Coming
in September
From AK Press
Featuring Essays by:
Edward Said, Robert Fisk, Michael Neumann, Shahid Alam, Alexander
Cockburn, Uri Avnery, Bill and Kathy Christison and More
Today's
Stories
August 14, 2003
Peter Phillips
Inside
Bohemian Grove: Where US Power Elites Party
Brian Cloughley
Charlie Wilson and Pakistan: the Strange Congressman Behind the
CIA's Most Expensive War
Linville and Ruder
Tyson
Strike Draws the Line
Jim Lobe
Bush Administration Divided Over Iran
Ramzy Baroud
Sharon Freezes the Road Map
Tom Turnipseed
Blowback in Iraq
Gary Leupp
Condi's
Speech: From Birgmingham to Baghdad, Imperialism's Freedom Ride
Website of the Day
Tony Benn's Greatest Hits
Recent
Stories
August 13, 2003
Joanne Mariner
A Wall of Separation Through the
Heart
Donald Worster
The Heavy Cost of Empire
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Elaine Cassel
Murderous Errors: Executing the Innocent
Ralph Nader
Make the Recall Count
Alexander Cockburn
Ted Honderich Hit with "Anti-Semitism" Slur
Website of the Day
Defending Yourself Against DirectTV Lawsuits: 9000 and Counting
August 12, 2003
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Ron Jacobs
Revisionist History: the Bush Administration, Civil Rights and
Iraq
Josh Frank
Dean's Constitutional Hang-Up
Wayne Madsen
What's a Fifth Columnist? Well, Someone Like Hitchens
Ray McGovern
Relax,
It Was All a Pack of Lies
Wendy Brinker
Hubris in the White House
Website of the Day
Black
Mustache
August
11, 2003
Douglas
Valentine
Homeland Security for Whom?
Mickey
Z.
Bush's Progress
Bill
Glahn
RIAA Watch: Meet the New Bitch, Same
as the Old
Elaine
Cassel
Indicting DNA
Dr. Mohammad
Omar Farooq
Civil Liberties and Uncivil Super-Patriotism
Uri
Avnery
Who Will Save Abu Mazen?
Website
of the Day
RIAA Subpoena Clearinghouse
August
9 / 10, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
California's Glorious Recall!
Saul
Landau
Bush and King Henry
Gary
Leupp
On Terrorism, Methodism, "Wahhabism"
and the Censored 9/11 Report
Paul de
Rooij
The Parade of the Body Bags
Michael
Egan
History and the Tragedy of American Diplomacy
Rob Eshelman
A Home of Our Own
Daoud
Kuttab
Life as an ID Card
Philip
Agee
Terror and Civil Society: Instruments of US Policy in Cuba
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Marc Racicot: Bush's Main Man
Walt Brasch
Schwarzenegger, "Hollyweird"
and the Rigtheous Right
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush, Bribery and Berlusconi
Josh Frank
Mean, Mean Howard Dean
Elaine
Cassel
Will the Death Penalty Ever Die?
Sean Carter
Total Recall
Poets'
Basement
Hamod, Engel, Albert
August
8, 2003
John
Chuckman
What the US Says Goes
Roberto
Barreto
Defend the Vieques 12!
Bruce Gagnon
Iraq War Emboldens Bush Space Plans
Elaine
Cassel
The Reign of John Ashcroft
Dave
Lindorff
Snoops Night Out
Website
of the Day
Zero Boy
August
7, 2003
M.
Shahid Alam
It the US a "Terrorist Magnet?"
Toni
Solo
Neo-liberal Nicaragua: a New Banana
Republic
Adam Lebowitz
Hiroshima Commemorated: the View from Japan
Hanan
Ashrawi
When the Bully Whines
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Conscience Takes a Holiday
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Lets Slip: Iraq Not Behind 9/11; No Ties to Al-Qaeda
Mike Kimaid
What's the Score?
