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Why Iraq and Afghanistan? It's About
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Bread, Circuses, Uday and Qusay
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July
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Ashcroft Demands Death Penalty in
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Dylan in Bend
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Contract Killing
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Bush's Wars Weblog
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January 18, 2003
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July
31, 2003
Weapons
of Mass Deception
True Lies
By SHELDON RAMPTON
and JOHN STAUBER
Editors' Note:
We are pleased to present this excerpt from Sheldon Rampton and
John Stauber's excellent new book, Weapons
of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
(Tarcher/Penguin).
At a press briefing two weeks following the terrorist
attacks of September 11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had
an exchange with a reporter that deserves to be quoted in some
detail. In the context of the "war on terrorism," a
reporter asked, "Will there be any circumstances, as you
prosecute this campaign, in which anyone in the Department of
Defense will be authorized to lie to the news media in order
to increase the chances of success of a military operation or
gain some other advantage over your adversaries?"
Rumsfeld replied:
Of course, this conjures up Winston Churchill's
famous phrase when he said-don't quote me on this, OK. I don't
want to be quoted on this, so don't quote me-he said, sometimes
the truth is so precious it must be accompanied by a bodyguard
of lies, talking about the invasion date and the invasion location,
and indeed, they engaged not just in not talking about the date
of the Normandy invasion or the location, whether it was to be
Normandy Beach or just north off of Belgium, they actually engaged
in a plan to confuse the Germans as to where it would happen.
And they had a fake army under General Patton, and one thing
and another.
That is a piece of history. And I bring
it up just for the sake of background.
The answer to your question is no. I
cannot imagine a situation. I don't recall that I've ever lied
to the press. I don't intend to. And it seems to me that there
will not be reason for it. There are dozens of ways to avoid
having to put yourself in a position where you're lying. And
I don't do it. And [Victoria Clarke] won't do it. And Admiral
Quigley won't do it.
Reporter: That
goes for everybody in the Department of Defense?
Rumsfeld: You've
got to be kidding. (Laughter.)
A few months later, the New York Times
reported that a new group within the Pentagon, the Office
of Strategic Influence (OSI), was "developing plans to provide
news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations."
Headed by Brigadier General Simon P. Worden, the OSI had a multi-million-dollar
budget and "has begun circulating classified proposals calling
for aggressive campaigns that use not only the foreign media
and the Internet, but also covert  operations," the Times
stated. "General Worden envisions a broad mission ranging
from 'black' campaigns that use disinformation and other covert
activities to 'white' public affairs that rely on truthful news
releases, Pentagon officials said. 'It goes from the blackest
of black programs to the whitest of white,' a senior Pentagon
official said."
The proposal was controversial even within
the military, where critics worried that it would undermine the
Pentagon's credibility and blur the boundaries between covert
operations and public relations. Moreover, disinformation planted
in foreign media organizations could end up being published and
broadcast to U.S. audiences. The Times report sparked
an uproar in Congress and outraged newspaper editorials, and
within a week the White House closed down the OSI, disavowing
any intent to ever use disinformation. Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld claimed that he had "never even seen the charter
for the office," even though the OSI's assistant for operations
said otherwise.
In fact, however, Rumsfeld seemed to
care quite a bit about preserving the functions of an office
whose charter he claimed never to have seen. Nine months later,
he made the following remark during an airplane flight to Chile:
"And then there was the Office of Strategic Influence. You
may recall that. And 'Oh, my goodness gracious, isn't that terrible,
Henny Penny, the sky is going to fall.' I went down that next
day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing, fine, I'll
give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have the name,
but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be
done, and I have."
As these anecdotes illustrate, the Bush
administration had developed an uncommonly twisted way of discussing
deception itself. In his own way, Rumsfeld is uncommonly candid
about his willingness to deceive and about his techniques for
doing so. But even the deceptions are delivered in a convoluted
manner-usually through insinuations or evasive language games
rather than outright falsehoods. If the OSI is caught planning
to spread misinformation, the White House simply changes its
name. And this is just one of the "dozens of ways"
that Rumsfeld and company have used to deceive the public without
"having to put yourself in a position where you're lying."
