Sweet piece of satire, The Iraqi Alamo, A CNN/CIA Scenario

[anarchy1999]

Enjoy comrades, it brought a few much needed smiles to me this am.

April 28, 2004

The Iraqi Alamo
A CNN/CIA Scenario
By GRAEME GREENBACK

CNN News

Updated: 05:25 p.m. EDT (21:25 GMT) April 26, 2004

Graeme Greenback reporting...

It was Sunday in Basra when I got the call. I'd blown into the this British-held city a few days before, when I got "the word" that the CIA was planning something "explosive" to "distract" public attention from all the furor "the wanted radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadrin" was raising in Fallujah and Najaf. And sure enough, just like in Saigon in 1954, the bombs went off and scores of innocent people, even little school children, were killed by the usual anonymous suicide bombers -- at least, that's what they told us to report in our dispatches.

That's how it works here in Iraq most of the time: our "journalistic" careers depend on our being where the sensational events are happening, so a few of us, like me, have "non-attributable" contacts that allow us to be at the right place at the right time. Most of the time we paint by numbers the picture that officialdom wants the wild wild West to see.

But we play a double game too, because sometimes the boys and girls at CIA Central haven't got their good ear to the ground. Which is why those of us worth our press passes cultivate our own sources ­ call them spies -- like Kahlil, my man in Baghdad. Kahlil was a senior counter-intelligence officer in Saddam's Republican Guard, but saw the writing on the wall and helped recruit a bunch of junior army officers over to the CIA before the U.S.-British-Israeli invasion. In return for services rendered, Kahlil was "detained" in Abu Ghoryab prison for a few weeks, so none of his former colleagues would suspect he was a double agent, and then he was given a satellite cell phone and released on his own recognizance. Unbeknownst to the CIA, Brits, and Israelis, Kahlil also works for Russians, the Kurds, and anyone else who can afford his retainer.

So yesterday, I was sitting at the British Officers Club in Basra, sipping a gin and tonic, when I got the call from Kahlil. Within moments I had retrieved my driver from the local Kasbah, and was tooling up the Highway of Death to Baghdad in my six-cylinder camel, headed for the story of the century.


http://www.counterpunch.org/valentine04282004.html

[anarchy1999]

1. Kicking up.

n/t