Outing the IO - EFFWIT & M1 Dump

Last year the Jesse MacBeth story broke.

It broke and went viral.

Not long after that Haditha hit the MSM.

Now it would appear a new Jesse MacBeth IO is breaking: The Scott Thomas IO.



Last year, Swedish Meatballs Confidential's call from scratch was that the Jesse MacBeth story was a slick IO designed to soften the pending MSM splash of Haditha. (A year later the following corroborating documents were unclassified) The inevitable trashing of MacBeth and the veracity of his claims would serve to mitigate the impact of any imminently pending, and substantive!, claims of atrocities perpetrated by U.S. troops in Iraq.

We wrote the following as a comment at the Protein Wisdom blog and it was subsequently picked up and converted into posts at yet other blogs. I'm reprinting it here again because of it's relevance to the IO exposé coming down the track at the end of this windy preamble:

(...and just to contextualize a tad for the quote below: So as to post examples of the predictable reactions from the blogosphere to the unmasking of the MacBeth fraud, SMC randomly chose a somewhat popular blog's reaction-cloud (Protein Wisdom) to exemplify our point - and we also rather spitefully ended up posting the comment below there just to rile up the spunk quaffers.

Needless to say, the folks squirting and swallowing the protein at PW weren't pleased to have been picked & painted as prime examples of unwitting yet abetting chumps. They went quite O'Reilly on us and finally Protein Wisdom deleted all trace of our ad hominem exchanges. Well, we knew PW was a puss. We were just rather unprepared for the blatant revelation that PW's Stud d'Oz Jeff Goldstein (he wrote a smug piece about the gullible anti-war left based on the MacBeth deflowering and that piece is what swept him into our crosshairs) was in fact but a Closet Wuss. (It's the closet bit we have lingering issues with. Anyhow, on to the quote.))

This video is definitely a must see as Goldstein's entertaining post and its trailing comments are a must read.

The MacBeth Op's been run like a classic info-op, setting up a straw man with which to mine against the return to areas of inquiry harboring legitimate claims and grievances. It's 101 stuff right out of one of my skullduggerous freshman textbooks.

Most of the responses here prove my point and are the very reactions sought after per operational design. It's successes like this, as demonstrated by your unrestrained glee of solving the puzzle, that makes info-ops like this so entertainingly rewarding to work with. Your very exposé, and its limited depth of comprehension, comprises the actual honey trap.

Those that take unbridled pride in the inevitable exposition of an enigma designed for easy elucidation, and draw far reaching and boisterous conclusions about the validity of everything else critical, are in fact the honeytrapped - not the reasonably gullible that originally clung to MacBeth's revelatory promise.

Judging by the blog's post and the ensuing comments I dare say that most everyone here now has sticky feet.

Thanks for making this line of work so easy for my successors.

Now, a day or so ago I stumbled upon the following fishy piece (per way of its crude baiting, re:chumming) by Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard.

My immediate kneejerk reaction was that I was staring down the barrel of a Jesse MacBeth redux, but that this time around the IO's operators didn't rely on the potency of the basic formula but instead hypergored the trap like the overly eager amateurish rookies (or was it that arrogance again?) they must be accused of being.

And, eventually, we reached the bones. All children’s bones: tiny cracked tibias and shoulder blades. We found pieces of hands and fingers. We found skull fragments. One private, infamous as a joker and troublemaker, found the top part of a human skull, which was almost perfectly preserved. It even had chunks of hair, which were stiff and matted down with dirt. He squealed as he placed it on his head like a crown. It was a perfect fit. As he marched around with the skull on his head, people dropped shovels and sandbags, folding in half with laughter. No one thought to tell him to stop. No one was disgusted. Me included.

So I got on the ham radio and gave EFFWIT a call (July 20):

- M1:
Hey, you think this could be another Jesse MacBeth "water softener" story for some nasty shit about to break down the road?

-EFFWIT:
Naw, I think the stories are pure BS. Not info-op material.

And I can't imagine what good this sort of stuff could do. Unlike the quite specific and believable allegations of young Jesse.

Your call on Jesse was pure gold, but I have real doubts about these incidents as being a harbinger of anything at all. If it's an IO, it's being run by monkeys.

-M1:
They are totally Apocalypse Now...something from Tales from the Crypt.

-EFFWIT:
The stories were just too perverse. Sometimes too much embellishment on a story can be a giveaway.

Then earlier today my ham radio squelched like a spooked Ozark pig:

-EFFWIT:
Your nose for detecting PSYOP-y skullduggery is truly astounding.

I had blithely scoffed at the possibilities of those outrageous allegations about the soldiers in Iraq that you sent me.

M1 was spot on correct with his call.

The amateurish exaggeration that so offended my sense of info-oppy propriety was an inherent part of the plan.

The narrative that is being spun revolves around the perfidy of the "Liberal" [sic, read NeoCon] magazine The New Republic having published a faked slanderous attack upon our troops in Iraq.

The entire liberal media and blogosphere is supposed to be painted as treacherous and is now supposed to watch what they publish about Iraq.

Goddamn brilliant. And great call, my friend. (I hadn't grokked that angle because I do not view TNR under NeoCon war supporter Marty Peretz as being liberal.

I just Wiki-ed TNR and discover that Peretz sold the mag in Feb 2007 to a group including the right-wing Asper family. He remains Editor in Chief.

Here's the giveaway about the info-op. Bloggers Raise Red Flags Over New Republic's 'Baghdad Diarist'

And that my friends is how we roll the occasional meatball. It's not a science. It's an artsy fartsy process and at times it gets considerably spunky.

Now the only question is: what bad news à la Haditha are we imminently in store to hear about?