INFORMATION ATTACK
Report Exposes
Lies Leading To
No-Win War In Iraq
Retired Air Force Colonel identifies 50 bogus
news stories and a 'strategy of lies' behind the Bush Administration's worldwide marketing
campaign for invading Iraq in 2003.

By Gar Smith
The-Edge.org

Bush administration officials are probably having second thoughts about their decision to play hardball with former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Joe Wilson is a contender. When you play hardball with Joe, you better be prepared to deal with some serious rebound.

After Wilson wrote a critically timed New York Times essay in July 2003 exposing as false George W. Bush's claim that Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger, high officials in the White House contacted several Washington reporters and leaked the news that Wilson's wife was a CIA agent.

Wilson didn't wait for George W. Bush to hand over the perp. In mid-October 2003, the former ambassador began passing copies of an embarrassing internal report to reporters across the US, and we have received copies of this document.

The 56-page investigation, "Truth from These Podia: Summary of a Study of Strategic Influence, Perception Management, Strategic Information Warfare and Strategic Psychological Operations in Gulf II" was assembled by USAF Colonel (Ret.) Sam Gardiner. Gardiner has credentials. He has taught at the National War College, the Air War College and the Naval Warfare College and was a visiting scholar at the Swedish Defense College.

According to Gardiner, "It was not bad intelligence" that lead to the quagmire in Iraq, "It was an orchestrated effort [that] began before the war" that was designed to mislead the public and the world. Gardiner's research led him to conclude that elements at the highest levels of the US and British governments had conspired to plant "stories of strategic influence" that were known to be false.

"I know what I am suggesting is serious. I did not come to these conclusions lightly," Gardiner admits. "I'm not going to address why they did it. That's something I don't understand even after all the research." But the fact remained that "very bright and even well-intentioned officials found how to control the process of governance in ways never before possible."

Gardiner's dogged research identified a long list of stories that passed through Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's propaganda mill. According to Gardiner, "there were over 50 stories manufactured or at least engineered that distorted the picture of Gulf II for the American and British people."

Those stories include:

• The link between terrorism, Iraq and 9/11
• Iraqi agents meeting with 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta
• Iraq's possession of chemical and biological weapons.
• Iraq's purchase of nuclear materials from Niger.
• Saddam Hussein's development of nuclear weapons.
• Aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons
• The existence of Iraqi drones, WMD cluster bombs and Scud missiles.
• Iraq's threat to target the US with cyber warfare attacks.
• The rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch.
• The surrender of a 5,000-man Iraqi brigade.
• Iraq executing Coalition POWs.
• Iraqi soldiers dressing in US and UK uniforms to commit atrocities.
• The exact location of WMD facilities
• WMDs moved to Syria.

Every one of these stories received extensive publicity and helped form indelible public impressions of the "enemy" and the progress of the invasion. Every one of these stories was false.

AUDITION IN AFGHANISTAN (2001)

War as Women's Liberation

The techniques that proved so successful in Operation Iraqi Freedom were first tried out during the campaign to build public support for the US attack on Afghanistan.

Rumsfeld hired Rendon Associates, a private PR firm that had been deeply involved in the first Gulf War. Founder John Rendon (who calls himself an "information warrior") proudly boasts that he was the one responsible for providing thousands of US flags for the Kuwaiti people to wave at TV cameras after their "liberation" from Iraqi troops in 1991.

The White House Coalition Information Center was set up by Karen Hughes in November 2001. (In January 2003, the CIC was renamed the Office for Global Communications.) The CIC hit on a cynical plan to curry favor for its attack on Afghanistan by highlighting "the plight of women in Afghanistan." CIC's Jim Wilkinson later called the Afghan women campaign "the best thing we've done."

Gardiner is quick with a correction. The campaign "was not about something they did. It was about a story they created... It was not a program with specific steps or funding to improve the conditions of women."

The coordination between the propaganda engines of Washington and London even involved the respective First Wives. On November 17, 2001, Laura Bush issued a shocking statement: "Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women's fingernails for wearing nail polish." Three days later, a horrified Cherie Blair told the London media, "In Afghanistan, if you wear nail polish, you could have your nails torn out."

Anthrax Scare: Misleading via Innuendo

Time and again, US reporters accepted the CIC news leaks without question. Among the many examples that Gardiner documented was the use of the "anthrax scare" to promote the administration's pre-existing plan to attack Iraq.