Bullet Points
In an October 2002 opinion poll by the
Pew Research Center for People and the Press, 66 percent of Americans
said they believed Saddam Hussein was involved in the September
11 attacks on the United States, while 79 percent believed that
Iraq already possessed, or was close to possessing, nuclear weapons.
The same poll looked at why many people supported war
and found that the main reason was their belief that it would
reduce the threat of terrorism. The principal reason cited by
25 percent of war supporters related to their perceptions of
Hussein or the nature of his regime (he's "evil," a
"madman," "represses his own people"). However,
more than twice that number-60 percent-gave a reason related
to their concerns stemming from 9/11 (getting rid of weapons
of mass destruction, preventing future terrorism).
In January 2003, Knight-Ridder Newspapers
conducted its own, separate opinion poll. "Two-thirds of
the respondents said they thought they had a good grasp of the
issues surrounding the Iraqi crisis, but closer questioning revealed
large gaps in that knowledge," it reported. "For instance,
half of those surveyed said one or more of the Sept. 11 terrorist
hijackers were Iraqi citizens. In fact, none was." Moreover,
"The informed public is considerably less hawkish about
war with Iraq than the public as a whole. Those who show themselves
to be most knowledgeable about the Iraq situation are significantly
less likely to support military action, either to remove Saddam
from power or to disarm Iraq."
This gap between reality and public opinion
was not an accident. If the public had possessed a more accurate
understanding of the facts, more people would probably have seen
a "pre-emptive" war with Iraq as unwise and unwarranted.
The public's erroneous beliefs developed through a steady drumbeat
of allegations and insinuations from the Bush administration,
pro-war think tanks and commentators-statements that were often
false or misleading and whose purpose was to create the impression
that Iraq posed an imminent peril.
Iraq and Al Qaeda
The idea of an alliance between Al Qaeda
and Iraq was unlikely, since Osama bin Laden's hatred for the
"infidel" regime of Saddam Hussein was long-standing
and well-known before September 11. Much of the public speculation
about a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq was based on an alleged
meeting between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence
officials that supposedly took place in Prague, Czech Republic
between the dates of April 8 and 11, 2001.
Reports of this meeting first came from
Czech officials in October 2001, during the period of intense
speculation that followed the terrorist attacks. According to
Czech Republic's interior minister, Atta had met with Ahmed Khalil
Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, a second consul at the Iraqi Embassy. According
to Czech intelligence, however, the factual basis for the story
was thin from the beginning. Its sole source was a single Arab
émigré, who came forward with the information only
after 9/11, when photographs of Atta appeared in the local press.
As the New York Times reported in December 2001, the story
may have been simply a case of mistaken identity, since al-Ani
"had a business selling cars and met frequently with a used
car dealer from Germany who bore a striking resemblance to Mr.
Atta."
The story was thoroughly investigated
by the FBI in the United States. "We ran down literally
hundreds of thousands of leads and checked every record we could
get our hands on," FBI Director Robert Mueller said in an
April 2002 speech in San Francisco. The records revealed that
Atta was in Virginia Beach, Virginia in early April, during the
time he supposedly met al-Ani in Prague.
After conducting his own separate investigations,
Czech Republic president Vaclav Havel laid the story to rest.
The Times reported in 2002 that Havel "has quietly
told the White House he has concluded that there is no evidence
to confirm earlier reports that Mohammed Atta, the leader in
the Sept. 11 attacks, met with an Iraqi intelligence official
in Prague." Havel did this quietly "to avoid embarrassing"
the other Czech officials who had previously given credibility
to the story. "Today, other Czech officials say they have
no evidence that Mr. Atta was even in the country in April 2001,"
the Times reported.
Despite the lack of any credible evidence
that the Atta-Iraq meeting ever occurred, Bush administration
officials continued to promote the rumor, playing a delicate
game of not-quite-lying insinuations. In February 2002, for example,
San Francisco Chronicle reporter Robert Collier interviewed
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a leading advocate of
war with Iraq. "Have you seen any convincing evidence to
link Iraq to Al Qaeda or its international network?" Collier
asked.