Elaine
Cassel
The Smell of VICTORY: Ashcroft's Latest Stinkbomb
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
August 6, 2003
Steve
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause: It's Not
Easy Confronting King Coal
David
Krieger
Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Robert
Fisk
The Ghosts of Uday and Qusay
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush's War on the National Forests
Elaine
Cassel
No Fly Lists
Stan
Goff
Military Equipment and Pneumonia
Hugh Sansom
An Open Letter to Nicholas Kristof on the Nuking of Japan
August
5, 2003
Uri
Avnery
The Prisoner of Ramallah: Arafat at
74
Forrest
Hylton
Terrorism and Political Trials: the
View from Bolivia
Ray
McGovern
"We Cook Estimates to Go"
David
Morse
Poindexter's Gambit
Edward
Said
Orientallism: 25 Years Later
George
W. Bush
My Darn Good Resumé
Hammond
Guthrie
It's Incremental, Watson!
Website
of the Day
National Prayer Day
August 4, 2003
Bruce
K. Gagnon
Another Peace Activist Detained by
Airport Cops: My Story
David
Lindorff
Fear-Mongering About Social Security
Mark
Zepezauer
George F. Will: Descent into Self-Parody
James
Plummer
Tracking You Through the Mail
Mickey
Z.
Marriage Insecurity from Sharon to Bush
Bruce
Jackson
News that Isn't News: How the NYT's
Pimps for the White House
August
2 / 3, 2003
Tamara
R. Piety
Nike's Full Court Press Breaks Down
Francis
Boyle
My Alma Mater, the University of Chicago, is a Moral Cesspool
David
Vest
Sons of Paleface: Pictures from Death's Other Side
Neve Gordon
Nightlife in Jerusalem
Uri
Avnery
Their Master's Voice:
Bush, Blair and Intelligence Snafus
Robert
Fisk
Paternalistic Democracy for Iraq
Jerry
Kroth
Israel, Yellowcake and the Media
Noah Leavitt
What's Driving the Liberian Bloodbath: Is the US Obligated to
Intervene?
Saul
Landau
The Film Industry: Business and Ideology
Ron Jacobs
One Big Prison Yard: the Meaning of George Jackson
Thomas
Croft
In the Deep, Deep Rough: Reflections on Augusta
Amadi Ajamu
Def Sham: Russell Simmons New Black Leader?
Poets'
Basement
Vega, Witherup, Albert and Fleming
August
1, 2003
Joanne
Mariner
Stopping Prison Rape
Alex Coolman
Who Moved My Soap: Trivializing
Prison Rape
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Stan Goff
Injury and Decorum: The Missing Wounded in Iraq
Wayne
Madsen
Europe Unplugs from the Matrix
Robert
Fisk
Wolfowitz the Censor
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft Loses Big in Puerto Rico
Website
of the Day
Stop Prisoner Rape
July
31, 2003
Ray
McGovern
The Prostitution of Intelligence
Brian
Cloughley
Wolfowitz's Operative Statement
Sheldon
Hull
The RIAA's Jihad:
The Devil's Music (Industry)
Elaine
Cassel
The Next Time You Crack a Lawyer Joke, Think of These Attorneys
Sheldon
Rampton
and John Stauber
True Lies: Propaganda and Bush's
Wars
Hammond
Guthrie
Speculation Blues
Website
of the Day
Army of One?
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
July
30, 2003
David
Lindorff
Poindexter the Terror Bookie
Marjorie
Cohn
Why Iraq and Afghanistan? It's About
the Oil
Elaine
Cassel
How Ashcroft Coerces Guilty Pleas
in Terror Cases
Zvi
Bar'el
The Hidden Costs of the Iraq War
Lisa Walsh
Thomas
Killing Mustafa Hussein: Death of a Child, Birth of a Legend?
Sean
Carter
Pat Robertson's Prayer Jihad: God, Sodomy and the Supremes
ND Jayaprakash
India and Ariel Sharon
Steve
Perry
Bush's Top 40 Lies
Standard
Schaefer
Correction about Bloomberg and Outscourcing
Website
of the Day
Bring Them Home Now!
Hot Stories
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
August
16, 2003
A
Confidence Game on Iraq
War
Pimps
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Iago: He thinks men honest
That do but seem to be so.
Othello
The war on Iraq won't be remembered for how it
was waged so much as for how it was sold. It was a propaganda
war, a war of perception management, where loaded phrases, such
as "weapons of mass destruction" and "rogue state,"
were hurled like precision weapons at the target audience: us.
To understand the Iraq war you don't
need to consult generals, but reformed spin doctors or, even
better, two of the most seasoned investigators into the dark
arts of political propaganda, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton.