In both the US and the UK, "intelligence sources" provided a steady diet of unsourced allegations to the media to suggest that Iraq and Al Qaeda terrorists were behind the deadly mailing of anthrax-laden letters.

It wasn't until December 18, 2001, that the White House confessed that it was "increasingly looking like" the anthrax came from a US military installation. The news was released as a White House "paper" instead of as a more prominent White House "announcement." As a result, the idea that Iraq or Al Qaeda were behind the anthrax plot continued to persist. Gardiner believes this was an intentional part of the propaganda campaign. "If a story supports policy, even if incorrect, let it stay around."

In a successful propaganda campaign, Gardiner wrote, "We would have expected to see the creation [of] stories to sell the policy; we would have expected to see the same stories used on both sides of the Atlantic. We saw both. The number of engineered or false stories from the US and UK is long."

MARKETING WAR (2002-2003)

Creation of America's Ministry of Propaganda

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced plans to create an Office of Strategic Influence early in 2002. At the same time British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Strategy Director Alastair Campbell was setting up an identical operation in London.

White House critics were quick to recognize that "strategic influence" was a euphemism for disinformation. Rumsfeld had proposed establishing the country's first Ministry of Propaganda.

The criticism was so severe that the White House backed away from the plan. But on November 18, 2002, several months after the furor had died down, Rumsfeld arrogantly announced that he had not been deterred. "If you want to savage this thing, fine: I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done -- and I have."

A Battle between Good and Evil

Gardiner notes that cocked-up stories about Saddam's WMDs "was only a very small part of the strategic influence, information operations and marketing campaign conducted on both sides of the Atlantic."

The "major thrust" of the campaign, Gardiner explains, was "to make a conflict with Iraq seem part of a struggle between good and evil. Terrorism is evil... we are the good guys.

"The second thrust is what propaganda theorists would call the 'big lie.' The plan was to connect Iraq with the 9/11 attacks. Make the American people believe that Saddam Hussein was behind those attacks."

The means for pushing the message involved: saturating the media with stories, 24/7; staying on message; staying ahead of the news cycle; managing expectations; and finally, being prepared to "use information to attack and punish critics."

Iraq's "Dirty Bomb"

In June 2002, an Iraqi expatriate named Khidhir Manza told the Wall Street Journal that the situation was "ideal for countries like Iraq to train and support a terrorist operation using radiation weapons." Manza's interview with the Journal was arranged by the Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqi exiles that was set up by the Rendon Group and supported financially by agencies of the US government. (See Weapons of Mass Deception, by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton.)

Helping to make Manza's charges more credible, unnamed intelligence officials earlier had told the International Herald Tribune that "they are kept awake at night by the prospect of a dirty bomb." Astute readers will note that these anonymous sources never actually said Iraq had a dirty bomb. It was all managed through suggestion and innuendo.

Iraq's Planned Computer Attack on America

An alarming White House paper presented by Paul Wolfowitz before a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations warned that Iraqi engineers were preparing a vast attack on the country's computer networks.

The warning came from a single source who claimed that Iraq's Intelligence Service was working with the Babylon Software Company to break into US computers, steal documents and spread viruses. There were no such attacks. There was no such program.

Ansar al-Salam

The propaganda artists selected a small Kurdish splinter group called Ansar al-Salam and elevated it into an organized group of Al Qaeda "terrorists" who were "said to be" controlled by Saddam Hussein and "believed to be" producing ricin, a deadly biotoxin.

Since Ansar al-Salam was formed shortly after 9/11, "it was tied to bin Laden." Because a single source claimed to have seen Republican Guard officers in the region, "it was tied to Saddam Hussein."

"This was part of the 'big lie' to tie Iraq to 9/11," Gardiner wrote. "The 'terrorist' connection took many other forms, many forms but the truth. I don't see evidenced they cherished the truth."

In his February 3, 2003, presentation to the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell flashed a photo of an Ansar al-Salam "poison factory" in northern Iraq. In September 2003, seven months after Powell's presentation, a Los Angeles Times reporter managed to reach the "poison factory," which he described as "a small cinderblock building bearing brown granules and ammonia-like scents." When the Times had the material tested, the granules turned out to be a commercial rat poison.

Iraq's Scud Missiles

In the lead-up to the war, the British and American people were told repeatedly that Iraq had Scud missiles capable of striking Israel.

In October 2002, a CIA report determined that evidence for the existence of Iraqi Scuds was inconclusive. Nonetheless, by the time Colin Powell stepped up to the plate at the UN in February 2003, the missiles had become an accepted fact as far as Washington, London and Tel Aviv were concerned.

