To see this story with its related links on the The Observer site, go to http://www.observer.co.uk
Lessons in how to lie about Iraq
The problem is not propaganda but the relentless control of the kind of things we think about
Brian Eno Saturday August 16 2003 The Guardian
When I first visited Russia, in 1986, I made friends with a musician whose father had been Brezhnev's personal doctor. One day we were talking about life during 'the period of stagnation' - the Brezhnev era. 'It must have been strange being so completely immersed in propaganda,' I said. 'Ah, but there is the difference. We knew it was propaganda,' replied Sacha. That is the difference. Russian propaganda was so obvious that most Russians were able to ignore it. They took it for granted that the government operated in its own interests and any message coming from it was probably slanted - and they discounted it. In the West the calculated manipulation of public opinion to serve political and ideological interests is much more covert and therefore much more effective. Its greatest triumph is that we generally don't notice it - or laugh at the notion it even exists. We watch the democratic process taking place - heated debates in which we feel we could have a voice - and think that, because we have 'free' media, it would be hard for the Government to get away with anything very devious without someone calling them on it. It takes something as dramatic as the invasion of Iraq to make us look a bit more closely and ask: 'How did we get here?' How exactly did it come about that, in a world of Aids, global warming, 30-plus active wars, several famines, cloning, genetic engineering, and two billion people in poverty, practically the only thing we all talked about for a year was Iraq and Saddam Hussein? Was it really that big a problem? Or were we somehow manipulated into believing the Iraq issue was important and had to be fixed right now - even though a few months before few had mentioned it, and nothing had changed in the interim. In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America. According to Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber in their new book Weapons of Mass Deception , it was used to engineer a state of emergency that would justify an invasion of Iraq. Rampton and Stauber expose how news was fabricated and made to seem real. But they also demonstrate how a coalition of the willing - far-Right officials, neo-con think-tanks, insanely pugilistic media commentators and of course well-paid PR companies - worked together to pull off a sensational piece of intellectual dishonesty. Theirs is a study of modern propaganda. What occurs to me in reading their book is that the new American approach to social control is so much more sophisticated and pervasive that it really deserves a new name. It isn't just propaganda any more, it's 'prop-agenda '. It's not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about. When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks'. (What else can the spat between the BBC and Alastair Campbell be but a prime example of this?) With the ground thus prepared, governments are happy if you then 'use the democratic process' to agree or disagree - for, after all, their intention is to mobilise enough headlines and conversation to make the whole thing seem real and urgent. The more emotional the debate, the better. Emotion creates reality, reality demands action. An example of this process is one highlighted by Rampton and Stauber which, more than any other, consolidated public and congressional approval for the 1991 Gulf war. We recall the horrifying stories, incessantly repeated, of babies in Kuwaiti hospitals ripped out of their incubators and left to die while the Iraqis shipped the incubators back to Baghdad - 312 babies, we were told. The story was brought to public attention by Nayirah, a 15-year-old 'nurse' who, it turned out later, was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US and a member of the Kuwaiti royal family. Nayirah had been tutored and rehearsed by the Hill & Knowlton PR agency (which in turn received $14 million from the American government for their work in promoting the war). Her story was entirely discredited within weeks but by then its purpose had been served: it had created an outraged and emotional mindset within America which overwhelmed rational discussion. As we are seeing now, the most recent Gulf war entailed many similar deceits: false linkages made between Saddam, al-Qaeda and 9/11, stories of ready-to-launch weapons that didn't exist, of nuclear programmes never embarked upon. As Rampton and Stauber show, many of these allegations were discredited as they were being made, not least by this newspaper, but nevertheless were retold. Throughout all this, the hired-gun PR companies were busy, preconditioning the emotional landscape. Their marketing talents were particularly useful in the large-scale manipulation of language that the campaign entailed. The Bushites realised, as all ideologues do, that words create realities, and that the right words can over whelm any chance of balanced discussion. Guided by the overtly imperial vision of the Project for a New American Century (whose members now form the core of the American administration), the PR companies helped finesse the language to create an atmosphere of simmering panic where American imperialism would come to seem not only acceptable but right, obvious, inevitable and even somehow kind. Aside from the incessant 'weapons of mass destruction', there were 'regime change' (military invasion), 'pre-emptive defence' (attacking a country that is not attacking you), 'critical regions' (countries we want to control), the 'axis of evil' (countries we want to attack), 'shock and awe' (massive obliteration) and 'the war on terror' (a hold-all excuse for projecting American military force anywhere). Meanwhile, US federal employees and military personnel were told to refer to the invasion as 'a war of liberation' and to the Iraqi paramilitaries as 'death squads', while the reliably sycophantic American TV networks spoke of 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' - just as the Pentagon asked them to - thus consolidating the supposition that Iraqi freedom was the point of the war. Anybody questioning the invasion was 'soft on terror' (liberal) or, in the case of the UN, 'in danger of losing its relevance'. When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it's done so I would recognise when I was being lied to. I hope writers such as Rampton and Stauber and others may have the same effect and help to emasculate the culture of spin and dissembling that is overtaking our political establishments. · © Brian Eno 2003 A longer version of this article will appear in the new literary magazine, Zembla. Weapons of Mass Deception by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber is published by Robinson at £6.99 Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited
_____________________________________________________________________________
A Thanksgiving Day Letter from Michael Moore
November 27, 2002
Dear Friends,
It is Thanksgiving 2002 and it would seem that there is little to give thanks for this year. W. has scored an unbelievable hat trick and is now the first Republican since Eisenhower to control the House, the Senate and the White House. There is no getting around just how damned demoralizing and depressing this is. I wish there was a way to put a better face on what has transpired, but my well of optimism is just about dry. Bush has his "mandate" for war, his "mandate" for global frying, his "mandate" to turn our government into his own private corporation.