"A lot of this stuff is classified
and I really can't get into discussing it," Wolfowitz said,
adding, "We also know that there are things that haven't
been explained ... like the meeting of Mohammed Atta with Iraqi
officials in Prague. It just comes back to the fact that-"
"Which now is alleged, right?"
Collier said. "There is some doubt to that?"
"Now this gets you into classified
areas again," Wolfowitz replied. "I think the point
which I do think is fundamental, is that, the premise of your
question seems to be, we wait for proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
I think the premise of a policy has to be we can't afford to
wait for proof beyond a reasonable doubt."
Wolfowitz's performance typifies the
administration's handling of the Atta-in-Prague story. Using
vague references to "classified" information, he avoided
specifics, while dismissing requests for actual proof as
the bureaucratic concern of overly legalistic pencil-pushers.
The pattern continued throughout a variety of subsequent pronouncements:
* In May 2002, William Safire, the conservative
New York Times columnist and Iraq war hawk, cited an unnamed
"senior Bush administration official" who told him,
"You cannot say the Czech report about a meeting in 2001
between Atta and the Iraqi is discredited or disproven in any
way. The Czechs stand by it and we're still in the process of
pursuing it and sorting out the timing and venue."
* In July 2002, Donald Rumsfeld told
a news conference that Iraq had "a relationship" with
Al Qaeda but declined to be more specific. The following month,
the Los Angeles Times reported an interview with yet another
unnamed "senior Bush administration official" who said
evidence of an Atta meeting in Prague "holds up," adding,
"We're going to talk more about this case."
* In September 2002, defense department
advisor Richard Perle was quoted in an Italian business publication,
saying that Atta met personally with Saddam Hussein himself.
"Mohammed Atta met Saddam Hussein in Baghdad prior to September
11," Perle said. "We have proof of that, and we are
sure he wasn't just there for a holiday." (Since then, nothing
whatsoever has been heard about the alleged "proof.")
* On September 8, 2002, Vice President
Dick Cheney was interviewed on Meet the Press. "There
has been reporting," he said, "that suggests that there
have been a number of contacts over the years. We've seen in
connection with the hijackers, of course, Mohammed Atta, who
was the lead hijacker, did apparently travel to Prague on a number
of occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have reporting
that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official
a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center."
* "We know that Iraq and the Al
Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy," Bush himself
said in an October 7, 2002 speech to the nation. In the same
speech, he also mentioned "one very senior al Qaeda leader
who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year." However,
he did not mention that the terrorist in question, Abu Musab
Zarqawi, was no longer in Iraq and that there was no hard evidence
Hussein's government knew he was there or had contact with him.
At an election campaign rally a week later, Bush said that Saddam
was, "a man who, in my judgment, would like to use Al Qaeda
as a forward army."
The Atta-in-Prague story acquired solidity
in the minds of the public through sheer repetition. Each new
whisper from a Bush team insider yielded a fresh harvest of newspaper
editorials, I-told-you-so's and speculation on the Internet.
Simply by mentioning Iraq and Al Qaeda together in the same sentence,
over and over, the message got through. Where there is smoke,
people were led to believe, there must be fire. But actually,
there was only smoke.
Patterns of Global
Terrorism
The State Department's annual "Patterns
of Global Terrorism" report, issued in May 2002, makes interesting
reading in contrast to the Bush administration's claim that Iraq
was the leading world terrorist threat.
According to "Patterns of Global
Terrorism," Iraq's role as a state sponsor of terrorism
consisted of being "the only Arab-Muslim country that did
not condemn the September 11 attacks against the United States."
Also, Iraq provided safe haven to a number of Palestinian organizations
involved with the intifada, such as the Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine. Other terrorist groups that
Iraq was reported to support included the Kurdish Workers' Party
(PKK) and the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK). In both of these cases,
the terrorist link requires some qualification. The PKK, a Marxist
political party that supports Kurdish separatism in Turkey, publicly
abandoned armed struggle in 1999. The MEK is an armed guerrilla
force that has been trying to overthrow the government of Iran.
In all of these cases, Iraqi support for these groups reflects
rivalries with its next-door neighbors and does not differ substantially
from the type of support for terrorist groups that other governments
practice in the region. According to "Patterns of Global
Terrorism," in fact, it was Iran, not Iraq, that
"remained the most active state sponsor of terrorism in
2001"-a title that Iran has held for several years running.