When the invasion began, Iraq began to fire what the Pentagon called "Scud-type missiles." As Gardiner discovered, these rockets "were not Scuds and we have found no Scuds, but for three days they kept the story alive."

"American officials" also told the New York Times that "the sheer tenacity of the Iraqi fight" near a compound at Al Qa'im had led them to believe that "the Iraqis might be defending Scud missiles" hidden at the site. Gardiner notes laconically: "No Scuds or WMDs were found at Al Qa'im."

Saddam's Remote-Controlled Drones

The CIA's October 2002 report also claimed that Iraq had converted some J-29 jet fighters to deliver chemical and biological weapons. George W. Bush quickly seized on this specter for a speech in Cincinnati, where he told the astonished crowd that Saddam's poison-laden aircraft were capable of hitting US soil.

By the time Powell testified before the UN, the threat had been measurably pared down -- the fighter jets had become smaller, remotely piloted drones. Mr. Bush went public with the extraordinary claimed that these tiny drones could strike the US.

On June 15, 2003, an Air Force team in Iraq finally seized the drones. The Los Angeles Times described them as "five burned and blackened 9-foot-wings." The Air Force captain in charge of the inspection concluded that the drones could have been "a student project or maybe a model."

A subsequent investigation by the USAF determined that the drones' only possible mission was to take pictures.

Salman Pak

In a widely publicized September 12, 2002 briefing paper entitled, "Decade of Deception," the White House described "a highly secret terrorist training facility in Iraq known as Salman Pak, where both Iraqis and non-Iraqi Arabs receive training on hijacking planes and trains, planting explosives in cities, sabotage, and assassinations."

"This facility became a major part of the strategic influence marketing effort," Gardiner writes. Yet, in the invasion's aftermath, the Pentagon offered no "compelling evidence" that such a site existed.

American's Heroic Hostage

In an episode that recalled the creation of the "Old Shoe, the fictitious hero concocted by Robert deNiro's ace "perception manager" in the film "Wag the Dog," Washington's propaganda artists literally brought someone back from the dead.

Lt. Commander Scott Speicher had been shot down during the first Gulf War in 1991. In an attempt to generate sympathy and support for Bush's pre-emptive war, "intelligence sources" began circulating a bizarre new story to the US media. In what Gardiner called "a pattern typical of created stories," these unnamed sources started a rumor that Commander Speicher had not only survived but that he had somehow spent the
past decade trapped in an Iraqi prison.

Iraqi officials vehemently denied that they were holding Speicher or, for that matter, any Americans. When asked about the Iraqi denial at a press conference, Rumsfeld's response was calculatingly oblique. "I don't believe much the regime puts out," Rumsfeld stated.

In Gardiner's estimation, Rumsfeld's answer "was too clever not to have been formulated to leave the impression that [Speicher] was alive."

Gardiner was troubled by Rumsfeld's apparent disinterest in the truth but, as a former military officer, there was another question that bothered Gardiner even more. "Why didn't [Rumsfeld] consider what he was doing to Speicher's family?"

On January 11, 2001, Speicher's status was changed from KIA (Killed in Action) to MIA (Missing in Action). As the invasion forces gathered in the Middle East, Speicher's status was changed once more, to "captured." Navy officials who contacted ABC News reported that they had been pressured to make this change.

In January, "intelligence officials" continued to leak information to the media that suggested Speicher was still alive. In April, the secretive ministry of propaganda leaked a report that his initials had been found on the wall of a cell in Iraq. Gardiner found this leak particularly strange since "Military POW recovery personnel are very careful about releasing information that would cause false hope in families." The release of such information would also, obviously, endanger the captives.

Long after Baghdad fell and the media's attention had been drawn to the fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction, a reporter thought to ask Rumsfeld about America's lost hero. The secretary replied vaguely that there was "nothing turned up thus far that I could elaborate on that would be appropriate." On July 16, 2003, a Washington Times investigation belatedly concluded that there was "no evidence" Speicher had survived or had been held captive in Iraq.

Iraqi Troops in US Uniforms

On March 7, 2003, White House Deputy Director of Communications Jim Wilkinson, described as "a senior US official," released a story about Iraq's alleged acquisition of US and UK military uniforms "identical down to the last detail." Wilkinson claimed Iraqis in US camouflage were planning to commit battlefield atrocities to cast discredit on coalition troops.

