Pentagon's Zarqawi PSYOPS Mission Targeted Americans

It's well known that the Pentagon will go to any lengths to use propaganda as a tool to win the war in Iraq. Monday's Washington Post details the use of PSYOPS to demonize Abu Musab al-Zarqawi not only in Iraq where a partial effect has been an increase in attacks against his cohorts, but also in the United States where planted media stories have raised Zarqawi's status as Public Enemy Number Two - next to Osama bin Laden.

The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military documents. "Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response," one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed three methods: "Media operations," "Special Ops (626)" (a reference to Task Force 626, an elite U.S. military unit assigned primarily to hunt in Iraq for senior officials in Hussein's government) and "PSYOP," the U.S. military term for propaganda work.

Zarqawi is a Jordanian, so the Pentagon counted on "xenophobia", the fear of foreigners/strangers, to arouse the hatred some Iraqis feel - not to mention those in the US and worldwide who similarly fear "the other". The propaganda campaign also kept alive the false assertion that Zarqawi, who was linked to al Quaeda, was proof that the Iraq war was a justified response to the 9/11 attacks. As has been seen in the US, many still believe that lie even though their president has disavowed any connection between Iraq and 9/11 since the war began. Apparently, the PSYOPS program has been more successful than the Pentagon might have thought at the outset.

As for planting stories in the US press, it's no surprise that FOX news was the recipient of a disc that showed Saddam's atrocities, which they had no problem airing. But, the WaPo story also names one New York Times reporter, Dexter Filkins, who received a leak "about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, [which] ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004."

Filkins, reached by e-mail, said that he was not told at the time that there was a psychological operations campaign aimed at Zarqawi, but said he assumed that the military was releasing the letter "because it had decided it was in its best interest to have it publicized."

Filkins claimed he was skeptical about the letter and tried to confirm it with sources beyond the US military, which he did mention in his original piece.

Another New York Times journalist used by the Bush administration. How surprising. It seems Finkel, unlike his former NYT Judy Miller, was an unwitting accomplice, however.

The cost of the Zarqawi PSYOPS campaign is estimated to be around $24 million - money that would have been much better spent on reconstruction efforts. The PSYOPS has also raised Zarqawi's status to that of a martyr to the enemies of the US occupation of Iraq - a fact the Pentagon should have realized might have been one of the possible outcomes of its efforts. But, considering how short-sighted Rumsfeld's planning has been about everything Iraq war- related, it's obvious that they just don't believe they could ever shoot themselves in the foot despite the fact that they've done so repeatedly and it's long past the time for an amputation.