But if that's the case, why such a rush to go to war with Iraq?
Even the State Department report was
heavily influenced by spin. While condemning terrorism by Iran,
Iraq and other long-time U.S. adversaries, "Patterns of
Global Terrorism" praises allies such as Saudi Arabia, which
it says have "played strong roles in the International Coalition
against terrorism. In addition to condemning the September 11
attacks publicly, these governments took positive steps to halt
the flow of terrorism financing and, in some cases, authorized
basing and/or overflight provisions. In several cases, they did
so despite popular disquiet over their governments' military
support for Operation Enduring Freedom." Beneath a photograph
of U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell shaking hands with Saudi
Crown Prince Abdullah, the report acknowledges that laws against
solicitation of funds for terrorists "were not scrupulously
enforced in the past," but says the Saudis have "agreed
to cooperate with U.S. investigators."
The irony in all of this, of course,
is that 15 of the 19 hijackers who flew the planes on September
11 were Saudi citizens, and links between the Saudi regime and
Al Qaeda are much easier to draw than links between Iraq and
Al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden and his terror network belong to a
specific Muslim sect, Wahhabi fundamentalism, which is much more
ideologically severe than the religion practiced by most Muslims
throughout the world and which certainly differs from the largely
secular ideology of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party. However, Wahhabi
is the state religion of Saudi Arabia, the ideological underpinnings
of the absolute monarchy which rules the country with an iron
fist. Human rights groups such as Amnesty International have
pointed to the country's numerous cases of arbitrary arrest,
prolonged detention and physical abuse of prisoners, which security
forces commit with the acquiescence of the government. In addition,
the government prohibits or restricts freedom of speech, the
press, assembly, association and religion. Partly as a release
valve for domestic dissatisfaction with the oppressive nature
of the Saudi regime, the monarchy tolerates and even encourages
anti-Semitism and America-bashing that scapegoats Israel and
the United States for all of the problems of the region.
"It is worth stating clearly and
unambiguously what official U.S. government spokespersons have
not," stated Terrorist Financing, an October 2002
report sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. "For
years, individuals and charities based in Saudi Arabia have been
the most important source of funds for Al Qaeda, and for years
the Saudi officials have turned a blind eye to this problem.
This is hardly surprising since Saudi Arabia possesses the greatest
concentration of wealth in the region; Saudi nationals and charities
were previously the most important sources of funds for the mujahideen
[Islamic fundamentalists who fought the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan]; Saudi nationals have always constituted a disproportionate
percentage of Al Qaeda's own membership; and Al Qaeda's political
message has long focused on issues of particular interest to
Saudi nationals, especially those who are disenchanted with their
own government."
In fact, it appears that some of those
Saudi officials did more than merely turn a blind eye. In November
2002, the FBI investigated charitable payments by Haifa Al-Faisal,
the wife of Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar
bin Sultan. Beginning in early 2000, $3,500 a month flowed from
Al-Faisal to two Saudi students in the United States who provided
assistance to some of the 9/11 hijackers. One of the students
who received the money threw a welcoming party for the hijackers
upon their arrival in San Diego, paid their rent and guaranteed
their lease on an apartment next door to his own. The other student,
a known Al Qaeda sympathizer, also befriended the hijackers prior
to their awful deed. At a party after the attacks, he "celebrated
the heroes of September 11," openly talking about "what
a wonderful, glorious day it had been."
Princess Haifa's money did not flow directly
from her to the hijackers, and there is no evidence that she
had any prior knowledge of their plans. Nevertheless, the Bush
administration's willingness to accept her explanations at face
value contrasts strikingly with the enthusiasm with which the
Bush administration pursued every slim thread that might connect
Iraq to Al Qaeda, it handled the news about Haifa Al-Faisal's
payments by urging people not to jump to conclusions. White House
spokesman Ari Fleischer responded to the news by saying, "Saudi
Arabia is a good partner in the war against terrorism but can
do more."
