yabanip

yet another blog about nothing in particular

May 18, 2011

Gadhafi’s New Weapon or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love NATO Propaganda

From a Spencer Ackerman story dated May 16th, 2011 in Wired we learn of That Evil Gadhafi's new villionous plan:

"Fill an inflatable boat with explosives. Crew it with mannequins. Send it out to sea in search of a humanitarian aid ship to destroy. Behold the desperate ingenuity of Moammar Gadhafi."

The origin of the story is a NATO report that Reuters reported just an hour prior to Wired magazine. It got picked up by very few legitimate news sources after this. The Voice of Russia. Gizmodo!, well there's some technology in there somewhere. The Daily Mail covered it in their inimitable sensational style of course, but its legitimacy as a news source is always doubtful.

Trouble is the always excellent Gary Brecher, AKA War Nerd beat NATO and/or Gadhafi to it by a good few weeks. So who is it that's reading The War Nerd for ideas? NATO press office or Bond Super Villian Gadhafi? Expect more outlandish stories of this nature as the need to paint a picture of Gadhafi as an evil menace isn't going to go away just yet. Obviously, he is somewhat of a mad man, we've all seen his ridiculous epic speeches, but this is the same guy we were happily selling arms to and doing plenty of business with till the North Africa revolution tipping point. In those days we wouldn't dare report anything too disparaging of our ally. But now we will tell stories and not even original ones just so the public will hate him as much as they did Hussein and Bin Laden. This legitimises all our military actions of course.