Stauber and Rampton run PR Watch, the
Madison, Wisconsin-based group that keeps tabs on the nefarious
schemes of the global PR industry to sugarcoat useless, costly
and dangerous products. They have also written three of the most
important non-fiction books of the last decade. In 1995, they
published Toxic
Sludge is Good For You, a detailed expose of how the
PR industry plots and executes campaigns to greenwash corporate
malfeasance. This was followed by the prescient and disturbing
Mad
Cow USA. Last year, they produced Trust
Us We're Experts, a grim and exacting account of the
way scientists-for-hire are deployed to rationalize the risks
of dangerous products and smear opponents as know-nothings and
worrywarts.
Now comes their exquisitely timed Weapons
of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq.
Here Stauber and Rampton give us an immediate history, a real-time
deconstruction of the mechanics of the Bush war machine. This
lushly documented book is a chilling catalog of lies and deceptions,
which shows the press contretemps over the Niger yellowcake forgeries
to be but a minor distraction given the outlandish frauds pullulating
daily from the White House and the Pentagon. The history Rampton
and Stauber recounts is every bit as ground breaking as Chomsky
and Herman's
Manufacturing Consent and War Without Mercy, John Dower's riveting
account of the vile uses of propaganda against Japan during World
War II. Weapons of Mass Deceptions shreds the lies, and the motives
behind them, as they were being told and describes the techniques
of the cover-up as they were being spun.
Stauber and Rampton cut through the accumulated
media fog to reveal how the war on Saddam was conceived and how
the media battle plan developed and deployed. The identify the
key players behind the scenes who stage-managed the countdown
to war and follow their paper trails back through the murky corridors
of Washington where politics, corporate spin and psy-ops spooks
cohabit.
Most of this book was written well before
the invasion of Iraq. Yet, the story it relates is only now being
nibbled at by the mainstream press, which had done so much to
promote the vaporous deceptions of the Bush administration. Stauber
and Rampton expose the gaping holes in the Bush administration's
war brief and shine an unforgiving light on the neo-con ministers,
such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, who
concocted the war in the sebaceous quadrants of the White House
and the Pentagon, over the objections of the senior analysts
at the CIA and State Department.
The two journalists also trace in comic
detail the picaresque journey of Tony Blair's plagiarized dossier
on Iraq, from a grad student's website to a cut-and-paste job
in the prime minister's bombastic speech to the House of Commons.
Blair, stubborn and verbose, paid a price for his grandiose puffery.
Bush, who looted whole passages from Blair's speech for his own
clumsy presentations, has skated freely through the tempest.
Why?
Stauber and Rampton offer the best explanation
to date. Unlike Blair, the Bush team never wanted to present
a legal case for war. They had no interest in making any of their
allegations about Iraq hold up to a standard of proof. The real
effort was aimed at amping up the mood for war by using the psychology
of fear.
Facts were never important to the Bush
team. They were disposable nuggets that could be discarded at
will and replaced by whatever new rationale that played favorably
with their polls and focus groups. The war was about weapons
of mass destruction one week, al-Qaeda the next. When neither
allegation could be substantiated on the ground, the fall back
position became the mass graves (many from the Iran/Iraq war
supported by the US) proving that Saddam was an evil thug who
deserved to be toppled. The motto of the Bush pr machine was:
Move on. Don't explain. Say anything to conceal the perfidy behind
the real motives for war. Never look back. Accuse the questioners
of harboring unpatriotic sensibilities. Eventually, even the
cagey Wolfowitz admitted that the official case for war was made
mainly to make the invasion palatable not to justify it.
The Bush claque of neo-con hawks viewed
the Iraq war a product and, just like a new pair of Nikes, it
required a roll-out campaign to soften up the consumers. Stauber
and Rampton demonstrate in convincing and step-by-step detail
how the same techniques (and often the same PR gurus) that have
been used to hawk cigarettes, SUVs and nuclear waste dumps were
deployed to retail the Iraq war.
To peddle the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld
and Colin Powell and company recruited public relations gurus
into top-level jobs at the Pentagon and the State Department.
These spin meisters soon had more say over how the rationale
for war on Iraq should be presented than intelligence agencies
and career diplomats. If the intelligence didn't fit the script,
it was either shaded, retooled or junked.
