FEBRUARY 2003

The Media's Pro-War Propaganda Bubble


MEDIA ALERT: LIE AND RELY
January 29, 2003


"If war is to be averted, then Saddam Hussein and his scientists have to do much more to satisfy the United Nations." (ITN, 11:00 News, January 24,
2003)

So argues ITN's Kevin Dunn. It is certainly one interpretation of the situation - the one favoured by the US and UK governments. Another interpretation - shared by much of the world's informed and unbiased opinion - is that Iraq and its scientists are powerless to avert war for the simple reason that the US and UK governments are determined to find a reason to attack. Most people can see that Bush/Powell/Blair/Straw are "losing patience" with Iraq because it is failing to cooperate in supplying an excuse to attack.

This interpretation is supported by the arrival of 150,000 troops in the Gulf, which is like the judge erecting the gallows, preparing the burial plot and engraving the headstone while the jury is still deliberating. The media interpretation of this - again shared by the US/UK governments - is that the
judge is merely "turning the thumbscrews" to ensure a fair trial.

Opinion polls show that 70% of the British public feel that no good case has been made for war on Iraq. Figures from the US suggest that opposition to an invasion with US ground troops is at 43%, up from 38% in a poll taken January 10-12 and up from 20% in a poll taken in November. Support for an invasion is at 52%, down from 56% in January and 74% in November. 56% say UN weapons inspectors should be given more time to complete their search for banned chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. These are remarkable figures from a country subjected to the most sophisticated and intensive system of propaganda ever devised.

Nevertheless the media tirelessly attempt to keep us sealed in a bubble of pro-war propaganda. Iraqi generals aside, anti-war voices are almost totally excluded - no one in the media is interested in stepping outside the bubble to explore why the German and French public and politicians, and huge numbers of countries and people around the world, view the US/UK position as a farcical cover for an oil grab. Virtually the entire world is shaking its, but not our media.

Instead, journalists - whose job, above all, is to avoid suggesting to the public that there is anything very wrong with the status quo - continue to portray Blair as a benevolent figure struggling to do 'the right thing': Thus, "Putting the world to rights: a busy day in Downing Street", proclaims a headline in the liberal Independent (January 10, 2003). As though sampling from a Goebbels primer on propaganda, the Independent describes wistfully how Blair "spent much of yesterday advancing the cause of world peace with a series of high-profile Downing Street guests".

Historian Mark Curtis reveals just how deceptive this claim is:

"Since 1945, rather than occasionally deviating from the promotion of peace, democracy, human rights and economic development in the Third World, British (and US) foreign policy has been systematically opposed to them, whether the Conservatives or Labour (or Republicans or Democrats) have been in power. This has had grave consequences for those on the receiving end of Western policies abroad." (The Ambiguities of Power, Zed Books, 1995, p.3)

.The Guardian has also nostalgically recalled Bill Clinton's years as a force for peace in the world. His Strategic Command (STRATCOM) advised that "part of the national persona we project" should be as an "irrational and vindictive" power, with some elements "potentially 'out of control'". Donald Rumsfeld's recent threat to use nuclear weapons in Iraq is doubtless designed to enhance this "persona". A recent report in The Independent claimed that a six-page "doctrine" (sic), titled the National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction, calls for "pre-emptive action against potential enemies" including a "readiness to launch a nuclear strike against a foe threatening to use weapons of mass destruction against America or its forces." ('US warns Iraq it will get nuclear response', Andrew Buncombe, The Independent, 12 December, 2002)

Beside this kind of entrenched realpolitik - the understood need to maintain control through fear and force; in short, terrorism - the individual qualities and motivations of our 'leaders' are trivial in the extreme.

As we know from our dealings with journalists they inhabit a world of their own making - everything they see around them suggests that they are basically telling the truth. They are confirmed in their view by the fact that other journalists have created the same view - so they must all be right. They really believe it. But they believe it because they can't look outside that worldview to see another forbidden world.