The Search for the
Real Killers
Several investigators-including Joel
Mowbray of the conservative National Review, leftist BBC
reporter Greg Palast, and an investigative team at the Boston
Herald -have found evidence of links between prominent Saudis
and the financing of Al Qaeda. Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow
in terrorism studies at the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy, says that much of Al Qaeda's funding has come through
charities "closely linked to the Saudi government and royal
family" including the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, Benevolence
International Foundation, International Islamic Relief Organization,
Muslim World League, Rabita Trust, and World Assembly of Muslim
Youth. A Canadian intelligence assessment prepared on July 25,
2002, reported that individuals in Saudi Arabia " were donating
1 to 2 million a month through mosques and other fundraising
avenues."
In August 2002, 600 family members of
people who died on September 11, calling themselves "9/11
Families United to Bankrupt Terrorism," launched a $1 trillion
lawsuit against parties that they allege have helped finance
international terrorism. By March 2003, more than 3,100 plaintiffs
had joined the lawsuit, whose list of terrorist financiers includes
seven international banks, eight Islamic charities, several members
of the Saudi royal family and the government of Sudan. But class
action lawyer Ron Motley, the lead attorney in the case, said
the Bush administration was providing no help. After three meetings
with State Department officials, he said, "we received zero
pieces of paper and zero help."
Saudi cooperation in the post-9/11 investigations
was also lackluster. The Boston Herald reported in December
2001 that although terrorism suspects had been arrested in more
than 40 countries following September 11, none had been announced
in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis also balked at freezing the assets
of organizations linked to bin Laden and international terrorism.
The U.S. barely whispered about this lack of cooperation, for
fear of disrupting what Herald reporters Jonathan Wells,
Jack Meyers and Maggie Mulvihill described as "an extraordinary
array of U.S.-Saudi business ventures which, taken together,
are worth tens of billions of dollars." They cited examples
of top Bush officials who have "cashed in on the Saudi gravy
train," including the following:
* Vice president Dick Cheney's old company,
Halliburton, has done more than $174 million in business developing
oil fields and other projects for the Saudis.
* National security adviser Condoleezza
Rice is a former longtime member of the board of directors of
Chevron, which does extensive business with the Saudis. Rice
even has a Chevron oil tanker named after her.
* The president's father, George Bush,
Sr., works as a senior advisor to the Carlyle Group, which has
financial interests in U.S. defense firms hired by the Saudis
to equip and train their military.
"It's good old fashioned 'I'll scratch
your back, you scratch mine.' You have former U.S. officials,
former presidents, aides to the current president, a long line
of people who are tight with the Saudis, people who are the pillars
of American society and officialdom,'' said Charles Lewis of
the Center for Public Integrity. "No one wants to alienate
the Saudis, and we are willing to basically ignore inconvenient
truths that might otherwise cause our blood to boil. We basically
look away."
The administration's ties to the Saudis
through the Carlyle Group are especially intricate. Carlyle,
an investment equity firm, is America's 11th largest military
contractor and one of the biggest "old boys networks"
in the modern business world, bringing together high-powered
former politicians with Saudi financial moguls and other major
investors. The chairman of the Carlyle Group is Frank C. Carlucci,
a former secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan and old college
classmate of current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Carlyle's
other employees include a roster of former top-level government
officials from the United States and other countries, including
former British prime minister John Major, former U.S. Secretary
of State James A. Baker III, and former White House budget director
Dick Darman. The former politicians work as rainmakers, using
their reputations and contacts to help grease the wheels for
weapons contracts and other high-stakes insider deals. "The
revolving door has long been a fact of life in Washington, but
Carlyle has given it a new spin," reported Fortune magazine
in March 2002. "Instead of toiling away for a trade organization
or consulting firm for a measly $250,000 a year, former government
officials can rake in serious cash by getting equity cuts on
corporate deals. Several of the onetime government officials
who have hooked up with Carlyle-Carlucci, Baker, and Darman,
in particular--have made millions."
On March 5, 2001, Leslie Wayne of the
New York Times reported that George Bush Sr. had taken
time off from campaigning for his son's presidential election
"to call on Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at a luxurious
desert compound outside Riyadh to talk about American-Saudi business
affairs. Mr. Bush went as an ambassador of sorts, but not for
his government. Traveling with the fanfare of dignitaries, Mr.
