Bush’s War on Perception; the bombing of the Golden Mosque

An Excellent, Long Article
(I recommend reading it in its entirety)
By Mike Whitney

"......Here's what we know: Less than 4 hours after the explosion, the Bush public relations team cobbled together a statement that the bombing was the work of Sunni extremists or al Qaida terrorists. But, how did they know? They didn’t have witnesses on the ground in Samarra and they’ve never produced a scintilla of evidence to support their claims. It may be that the administration simply saw the bombing as an opportunity to twist the facts to suit their own purposes?

After all, the incident has been a propaganda-bonanza for the Bush team. They’ve used it to support their theory that Iraq is "the central battle in the war on terror" and that "we must fight them there if we don’t want to fight them over here". It’s become one of the main justifications for the occupation; implying that the US military is needed as a referee to keep the warring factions from killing each other. It’s all just nonsense that’s designed to advance the administration’s political agenda......

The incident may well have been a "false flag" operation carried out by US intelligence agencies to provoke sectarian violence and, thus, reduce the number of attacks on American troops.......

In the first 30 hours after the blast, more than 1,500 articles appeared on Google News providing the government version of events without deviation and without any corroborating evidence; just fluff that reiterated the Pentagon’s account verbatim and without challenge. 1500! Now that’s a well-oiled propaganda system!......

The Golden Mosque; truth or psy-ops?

The Bush administration is very serious about controlling information. That’s why they launched the Pentagon’s Dept of Strategic Information. The military is now deeply engaged in "full spectrum dominance" of all information technologies. Consequently, "controlling the narrative" is more important than one might think. Propaganda is the cheapest and most effective way to control public behavior. The growth in public relations illustrates the importance that political leaders put on managing perception in a way that compels the masses to conform to an elite agenda. That’s why the administration has spent zillions on PR campaigns and inserted themselves into every area of human communication. They are forever looking for the right combination of patriotic and religious imagery that will get the public to march along in harmony.

The Bush administration has made some notable contributions to the traditional propaganda-paradigm. In fact, former Counselor at the State Dept, Philip Zelikow, (who was also executive director of the 9-11 Commission and author of the National Security Strategy NSS) is an expert in "the creation and maintenance of 'public myths’ or 'public presumptions’, which he defines as beliefs thought to be true although not necessarily known to be true with certainty, shared in common with the relevant political community (sounds like Rumsfeld)….He has taken a special interest in 'searing’ or 'molding’ events that take on 'transcendent’ importance and, therefore, retain there power even as the experiencing generation passes from the scene". ("Thinking about Political History" Miller Center report; winter 1999) "Searing’ or 'molding’ events that take on 'transcendent’ importance"?!? Like 9-11, for example?.....

The same pattern of terrorizing the public through "the application of extreme violence" has reemerged in Iraq with many of the same US leaders supervising the covert operations. The plan was clearly designed to eliminate the need for more US troops to provide security and, instead, aimed at "pacifying" the resistance through a well-coordinated and fully-funded campaign of terror.

The (predominantly) Shiite militias operating out of the Interior Ministry were armed and trained by the CIA and were used to secretly to carry out assassinations and torture of suspected "Sunni insurgents." .....

The Pentagon’s counterinsurgency strategy was developed long before the mutilated bodies of Sunni men began showing up daily bobbing along the Euphrates River. It’s part of a broader plan to dominate the entire region through military force. The purpose is to extend the Bush Caliphate--the "new world order"-- throughout the entire Middle East.....

Zelikow’s theories have provided a master-plan for shaping public opinion around "searing" events. He is right to assume that people will accept all manner of absurdities if they are assembled in the context of a larger catastrophe. Clearly, the Bush administration is venturing into uncharted waters, proactively fabricating "historical events" to create their own reality and, thus, support the narrow objectives of an elite agenda.

The destruction of the Golden dome Mosque bears the same bloody fingerprints as do the victims of the occupation’s unrelenting violence. The guilty parties may have escaped accountability so far, but when the smoke clears, we’ll know whose bombs they really were. "