John Pilger sums it up:

"An accounting of the sheer scale and continuity and consequences of American imperial violence is our élite's most enduring taboo." (Beyond September 11: An Anthology of Dissent, edited by Phil Scraton, Pluto Press, London, 2002, p. 21)

If you don't want to see, you won't see. If you don't see, you can believe that what you do see is all there is. This is the art of self-deception - we all do it to a greater or lesser extent. But journalists are masters of the art. At best, uncomfortable facts can be hinted at, such as when a recent BBC report referred to Henry Kissinger as "one of the United States' best known statesmen [who] was seen by some as tainted not only by his business dealings, but also by his involvement in murky periods of the country's history." (BBC news online, 14 December, 2002)

Ordering the "secret bombings" of Cambodia, at the cost of some 600,000 civilian lives, according to the CIA, and complicity in a conspiracy to overthrow democracy in Chile - these are "seen by some" as "involvement" in a "murky period" of history.


Racking Up The "Frequent Liar Miles"

Because the truth of US/UK motivation is nowhere to be seen, the argument continues to rage on whether Iraq is somehow managing to hide its weapons of mass destruction, as if this had anything to do with anything. Thus, an anonymous UK government spokesman says: "'We know the stuff is there. Whether the UN team can find it is a different matter.'" ('Blair: war can start without UN arms find', Kamal Ahmed and Peter Beaumont, Ed Vulliamy and Suzanne Goldenberg, The Observer, January
26, 2003)

Suddenly, the whole logic of inspections - previously demanded and pursued with great vigour by the US/UK - is rejected, for essentially the same reason that three-year-olds throw the pieces of a board game across the room when they lose.

Unmentioned is the fact that the endgame in 1998 - in which the destruction of the final 5-10% of Iraq's WMD could have been peacefully played out - was deliberately obstructed by the US which had no intention of giving Iraq the clean bill of health that would have required the lifting of sanctions. Unmentioned is the possibility that Iraq would then, as now, have abandoned all WMD aspirations and allowed any amount of monitoring if the West agreed to lift non-military sanctions. Has this possibility been raised even once in the media? And yet the refusal to lift sanctions, no matter how much Iraq cooperated between 1991-1998, was the major stumbling block that prevented successful completion of the arms inspection programme.

The BBC's Fergus Walsh reassures us, there's "no conspiracy or deliberate 'filtering' my end - no-one asked me or told me what to put in the piece". (Email to Media Lens, January 28, 2003) We don't doubt it - it's the reason Walsh is doing the job he's doing.

As US press critic George Seldes wrote in 1938:

"'The most stupid boast in the history of present-day journalism is that of the writer who says, 'I have never been given orders; I am free to do as I like'... No one needs to instruct the editor of a magazine dependent on cigarette-ad revenue not to launch a crusade against the tobacco industry." (Quoted FAIR, Extra! November/December 1995)

The deeper deception is the whole re-definition of what is meant by a country's capacity for producing weapons of mass destruction (WMD). We surely do not mean a country's ability to hide a few short-lived battlefield biological and chemical weapons in the sand (no one of a sound mind is
suggesting that Iraq possesses nuclear weapons) - an imprecise and limited addition to conventional arsenals even in the best of circumstances. By WMD capability we surely mean the large amounts of infrastructure - research facilities, laboratories, industrial and arms factories - required to supply a country with serious WMD capability. But because these were all demolished in the 1990s, and because war is the goal now, Iraq as a country is being treated as a giant individual passing through customs - the issue is not a national WMD production capacity, but the possession of even tiny remnants of its former capacity. This is common sense gone mad; it is, in short, an excuse intended to lead to a desired outcome.

Three striking features of our society are being starkly revealed by the current crisis:

1) Mainstream politicians will distort common sense and deceive the public without limit so long as they know they will not be publicly corrected by the media.

2) Mainstream journalists have unlimited reservoirs of faith in the essential benevolence and sincerity of our leaders, no matter how cynical and corrupt their arguments, motives and allies.

The combined result of these two factors is, as American writer Dennis Hans writes, that politicians know they are free to "lie and rely" on the media to cover for them. Thus, George Bush is happily racking up his "frequent liar miles", most recently with his tragi-comic claim of newly discovered links between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

3) The first two features are in dramatic collision with the public's inherent rationality and common sense, such that large numbers of people are seeing through the crazed political/media version of world events.

