Last night I stumbled upon an old piece I wrote in July of 2007 called When Psy-Ops Go Bad. The key Los Angeles Times source in that piece is now a dead link, but you can find the article here. It details the Pentagon’s claims that the notorious al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist Abu Omar Baghdadi was an entirely fictional character.
In March, he was declared captured. In May, he was declared killed, and his purported corpse was displayed on state-run TV. But on Wednesday, Abu Omar Baghdadi, the supposed leader of an Al Qaeda-affiliated group in Iraq, was declared nonexistent by U.S. military officials, who said he was a fictional character created to give an Iraqi face to a foreign-run terrorist organization.
An Iraqi actor has been used to read statements attributed to Baghdadi, who since October has been identified as the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq group, said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner.
Bergner said the new information came from a man captured July 4, described as the highest-ranking Iraqi within the Islamic State of Iraq.
He said the detainee, identified as Khalid Abdul Fatah Daud Mahmoud Mashadani, has served as a propaganda chief in the organization, a Sunni Muslim insurgent group that swears allegiance to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda.
According to Bergner, Mashadani helped create Islamic State of Iraq as a “virtual organization” that exists in cyberspace and is essentially a pseudonym for Al Qaeda in Iraq, another group that claims ties to Bin Laden. The front organization was aimed at making Iraqis believe that Al Qaeda in Iraq is a nationalistic group, even though it is led by an Egyptian and has few Iraqis among its leaders, Bergner said at a news conference.
“The Islamic State of Iraq is the latest effort by Al Qaeda to market itself and its goal of imposing a Taliban-like state on the Iraqi people,” Bergner said.
Islamic State of Iraq has been widely described as an umbrella organization of several insurgent groups, including Al Qaeda in Iraq.
There was no way to confirm the military’s claim, which comes at a time of heightened pressure on the White House to justify keeping U.S. troops in Iraq. Critics of the Bush administration say the president has been trying to do so by linking Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network to the conflict in Iraq, even though the organization had no substantial presence here until after the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003.
“The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is the crowd that is now bombing people” in Iraq, Bush said Tuesday.
The U.S. military’s announcement Wednesday was the latest bizarre twist surrounding the figure known as Baghdadi. If the Iraqi government’s reaction was anything to go by, it won’t be the last.
Defense Ministry spokesman Mohammed Askari rejected the U.S. assertion, insisting that Baghdadi is real. “Al-Baghdadi is wanted and pursued. We know many things about him, and we even have his picture,” Askari said. However, he said he could not release a photograph or additional information because it could jeopardize attempts to capture Baghdadi.
The man known as Baghdadi emerged last year when Islamic State of Iraq was formed after the slaying of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
At first, I mistook the name Abu Omar Baghdadi for the name of his successor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and I was quite confused, indeed. It would be quite a story if the leader of the Islamic State (aka, ISIL and ISIS) were someone that the Pentagon had declared a fictional being back in 2007.
But, then, I went back into my archives, and I found something else interesting that has now largely gone down the rabbit hole. And that is that U.S. military used a propaganda campaign to exaggerate the influence of Abu Musab Zarqawi. The purpose of this campaign was twofold. For the Iraqi audience it was to give them the impression that all the car bombs that were going off were to doings of foreigners, not a legitimate indigenous opposition to the occupation. For American audiences, the purpose was to link al-Qaeda to the war in Iraq in order to repair the damage done to the legitimacy of the cause once it was determined that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction.
THE US 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 organisation responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks.
The documents say that the US campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners. US authorities claim some success with the effort, noting that some tribal Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists.
For the past two years US military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicise Zarqawi’s role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the “US home audience” as a target of a broader propaganda campaign.
Lest you think I am dabbling in conspiratorial thinking, it was the Pentagon that argued that Abu Omar Baghdadi was a fictional character before celebrating his demise, and it was leaked military papers and transcripts that confirmed that the hype around Zarqawi was part of an organized psychological warfare campaign aimed, in part, at American audiences.
So, these two predecessors to the current head of the Islamic State were not quite what we were led to believe they were. It would seem wise, then, for the press to follow Peter Beinart’s suggestion that they use a greater degree of skepticism this time around than they demonstrated when we were first introduced to the Islamic State of Iraq. Whether that is happening or not is doubtful. For example, how many of the facts in Bobby Ghosh’s recent piece on Zarqawi for The Atlantic can we believe are free from the taint of the Pentagon’s psychological warfare program from back in 2005-2007 period? Personally, I don’t feel that I can believe any of it at face value.
