Today’s Times “democracy is our goal” headline comes just as the Washington Post
reports that the Times and other papers were fed propaganda from a secret military psy-ops program over the last couple of years conflating the role of Abu Masab al-Zarqawi in the Iraqi insurgency. The Post reports:
”[A] ‘selective leak’ about Zarqawi was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter based in Baghdad. Filkins’s resulting article, about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004. Leaks to reporters from U.S. officials in Iraq are common, but official evidence of a propaganda operation using an American reporter is rare.”
It’s rare because it’s illegal. The Pentagon isn’t supposed to target domestic news outlets. They are only officially allowed to spread lies to foreigners – you know, the people we’re delivering democracy to.