'Liberating' Iraq

This collision poses a real and bewildering problem for journalists: how to continue their traditional role of framing the world in terms conducive to the preservation of the status quo without appearing to be stark staring mad. Consider, for example, the erratic reporting of Martin Woollacott. In his latest Guardian article, Woollacott writes, reflecting the propaganda needs of the day:

"[I]t is necessary to be as hard on many of the opponents of war as on its proposers, as well as to clear away the misleading idea that evidence that Saddam is concealing weapons of mass destruction is at the centre of the argument. It is at the centre of the manoeuvring, yes, but not of the
argument. Among those knowledgeable about Iraq there are few, if any, who believe he is not hiding such weapons. It is a given." ('This drive to war is one of the mysteries of our time - We know Saddam is hiding weapons. That isn't the argument', Martin Woollacott, The Guardian, January 24, 2003)

It is "a given", Woollacott writes. Can this be the same Martin Woollacott who wrote last September:

"If the views of the former UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, are sound this danger may be remote, for they suggest that Saddam has little left in the way of weapons of mass destruction, and hardly any means of delivering what he has... It is precisely because he is not now a real threat to the US, nor a real ally of al-Qaida, and nor, probably, in possession of usable weapons, that war is feasible... War is only feasible because Iraq isn't a threat to the US."? ('A diplomatic fix will only be acceptable if it humiliates Saddam', Martin Woollacott, The Guardian, September 20, 2002)

"Even if the war is a low-casualty success, and the liberation of the Iraqi population can be counted as a boon, the dangers arising from a consequent American attempt to put into practice a master plan for the region are clear."

Well the liberation of Iraq certainly would be counted a boon. But where is the evidence that it will happen? We might consider the example of Iraq's neighbour, Iran, and the gory effects of US intervention there in the 1950s, '60s and '70s.

Or we could take a glance at the US's Central and South American neighbours - beneficiaries of continuous US intervention over hundreds of years. What has 'liberation' meant for the people of Chile, Colombia, Panama, Peru, Nicaragua, Brazil, Honduras, Mexico, Guatemala, and on and on?

Finally, as Woollacott writes, it is "a given" that Iraq has WMD because the knowledgeable know what they know. Just as they knew what they knew last September when Blair announced the government's arms dossier. Alas, a short paragraph at the end of Richard Norton-Taylor's recent article quietly informs us:

"The government, meanwhile, said yesterday that UN inspectors had visited all the sites mentioned in its intelligence-backed dossier but had not found 'any signs' of weapons of mass destruction. "Nor were there any signs of 'programmes for their production at the sites,' Mike O'Brien, the Foreign Office minister, told the Labour MP Harry Cohen. "Mr O'Brien added that, given the advance publicity the government gave to the sites, 'it is not entirely surprising that the inspectors failed to uncover any evidence'". ('Scepticism over papers detailing chemical warfare preparations', Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian, January 25, 2003)


It is of course noticeable that exposures of government propaganda receive a fraction of one percent of the coverage afforded to the initial declarations, dossiers and 'terrorist arrests'.

When confronted with their role in maintaining the propaganda bubble, BBC news managers reply, with apparent sincerity, "it is absolutely the BBC's role to be the objective and calm voice, reporting what we know to be fact and exploring the various viewpoints involved", such that the BBC will "air a full range of views" (emails from Sambrook to Media Lens, January 10 and
23, 2003).

The reality is breathtakingly different. When was the last time viewers saw Tony Benn, George Galloway, John Pilger, Denis Halliday, Hans von Sponeck, Noam Chomsky and all the rest saying a word on BBC1 News? Or any peace activist that wasn't a member of the demonised Iraqi government? Could it be any more obvious that they are all completely drowned out by the oceans of air-time devoted to Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, Jack Straw and the rest?



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IllustrationGeorge Grosz - A Pillar of the Community

The Administration Builds Up Its Pretext for Attacking Iraq
Fighting Words
by Roger Trilling   Village Voice, Week of May 1 - 7 2002

It is now clear that the Bush administration is determined to force a "regime change" in Baghdad no matter how severe the crisis in the Mideast. Or how much the Arabs protest: At the Arab summit in March, both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia formally reconciled with Iraq, an emphatic signal that they regarded Saddam as less of "a threat to the region" than an attack by the U.S. would be.

The ostensible reason the administration regards Saddam as a threat is his possession of weapons of mass destruction—that's what the switch from "war on terror" to "axis of evil" signified. But dismantling Saddam's arsenal is a job for UN arms inspectors. And there are many in Washington who worry that they may not be up to it.

"Are you still committed to trying to get UN weapons inspection teams back into Iraq?" CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked Vice President Cheney. "Because, as you know, some critics . . . have said that would be a waste, that they're just going to give a runaround."