Take Charlotte Beers who Powell tapped
as Undersecretary of State in the post-9/11 world. Beers wasn't
a diplomat. She wasn't even a politician. She was the grand diva
of spin, known on the business and gossip pages as "the
queen of Madison Avenue." On the strength of two advertising
campaigns, one for Uncle Ben's Rice and another for Head and
Shoulder's dandruff shampoo, Beers rocketed to the top of the
heap in the PR world, heading two giant PR houses Ogilvey and
Mathers as well as J. Walter Thompson.
At the state department, Beers, who had
met Powell in 1995 when they both served on the board of Gulf
Airstream, worked at, in Powell's words, "the branding of
US foreign policy." She extracted more than $500 million
from congress for her Brand America campaign, which largely focused
on beaming US propaganda into the Muslim world, much of it directed
at teens.
"Public diplomacy is a vital new
arm in what will combat terrorism over time," said Beers.
"All of a sudden we are in this position of redefining who
America is, not only for ourselves, but for the outside world."
Note the rapt attention Beers pays to the manipulation of perception,
as opposed, say, to alterations of US policy.
Old-fashioned diplomacy involves direct
communication between representatives of nations, a conversational
give and take, often fraught with deception (see April Glaspie),
but an exchange none-the-less. Public diplomacy, as defined by
Beers, is something else entirely. It's a one-way street, a unilateral
broadcast of American propaganda directly to the public, domestic
and international-a kind of informational carpet bombing.
The themes of her campaigns were as simplistic
and flimsy as a Bush press conference. The American incursions
into Afghanistan and Iraq were all about bringing the balm of
"freedom" to oppressed peoples. Hence, the title of
the US war: Operation Iraqi Freedom, where cruise missiles were
depicted as instruments of liberation. Bush himself distilled
the Beers equation to its bizarre essence: "This war is
about peace."
Beers quietly resigned her post a few
weeks before the first volley of tomahawk missiles battered Baghdad.
From her point of view, the war itself was already won, the fireworks
of shock and awe were all after play.
Over at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld
drafted Victoria "Torie" Clarke as his director of
public affairs. Clarke knew the ropes inside the Beltway. Prior
to becoming Rumsfeld's mouthpiece, she had commanded one of the
world's great parlors for powerbrokers: Hill and Knowlton's DC
office.
Almost immediately upon taking up her
new gig Clarke convened regular meetings with a select group
of Washington's top private PR specialists and lobbyists to develop
a marketing plan for the Pentagon's forthcoming terror wars.
The group was filled with heavy-hitters and was strikingly bi-partisan
in composition. She called it the Rumsfeld Group and it included
PR executive Sheila Tate, columnist Rich Galen, and Republican
political consultant Rich Galen.
The brain trust also boasted top Democratic
fixer Tommy Boggs, brother of NPR's Cokie Roberts and son of
the late Congressman Hale Boggs of Arkansas. At the very time
Boggs was conferring with top Pentagon brass on how to frame
the war on terror, he was also working feverishly for the royal
family of Saudi Arabia. In 2002 alone, the Saudis paid his Qorvis
PR firm $20.2 million to protect its interests in Washington.
In the wake of hostile press coverage following the exposure
of Saudi links to the 9/11 hijackers, the royal family needed
all the well-placed help it could buy. The seem to have gotten
their money's worth. Boggs' felicitous influence peddling may
help to explain why the damning references to Saudi funding of
al-Qaeda were redacted from the recent congressional report on
the investigation into intelligence failures and 9/11.
According to the trade publication PR
Week, the Rumsfeld Group sent "messaging advice" to
the Pentagon. The group told Clarke and Rumsfeld that in order
to get the American public to buy into the war on terrorism they
needed to suggest a link to nation states, not just nebulous
groups such as al-Qaeda. In other words, there needed to be a
fixed target for the military campaigns, some distant place to
drop cruise missiles and cluster bombs. They suggested the notion
(already embedded in Rumsfeld's mind) of playing up the notion
of so-called rogue states as the real masters of terrorism. Thus
was born the Axis of Evil, which, of course, wasn't an "axis"
at all, since two of the states, Iran and Iraq hated each other,
and neither had anything at all to do with the third, North Korea.
