Cuban Propaganda Agency Issues Phony Blackwater Report

The Cuban government's Soviet-built propaganda agency, Prensa Latina, is running a false report that the US has announced that Blackwater will withdraw its security operations from Iraq.

"US Announces Blackwater Pullout of Iraq," Prensa Latina says in a headline today. Google News is giving it prominence, having pulled down most other reporting on Blackwater as questions continue about the objectivity of its search engine. Most of the recent positive reporting on Blackwater from the past few days no longer appears on Google News.

The Cuban article is difficult to read because its Mexico-based server is slow and the site requires readers to register.

A banner on the top right of the Prensa Latina page champions the cause of the "Miami Five," a group of Cuban infiltrators and saboteurs currently in federal US prison. Prensa Latina calls the five "anti-terrorists [who] battle for justice."

Prensa Latina is the Castro version of the old Soviet TASS "news" agency created during the Cold War. Why it's reporting a false story about Blackwater at this time remains to be seen, but we're putting down this marker to keep track.

(Note: For the record, The Nation magazine, which has sponsored Jeremy Scahill's writing on Blackwater, has been a strong sympathizer with the Castro regime for decades.)

More 'Unusual' Spin from the Associated Press

The Associated Press is a mixed bag in terms of the objectivity of its writers, so one always has to be careful when reading AP stories.

The latest cause for caution is headlined, "US Mulls Unusual Tactic as Charges Loom," by the AP's Matt Apuzzo (pictured) and Lara Jakes Jordan.

Apuzzo and Jordan breathlessly report that some people in the Justice Department are considering use of the "Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988" as an inspired flash of brilliance in a long-shot effort to convict Blackwater security guards involved in the September 2007 incident at Nisoor Square in Baghdad.

It's another non-story that AP axe-grinders crank out to blow more smoke about Blackwater, leading people to think there's now some kind of drug connection. There's nothing "unusual" about the 1998 law, incorporated into the federal statute called 18 U.S.C. § 924(c).

That law makes it a crime to use any gun in connection with a "violent crime." Of course, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 was a Reagan-era law designed to crack down on drug traffickers. Now, some in the Justice Department want to twist the intent of the law so they can go after Blackwater.

The law in question provides legal beagles of the world a whole a la carte smorgasbord of extra charges to heap on an accused person in order to try to scare them into making a plea.

Abusing 18 U.S.C. § 924(c) in order to scare people of forcing a plea is nothing "unusual."

If Apuzzo and Jordan at AP had looked at the Nazario case (the Marine accused of killing Iraqis) that they trotted out in their very own article, they would have promptly seen that the charge was used there.

In fact, they could have checked out just about any federal court case involving allegations of “violent crime” and they’d have found The Anti-Drug Abuse Act charge at work.

Want a statistical measure of how “new” and “unusual” is this count? Well, in 1990 it was used 4,000 times. In 2000 it was used 5,000 times.

If our intrepid mudslingers weren’t up to going down to the courthouse and digging through legal cases (usually they're content to let trial lawyers and political hacks feed them with dirt), even though they wanted to spout off about them, they could have found out how "unusual" is use of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c) by going to Wikipedia. An entry there describes 18 U.S.C. § 924(c) as “a frequently used section of the federal criminal code.”

But we can't expect those two AP reporters to be careful or objective. Apuzzo admitted that he was a "D" student in college before he decided to become a journalist. And if AP stuck to professional journalism standards, it would never hire someone like Jordan to cover contentious political issues because her husband is a career Washington political operative.

AP's Jordan Is Wife of Partisan Political Operative

When you read Associated Press stories, pay close attention to the byline. Some AP reporters are pretty objective and try to get things right, even if we might not like the message. Others from AP sound a lot like partisan political hacks.

Washington correspondent Lara Jakes Jordan is one of them. Her reporting uniformly undermines almost anything to do with fighting terrorism, and she's been sloppy (to be polite about it) in her reporting on Blackwater.