Back when Al-Qaeda in Iraq was as much fiction as reality, I basically wrote off whatever the Bush administration had to say about them. But ISIS is definitely real now. They are definitely decimating communities and committing atrocities everywhere they go. But, if we are to understand them properly, we must remember their murky roots in lies and hype.
For the media to do its job today it must sift through the propaganda they served up to build a legend that was not accurate.
If a myth gave birth to this horrible reality, the media have to take a degree of responsibility for the role they played.
All perfectly plausible, because psy warfare of that kind is and always has been SOP for the CIA, and apart from a few dubious “successes” (like Arbenz in Guatemala), they always make things worse (e.g. Vietnam after the death of JFK).
Aside from all the cloak-and-dagger stuff, the CIA is a huge bureaucracy, and it acts like a bureaucracy, mindlessly continuing to utilize the same techniques in the same ways over and over, no matter what, simply because that’s what it was set up to do.
In 1998, Brzezinsky admitted that al-Qaeda, or the radical jihadi movement, itself had been created by the CIA to lure Russia into Afghanistan.
http://bellaciao.org/en/spip.php?article22586
My impression is that it was mainly military intelligence and not the CIA that ran that pay-op.
My own impression is that whether Tweedledum Tweedledee or any other member of the PermaGov Tweediddle family is feeding the public information, it should be immediately and completely discounted. They lie as a matter of course and they are so fool-polluted a bureaucracy that the word “incompetence” does not even begin to fill the bill. Why pay attention to anything that they claim? This goes for the the major media as well in terms of any information of true national import that they try to impart . The media are completely and unquestioningly dependent on the PermaGov for their information, and thus they only serve as conduits for misinfo/disinfo.
Like dat.
The only way to get some sort of accurate take on what is happening on these levels is to go through all of the media special interest levels…from left to fright, everything in between and a good, hard look at the so-called “opposition” media as well…Russian, Chinese, Islamic media, etc. They are all lying their asses off. Whatever is not covered is probably the closest to the truth of the matter.
For example…look at the coverage of the depositioning and subsequent statements of Igor Strelkov, unuestionably the most important military leader of the Novorussian rebellion in Ukraine. He was mysteriously disappeared about a month ago and now has been reappearing through statements and videos. He is a central figure in the whole Ukraine imbroglio and apparently an honest and highly capable military man.
No coverage on the Russian side according to The Vineyard of the Saker, a blog run by an (ex?)-central Europeanish military intelligence professional living in the U.S. (If anything about anything is to be believed, of course. he must be watched with a careful eye as well.)
Hmmmm…”and none on the NATO side either.”
HMMMMmmmm…!!!
He done been non-personed!!!
By all sides of the conflict.
Jeez!!!
He must really be honest!!!
And now this from the same site:
They do things a little…differently…in Central Europe/Russia than we now do in Oceania…errr, ahhh, I mean Americania. They have not yet refined their media so that it is more efficient than old-fashioned wetwork. Sometimes media non-personing simply isn’t effective enough.
This sort of cooperation between seeming enemies smacks of 1984’s three “competing” nations (Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia) along with are areas known as “the Disputed area”…anyplace where doublethink has not yet been thoroughly established as the norm.
Does the following map look at all somewhat….errr, ehhh…”familiar” to you?
Yeah.
Me too.
It looks like what could quite possibly happen if the NATO powers were to lose their Bad Cop America.
WTFU.
You been had!!!
Later…
AG
Nice description of the difficulty of reading between the lines of media that are known to be owned (all of them). But every now and then some idiot worker bee messes up and tells the truth or the press of events results in issuing contradictory stories. Or the ignorance of various stores (like wayback machines or wikipedia audit trails or or dispersed tracking of information) exposes some of the contradictions in the stories and raises questions.
Your comment on 1984 is cause for a reiteration about international cooperation between nations and their leaders reminds once again of Lord Palmerston’s observation during the British Empire:
Nations have a habit of never stating those permanent interests explicitly–nor do leaders, whose interests might not exactly coincide with the “national interest” perceived by most observers.
I didn’t read his whole post, but AG may be right about Tweedledum & Tweedledee. Military intelligence is riddled with CIA operatives working under cover of military intelligence. That was true in the Vietnam days and it’s true now. So what’s probably going on is that “military intelligence” is the more appropriate hat to wear for these operations.
