Monday, June 25, 2007

It’s All al Qaeda All The Time

Where have all the Iraqi insurgents gone? How about those remaining Baathist loyalists? The Shiite militia? They’ve been magically turned into al Qaeda!

Glenn Greenwald, writing for Salon.com notices a newly emerging pattern throughout the MSM. He notes the fact that recent reports have been referring to enemy casualties as "al Qaeda". Such as... "today in Iraq (x) numbers of al Qaeda fighters were killed"…as if they were wearing name tags.


He quotes from McClatchy news agency:
U.S. forces continue to battle Shiite militia in the south as well as and Sunni insurgents in Baghdad. Yet America's most wanted enemy at the moment is Sunni al Qaida in Iraq. The Bush administration's recent shift toward calling the enemy in Iraq "al Qaida" rather than an insurgency may reflect the difficulty in maintaining support for the war at home more than it does the nature of the enemy in Iraq.

Greenwald writes:
This sudden shift in describing the "enemy" in Iraq as "Al Qaeda" is the by-product of a very familiar information-producing system: namely, the administration formulates narratives, the President announces them, his top officials and military commanders recite them endlessly, and then establishment.
Of course, most reporters in Iraq, spending their time in the relative security of the Green Zone, are happy to pass along whatever is spooned to them. The talking points are free, too.

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1 Comments:

At 8:00 AM, Blogger Lumberjack said...

And it isn't even like "al Qaeda in Iraq" are the real "al Qaeda".

The most organized group of insurgents in Iraq renamed themselves to take advantage of the notoriety gained by Bin Laden & Co.

Prior to the war, Al Qaeda weren't welcome in Iraq.

 

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