Give It To Filkins, He'll Print Anything

InfoDominationForTheNation
SubmissiveHackVille


That was then:

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.

This is now, with Mr. Filkins is still acting as the willing shill, once again on A1, above the fold, in the NY Times.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 15, 2006 — American military officers on Thursday put a face on the new chief of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, releasing a photograph and details of the man they say succeeded Abu Musab al-Zarqawi after he was killed in an airstrike last week.

n a news briefing, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the American military spokesman here, identified Mr. Zarqawi's successor as Abu Ayyub al-Masri, an Egyptian who he said had trained in one of the terrorist camps in Afghanistan run by Al Qaeda in 1999.

Mr. Masri, he said, was a "founding member" of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and had become one of Mr. Zarqawi's "closest remaining associates." The group is believed to be responsible for dozens of suicide attacks and car bombings across Iraq that have killed hundreds of Iraqi civilians.

So, what all began with Rhoda following the departed Mary, has all come down to this. A villianous sequel show slickly produced to sell a never-ending war to a TV-addicted nation.

Sheesh.

And I thought Billmon was just joking.

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