This is, in fact, a direct violation of US law. But one that has never had consequences for the military or the intelligence community.
There have been cases in history in which the mythology of the enemy constructed by a self-serving political power has be such good mythos that a person or group of people arise that inhabit the story in reality. Your question is right on target. My guess is the transformation came in 2010 or so and was complete by 2012 when the Syrian civil war became intractable.
I was remarking yesterday on how well the ISIS propaganda corresponds to Western comic book characterizations of the evil Muslims. In settings, costume, props, and dialogue. It clearly is meant to push Western buttons of reflexive action. John McCain sure has latched onto the bait.
The other item is the remarks by those who did view the beheading videos about the careful staging and the very identifiable British accent of the executioner, such that several comments focused on the likely region in which he grew up.
The fact that the targets are Western journalists show that the motive beyond terror is to disguise the exact nature of the movement and the operation–not the usual action for an army based on a popular movement. More equivalent to the attacks on journalists and citzen journalist made by US police forces. A warning to stay away and don’t look to closely.
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” seems to be the guiding principle in our dealings in the ME. That’s not surprising because that principle was the one by which we operated, despite the tremendous damage it did, throughout the Cold War. No matter how tyrannical and oppressive the regime we backed it because that regime made anti-communist noises. No matter how popular an elected government we did our best to overthrow it because the head of the thing just may have been slightly pink and/or want a fair price for whatever it was we were plundering. That principle was applied in Afghanistan and beyond with our arming and training anyone who’s opposed to our terrorist enemy du jour while propping up any number of despots.
It’s necessary to gin up plenty of lies about both sides in order for that to work. We have to portray the enemy as deep-dyed, irremediable villains and portray our friends-of-the-moment as pure-hearted patriots. Nuance? Forget about it. Input from people who actually know something about the complex dynamics of the region? No way, because they so often tell the policy makers things that they don’t want to hear.
We’ll go on, until we run out of money, propping up, arming and training new people to combat the people whom we formally propped up, armed and trained because the bureaucracies that are in charge of situations like this have ossified. They are averse to new ideas, new approaches or even knowing much beyond the map coordinates within the areas they’re operating. And why not? If an agency can torture people without the Executive Branch doing so much as bureaucratic shakeup in response then there’s no moral hazard for just fucking up over and over and over again.
Probably doesn’t help that an image circulated in 2006 as Zarqawi has been recycled and as al-Baghdadi
It is a rabbit hole, but at least we know it is, at least in part, a rabbit hole.
Back around 1996 when Osama bin Laden went from Sudan to Afghanistan, the papers made him sound to me so much like a James Bond villain that I was sure he was at least half CIA hype and refused to believe he could be actually dangerous. Then “9/11 changed everything”. Now I’m really wondering if US intelligence isn’t just continually inventing monsters that end up taking on reality.
I’m convinced that US intelligence has become so inbred that making up monsters and heroes is all they can do. It’s much easier to produce hype than it is to produce intelligence.
Use the WayBackMachine archive for the August 13, 2004 version Wikipedia on al-Zarqawi. He was used as a tool for military deployment/spending and warmongering. Similar to today’s war on Syria and the insurgency of ISIS in Iraq …
The confluence of Sunni jihadists from Anbar province in Iraq with Islamists fighting Assad was wel known over 2.5 years ago!! The same suicide bombings in Aleppo and Damascus were “welcomed” by Secretary Clinton because they were a tactic used against the enemy of the ZioAmeriSaudi alliance. The USA is morally bankrupt and can never claim any military action for the goal of humanity. The quagmire is created by and with support of US allies. What a failure for Barack Obama.
○ Fallujah Sunnis Repay Debt to Syrian Rebels vs Assad Feb. 13, 2012
Of course, the US was comfortable with using Assad’s torture chambers …
○ Regional War and Beirut Assassination by Car Bomb
Forgot or never noticed that Zarqawi was labeled another “Hitler” that we had to kill.
How many times do we have to bomb Iraq to save ourselves from Hitler?
Suppose we could always save ourselves by bombing Russia, since Hillary Clinton said that Putin is like Hitler.
I didn’t read his whole post, but AG may be right about Tweedledum & Tweedledee. Military intelligence is riddled with CIA operatives working under cover of military intelligence. That was true in the Vietnam days and it’s true now. So what’s probably going on is that “military intelligence” is the more appropriate hat to wear for these operations.