April 13th, 2006
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Slide of early sighting of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in remote Montana wilderness.
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| 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. |
| Leaks to reporters from U.S. officials in Iraq are common, but official evidence of a propaganda operation using an American reporter is rare. |
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“Since we stopped worrying that the trolls would come and get us, their existence have become so pointless that they have all emigrated. Some of them got lost and ended up in the Rocky Mountains, and one of them was temporarily seen by professor Pronin in Soviet Pamir. But the mayority of these poor trolls into exile have established themselves in Himalaya, where they only risk being seen by people with a desire to have something to tell.”
Less charitable scientists have argued that many (or most) sightings are simply hoaxes.
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Posted in Press Coverage, The War Years | By Willie Buck Merle