Tens of millions in federal money were
poured into private public relations and media firms working
to craft and broadcast the Bush dictat that Saddam had to be
taken out before the Iraqi dictator blew up the world by dropping
chemical and nuclear bombs from long-range drones. Many of these
pr executives and image consultants were old friends of the high
priests in the Bush inner sanctum. Indeed they were veterans,
like Cheney and Powell, of the previous war against Iraq, another
engagement that was more spin that combat.
At the top of the list was John Rendon,
head of the DC firm the Rendon Group. Rendon is one of Washington's
heaviest hitters, a Beltway fixer who never let political affiliation
stand in the way of an assignment. Rendon served as a media consultant
for both Michael Dukakis and Jimmy Carter, as well as Reagan
and George H.W. Bush. Whenever the Pentagon wanted to go to war,
he offered his services at a price. During Desert Storm Rendon
pulled in $100,000 a month from the Kuwaiti royal family. He
followed this up with a $23 million contract from the CIA to
produce anti-Saddam propaganda in the region.
As part of this CIA project, Rendon created
and named the Iraqi National Congress and tapped his friend Ahmed
Chalabi, the shady financier, to head the organization.
Shortly after 9/11, the Pentagon handed
the Rendon Group another big assignment: public relations for
the US bombing of Afghanistan. Rendon was also deeply involved
in the planning and public relations for the pre-emptive war
on Iraq, though both Rendon and the Pentagon refuse to disclose
the details of the group's work there.
But it's not hard to detect the manipulative
hand of Rendon behind many of the Iraq war's signature events,
including the toppling of the Saddam statue (by US troops and
Chalabi associates) and videotape of jubilant Iraqis waving American
flags as the Third Infantry rolled by them. Rendon had pulled
off the same stunt in the first Gulf War, handing out American
flags to Kuwaitis and herding the media to the orchestrated demonstration.
"Where do you think they got those American flags?"
clucked Rendon in 1991. "That was my assignment."
The Rendon Group may also have had played
a role in pushing the phony intelligence that has now come back
to haunt the Bush administration. In December of 2002, Robert
Dreyfuss reported that the inner circle of the Bush White House
preferred the intelligence coming from Chalabi and his associated
to that being proffered by analysts at the CIA.
So Rendon and his circle represented
a new kind of off-the-shelf psy-ops, the privatization of official
propaganda. "I am not a national security strategist or
a military tactician," said Rendon. "I am a politician,
and a person who uses communication to meet public policy or
corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior
and a perception manager."
What exactly, pray tell, is perception
management? Well, the Pentagon defines it this way: "actions
to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to
foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives and objective
reasoning."
In other words, lying about the intentions
of the US government. In a rare display of public frankness,
the Pentagon actually let slip its plan (developed by Rendon)
to establish a high-level den inside the Department Defense for
perception management. They called it the Office of Strategic
Influence and among its many missions was to plant false stories
in the press.
Nothing stirs the corporate media into
outbursts of pious outrage like an official government memo bragging
about how the media is manipulated for political objectives.
So the New York Times and Washington Post threw indignant fits
about the Office of Strategic Influence, the Pentagon shut down
the operation and the press gloated with satisfaction on its
victory. Yet, Rumsfeld told the Pentagon press corps that will
he was killing the office, the same devious work would continue.
"You can have the corpse," said Rumsfeld. "You
can have the name. But I'm going to keep doing every single thing
that needs to be done. And I have."
At a diplomatic level, despite the hired
guns and the planted stories, this image war was lost. It failed
to convince even America's most fervent allies and dependent
client states that Iraq posed much of a threat. It failed to
win the blessing of the UN and even NATO, a wholly-owned subsidiary
of Washington. At the end of the day, the vaunted coalition of
the willing consisted of Britain, Spain, Italy, Australia, and
a cohort of former Soviet bloc nations. Even so the citizens
of the nations that cast their lot with the US overwhelmingly
opposed the war.
Domestically, it was a different story.
A population traumatized by terror threats and shattered economy
became easy prey for the saturation bombing of the Bush message
that Iraq was a terrorist state linked to al-Qaeda that was only
minutes away from launching attacks on America with weapons of
mass destruction.
