[Mb-civic] Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi
Jordanian Painted As Foreign Threat To Iraq's Stability

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 10, 2006; A01

The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the 
role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military 
documents and officers familiar with the program. 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 state that the U.S. campaign aims to turn Iraqis against 
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike 
of foreigners. U.S. authorities claim some success with that effort, 
noting that some tribal Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists.

For the past two years, U.S. 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 "U.S. 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 an American 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, Kan., 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 long-term threat is not Zarqawi or religious extremists, but these 
former regime types and their friends," said Harvey, who did not return 
phone calls seeking comment on his remarks.

There has been a running argument among specialists in Iraq about how 
much significance to assign to Zarqawi, who spent seven years in prison 
in Jordan for attempting to overthrow the government there. After his 
release he spent time in Pakistan and Afghanistan before moving his base 
of operations to Iraq. He has been sentenced to death in absentia for 
planning the 2002 assassination of U.S. diplomat Lawrence Foley in 
Jordan. U.S. authorities have said he is responsible for dozens of 
deaths in Iraq and have placed a $25 million bounty on his head.

Recently there have been unconfirmed reports of a possible rift between 
Zarqawi and the parent al-Qaeda organization that may have resulted in 
his being demoted or cut loose. Last week, Defense Secretary Donald H. 
Rumsfeld said that it was unclear what was happening between Zarqawi and 
al-Qaeda. "It may be that he's not being fired at all, but that he is 
being focused on the military side of the al-Qaeda effort and he's being 
asked to leave more of a political side possibly to others, because of 
some disagreements within al-Qaeda," he said.

The military's propaganda program largely has been aimed at Iraqis, but 
seems to have spilled over into the U.S. media. One briefing slide about 
U.S. "strategic communications" in Iraq, prepared for Army Gen. George 
W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describes the "home 
audience" as one of six major targets of the American side of the war.

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.

Filkins, reached by e-mail, 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 U.S. military.

"There was no attempt to manipulate the press," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, 
the U.S. military's chief spokesman when the propaganda campaign began 
in 2004, said in an interview Friday. "We trusted Dexter to write an 
accurate story, and we gave him a good scoop."

Another briefing slide states that after U.S. commanders ordered that 
the atrocities of Saddam Hussein's government be publicized, U.S. 
psychological operations soldiers produced a video disc that not only 
was widely disseminated inside Iraq, but also was "seen on Fox News."

U.S. military policy is not to aim psychological operations at 
Americans, said Army Col. James A. Treadwell, who commanded the U.S. 
military psyops unit in Iraq in 2003. "It is ingrained in U.S.: 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.

"When we provided stuff, it was all in Arabic," and aimed at the Iraqi 
and Arab media, said another military officer familiar with the program, 
who spoke on background because he is not supposed to speak to reporters.

But this officer said that the Zarqawi campaign "probably raised his 
profile in the American press's view."

With satellite television, e-mail and the Internet, it is impossible to 
prevent some carryover from propaganda campaigns overseas into the U.S. 
media, said Treadwell, who is now director of a new project at the U.S. 
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 program was not related to another effort, led by the 
Lincoln Group, a U.S. consulting firm, to place pro-U.S. articles in 
Iraq newspapers, according to the officer familiar with the program who 
spoke on background.

It is difficult to determine how much has been spent on the Zarqawi 
campaign, which began two years ago and is believed to be ongoing. U.S. 
propaganda efforts in Iraq in 2004 cost $24 million, but that included 
extensive building of offices and residences for troops involved, as 
well as radio broadcasts and distribution of thousands of leaflets with 
Zarqawi's face on them, said the officer speaking on background.

The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military 
documents. "Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response," one U.S. 
military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed three methods: "Media 
operations," "Special Ops (626)" (a reference to Task Force 626, an 
elite U.S. military unit assigned primarily to hunt in Iraq for senior 
officials in Hussein's government) and "PSYOP," the U.S. military term 
for propaganda work.

One internal briefing, produced by the U.S. 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 
the internal briefing must be mistaken because he did not actually run 
the psychological operations and could not speak for them.

Kimmitt said, "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."

A goal of the campaign was to drive a wedge into the insurgency by 
emphasizing Zarqawi's terrorist acts and foreign origin, said officers 
familiar with the program.

"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.

Officials said one indication that the campaign worked is that over the 
past several months, there have been reports that Iraqi tribal 
insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists, especially in the culturally 
conservative province of Anbar. "What we're finding is indeed the people 
of al-Anbar -- Fallujah and Ramadi, specifically -- have decided to turn 
against terrorists and foreign fighters," Maj. Gen Rick Lynch, a U.S. 
military spokesman in Baghdad, said in February.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/09/AR2006040900890.html?referrer=email
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