Bush and [former secretary of state James A. Baker III] were
using their extensive government contacts to further their business
interests as representatives of the Carlyle Group, a $12 billion
private equity firm based in Washington that has parlayed a roster
of former top-level government officials, largely from the Bush
and Reagan administrations, into a moneymaking machine."
Wayne noted that Bush Sr. was receiving $80,000 to $100,000 per
speech for his activities on behalf of Carlyle and that the company
had also helped Bush Jr. in 1990 by putting him on the board
of a Carlyle subsidiary, Caterair, an airline-catering company."
The strange bedfellows at Carlyle's slumber
party included family members of Osama bin Laden, several of
whom were in the United States doing business on the day of the
September 11 attacks. Although the family has disowned him and
publicly condemns his terrorist activities, the family's $2 million
investment in Carlyle raised eyebrows. At the request of other
shareholders, the bin Ladens sold their stake in Carlyle immediately
after 9/11. To handle PR aspects of the controversy regarding
its links to the bin Ladens, the Carlyle Group hired Chris Ullman,
a former official with the U.S. Office of Management and Budget,
as its vice president for corporate communications. The bin Ladens
(who now spell their last name Binladin to differentiate themselves
from Osama) went shopping for a public relations firm of their
own, approaching Steven Goldstein and his PR firm, Attention
America. Goldstein, who is Jewish and pro-Israel, came to the
conclusion that he was approached in part because of his religious
and political stance. He turned them down, and the Binladins
turned instead to the public relations firms of Hullin Metz &
Co. and WMC Communications, headed by former Hill & Knowlton
chairman David Wynne-Morgan. "We have checked them out and
they have no links with terrorism," Wynne-Morgan said.
The Saudi monarchy also turned to public
relations firms for assistance following September 11. Three
days after the 9/11 attacks, the PR giant Burson-Marsteller signed
an agreement to provide "issues counseling and crisis management"
for the Kingdom and to place ads in the New York Times expressing
Saudi support for the U.S. in its time of crisis. In November,
it began paying $200,000 per month to another PR firm, Qorvis
Communications and its affiliate, Patton Boggs. During the last
nine months of 2002 alone, reported O'Dwyer's PR Daily,
Qorvis received $20.2 million from the Kingdom. "That amount
exceeds the previous record $14.2 million that the Citizens for
a Free Kuwait front group spent at Hill & Knowlton during
a six-month period in 1990-`91 to build support for the Persian
Gulf War," O'Dwyer's reported. Qorvis helped the
Saudis set up their own front group, called the "Alliance
of Peace & Justice," described in the PR firm's government
filing as an American organization concerned about the Middle
East process. Qorvis arranged media interviews for Saudi representatives
with media figures including Ted Koppel, Bill Plant, Paula Zahn,
Andrea Mitchell, Aaron Brown, Chris Matthews and Bill O'Reilly."
Hill & Knowlton also courted the
Saudis, with H&K account manager Jim Cox giving an obsequious
interview to Arab News, a publication owned by members
of the monarchy. Described as "forthright and straight talking"
by Arab News, Cox explained that "Saudi Arabia has
a cadre of friends who know, respect and value it in terms of
business relationships and the culture of the Kingdom. The trouble
is that cadre is very small. It's a real industry-based group,
limited to those who have had business contacts with the Kingdom."
Due to the fact that the majority of the 9/11 hijackers were
Saudis, Cox said, the Kingdom had "this huge hurdle of disbelief
to overcome." But who's to blame? "It's not the Saudis,
it's not the government, and it's not anybody else in particular.
It's simply the world we live in." Hill & Knowlton signed
deals in excess of $77,000 per month with state-owned companies
including Saudi Basic Industries and Saudi Aramco, the world's
largest oil company. Another PR firm, the Gallagher Group, headed
by Republican policy analyst Jamie Gallagher, signed a $300,000,
one-year deal in early 2003 to assist Qorvis Communications in
its PR work for the Kingdom.
