Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 3 - 2004 (mainly Iraq)
U.S. Team in Baghdad Fights a Persistent Enemy: Rumors by Thom Shanker 
New York Times, March 23, 2004 U.S. Team in Baghdad Fights a Persistent Enemy: Rumors By THOM SHANKER BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 22 - The American project to build a stable democracy in Iraq has encountered many obstacles. But perhaps the most elusive enemy is an old phantom called rumor. Less than 24 hours after a bombing in central Baghdad that tore the facade off the Mount Lebanon Hotel, the rumors began circulating in the marketplaces and teahouses: that the hotel was demolished not by a bomb, as the Americans maintained, but by an errant American missile. Or, the whispers had it, the terrorist attack was actually an assassination attempt, because one hotel resident was said to be a relative of the man who had identified the hideout of Uday and Qusay Hussein, two of Mr. Hussein's sons, in Mosul last summer. More chatter: Mr. Hussein's Baath Party, far from defeated, was even now operating from a secret exile headquarters in London and planning more such attacks ahead of the June 30 transition to a sovereign Iraqi state. Those are just a few of the rumors collected by the staff of The Baghdad Mosquito, a daily intelligence document that chronicles the latest street talk in the Iraqi capital, however ill founded, bizarre or malevolent. The Mosquito's staff includes 6 American intelligence analysts, 2 Arab-American translators and 11 Iraqis. One of the Iraqis is a doctor and one a university professor, but several come from some very tough neighborhoods. They are Sunni and Shiite and Kurd and Christian. Some of the women wear traditional head scarves; others work with heads uncovered. The Mosquito began last fall after American military leaders realized that rumors themselves had become a security problem, and decided to fight back. It is distributed via e-mail to an elite group of military officers and policy planners and is posted on the military's classified Web server. Under Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi state became an industry of untruth, where rumors often consigned people to the torture chambers, and propaganda was presented as fact. Believing almost nothing, Iraqis turned by the millions to the base currency of all who live in closed societies: the whispers of unsanctioned truth. Throw in the natural suspicions now raised by the presence of an occupying power, and you have an almost ideal hothouse for rumors and gossip. Seven days a week, a staff of Iraqis and Americans compile and analyze local press and satellite television reports. And once a week, in what has become required reading for senior American officials in Baghdad and a devoted readership in Washington, The Mosquito produces an exclusive collection of rumor, gossip and chatter called, "What's the Word on the Streets of Baghdad?" The name may sound vaguely metaphoric for a report concerned with buzz, but in truth, employees said, it was named for the swarm of insects that terrorized the office last summer. "We want all the stuff they're saying," said William H. Putnam, the project director. "The good and the bad. We want to understand what we're dealing with." Mr. Putnam, a former military intelligence officer, now an Army reservist here on contract as director of the Mosquito project, said his assignment was "to measure the effectiveness of what the coalition does." "How do you do that? You can read the newspapers and listen to what satellite TV channels are saying." Just as important, Mr. Putnam says he realized, you can listen in on the talk of ordinary Iraqis. The American civilian occupation bureaucracy is often criticized by Iraqis for hiding behind the 13-foot concrete blast walls surrounding its headquarters. In such isolation, those critics say, the coalition authorities have little grasp of Iraqis who live in what the Americans call the Red Zone - Baghdad beyond the Americans' gates. In effect, then, the team's role is to fly over that divide and catch the amorphous, shifting sense of public angst and private hope that characterizes an Iraq emerging from dictatorship. One of the problems they face is that against all odds, some of the street talk proves to be true. For much of last year, for instance, the word on the street was that Mr. Hussein had evaded capture by living low, having jettisoned his security entourage, and was riding in taxis. Sure enough, when American forces captured him in December outside Tikrit, a taxi was parked nearby. As a result, almost no tale is too outlandish to be believed. Consider the following item, which made the pages of the latest Mosquito: American commanders, supposedly humiliated by a rising death toll, were seen throwing the bodies of American soldiers into lakes and rivers all across Iraq, especially troops who had been identified as having no next of kin. (A similar rumor is making the rounds on the Internet.) More credibly, almost everybody worries about civil war, and that, too, was reported in the journal, which is published by the intelligence arm of the military's joint task force in Iraq. With the growing number of killings of Iraqis who work with the Americans, they operate in a climate of fear. Few will tell anyone outside their immediate families about their job, and none agreed to be quoted by name. At the journal's most recent meeting, an Iraqi staff member said Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, suspected by the occupation authorities of organizing a string of deadly bombings, would already have been captured by Iraqi security forces had he not cut an amnesty deal with Polish troops near Hilla, or so he had heard. No, said another, that is not true. It was Bulgarian soldiers who intervened. The Mosquito's buzz has already helped refine the information campaigns being run by the military and occupation authorities here, said a senior officer. "These people, after living 35 years under a very brutal regime, allow us to better understand what really are the concerns of the citizens on the streets of Baghdad," said Brig. Gen. Mark P. Hertling, assistant commander of the First Armored Division, which is responsible for the security of Baghdad and central Iraq. General Hertling said The Mosquito's reports helped the division fine-tune advertisements, posters and billboards that focus on new Iraqi security forces. "The feedback we received from The Mosquito was especially helpful in our design of a campaign countering the belief that all Iraqi police officers are corrupt and work contrary to the service of the citizens," he said. The Mosquito also gathered wild negative rumors about the interim constitution, which was signed early this month by the 25 members of the Iraqi Governing Council. One of its main findings was that many of the document's sharpest critics appeared not to have read it - a fact that General Hertling said assisted the division in producing an Iraqi version of the Federalist Papers, an explanatory document to counter misunderstanding and apprehension. |