Americans were the victims of an elaborate
con job, pelted with a daily barrage of threat inflation, distortions,
deceptions and lies. Not about tactics or strategy or war plans.
But about justifications for war. The lies were aimed not at
confusing Saddam's
regime, but the American people. By the start of the war, 66
percent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and
79 percent thought he was close to having a nuclear weapon.
Of course, the closest Saddam came to
possessing a nuke was a rusting gas centrifuge buried for 13
years in the garden of Mahdi Obeidi, a retired Iraqi scientist.
Iraq didn't have any weaponized chemical or biological weapons.
In fact, it didn't even possess any SCUD missiles, despite erroneous
reports fed by Pentagon pr flacks alleging that it had fired
SCUDs into Kuwait.
This charade wouldn't have worked without
a gullible or a complicit press corps. Victoria Clarke, who developed
the Pentagon plan for embedded reports, put it succinctly a few
weeks before the war began: "Media coverage of any future
operation will to a large extent shape public perception."
During the Vietnam war, tv images of
maimed GIs and napalmed villages suburbanized opposition to the
war and helped hasten the US withdrawal. The Bush gang meant
to turn the Vietnam phenomenon on its head by using tv as a force
to propel the US into a war that no one really wanted.
What the Pentagon sought was a new kind
of living room war, where instead of photos of mangled soldiers
and dead Iraqi kids, they could control the images Americans
viewed and to a large extent the content of the stories. By embedding
reporters inside selected divisions, Clarke believed the Pentagon
could count on the reporters to build relationships with the
troops and to feel dependent on them for their own safety. It
worked, naturally. One reporter for a national network trembled
on camera that the US army functioned as "our protectors."
The late David Bloom of NBC confessed on the air that he was
willing to do "anything and everything they can ask of us."
When the Pentagon needed a heroic story,
the press obliged. Jessica Lynch became the war's first instant
celebrity. Here was a neo-gothic tale of a steely young woman
wounded in a fierce battled, captured and tortured by ruthless
enemies and dramatically saved from certain death by a team of
self-less rescuers, knights in camo and nightvision goggles.
Of course, nearly every detail of her heroic adventure proved
to be as fictive and maudlin as any made-for-tv-movie. But the
ordeal of Private Lynch, which dominated the news for more than
a week, served its purpose: to distract attention from a stalled
campaign that was beginning to look at lot riskier than the American
public had been hoodwinked into believing.
The Lynch story was fed to the eager
press by a Pentagon operation called Combat Camera, the Army
network of photographers, videographers and editors that sends
800 photos and 25 video clips a day to the media. The editors
at Combat Camera carefully culled the footage to present the
Pentagon's montage of the war, eliding such unsettling images
as collateral damage, cluster bombs, dead children and US soldiers,
napalm strikes and disgruntled troops.
"A lot of our imagery will have
a big impact on world opinion," predicted Lt. Jane Larogue,
director of Combat Camera in Iraq. She was right. But as the
hot war turned into an even hotter occupation, the Pentagon,
despite airy rhetoric from occupation supremo Paul Bremer about
about installing democratic institutions such as a free press,
moved to tighten its monopoly on the flow images out of Iraq.
First, it tried to shut down Al Jazeera, the Arab news channel.
Then the Pentagon intimated that it would like to see all foreign
tv news crews banished from Baghdad.
Few newspapers fanned the hysteria about
the threat posed by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction as sedulously
as did the Washington Post. In the months leading up to the war,
the Post's pro-war op-eds outnumbered the anti-war columns by
a 3 to 1 margin.
Back in 1988, the Post felt much differently
about Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. When reports
trickled out about the gassing of Iranian troops, the Washington
Post editorial page shrugged off the massacres, calling the mass
poisonings "a quirk of war."
The Bush team displayed a similar amnesia.
When Iraq used chemical weapons in grisly attacks on Iran, the
US government not only didn't object, it encouraged Saddam. Anything
to punish Iran was the message coming from the White House. Donald
Rumsfeld himself was sent as President Ronald Reagan's personal
envoy to Baghdad. Rumsfeld conveyed the bold message than an
Iraq defeat would be viewed as a "strategic setback for
the United States." This sleazy alliance was sealed with
a handshake caught on videotape. When CNN reporter Jamie McIntyre
replayed the footage for Rumsfeld in the spring of 2003, the
secretary of defense snapped, "Where'd you get that? Iraqi
television?"
