About a week ago Glenn Greenwald posted a piece called "Everyone we fight in Iraq is now 'al-Qaida'", about the change in White House rhetoric such that Bush and his sock puppets currently insist on referring to the insurgents in Iraq as "al-Qaeda fighters" rather than as "insurgents". I had meant to flag the Greenwald post because I had noticed the same thing, and Greenwald had saved me the trouble of having to write about it.

Labeling everyone the US fights in Iraq as "al-Qaeda" is, of course, wildly inaccurate: it's common knowledge that foreign fighters are the smallest group of militants in Iraq, and even if that were not the case referring to foreign fighters as "al-Qaeda fighters" would still be deeply misleading.

As Greenwald and others have pointed out, this is a new development. Remember that whole almost year-long era of White House Frank-Talk-on-Iraq? -- when Bush would gamely characterize the largest group of insurgents as "Sunni rejectionists", i.e. ordinary Iraqis. In a post about Bush's State of the Union last year, for example, I was talking about the Frank-Talk-on-Iraq era when I wrote

The talking heads in the State of the Union postmortems seemed to be enchanted by Bush's distinction between the good war critics and the bad war critics; however, that whole line was boiler-plate from the nineteen thousand terrorists-rejectionists-and-Saddamists speeches he gave in the fall after his numbers dipped below forty.

Greenwald makes it pretty clear that this new direction in White House and Pentagon rhetoric is intentionally deceptive, and he discusses the extent to which the media is complicit in the deception.

Anyway, why am I bringing this up? -- check out this article from McClatchy Newspapers:

Facing eroding support for his Iraq policy, even among Republicans, President Bush on Thursday called al Qaida "the main enemy" in Iraq, an assertion rejected by his administration's senior intelligence analysts.

The reference, in a major speech at the Naval War College that referred to al Qaida at least 27 times, seemed calculated to use lingering outrage over the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to bolster support for the current buildup of U.S. troops in Iraq, despite evidence that sending more troops hasn't reduced the violence or sped Iraqi government action on key issues.[...]

U.S. military and intelligence officials, however, say that Iraqis with ties to al Qaida are only a small fraction of the threat to American troops. The group known as al Qaida in Iraq didn't exist before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, didn't pledge its loyalty to al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden until October 2004 and isn't controlled by bin Laden or his top aides.

You know, Glenn Greenwald is as close to mainstream media as you can get and still be a blogger -- actually, in a sense, he's not a blogger: he's a columnist for Salon -- so he's probably widely read among journalists. I don't think it's far-fetched to believe that the above is the result of the Greenwald post. One might imagine we'd see more newspaper articles like the above given that Bush's numbers have been in Nixon territory for as long as I can remember now, but what do I know.

Labels: Al Qaeda, Bush, propaganda, State of the Union

Many many moons ago I wrote about a rumor that PBS was supposedly going to air a hagiographical documentary on Richard Perle. This tidbit was mentioned offhandedly in a piece about rightwingers taking over PBS. Well, it may have taken a while, but Richard Perle: The Movie is going to air in April as part of a series called America at the Crossroads.

The deal is that the producer of the show, Brian Lapping, is a personal friend of Perle's, the next door neighbor of Perle's villa in France, so one can imagine how fair and balanced this thing is going to be. According to David Corn the film will show "the softer side of Perle and argue that all those people out there who regard Perle as the Price of Darkness are simply misguided.":

It gets worse. The GOP hacks now in charge at CPB did realize they needed some balance. So they also commissioned a film that would be critical of Bush's foreign policy. Note that the CPB did not take steps to insure that the film on Perle would be balanced. No, it greenlighted a project designed as a puff piece about a man who was utterly wrong about Iraq. Recently on this site I chronicled but a few of Perle's whoppers. Before the war, he said there was no doubt that Saddam Hussein had revved up a nuclear weapons program. He also claimed that Iraq could be easily taken with a military force of 40,000 or less. In other words, he knew nothing, but, not letting ignorance stand in the way, he urged America on to war. You think any of this is going to end up as a significant piece of Lapping's wetkiss?

Actually I'm kind of looking forward to it in a sort of masochistic way. I have a feeling it's going to be strange to watch. The thing was so long in production that it's going to be like a time capsule from a bygone era -- sort of like watching a WWII propaganda film or something.

Anyway, it's nice to know they're putting our tax dollars to good use...

Labels: PBS, propaganda, Richard Perle