Who are You Gonna Believe: Me or Your Own Lying Eyes?
The term is “conspiracy theorist”.
When I said what I thought of as the obvious, that the dropping of the statue of Saddam Hussein was staged, and spurred by the US Military more than the Iraqi civilians, what was I indulging in? Playing in the realm of conspiracy theories.
It took over a year for the mainstream press to deliver the news to anyone who was still paying attention.
The biggest problem with the piece of propaganda was that the propaganda was aimed at the wrong audience: draping the statue with the American flag goes over well with the American public — sort of — but leaves the “liberated” Iraqis a bit cold, and leaves a lasting impression toward anyone in the Arab World who wishes to yell “Imperialism!”
Oddly enough, I was never willing to go so far as this source suggests, that the crowd consisted of a lot of Iraqi National Congress People…
… until just about now. But that’s just a gut feeling.
The same thing happened with Jessica Lynch. But, it seems that most people — shy of the Fox News / FreeRepublic set — picked up on that one rather quickly. Here, we get the curious case where when Jessica Lynch finally said that the gummint made a lot of it up, a lot of the FreeRepublic crowd actually turned on her. “Support the Troops”, indeed.
Part Two coming later.
“This is all Theater!” — Saddam Hussein.
July 16th, 2004 at 11:20 am
The Control Room – a recent documentary about Al Jazeera – includes some interesting footage of the Saddam statue toppling and the pre-packaging of the Jessica Lynch story.
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I’ve been really puzzled by some of the different revelations – the statue toppling was staged, CIA reports were based on out of date and un-vetted sources. I thought that these were things that we knew already.