The current crop of Iraq hawks also saw
Saddam much differently then. Take the writer Laura Mylroie,
sometime colleague of the New York Times' Judy Miller, who persists
in peddling the ludicrous conspiracy that Iraq was behind the
1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
How times have changed. In 1987, Mylroie
felt downright cuddly toward Saddam. She penned an article for
the New Republic titled Back Iraq: Time for a US Tilt in the
Mideast, arguing that the US should publicly embrace Saddam's
secular regime as a bulwark against the Islamic fundamentalists
in Iran. The co-author of this mesmerizing weave of wonkery was
none other than the minor demon himself, Daniel Pipes, perhaps
the nation's most bellicose Islamophobe. "The American weapons
that Iraq could make good use of include remotely scatterable
and anti-personnel mines and counterartillery radar," wrote
Mylroie and Pipes. "The United States might also consider
upgrading intelligence it is supplying Baghdad."
In the roll-out for the war, Mylroie
seemed to be everywhere hawking the invasion of Iraq. She would
often appear on two or three different networks in the same day.
How did the reporter manage this feat? She had help in the form
of Eleana Benador, the media placement guru who runs Benador
Associates. Born in Peru, Benador parlayed her skills as a linguist
into a lucrative career as media relations whiz for the Washington
foreign policy elite. She also oversees the Middle East Forum,
a fanatically pro-Zionist white paper mill. Her clients include
some of the nation's most fervid hawks, including Michael Ledeen,
Charles Krauthammer, Al Haig, Max Boot, Daniel Pipes, Richard
Perle and Judy Miller. During the Iraq war, Benador's assignment
was to embed this squadron of pro-war zealots into the national
media, on talk shows and op-ed pages.
Benador not only got them the gigs, she
also crafted the message and made sure they all stayed on the
same theme. "There are some things, you just have to state
them in a different way, in a slightly different way," said
Benador. "If not people get scared." Scared of intentions
of their own government.
It could have been different. All of
the holes in the Bush administration's gossamer case for war
detailed by Stauber and Rampton (and other independent journalists)
were right there for the mainstream press to unearth and expose.
Instead, the US press, just like the oil companies, cravenly
sought to commercialize the Iraq war and profit from the invasions.
They didn't want to deal with uncomfortable facts or present
voices of dissent.
Nothing sums up this unctuous approach
more brazenly than MSNBC's firing of liberal talk show host Phil
Donahue on the eve of the war. The network replaced the Donahue
show with a running segment called Countdown: Iraq, featuring
the usual nightly coterie of retired generals, security flacks
and other cheerleaders for invasion. The network's executives
blamed the cancellation on sagging ratings. In fact, during its
run Donahue's show attracted more viewers than any other program
on the network. The real reason for the pre-emptive strike on
Donahue was spelled out in an internal memo from anxious executives
at NBC. Donahue, the memo said, offered "a difficult face
for NBC in a time of war. He seems to delight in presenting guests
who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's
motives."
The memo warned that Donahue's show risked
tarring MSNBC as an unpatriotic network, "a home for liberal
anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving
the flag at every opportunity." So, with scarcely a second
thought, the honchos at MSNBC gave Donahue the boot and hoisted
the battle flag.
It's war that sells.
There's a helluva caveat, of course.
Once you buy it, the merchants of war accept no returns.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 9 / 10, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
California's Glorious Recall!
Saul
Landau
Bush and King Henry
Gary
Leupp
On Terrorism, Methodism, "Wahhabism"
and the Censored 9/11 Report
Paul de
Rooij
The Parade of the Body Bags
Michael
Egan
History and the Tragedy of American Diplomacy
Rob Eshelman
A Home of Our Own
Daoud
Kuttab
Life as an ID Card
Philip
Agee
Terror and Civil Society: Instruments of US Policy in Cuba
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Marc Racicot: Bush's Main Man
Walt Brasch
Schwarzenegger, "Hollyweird"
and the Rigtheous Right
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush, Bribery and Berlusconi
Josh Frank
Mean, Mean Howard Dean
Elaine
Cassel
Will the Death Penalty Ever Die?
Sean Carter
Total Recall
Poets'
Basement
Hamod, Engel, Albert
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