syria did it

* i was watching lehrer and they pointed to this story "in the nytimes":
"U.S. Accuses Syria of Meddling in Lebanon: Syria has not fully withdrawn its intelligence forces from neighboring Lebanon and is interfering with elections there, perhaps even organizing political assassinations, the Bush administration alleged Friday."
and they showed the paper and the headline on the screen and also the nytimes masthead. it kinda stuck out a bit like these things do, so i had a quick look and the article is actually an AP article. surely the lehrer team knows the difference.

the article is the usual AP propaganda - but 2 questions: a) why did lehrer try to borrow the remnants of the nyt's credibility (there are over 100 outlets that have carried the AP story according to a search on the title at news.google) b) why is the egadministration ramping up the story now?

you'll remember weeks (months?) back that i said i could see the noise machine sowing the seeds on this story and that i was worried that they'd keep the meme alive until the lebanese election and then thered be a terrorist attack and the egadmin could blame it on the syrians. it all looked so obvious. i hope those predictions dont become true. its the 3rd of 4 voting days on sunday.

if we assume away the now-absurd possibility that the egadmin folk actually believe what they say, then we need to ask why they are turning up the heat on this 'story'. cos, ya see, if they talk up the threat and nothing happens, then it undermines both the credibility of their intelligence (generally) and the premise that syria is evil - ie there are costs for them ramping a story and getting it wrong. on the other hand, imagine the propaganda benefits of pre-seeding the idea that 'syria did it' if there actually was a terrorist attack.

an alternative view is that the radmin might be trying to build up the sense of a threat so that then they can say that the lebanese voters want freedom and are brave and we'll see inked fingers in the color du jour or some other media-generated faux-differentiator.

lets hope its the alternative