Patton Boggs, a Qorvis affiliate, distributed
documents to journalists and members of congress portraying the
Saudis as partners in the war on terror and victims themselves
of terrorism. One document addressed "hot button" issues
such as 'Saudi Support for Osama bin Laden,' 'Alleged Saudi Funding
for Terrorism,' 'Saudi Freezing of Assets,' 'Saudi Education
System and Anti-Americanism,' 'Saudi Arabia and Suicide Bombers,'
and 'Stability in Saudi Arabia.'" For the most part, however,
the document stayed away from specifics on each of those points,
preferring instead to rely on statements of endorsement for the
Kingdom from U.S. officials including George W. Bush, Donald
Rumsfeld, Pentagon spokesperson Torie Clarke, State Department
spokesperson Richard Boucher, Colin Powell, White House Press
Secretary Ari Fleischer and General Tommy Franks.
Sometimes the Saudis were their own worst
enemies in the PR war. In December 2001, for example, the Saudi
defense minister drew criticism when he publicly accused the
"Zionist and Jewish lobby" of orchestrating a "media
blitz" against the desert kingdom.
Just as American propaganda has limited
impact in the Middle East, the Saudi PR blitz fell on mostly
deaf ears in the United States. Millions of Saudi dollars went
into TV and print ads positioning Saudi Arabia as a trusted ally
of the U.S. and a partner in the war on terror. "The ads
are signed 'The People of Saudi Arabia,' but that's a lie,"
commented Advertising Age columnist Bob Garfield. "And
so is the premise. For decades, the U.S. relationship with Saudi
Arabia and other so-called 'moderate' Arab states has been a
deal with the devil. We sponsor their corrupt, repressive, authoritarian
regimes with cash and weaponry. They sell us oil. Such unholy
alliances, dictated by Cold War realpolitik, were bound
to create backlash, and so they have, in the 1979 Iranian revolution
and decades of state-sponsored terrorism. In Saudi Arabia and
Egypt, meanwhile, we have continued to deal with the devils we
know rather than risk the Pandora's Box of popular Islamism.
The results: A Saudi regime that pays protection money to radical
fundamentalists by underwriting hate-spewing madrassas around
the Muslim world, spreading the virus of radical Islam while
inoculating itself from revolutionary threats within its kingdom."
Although most of the flacks on retainer
to the Saudis had Republican connections, some of the most scathing
critics of the Kingdom were conservatives like Wall Street
Journal columnist William McGurn and Congressman Dan Burton
(R-Indiana), who held hearings in October 2002 on charges that
the American children born of mixed U.S./Saudi parents have been
kidnapped to the Kingdom and held there. There are "hundreds
of such cases," Burton said, adding that the U.S. State
Department had done nothing to pressure the Kingdom to return
American children held there against their will. U.S. reluctance
to address the kidnapping matter made Burton wonder whether "we
have the resolve to deal with Saudi Arabia on other issues, ranging
from funding for terrorists to cooperation in the effort against
Iraq?"
Qorvis helped the Saudis handle fallout
from the charges, prompting Burton to subpoena the PR firm's
records. When the Saudis claimed that this would violate diplomatic
privileges under the Vienna Convention, Burton responded with
a scathing letter, stating that the convention "has no application
to American citizens who choose to sell their services as public
relations/lobbying mouthpieces for foreign interests. To the
contrary, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which was enacted
by Congress in 1937, makes clear that the activities of such
'propagandists,' including the documents they generate, are to
be subject to the 'spotlight of pitiless publicity' so that the
American people may be fully informed of both the identity of
the propagandists and the nature of the activities they undertake
on behalf of their foreign masters."
Even within Qorvis, the Saudi account
seemed to stir concern. In December 2002, three of the company's
founders quit to form their own PR firm. "Associates say
their departure reflects a deep discomfort in representing the
government of Saudi Arabia against accusations that Saudi leaders
have turned a blind eye to terrorism," the New York Times
reported on December 6, 2002. "Friends and associates,
speaking on condition of anonymity, said the departures had been
prompted largely by growing evidence of ties between prominent
Saudis and the financing of the terrorism network Al Qaeda."
Sheldon Rampton
and John Stauber are the editors of PR
Watch, an investigative journal that exposes deceptive
and manipulative public relations and propaganda campaigns. This
article is excerpted from their latest book, Weapons
of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq,
published by Tarcher/Penguin.
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