Lincoln's Planted Stories

The Independent has published examples of some of the fake "newspaper articles" that the Lincoln Group paid to place in Iraqi newspapers. Andrew Buncombe shows how the articles were full of claims that contrasted sharply with reality on the ground at the time they were published. "Furthermore," he writes, "it has been alleged that quotations contained within these reports and others - attributed to anonymous Iraqi officials or citizens - were routinely made up by US troops who never went beyond the perimeter of the Green Zone. What seems clear is that, taken by themselves, these reports would provide an unbalanced picture of the situation inside Iraq where ongoing violence wreaks daily chaos and horror."