"The issue's not inspectors," Cheney replied. "The issue is that he has chemical weapons—and he's used them."

Last month, the administration's effort to garner public support for its go-it-alone posture got a boost from an unlikely source. In its March 25 issue, The New Yorker ran an 18,000-word piece by Jeffrey Goldberg about Halabja, a Kurdish town where, on March 16, 1988, Saddam is accused of massacring his own citizens with poison gas.

The scenes of devastation were severe, and historically nuanced in the retelling. "The Iraqis, knowing that gas is heavier than air, and that it would penetrate cellars effectively, drove everybody into their basements by launching a conventional artillery attack," Goldberg said on NPR's Fresh Air. "They were stuck in their basements." He concluded: "The way it was described to me [was] really as gas chambers."

There were other dire details—a woman succumbing as she suckled a baby she hoped would survive the fumes; people rendered blind, mad, or infertile; even a plague of poisonous snakes. "Saddam Hussein's attacks on his own citizens," Goldberg wrote, "marks the only time since the Holocaust that poison gas has been used to exterminate women and children."

Though he says it wasn't meant that way, Goldberg's piece—entitled "The Great Terror"—provided an eloquent set of images for the Bush administration's Iraq policy. "It's a devastating article," Cheney said on Meet the Press. "Specifically, its description of what happened in 1988 when Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against the Kurds in northern Iraq, against some of his own people. It demonstrates conclusively what a lot of us have said: that this is a man who is a great danger to that region of the world—especially if he's able to acquire nuclear weapons."

The president agreed. A few days earlier, he had invoked the story during his trip to Mexico. "It details about his [Saddam's] barbaric behavior toward his own people," Bush said. "And this is a man who refuses to allow us to determine whether or not he still has weapons of mass destruction—which leads me to believe he does."

Ever since September 11, the administration has been trying to hook Iraq into the "war on terror." Initially, a claim was advanced that suicide pilot Mohammed Atta had met with Iraqi operatives in Prague. Then Iraq was floated as a source of the anthrax attacks. Finally, the "axis of evil" speech accused Saddam of stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Although few doubt that Saddam has such armaments, none of these charges was ever substantiated. But by repeatedly citing the New Yorker article, Bush and Cheney were saying that they didn't need to prove a thing. What Saddam did in Halabja is reason enough to oust him.

It's quite a stretch to predicate a threat of war on an incident that took place 14 years ago—especially if there's a possibility that it didn't happen the way Goldberg described it.

Halabja was attacked in the closing weeks of the Iran-Iraq War, when two Kurdish guerrilla groups sided against Saddam. It lies just inside Iraq's border with Iran, and the Iranians had mounted an offensive in the region. Halabja was thus contested territory. That many people died that day is beyond dispute. The question is, Who killed them?

When pictures and stories flooded the world press—reporters had been helicoptered in by the Iranians, who saw Halabja as a PR opportunity—the reaction was automatic. Most reporters, well aware of Saddam's long history of poison gas use against the Iranian army, accepted their hosts' explanation: Saddam had gassed his own people.

The Reagan-Bush White House, which had tilted decisively toward Saddam in the war, denounced Iraq immediately. But the State Department wasn't so sure. "There are indications that Iran may also have used chemical artillery shells in this fighting," spokesman Charles Redman told the press a week after the attack. "We call on Iran and Iraq to desist immediately from the use of any chemical weapons."

Redman may have been relying on a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report filed the day of his announcement. It stated that "most of the casualties in Halabja were reportedly caused by cyan[o]gen chloride. This agent has never been used by Iraq, but Iran has shown interest in it. Mustard gas casualties in the town were probably caused by Iraqi weapons, because Iran has never been noted using that agent."

In time, studies were commissioned from and produced by the military and intelligence communities, which found that both armies had used gas. One report, "Lessons Learned: The Iran-Iraq War," was prepared by Dr. Stephen Pelletiere and Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Johnson of the U.S. Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute. Its findings came out of a two-day conference attended by U.S. defense attachés who had served in the Middle East, as well as by military and political analysts from both the CIA and the DIA who had monitored the war. Because neither Iran nor Iraq had allowed reporters or foreign military observers at the front, the report drew on field reports, open source materials, and "signal intelligence"—phone and radio messages sent by the warring armies, and picked up by the National Security Agency.