On March 26, Pentagon spokesperson Victoria "Tori" Clarke embellished the story. Clarke told reporters that "we knew they were acquiring uniforms that looked like US and UK uniforms. And the reporting was ... [that Saddam Hussein would] give them to the thugs, as I call them, to go out, carry out reprisals against the Iraqi people, and try to blame it on coalition forces."

Two days later, Rumsfeld added a new twist, claiming that Saddam Hussein's troops planned to don UK an US uniforms "to try to fool regular Iraqi soldiers into surrendering to them and then execute them as an example for others."

There were never any reports of Iraq attempting such stunts. In his report, Gardiner concludes: "The way it was put by Jim Wilkinson (a name that keeps appearing in these questionable stories), it seems to fit a pattern of pre-blaming Iraq. It has the feel of being a created story."

Chemical Cluster Bombs

On March 10, 2003, administration officials attempted to discredit Hans Blix and UNMOVIC, the UN weapons inspection program. Administration officials told the Boston Globe that "Blix did not give details... of the possible existence of a cluster bomb that could deliver deadly poisons."

Presidential spokesperson Ari Fleischer claimed that the US was "aware of UNMOVIC's discovery of Iraqi production of munitions capable of dispensing both chemical and biological weapons." Videotape was released allegedly showing the Iraqis testing a cluster bomb for dispersing chemical weapons.

"The chemical cluster bomb story certainly didn't linger," Gardiner wrote. "It was around only a couple of days, but it still served its purpose at the time."

Few newspaper readers or TV watchers realized that there was never any evidence that Iraq had such technologically complex weapons. Indeed, the Pentagon had dismissed the possibility of Iraq ever developing these weapons during the first Gulf War.

WAGING WAR ON TV (March-April 2003)

The US and Britain:
The Axis of Disinformation

Before the coalition invasion began on March 20, 2003, Washington and London agreed to call their illegal pre-emptive military aggression an "armed conflict" and to always reference the Iraqi government as the "regime." Strategic communications managers in both capitols issued lists of "guidance" terms to be used in all official statements. London's 15 Psychological Operations Group paralleled Washington's Office of Global Communications.

In a departure from long military tradition, the perception managers even took over the naming of the war. Military code names were originally chosen for reasons of security. In modern US warfare, however, military code names have become "part of the marketing." There was Operation Nobel Eagle, Operation Valiant Strike, Operation Provide Comfort, Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Uphold Democracy and, finally, Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Operation TELIC

In the first days of the invasion, a US Marine Corps spokesman made a prophetic statement: "The first image of the war will define the conflict."

The attempts to control those "first images" were of overriding interest to the coalition's ministries of propaganda. Because it was believed that the city of Basra would quickly fall to the coalition troops, the "Battle of Basra" was heavily scripted long before the first soldiers even entered Iraq.

Marines were given food packets to hand out to Basra children. Journalists were to be bused to the newly captured city and TV crews were to be flown in to film the "liberated" citizens welcoming coalition soldiers with smiles and flowers. The UK had expected to lead the attack on Basra but, over Blair's objections, the US insisted on giving this plum assignment to the US Marines. Gardiner's sources in Britain told him that the sole reason was that the US "wanted to have their forces lead the victory into Basra."

When the residents of Basra refused to be "liberated," the carefully planned media event evaporated in a hail of gunfire. "It was about image," Gardiner marvels. "So much effort and money on image."

PSYOPS: The Darkest Face of Deception

"Strategic influence is aimed at international audiences (and maybe domestic audiences)," Gardiner explains, while PSYOPS (Psychological Operations) "are targeted at the bad guys."

The disturbing thing about this war, Gardiner found, was that "PSYOPS became a major part of the relationship between the governments of the US and the UK and the free press."

The record reveals how the Pentagon, State Department and White House all relied on PSYOPS techniques to manipulate the media as a psychological weapon against the Iraqis.

When Rumsfeld declared that "The days of Saddam Hussein are numbered," that the "regime is starting to lose control of their country," and that "The outcome is clear. The regime of Saddam Hussein is gone. It's over," he was really using the US media to send a message to the people in Iraq.

On March 24, 2003, British Air Marshall Brian Burridge told the press that the old regime was "crumbling" and encouraged Saddam's opponents to "develop greater levels of courage" and rise up against the dictator.

There was no better example of PSYOPS "distorting the free press with false information," Gardiner claims, than the alleged surrender of Iraq's 51st Division.

On March 21, Reuters (citing "defense officials, who asked not to be identified") reported the stunning news that an entire Iraqi division had surrendered en masse to US Marines in southern Iraq.

