Pentagon lies to the public in order to Dupe it

re: www.abovetopsecret.com...

Thats a thread about how the pentagon admits that it basically manufactured the "Zarqawi mythos", making this guy appear to be much more of a threat than he was, in order to "galvinize" public opinion in favour of the iraq war.

In this thread, I am wanting to get some ideas about how this sort of information will affect US politics. People are already calling for rumsefeld to step down, if the public has a healthy reaction to being lied to, perhaps there will be more calls for that?

Also, the US has some elections comming up before long. If we consider that the government is admiting that it uses tax money (cf. 23 million for this misinformation campaign alone) to propagate lies in the american media, are people going to be voting in favour of candidates calling for decreases in taxes?

Will public trust in the military as a whole fall? Surely this entire programme wasn't carried out by Don Rumsfeld and his secretaries, indeed, it must've invovled a large number of officers and staff within the military. Will public 'support' for the troops wane, if the troops are perceived as lying to the public? I doubt that that would happen, the vast majority of soldiers were themselves duped by this, being on the look out for al-qaida master minds and dark evil cells, whereas the insurgency in iraq might be much more of a citizen's affair. So I at least hope that support for the troops doesn't go down because of this.

When peopole were talking about releaseing abu garaib photos, there were calls for the execution of the people wanting to release the photos, because, the logic went, that will support the enemy (and, agian, recall now that the enemy is not what we've been told, that was a misinformation campaign), and supporting the enemy is an act of treason.

It seems like conducting a 23 dollar media campaign that distracts attention from the real enemy on the battlefield, or distorts the image of the enemy, would be providing support to them, no? Perhaps Rumsfeld and everyone involved in this operation are the ones that should be publically shot?

What do you think?

Well you need a motive and a perp don't you if a crime is committed? Then who runs the pentagon and why would they do this? Easy place to start really. For myself there is no big deal here since I know that every war has been 'sold' to the public... and I'm talking about all wars known in history. So why would this one be any different is beyond me.

THere;'s a difference between making a case, and making up lies in order to convince people to accept your product. We all know that different marketers of milk are going to have different adds for their product, thats fine. We also know that half the crap sold in informericials is, well, crap that doesn't work. We know it, so we don't buy it, despite the lies.

Problem here is, most people look at the pentagon and government as one of the sellers of milk, they're not lying, maybe they're bragging, but heck, ya need milk anyway.

When in reality, this crew is like those freaks that sell hair out of a can.

Originally posted by Nygdan
re: www.abovetopsecret.com...
Thats a thread about how the pentagon admits that it basically manufactured the "Zarqawi mythos", making this guy appear to be much more of a threat than he was, in order to "galvinize" public opinion in favour of the iraq war.

Not surprising at all; I'm only a 9th grader, but even my human geography text book talks about several countries doing this. There is an extensive section about centripetal forces in which a government lies or exaggerates threats.

"Still another unifying force can come from a real or perceived external threat. When a country is confronted by an aggressive neighbor or by the loss of something vital, or even just simply find the need to have something done, the people are likely to rally tto the national cause when external threats are exaggerated or made up. Some governments have taken advantage of this tendency by creating artificial crises to divert attention from internal national problems"

That's just a small excerpt from the book; but it pretty accurately describes what the Pentagon and our government (U.S.) tend to do in general. Not saying it's right, but it's what they do... Surprises me that they have the guts to admit it, though.