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by notahacker 3447 days ago
I think it's more than a little unlikely the US government was so obsessed with making the case for war it launched (and successfully concealed from the public) a massive campaign to troll online forums without even being able to do basic stuff like make the official case for war a bit more competently and "discover" some WMDs to vindicate themselves afterwards.

It's not like there's any reason to believe that the millions of US citizens who passionately believed in the necessity of bringing down the "Axis of Evil" or just enjoy trolling liberals would recuse themselves from online debate in the build up to the war
1 comments
ConfuciusSay02 3447 days ago
Influencing opinion online is many orders of magnitude easier to accomplish than faking WMD's in Iraq.
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notahacker 3447 days ago
Paying enough people to troll enough web forums for there to be a non-trivial possibility the OP was interacting with several of them without being rumbled doesn't really seem orders of magnitude more difficult than paying a couple of "weapons experts" to lie for you, or getting some material your military possesses into a territory your military controls.
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ConfuciusSay02 3447 days ago
They tried that mate. But it turns out it's hard to find credible weapons experts that are total hacks with no qualms about lying. When it became clear that their chosen expert was going to expose the fact that there were indeed NO WMD's, he promptly died shortly before his report was due to be published: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert)

By comparison, posting on online forums can be done very easily by anyone of any character.

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