Here's a blatant keyword hijacking of "Ritter." As in, former UNSCOM weapons inspector and Bush administation critic Scott Ritter.
Scott is being displaced by a folkie named Josh now dialed in by Operation Mockingbird.
Ex-Marine Scott Ritter blasted the Bushies in the 1/24/07 edition of The Nation-
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/012907B.shtml
The Washington Post's Pentagon correspondent is being teamed up with folk rocker Josh RITTER and the two are being showcased on NPR's Talk of the Nation radio show today. I just heard it. They also 'gigged' together on Bill Maher's show.
I listened to the WPost's Pentagon correspondent tell of bringing Josh RITTER down to the WPost to show him around. This is some high-level propaganda and social engineering. The two also appeared together on Bill Maher's HBO talk show.
Keyword hijacking is all over the place. Extremely common and probably found to be effective due to the brain's mutual exclusivity tendency to latch onto first impressions which has been confirmed by research during the 1990s. But the use of decoys and parallel narratives has been going on since atleast the 1950s when the Pentagon's code for a nuclear weapons accident, "Broken Arrow," became first a movie and then a TV series, a western of course.
http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=5
COMING UP:
Jan. 29 · They are an unlikely pair, the tireless war reporter, and the young folk-rocker with the thoughtful, melancholy song about war. But, while writing his latest book, Thomas Ricks created a soundtrack to write by, including the music of Josh Ritter. Ricks joins us for a live performance by his friend, Josh Ritter.
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Arts & Culture: Author Thomas Ricks and Singer Josh Ritter
Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks discusses his book, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, and he is joined by singer-songwriter Josh Ritter who performs "Girl in the War."
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("Author?" Yeah, right. Ricks is an Operation Mockingbird Pentagon rep just like Bob Woodward. Remember, the cover story is 'mistake,' not 'war crime.'
-HMW)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2006/07/06/LI2006070600612.html
Military Beat: Thomas E. Ricks
About Thomas E. Ricks
Thomas Ricks has covered the U.S. military for the Washington Post since 2000. Until the end of 1999 he had the same beat at the Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter for 17 years.
He has reported on U.S. military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan and Iraq. He was part of a Wall Street Journal team that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2000 for a series of articles on how the U.S. military might change to meet the new demands of the 21st century. Ricks also was part of a Washington Post team that won the 2002 Pulitzer prize for reporting about the beginning of the U.S. counteroffensive against terrorism.
His book, FIASCO: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, was published by Penguin Press in July 2006.
Born in Massachusetts in 1955, he grew up in New York and Afghanistan and graduated from Yale in 1977.
* Fiasco Excerpts: In Iraq, Military Forgot the Lessons of Vietnam.
* One Unit's Aggressive Approach to Fighting the Insurgency.
A collection of his Washington Post reporting is below:
Thomas E. Ricks
Contact Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
1150 15th Street, NW Washington, DC 20071
pentagon@washpost.com
Discussion
FIASCO Washington Post staff writer Thomas E. Ricks was online on Monday, July 24 to discuss his new book and to answer reader questions.
General Affirms Anbar Analysis
The U.S. commander in western Iraq said he agrees with the findings of a pessimistic classified report recently filed by his top intelligence officer but also insisted that "tremendous progress" is being made in that part of the country.
(Now what does Scott Ritter have to say that makes Josh Ritter's folk rock so much more interesting to the WPost and NPR?)
from the 1/24/07 The Nation link above--
Stop the Iran War Before It Starts
By Scott Ritter
The Nation
Wednesday 24 January 2007
In April 2001 I was invited to Washington, DC, by a group of Republican Congressmen collectively known as the Theme Team. The subject was Iraq. It seems that the Theme Team, responsible for monitoring the ideological pulse of America, was somewhat perturbed that a self-described Republican and former Marine officer, not to mention a former UN weapons inspector, was trash-talking America's Iraq policy. While this sort of action might have been acceptable during the tenure of a Democratic President like Bill Clinton, it was not part of the grand design when it came to the presidency of George W. Bush.
The conference room was packed with more than seventy Representatives and their staffs. I provided an opening in which I stressed that the case being made against Saddam Hussein and Iraq, centered as it was on the issue of WMD, did not hold water. I chastised the Republican lawmakers with a warning: If they continued to support the policy of confronting Saddam's Iraq over a trumped-up charge, they would not only get America involved in a war it could not win but would end up destroying the credibility of the Republican Party, and turn control of the Congress, and eventually the Presidency, to the Democrats. There were questions asked, and answers given, and in the end most thanked me for what they called an "illuminating" meeting.
Then they proceeded to do nothing.
