BobHarris.com - Name Calling as a Military Tactic

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Name Calling as a Military Tactic

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Monday, 25 June 2007

Glenn Greenwald notes that thanks to the mass media adoption of more nonsense from the White House, everyone we fight in Iraq is now "Al-Qaeda."

Never mind that Al-Qaeda-aligned foreigners have never comprised more than a tiny minority of combatants. But demonize and blur the motives of everyone else, and you get to look righteous by comparison, especially if nobody knows any better.

It's a desperate move by the White House, indicating awareness of how untenable the U.S. position has become. And it's appalling that so much of the media is still going along for the ride.

Greenwald's second post on the subject is here.

On a related subject, Think Progress points out a galling new Newsweek poll: 41 percent of Americans now believe incorrectly that Saddam was involved in 9-11. That number is rising, not falling. Four years after the invasion, reality does not yet intrude on the minds of two Americans in five.

For all our enjoyment of CNN's mislocation of Afghanistan, we also know that CNN has not made that mistake before, and they almost certainly will not again.

But Greenwald catches them repeating the blatant Al Qaeda distortion, an absolute falsehood they and the rest of the media continue to propagate.

Thanks to such rubbish, plus our own comfortable complicity, at least 40 percent of Americans still have no functional understanding of a four-year-old war.