« Hamas-Israel prisoner exchange? | Main | Tim Cook, RIP »

August 04, 2006

Comments

steve laudig

Am having difficulties with the link to Cox's article. I end up here "http://www.w3.org/Protocols/"

aardvark

not sure why - it works for me. do you have trouble with pdf files?

b

Link does not work for me either. It has a douple "http://" but even when I remove that I go to W3.org and don“t get the pfd

Kevin Drum

The URL is wrong. The "http" is in there twice.

KCinDC

b, when you remove the "http:// " at the beginning you still have to add the missing colon in the "http//" that follows. What you're ending up doing is a Google search for "http", which is why you end up at that W3C page. Here's the correct link.

oscar

The Cox paper was originally disclosed yesterday by Secrecy News. You can link directly to it there.

the aardvark

link fixed, thanks - and I added the Secrecy News link too

Amy H

Is this really such a surprise? I thought it would be obvious that an occupying power would try to do this...and earlier reporting (such as when the LAT broke the story last Dec. about the USG paying Iraqi news outlets to run pro-US pieces) hinted at it, I recall. What's interesting is that you have an Army major (?) basically saying so publicly while the war is still going on. AND what an utter failure/PR disaster these efforts turned out to be...

the aardvark

Yes, but remember what the Lincoln Group project scandal was all about: they did not clearly label the "good news" stories they were paying to plant in the Iraqi press as coming from CENTCOM - which violated (at the least) the basic rules of the game. This would be far worse, IF it is the case that these newspapers, radio and TV stations were not clearly labeled as US military outlets. The key question to ask here is whether Major Cox is describing media outlets which clearly bore an American military label, or were they presented as authentic Iraqi media. If it's the former, no problem - other than their ineffectiveness. If it's the latter, that would seem to be a very, very big problem. But the report just doesn't make that clear - hence my posing this as a question rather than as any kind of definitive expose.

Jamal

There's plenty of Iraq vets back in the country now and I'm sure many who were involved in the units behind these alleged operations. If somebody can figure out how to contact a bunch of them and present them with this publicly available report, seems that asking them to corroborate or deny would be the first most direct thing to do.

Green Zone Cafe

I can corroborate it - CERP and DFI money was used to support Iraqi newspapers and local broadcasters. There was seed and sustainment money paid.

Rex Brynen

Another take on the Iraq information operations issue:

http://www.cagle.com/news/IraqNews/images/thompson.jpg

The comments to this entry are closed.

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Blog powered by Typepad
Analytics