After the U.S. and Britain were shown to be providing bogus "intelligence" documents to the U.N. Security Council to proved Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, the world's media is now being fed a steady stream of U.S.-found Iraqi "intelligence" documents from the rubble of Iraq's intelligence headquarters.

The problem with these documents is that they are being provided by the U.S. military to some of its "favored" reporters, Wayne Madsen, an American investigative journalist, wrote Wednesday, April 30, in the Online Journal.

"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," elaborated Madsen, author of the forthcoming book, "America's Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II."

He said Gilmore told the BBC that he noticed some "erased" information on the documents he discovered. Gilmore said the erasures were apparently made with a combination of black marker ink and correction fluid, adding that he scraped away at the paper with a razor and "miraculously" found the name bin Laden in three places.

Dismissing the claims as "spurious," the investigative journalist said: "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. The standard procedure for redacting a classified document is to only use a black indelible marker to mask classified information," Madsen averred.

Face Saving

The American journalist said that the U.S. let favored journalists to walk freely about some of Iraqi government facilities, such as intelligence headquarters, to find any "shred" of paper that can be used in its smear campaign against Iraq but clamped water-tight security on other facilities, chief among which the oil ministry.

"The reason for this is obvious. While the intelligence 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 U.N. oil-for-food program," said Madsen.

He added that the reports about Cheney's "links" to Saddam Hussein's oil industry have been papered over by media sources, including ABC News, The Washington Post, and The Texas Observer. The American investigative journalist said that America's 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," he said.

Smear Campaign

Madsen further said that the "found" documents were also aimed at tarnishing the image of some leading anti-war activists such as George Galloway, the famed British MP and member of Labor Party.

He said that the so-called documents "revealed" that "anti-Bush" Galloway had solicited hundreds of thousands of dollars from Iraq, which were skimmed from the country's oil-for-food program.

Madsen recalled that 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 . . . 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. The American investigative journalist noted that the "smoking gun" document on Galloway was further played up on Fox News Sunday. "William Kristol, a leader of the neo-conservatives, and Fox's Brit Hume, a right-wing ideologue, said the documents implicating Galloway in accepting money from Saddam Hussein were the 'tip of the iceberg,'" he said.

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," said Madsen.

Octopus Media

Madsen also said that such newspapers like The Telegraph and channels like Fox News are taking advantage of their "octopus" sources to disseminate their right-wing propaganda "masked as news." "To understand the process, it is important to understand the relationship between The Daily Telegraph and its parent company, the Hollinger Corporation, which is owned by British subject 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," said Madsen. 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 telescreens of the corporate media," he added.