Boogie Man Update

Wayne Madsen Report - Home:

"April 26, 2006 -- Terrorism, Lies, and Videotapes. Earlier this month, it was reported that a Pentagon psychological warfare (psyop) unit purposely hyped the threat posed in Iraq by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi. It was also revealed that a 17-page letter written by Zarqawi to Osama bin Laden in 2004 and selectively leaked to a New York Times reporter in Baghdad. The contents of the letter was featured on page one of the Times on Feb. 9, 2004. In the letter to Bin Laden, 'Zarqawi' said that if democracy took root in Iraq, it would suffocate the terrorists. On April 10, 2006, President Bush cited the 2004 Zarqawi letter in a speech before Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). This was after it was revealed in the Washington Post that same morning that the Pentagon had hyped the Zarqawi threat and that its psyop team may have even written the Zarqawi letter to Bin Laden as a feint to justify a continued U.S. military presence in Iraq. It was reported that there were Kurdish fingerprints on the supposed Zarqawi letter. The Kurds see every day of U.S. military presence as helping them in their goal of achieving an independent state. It now appears that the Zarqawi letter to Bin Laden was every bit as phony as the Niger uranium documents. Bush used the Zarqawi and Niger fraudulent documents in his public statements.

The Post's information came from a briefing Joint Chiefs of Staff psyop officer Col. Derek Harvey told a meeting in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in 2005. According to a transcript of the meeting, Harvey said, 'Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will -- made him more important than he really is, in some ways . . . The long-term threat is not Zarqawi or religious extremists, but these former regime types and their friends.' In addition to an Iraqi audience for the Pentagon disinformation campaign, documents from the Kansas meeting indicated that another target was the 'U.S. Home Audience.' The psyops were part of a U.S. Special Operations Command program called 'trans-regional' media operations. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the media spokesman in Baghdad, called the Zarqawi Psyop campaign 'the most successful information campaign to date.'"