The U.S. military command in Iraq was forced to retract showpiece statements made this week that they had killed a high profile Al Qaeda leader due to the fact that they had already announced the killing one year ago.
A military spokesman acknowledged the mistake after it was called to his attention by The Examiner. He said public affairs officers will be more careful in announcing significant kills.
Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner announced to the media on Monday that Kamal Jalil Uthman, also known as Said Hamza, thought to be the chief of al Qaeda in Iraq military operations in Mosul, had been “recently eliminated”
“He planned, coordinated and facilitated suicide bombings, and he facilitated the movement of more than a hundred foreign fighters through safe houses in the area.” Bergner said.
Yet reporters recognized the name and soon realised that the same person had been “eliminated” on a previous occasion. Rowan Scarborough reports:
When The Examiner pointed out that Uthman’s death had been announced twice, a command spokesman said in an e-mail, “You are correct that we did previously announce that we killed him. This was a roll up to show an overall effort against [al Qaeda in Iraq]. We can probably do a better job on saying ‘previously announced’ when we do long-term roll ups to show an overall effort.”
It has become clear that the military is disseminating propaganda in a blatant attempt to artificially inflate the success of what is in actual fact a total disaster. “Eagerness” to be successful does not excuse lying to the media about operations in Iraq.
In addition, this is not the first time so called Al Qaeda in Iraq leading figures have been killed more than once.
Like some kind of mythical god or deity, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the supposed former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, was apparently killed no less than five times by coalition forces.
He was first killed in the Sulaimaniyah mountains of northern Iraq, then he was killed in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, followed by a death during Operation Matador near the town of Qaim on the Syrian border, then he was killed, along with his mentor, Osama bin Laden, in the besieged city of Fallujah, and finally met his fifth demise in a U.S. air raid north of Baghdad in the town of Hibhib near Baquba.
Before al-Zarqawi met his final demise it also seemed as if he had magical powers that enabled him to escape multiple captures.
Inquisitive questions into just how al-Zarqawi had managed such feats were answered last year when it was revealed via leaked internal military documents that al-Zarqawi was a neocon pet propaganda program. His role and actions had been consistently artificially magnified according to officers involved in the program.
When some senior intelligence officers went public with fears that Zarqawi’s role might have been overemphasized by the propaganda campaign, the Pentagon conveniently released a video showing al-Zarqawi wearing tennis shoes and fumbling with a U.S. M-249 squad automatic weapon, unable to operate the gun and appearing to be a total buffoon.
Just months after that pictures of Zarqawi’s dead body were widely broadcast and the operation was retired.
In a previous propaganda ploy by the U.S. military command in Baghdad, it was revealed that Iraqi newspapers were paid to carry positive news about U.S. efforts in Iraq.
The latest example of Al Qaeda in Iraq propaganda shows that the military is still desperately trying to placate a media and a population that is sick and tired of funding the globalist empirical operation in the Middle East.
