War on Terror propaganda preceded and pre-framed military action

Evidence

Mark Twain deftly wrote, “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.” The Bush administration took a page out of Twain’s book and unleashed an aggressive propaganda blitz before any bullets were fired or any boots landed on foreign soil. The facts were the first victims of the War on Terror, and the disfiguration of the facts primed the terrain for a new crusade waged in the name of democracy but staged to broaden American empire. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 215

Categorization

• XREF: Lines up with the reader’s broader media-propaganda thread on how frames are set before facts surface. — connects to: Framing a civil war as foreign defense can legitimize aggression — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 308; War-on-terror ideology theory derives from Cold War totalitarianism theory; Denouncing ISIS without denouncing US violence legitimizes the war on terror (+4 more)