CBS News followed with a report the next day claiming that "an entire division of the Iraqi army, numbering 8,000 soldiers, surrendered to coalition forces." CBS's source: unnamed "Pentagon officials."

The surrender of the 51st became a major news story that truly seemed to confirm the Pentagon's predictions of a quick and easy victory. "It was told as if it were a truth," Gardiner writes. "It was told on both sides of the Atlantic. It had been coordinated. It was not true."

The story was intended to break the fighting will of the Iraqi army. On March 23, reporters from Agence France-Presse and Al-Jazeera TV managed to reach Col. Khaled al-Hashemi, the commander of the 51st. He replied in no uncertain terms that he not only had not surrendered but he would remain in Basra and "continue to defend the people."

The surrender of an entire division would have been a powerful blow to the will of the Iraqi army. The perception managers knew this. It is clear to Gardiner that this story "was not an intelligence failure. You would know if you have an entire division" suddenly surrendering. The story was a PSYOPS hoax.

Other PSYOPS hoaxes were to follow. Stories were leaked that Hussein had made secret plans to spirit his family out of Iraq to safety. It was rumored that Hussein had deposited $3.5 billion in Libyan banks. There was also the false story that Saddam Hussein had taken refuge in the Russian Embassy in Baghdad, an item which served to slime the Russians, who had refused to back Bush's pre-emptive invasion.

The White Flag Incidents

On March 24, Pentagon briefing officer Tori Clarke told reporters that "the Iraqi regime is engaged in other deadly deceptions. They are sending forces out carrying white surrender flags... The most serious violations of the laws of war."

There were only two alleged incidents cited to support this story. One appeared engineered and Gardiner now believes that the other incident was "fabricated to cover a very serious friendly-fire event."

On March 23, a Marine unit came under artillery fire near Nasiriyah in southern Iraq soon after some Iraqi soldiers had surrendered. Gen. Abizaid, the Deputy Commander of CENTCOM called the surrender "a ruse" to draw the Marines into an ambush. Gardiner finds this difficult to believe since it was well known that "the Iraqi Army had trouble coordinating artillery fire at all."

George W. Bush repeated the white flag story on April 5. By then, Bush should have been aware of the real cause of those Marine deaths. Gardiner reports that, according to the surviving Marines, nine of those killed "may have been killed by an A-10 [a US military aircraft] that made repeated passes attacking their position."

A report released in October 2003 indicates that these deaths were being investigated as a "friendly fire accident." At least one of the young Marines caught in the supposed Iraqi "ruse" was, in fact, killed by a round fired from an A-10 gun that hit him directly in the chest.

The other "White Flag" incident was a widely reported tragedy in which Iraqi soldiers shot civilians who were trying to flee to safety under a white flag. But the Iraqi soldiers were also killed, Gardiner notes.

Other white flag incidents were not mentioned by the Pentagon or Messrs. Bush and Blair. Gardiner recalls one "memorable picture of the war" that showed "British troops standing over two dead Iraqis in a foxhole: they had been holding up a white flag."

Iraq's 'Terrorist Death Squads'

To Gardiner, the "most serious transformation of language" involved Washington's directive to refer to Iraq's irregular troops as "terrorist death squads." The order apparently came down on March 25.

Renaming the Iraqi defenders "terrorists" appears to have been part of the strategic influence campaign since it served to connect the Iraqi fighters with "one of the major themes of Gulf II -- Iraq = terrorist = 9/11."

Gardiner stressed the role repetition plays in the "effective implementation of… creating memory in a population" and observed that "this theme was successful by US opinion polls" that show a majority of US citizens now believe, in the absence of evidence, that Iraq "was connected" to 9/11.

The Execution of Prisoners

At a joint news conference with Mr. Bush at Camp David on March 27, 2003, British PM Tony Blair informed the media that the Iraqis had executed two British prisoners. "If anyone needs any further evidence of the depravity" of Hussein's reign, Blair suggested, this was it.

Unfortunately, further evidence was exactly what Blair lacked. The very next day the sister of one of the dead soldiers told the Daily Mirror that her brother's colonel "told us he was not executed. We just can't understand why people are lying."

Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clarke also told reporters that the Iraqis had killed "Americans who had either surrendered or were attempting to surrender." This report turned out to be "unconfirmed."

