Thread by @jaraparilla

THREAD: Once upon a time there were three brothers in #Iraq who wrote a pro-US blog welcoming the illegal invasion of their country... #Fullbright

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Their names were Omar, Mohammed and Ali Fadhil. Their blog was called Iraq The Model (inspired by Neocon claims that the Iraq invasion would become a model for US expansion in ME).

The blog was wildly popular with the pro-war crowd and heavily featured in US corporate media. The Fadhil brothers even got invited to meet President Bush in the White House (thanks to Paul Wolfowitz).

In March 2007, Bush publicly quoted a @WSJ article by the Fadhil brothers as proof that everything was going great in Iraq. bushout.blogspot.com.au/2007/03/wsjs-n… Predictably, both the WSJ.com and whithouse.gov links to that story & Bush's remarks no longer work.

Luckily, for the historical record, President Bush's stupid remarks are saved on my old Bushout blog. bushout.blogspot.com.au/2007/03/wsjs-n…

The funny thing is that three years earlier, when the Fadhil brothers went to meet Bush, youngest brother Ali called bullshit. bushout.blogspot.com.au/2007/03/omfg-b…

Sad to say, the Spirit Of America bogus charity which helped send the Fadhil brothers to Washington still appears to be active. spiritofamerica.org Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of…

And of course there was layer upon layer of corporate bullshit set up to hide the real identities of those who pushed this pro-war propaganda. I tracked it down and exposed it, but nobody cared. It was too complex.

Well, kinda. For example, #Fairfax @smh ran a story with far less details that what I had blogged: smh.com.au/news/World/Geo… Likewise, @Reuters, @nytimes , @AP, @RawStory , @dailykos and others totally failed to scrape the surface of the real story: pro-war propaganda.

Well at least NYT's Sarah Boxer (now
@Sarah_Boxer?) investigated Ali Fadhil's claims that it was all a massive hoax: nytimes.com/2005/01/18/art… She was backed up by ME scholar @JriCole: juancole.com/2004/12/iraqth…

Blogger @jeffjarvis - who helped set up Iraq The Model - called Juan Cole "pond scum" and screamed that my reckless allegations had foolishly endangered the Fadhil brothers' lives. LOL

Shortly thereafter, US forces staged a (mock?) raid on the Fadhil brothers' home: iraqthemodel.blogspot.com.au/2007/03/midnig… The brothers made a point of not posting their own photos even though they had already published their pics as part of a new political party.

Anyway, that's all ancient history now, isn't it? Nobody cares. What's interesting is that Omar and Mohammed Fadhil got #FULBRIGHT scholarships to the USA. Poor brother Ali of course got nothing.

Also interesting for historical purposes is how @BBCNews branded me and maybe a couple of other guys at the site "conspiracy theorists" for claiming it was all propaganda: news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_ea…

(Very few anti-war people would even bother posting comments at the site because it was so gung-ho military: I regularly got death threats against myself and my family.)

Anyway, the Fadhil brothers moved on to @PJMedia_com and kept publishing crap at @WSJ for a while till it all became too ridiculous.

But looking back, what gets to me is how I - a humble blogger with 3 kids and a fulltime job - was able to figure out and document all this obvious shit but the global corporate media remained deliberately ignorant, even when President Bush was quoting and hosting these guys.

Which takes me back to this, the first time I even asked for money to keep holding these bastards to account: dengwatch.blogspot.com/2007/07/suppor…

As I remember, one guy offered me $20. Thanks, Bukko.

CONCLUSIONS:

1. The system is broken.

2. We are ruled by criminals.

3. Money buys elections and wars for profit.

4. Everything is fucked.

You are welcome.

PS: The Arctic already melted.

/endrant