US military plays up role of Zarqawi

The US military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, according to internal military documents published by the Washington Post and officials interviewed by the newspaper. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The documents, published on Apr. 10, state that the US campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners. US authorities claim some success with that effort, noting that some Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists. For the past two years, US military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "US Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign. Some senior intelligence officers believe Zarqawi's role may have been overemphasized by the propaganda campaign, which has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, internet postings and at least one leak to a US journalist. Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, KS, last summer. In 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 military's propaganda program largely has been aimed at Iraqis, but apparently has spilled over into the US media. One briefing slide about US "strategic communications" in Iraq, prepared for Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top US commander in Iraq, describes the "home audience" as one of six major targets. That slide, created by Casey's subordinates, does not specifically state that US citizens were being targeted by the effort, but other sections of the briefings indicate that there were direct military efforts to use the US 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 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." No special conditions were placed upon him in being briefed on its contents, he said. He said he was skeptical about the document's authenticity then, and remains so now, and so at the time tried to confirm its authenticity with officials outside the US military. The 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. Filkins detailed the contents of the letter and its significance matter-of-factly for eight paragraphs. Only then did he introduce any doubt, suggesting that possibly it could have been "written by some other insurgent… who exaggerated his involvement." After a one-sentence brief mention, Filkins went directly to: "Still, a senior United States intelligence official in Washington said, 'I know of no reason to believe the letter is bogus in any way.'" The story continued for another 1000 words without expressing any other doubts about the letter–which was found on a CD-ROM and was unsigned. William Safire, in a column for the Times published a few days later entitled "Found: A Smoking Gun," declared that the letter "demolishes the repeated claim of Bush critics that there was never a 'clear link' between Saddam and Osama bin Laden." 'No attempt to manipulate the press' "There was no attempt to manipulate the press," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the US military's chief spokesman when the propaganda campaign began in 2004, said in an interview with the Washington Post. "We trusted Dexter to write an accurate story, and we gave him a good scoop." According to Army Col. James A. Treadwell, who commanded the US military psyops unit in Iraq in 2003, US military policy is not to aim psychological operations at US citizens. "It is ingrained in us: You don't psyop Americans. We just don't do it," said Treadwell. He said he left Iraq before the Zarqawi program began but was later told about it. With satellite television, email and the internet, it is impossible to prevent some carry-over from propaganda campaigns overseas into the US media, said Treadwell, who is now director of a new project at the US Special Operations Command that focuses on "trans-regional" media issues. Such carryover is "not blowback, it's bleed-over," he said. "There's always going to be a certain amount of bleed-over with the global information environment." The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military documents. "Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response," one US military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed three methods: "Media operations," "Special Ops 626" (a reference to Task Force 626, an elite US military unit assigned primarily to hunt in Iraq for senior officials in Hussein's government), and "PSYOP," the US military term for propaganda work. One internal briefing, produced by the US military headquarters in Iraq, said that Kimmitt had concluded that, "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date." Kimmitt is now the senior planner on the staff of the Central Command that directs operations in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. In 2003 and 2004, he coordinated public affairs, information operations and psychological operations in Iraq–though he said in an interview with the Post the internal briefing must be mistaken because he did not actually run the psychological operations and could not speak for them. "There was clearly an information campaign to raise the public awareness of who Zarqawi was, primarily for the Iraqi audience but also with the international audience," Kimmitt said. A goal of the campaign was to drive a wedge into the insurgency by emphasizing Zarqawi's terrorist acts and foreign origin. "Through aggressive Strategic Communications, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi now represents: Terrorism in Iraq/Foreign Fighters in Iraq/Suffering of Iraqi People [Infrastructure Attacks]/Denial of Iraqi Aspirations," the same briefing asserts. The same day the Post article was published, Major General Rick Lynch, the chief military spokesman in Iraq, issued a statement denying the report and said that Zarqawi remained a grave threat. "A recent article citing a military briefing from 2004 has called into question the threat that Abu Musab Zarqawi and al-Qaida in Iraq pose to Iraq, dismissing it as 'propaganda'–nothing could be further from the truth."