A week after the British press had attacked the "executions" story as a total fabrication, and Blair's press spokesperson had been forced to admit that there was no "absolute evidence" to support the story, George W. Bush told the American Forces Press Service: "They have executed prisoners of war." Bush repeated the falsehood on April 5 and Rumsfeld echoed the lie on April 7.

The US press attempted to catch up to their British counterparts by questioning Rumsfeld on April 7. As usual, Rumsfeld's defense was the non-answer.

Reporter: Mr. Secretary, you stated flatly that American POWs have been executed. On what basis do you make that statement?

Rumsfeld: I think I said they have executed prisoners of war.

Reporter: Are you saying that there have not been American prisoners executed then?

Rumsfeld: I'm not saying that either. There may very well have been, but I'm not announcing that, if that's what you're asking... We do know that they executed a lot of prisoners of war over the years."

The Shula District Bombing

On March 29, an explosion in an open-air market in Baghdad's Shula District killed more than 50 Iraqi civilians. The Iraqi government condemned the attack and blamed it on coalition bombers. US military spokespersons tried to turn the blame back on Iraq, suggesting that the civilians were killed by Iraqi artillery or anti-aircraft rockets that went awry.

British journalist Robert Fisk reachned the site soon after the massacre and uncovered a 30-centimeter shard of shrapnel that showed the serial number of the weapon that caused the massacre. It was a HARM missile built by the US military contractor Raytheon.

On April 3, CENTCOM issued a new story claiming to have received "reliable information" that the Hussein regime was planning to bomb Shiite Muslim neighborhoods in Baghdad so that it could blame the damage on the US-UK coalition.

"The CENTCOM cover story came from Jim Wilkinson," Gardiner discovered. The British, however, refused to support this argument. They continued to claim (rightly, it now appeared) that no British bombs had caused the death and devastation in the Shula District.

US Lied about Attacks on Iraq's Power Grid

When the capital city of Baghdad was blacked out by a power failure during the April bombardment, Pentagon spokesperson Victoria "Tori" Clarke rushed to assure the world that "We did not have the power grid as a target. That was not us."

The facts would subsequently show that the US had targeted portions of the power grid. In the North, a special operations team staged an attack on the Hadithah Dam on April 1 or 2. Human Rights Watch documented at least two attacks on the power grid south of Baghdad "along Highway 6 [that] included a Tomahawk [missile] strike using carbon fibers."

The use of a sophisticated carbon-fiber weapons is significant since the deployment of these specialized devices required prior approval from Washington.

The "Rescue" of Jessica Lynch

The Pentagon's control over the news surrounding the capture and rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch receives a good deal of attention in Gardiner's report. "From the very beginning it was called an 'ambush'," Gardiner noted. But, he pointed out, "If you drive a convoy into enemy lines, turn around and drive back, it's not an ambush. Military officers who are very careful about how they talk about operations would normally not be sloppy about describing this kind of event," Gardiner complained. "This un-military kind of talk is one of the reasons I began doing this research."

One of the things that struck Gardiner as revealing was the fact that, as Newsweek reported: "as soon as Lynch was in the air, [the Joint Operations Center] phoned Jim Wilkinson, the top civilian communications aide to CENTCOM Gen. Tommy Franks."

It struck Gardiner as inexplicable that the first call after Lynch's rescue would go to the Director of Strategic Communications, the White House's top representative on the ground.

On the morning of April 3, the Pentagon began leaking information on Lynch's rescue that sought to establish Lynch as "America's new Rambo." The Washington Post repeated the story it received from the Pentagon: that Lynch "sustained multiple gunshot wounds" and fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldier... firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition."

Lynch's family confused the issue by telling the press that their daughter had not sustained any bullet wounds. Lynch's parents subsequently refused to talk to the press, explaining that they had been "told not to talk about it." (Weeks later, the truth emerged. Lynch was neither stabbed nor shot. She was apparently injured while falling from her vehicle.)

Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers let the story stand during an April 3 press conference although both had been fully briefed on Lynch's true condition.

"Again, we see the pattern," Gardiner observed. "When the story on the street supports the message, it will be left there by a non-answer. The message is more important than the truth. Even Central Command kept the story alive by not giving out details."

Gardiner saw another break with procedure. The information on the rescue that was released to the Post "would have been very highly classified" and should have been closely guarded. Instead, it was used as a tool to market the war. "This was a major pattern from the beginning of the marketing campaign throughout the war," Gardiner wrote. "It was okay to release classified information if it supported the message."

CONTINUED ...

Iraq War Marketing Campaign Exposed
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