CAIRO, April 10, 2006 (IslamOnline.net) – The US military has been for two years overstating the role of presumed Al-Qaeda operative in Iraq Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi through an extensive propaganda campaign that targeted both the Iraqis and the American people, a leading US newspaper revealed on Monday, April 10.

"Through aggressive Strategic Communications, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi now represents: Terrorism in Iraq/Foreign Fighters in Iraq/Suffering of Iraqi People (Infrastructure Attacks)/Denial of Iraqi Aspirations," according to an internal military document obtained by the Washington Post.

The US campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners.

The propaganda blitz has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts and Internet postings.

News of bribes by the Pentagon to Iraqi newspapers to print stories written by American soldiers to polish the tarnished image of the US occupation in the oil-rich country started popping up late last year.

The Los Angeles Times said in November 30 that articles have been written in English, translated into Arabic, by US military "information operation" troops and then given to Baghdad newspapers to print in return for money.

Other military documents show that US military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency, the American term for Iraqi resistance.

Although Zarqawi and other foreign "insurgents" in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," Col. Derek Harvey, a former top military intelligence officer in Iraq, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last summer.

In a transcript of the meeting obtained by the Post, Harvey said, "Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will -- made him more important than he really is, in some ways."

The US military documents explicitly list the "US Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.

One briefing slide about US "strategic communications" in Iraq, prepared for Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top US commander in Iraq, describes the "home audience" as one of six major targets of the American side of the war.

The "home audience" campaign included "selective leaks" to American journalists in order to be published by leading American newspapers.

One "selective leak" was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter based in Baghdad.

Filkins's resulting article, about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the Times front page on February 9, 2004, the Washington Post said citing the briefing slide.

Filkins told the Post he was skeptical about the document's authenticity then, and remains so now, and that at the time he tried to confirm its authenticity with officials outside the US military.

One internal briefing said that Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the US military's chief spokesman when the propaganda campaign began in 2004, had concluded that, "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date."

Kimmitt is now the senior planner on the staff of the Central Command that directs operations in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East.

Documents showed that the US military was playing on Iraqis perceived dislike of Zarqawi as a foreigner.

Military intelligence officials said one of the Zarqawi program's goals was to tie the Iraq war to Al-Qaeda.

An official investigation into the September 11 attacks found no links between Al-Qaeda and the regime of ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, refuting a claim exploited by the Bush administration to justify the invasion-turned-occupation of the oil-rich Arab country.

The New York Times reported last September that senior Al-Qaeda leader Ibn Al-Shaykh Al-Libi, now in US custody, was "intentionally misleading the debriefers" in making claims about Iraqi support for Al-Qaedas work with illicit weapons.

Terror experts said Zarqawi-Qaeda link is the making of the US intelligence.

They said a closer look at the operations of Al-Qaeda and the Zarqawi group reveals a great difference and a divergent ideology between both groups.

Osama Bin Laden, they say, had never resorted to the grisly beheadings or kidnappings of Muslims unlike Zarqawi.