Most of the report's chapter on chemical weapons is devoted to Iraqi military tactics, but one sentence stands out: "Blood agents [i.e., cyanogen chloride] were allegedly responsible for the most infamous use of chemicals in the war—the killing of Kurds at Halabjah. Since the Iraqis have no history of using these two agents—and the Iranians do—we conclude that the Iranians perpetrated this attack." (The report is available at www.fas.org/man/dod-101/ops/war/docs/3203/.)

All of this was reported at the time. On May 3, 1990, referring to yet another study, The Washington Post stated: "A Defense Department reconstruction of the final stages of the Iran-Iraq war has assembled what analysts say is conclusive intelligence that one of the worst civilian massacres of the war, in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Halabja, was caused by repeated chemical bombardments from both belligerent armies."

In response to the orthodoxy already established around the event, the Post's Patrick Tyler went on to note that the reconstruction "calls into question the widely reported assertion of human rights organizations and Kurdish groups that Iraq bore the greatest responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of Iraqi Kurds—women, infants and elderly—who died at Halabja."

Articles asserting Iranian complicity also ran in The New York Times ("Years Later, No Clear Culprit in Gassing of Kurds"), Newsday, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.

But that's all forgotten now. Since the 1991 Gulf War, the demonization of Saddam has become a linchpin of U.S. foreign policy, and his solo turn as Killer of Kurds has passed beyond question. Likewise, Halabja has become an Alamo for human rights and Kurdish rights groups, who have used it ever since for their own often admirable purposes.

In a telephone interview with the Voice, Goldberg explained why he had chosen to elide the position of the military and intelligence communities from his piece. "I didn't give it much thought, because it was dismissed by so many people I consider to be experts," he told me. "Very quickly into this story, I decided that I support the mainstream view—of Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, the State Department, the UN, and various Kurdish groups—that the Iraqis were responsible for Halabja. In the same way, I didn't give any merit to the Iraqi denials."

Implying that the Pentagon, the DIA, and the CIA are no more reliable than the Iraqis seems a bit extreme, but Goldberg's point is essentially correct. Never more than since September 11, Saddam's sole responsibility for the massacre at Halabja has become conventional wisdom.

To Stephen Pelletiere, who was the CIA's senior political analyst on Iraq throughout the Iran-Iraq War, this is highly alarming. "There is to this day the belief—and I'm not the only one who holds it—that things didn't happen in Halabja the way Goldberg wrote it," he told the Voice. "And it's an especially crucial issue right now. We say Saddam is a monster, a maniac who gassed his own people, and the world shouldn't tolerate him. But why? Because that's the last argument the U.S. has for going to war with Iraq."

----- Original Message ----- From: Jocelyn Braddell To: togethernet@yahoogroups.com Sent: July 15, 2002 12:04 PM Subject: [togethernet] re. war in IraqHow evil is Saddam?
I have a letter taken from the Guardian some time back that I have just come across: it is from a Dr.Thomas Anderson in British Columbia,Canada as follows   Sir, According to George W Bush, Saddam Hussein not only has weapons of mass destruction, he has demonstrated his willingness to use them. This was not during the Persian Gulf War, nor at any time since, but back in the 1980s when Iraq was engaged in its long and bloody battle with Iran. The "gassed his own people" story was dredged up and repeated endlessly by Bush senior as his administration prepared to oust Iraqi troops from Kuwait. It was just one of many stories designed to win support for US action which had little or no basis in fact.The incident in question happened during a three day battle for the Kurdish city of Halabja in March of 1988.According to the Bush version of the story, Saddam ordered a gas attack on the city which killed as many as 8,000 innocent citizens. However according to a study by the US Defence Dept., the whole thing was a horrible mistake. Drawing on numerous intelligence reports, the study concluded that the Iranians, believing that Iraqi troops held Halabja, had bombarded the city with shells containing cyande gas.The following day the Iraqi forces thought that the Iranians had captured the city and shelled it with mustard gas. When foreign medical teams arrived the following week, they found approximately 200 civilian corpses, some evidently killed by cyanide and others by mustard gas. It was not until the Bush administration began its propaganda war against Saddam that this incident was changed into the story we hear today.The body count then rose from 200 to "3,000, then 5,000, and later 8,000. The photographs of the victims suggest that most were killed by cyanide gas. Iran was using cyanide gas. Iraq was not. Iraq did not even possess cyanide gas at the time.

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