them travelling through the print and TV media, noting times, places, reporters names, page numbers. It would be like bird spotters sighting the lesser striped petrol as it flies across the countryside.

If we tracked sightings for a handful of stories, the structure of lies dissemination and who is doing it should emerge pretty strongly, since the channels, I think, are persistent.

It might make for some neat charts of disinformation flow. Once we know where it is going, it would be possible to predict which lies each paper will print hours before it appears.

Lies require hidden coordinated action from once source. The truth seeps out of the ground for those who care to look.

goatchurch

i am willing to offer...

28.04.2003 16:11

i have been tracking this in the guardian. i have uncountable records and some shocking. i have also some ideas that taken in the hands of many under coordinated action can result in effective countereffect of huge dimensions. it is a powerful seed. ideologically they are framed, now it is to practise against their opression.

jose
mail e-mail: jesuisgil@yahoo.com

suspicious papers

28.04.2003 16:52

I've seen those comments etc before on the actual site, but they aren't talking about the same documents. Toronoto Star acknowledges that they were with the Telegraph, and the others are I think talking about differnet documents.

Incredibly suspicious however how pretty much every (pro-war) paper seems to be finding documents incriminating appropriate anti-war figures/counties who opposed the war. The Toronto Star article also points out something like 'The CIA had scoured the building earlier but seemingly missed these documents'.

So the story is that the CIA goes through burnt out buildings looking for stuff, doesn't find these particular documents (after all they're only the CIA, not professionals like the Telegraph guy), and then the reporters of various papers turn up later and all stumble upon unburnt papers incriminating anti-war figures/countries... Hmm....

harry

maybe a listserv?

28.04.2003 18:05

If Jose opens a listserv like a yahoo group or something, that would be good.
Someone please nominate a list server other than yahoo though!
Meanwhile, thanks to you spotters out there - I don't even trust the Torygraph's weather forecast, but it's great to have specific bullshit highlighted.

bobby

it's a game

28.04.2003 21:41

They're fronting it, putting it in your face. It hardly needs deep interpretation. They just want to test how far the general credibility and media gullibility will go.
Some very perceptive people still go along with part of the game - like accepting the central thesis of 9/11 as the most common example. Once you've accepted that for the Reichstag fire it was, you've got it. Everything else becomes clear.

The surface truth is enough

29.04.2003 09:25

DH: we don't need any bullshit conspiracy theories about 9-11. To introduce that into this thread amounts to disinformation: a desire to turn the point of the argument into a meaningless direction. The surface facts are damning enough.

Epimenedes

bullshit conspiracy theories?

29.04.2003 13:56

Oh dear!
Some people still think that's a logical argument
Despite the acres of info put up here and in many other places by so many people
All I meant was see through the one big lie, and all the other countless lies before and since fall into place
Hardly disinformation, when the subject of the piece is disinformation. When this little bit of the conspiracy is so obvious
Continue to sleep the big sleep if you wish
Time may have run out for you

However...

30.04.2003 06:56

The documents are indeed amazingly convenient.

However, to understand amazing coincidinces like
this it helps to know a little about how hacks work.

Someone who gets a good story is going to sell it as
often as they can; one exclusive per major
English-speaking market is a good start - and
fits the pattern above.

So the *same* hack can write "the Boston Globe
found", "the Sydney Morning Herald found", "the
Toronto Post + Mail found"... and so on. Quite
legitimately, within the conventions.

In fact, it's not unknown for someone who has
a story from a place not swarming with competition
to file under different names to different papers
in the same market. Next time you see a story
from Burma, say, compare the texts... (having
first checked it's not just a wire service
story).

So: that pattern is not of itself evidence of
anything in particular.

Mike
mail e-mail: editor@freelancenews.org
Homepage: http://www.freelancenews.org

Six reasons to doubt the documents

30.04.2003 08:44

I'm dubious about the entire "we got documents" crop of stories. For these reasons:
1. The USA and Britain invaded a country with no more legitimacy for doing so than Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy had when they went into Poland, Ethiopia and so on. With this credibility gap, the urge to tell lies or commit forgery is ever present.
2. The famous weapons of mass destruction have never materialised, and the urge to divert public opinion from that awkward fact is there also.
3. Smearing opponents through the planting of forged letters or documents with the media is an old tactic. The British press got involved in such doings in relation to the 19th century Irish politician Charles Parnell, for example. You don't have to be an admirer of Galloway to think that he may be the target of a set-up.
4. Much of the bourgeois media have liaison to or a cosy relationship with the security and intelligence services, who are eminently capable of forging documents.
5. The occupation of Iraq is starting to bog down, with Iraqis protesting against the presence of their "democratic liberators" and being fired on, often fatally. Again, there is an urge to divert public opinion from such awkward facts.
6. I believe the size of anti-war mobilisations throughout the world has frightened the powers that be and given them a motive to smear people associated with the protests.

The Crimson Expat