"They brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house"

I heard a man who had been in Abu Ghraib prison say: ‘The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house.’

I heard that the Lincoln Group, a public relations firm in Washington, had received $100 million from the Pentagon to promote the war. As well as bribing Iraqi journalists, often with monthly stipends, the Lincoln Group was writing its own articles and paying Iraqi newspapers to publish them. I heard that the articles, intending to have local appeal, had titles such as ‘The Sands Are Blowing toward a Democratic Iraq’ or ‘Iraqi Forces Capture al-Qaida Fighters Crawling like Dogs’. I heard a Pentagon spokesman, Major General Rick Lynch, say: ‘We do empower our operational commanders with the ability to inform the Iraqi public, but everything we do is based on fact, not based on fiction.’ I heard him quote the al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri: ‘Remember, half the battle is the battlefield of the media.’

I heard that the average monthly war coverage on the ABC, NBC and CBS evening newscasts, combined, had gone from 388 minutes in 2003, to 274 in 2004, to 166 in 2005.

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=WEI20051230&articleId=1676

lol

I heard that Iraq was now ranked with Haiti and Senegal as one of the poorest nations on earth. I heard the United Nations Human Rights Commission report that acute malnutrition among Iraqi children had doubled since the war began. I heard that only 5 per cent of the money Congress had allocated for reconstruction had actually been spent. I heard that in Fallujah people were living in tents pitched on the ruins of their houses.

I heard that this year’s budget included $105 billion for the War on Terror, which would bring the total to $300 billion. I heard that Halliburton was estimating that its bill for providing services to US troops in Iraq would exceed $10 billion. I heard that the family of an American soldier killed in Iraq receives $12,000.

I heard that the White House had deleted the chapter on Iraq from the annual Economic Report of the President, on the grounds that it did not conform with an otherwise cheerful tone.

Within a week in January I heard Condoleezza Rice say there were 120,000 Iraqi troops trained to take over the security of the country; I heard Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat from Delaware, say that the number was closer to 4000; I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘The fact of the matter is that there are 130,200 who have been trained and equipped. That’s a fact. The idea that that number’s wrong is just not correct. The number is right.’

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=WEI20051230&articleId=1676