Small wonder: Her husband, Jim Jordan, is an accomplished partisan political operative. Jim ran Senator John Kerry's political operations for five years, serving as manager of Kerry's presidential campaign.

Veteran newsman Joseph Farah commented on Lara Jakes Jordan's partisan political connection a few years back. He said, "When I got started a quarter century ago, there was an old newsroom saying that went like this: 'I don't care if you sleep with elephants as long as you don't cover the circus.'

"Mrs. Jordan violated that old newsroom ethic. She abdicated her right to cover the circus because she was sleeping with an elephant – or, in this case, a donkey."

Jordan, he wrote, is a "politically motivated reporter with a big ax to grind. . . . The largest news-gathering organization in the world, the Associated Press, owes the American people an apology for continuing to assign Lara Jakes Jordan to politically sensitive stories."

Makes you wonder whether she's part of the trial lawyers' highly partisan effort to discredit the company. A PR firm in Washington, Levick Strategic Communications, brags that it has planted "thousands" of stories in the press for its clients - clients that included captured enemy combatants in Guantanamo. Trial lawyers hired Levick to trash Blackwater. Jordan has been out front covering both the Gitmo detainee issue and Blackwater. It would be interesting to go back and check if Jordan has served as a mouthpiece for Levick's paid propaganda.

Terrorist Propaganda Targets Contractors

WIRED reports that the Islamic Army of Iraq (IAI), a Sunni breakaway faction of al Qaeda, has released a video specifically targeting the contractors who protect US diplomats and provide key services to American uniformed personnel.

Sophisticated propaganda operations - such a slick website in English, Spanish, French and Arabic designed for Western media outlets and a strong presence on YouTube - seem to be hallmarks of the Islamic Army of Iraq and other new insurgent groups.

Noah Shachtman of Wired.com writes:

The video starts on March 31, 2004 -- a day when Iraqis, not American contractors, were the ones acting barbaric. Four Blackwater employees were killed by locals after getting lost in Fallujah. Their bodies were burned, dragged through the streets, and hung from a bridge.

The video goes on to claim that "crimes against Iraqis happen on a daily basis done by unleashed barbarians dressed in security uniforms, criminals protected by law and instructed by the Bush administration to murder for the sake of killing." As this blog and others committed to the truth have worked hard to show, this is not at all the case. But the propaganda pieces of the IAI and others have been picked up and believed by the American media and extreme elements of the anti-war movement and the political left. The consequence? Terrorist vitriol against those serving the US government has now become "common knowledge."

This latest video from the IAI shows "that security contractors are not being targeted just as an extension of targeting US forces but rather as a direct target," says Ben Venzke, the CEO of IntelCenter, which meticulously tracks insurgent and jihadist propaganda.

While attacks on contractors are nothing new, this video is one sign that the threat profile for contractors has continued to increase and that groups like IAI are specifically looking for ways to attack contractors such as Blackwater both on the ground and in the information war space.

Bizarre group criticizes private security contractors

Private security companies are facing international criticism again. It's the same old myths, recycled again: accountability, loopholes, ete. What's interesting is where the accusations are coming from.

Jose Luis Gomez del Prado heads the United Nations Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries to Impede the Right of Peoples to Self-Determination (UNWGUMIRPSD?). He's bringing forward this latest batch of criticism in a report he just issued, and demanding action.

And to whom is he bringing these claims and calling for action? The UN Human Rights Council, whose membership includes such bastions of human dignity and freedom as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Cuba and Nicaragua. Yes, the same body that wants to withdraw the special experts, representatives and rapporteurs who investigate human rights abuses in Cuba, Belarus, Burma and North Korea.

In submitting his report to the group, the UN official said, "The activities of private military and security companies take place in a grey zone, in which human rights violations with impunity are likely to occur."

This "news" is brought to us by Xinhua, an international propaganda arm of the Chinese government.