Except...
Only about 20% of the American people showed up three weeks ago to vote for a Republican. That's it. Just 20%. And about 19% voted for a Democrat (an amazing number considering how few fights the Democrats put up around the country).
And 61% said, "To hell with all of them!" and refused to show up and vote.
I am not surprised this happened. My greatest fear after the 2000 election was that the majority of Americans would just give up and say, "Why bother?" If there was one message to the average American from Bush's theft of the White House, it was this: "Not only doesn't your vote count, but even if you do vote, we're not going to count it!" I fear millions earlier this month saw the futility of exercising their right to govern when those who did the governing decided that the will of the people could be disposed of as easily as a drunk driving citation on a Kennebunkport back road.
Even worse, African Americans, whose right to vote was the most egregiously violated (and who usually are the first to stand and fight injustice), seem to have given up. Betrayed, forgotten and taken for granted by the Democrats, black voters saw no reason to revolt in 2000-and little reason to show up in 2002. They got the message loud and clear: "This is White America-we call the shots, we run this place, so shut the f*** up and stay home. The polls have closed for you."
Of course, those in charge are thrilled that 61% of the country has given up. That's right where they want us-out of the way! And it is for that reason alone why we must not now throw in the towel. If we sink into a collective state of despair, disgust and disinterest, we are truly doomed. Bush & Company (and this includes the Democrats) are all-too-happy to be left alone to run amok in the candy store. And, in the end, here is what we'll be left with: billions of impoverished people around the world hoping for a chance to kill you and me someday!
Ok, so what do we do? Perhaps the silver lining in all this is that Bush will actually think he has a "mandate" and pull such a big, stinking whopper that his re-installation in 2004 will be rendered impossible. Or perhaps some prosecutor somewhere will have the guts to indict him for the insider trading he conducted while on the board of Harken Oil. Who knows.
A lot can happen in 23 months. In the meantime, you, me, all of us, have to get together and come up with a plan that gets this country back in our hands. I have a few ideas. I'll bet you do, too. Why don't we have an online brainstorming session from now through the holidays? I'll set up a thread on my forum at http://www.michaelmoore.com/phpbb/viewforum.php?f=30 for you to post your comments and to generate a discussion about what we do for 2004. Or, if you want to send me your thoughts directly, email me at 2004@michaelmoore.com. I've just learned the site is getting over 2 million hits a day. Right now, 2,000,000 heads certainly feel better than one. Pass the turkey. Yours, Michael Moore Mike@michaelmoore.com http://www.michaelmoore.com http://www.bowlingforcolumbine.com
P.S. Thanks to all of you who continue to pack the theatres for "Bowling for Columbine." It has now broken the all-time box office record for a documentary in America. I am not only grateful for this, but I am thrilled that it has ignited a national discussion about guns, violence, the NRA, racism, why the Canadians don't lock their doors, and the insane preparation for an expanded war in Iraq. I am now getting reports of people around the country trying to get stores in their towns to ban the sale of bullets. The NRA candidates lost the race for Governor in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Illinois (three hunting states). The film continues to set box office records in the UK, France and elsewhere. And, next week, "Stupid White Men" begins its 10th month on the best-seller list. Thank you all so much. Have a happy Thanksgiving.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Laurie King-Irani is an anthropologist, freelance writer, former editor of MERIP's Middle East Report, and one of the founders of The Electronic Intifada. She is currently North American Coordinator for the International Campaign for Justice for the Victims of Sabra and Shatila. Laurie and her Lebanese husband, George, live in Victoria, Canada.
March 12, 2002 -- Imagine that it is September 2010. The site of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan is just a garbage dump now. Weather permitting, teenagers meet to play pick-up games of soccer or baseball in this space filled with the ashes of thousands. The photos of the innocents who perished unjustly in the shocking attacks nine years earlier have faded into oblivion. All of the makeshift altars and memorials to the dead are long gone, and no one remembers their names. Not a single monument to their senseless erasure from the world of the living has ever been erected.
Worse still, no one has been punished for these heinous crimes. Not one person has ever stood trial for the murders of thousands of innocent office workers and airplane passengers that bright September day nearly a decade ago. The whole event has, in fact, been pushed off the public stage and relegated to the private memories of the bereaved. They have gradually come to realize that their grief must remain unspoken. No one responds when they raise questions of justice, accountability, or the sacred duty to honor the dead. People get annoyed whenever they bring up the troubling events of September 11, 2001, so they have learned, after nine years, to suffer in silence and pretend that it was no big deal, after all.
Such a scenario is not only impossible to imagine, but offensive as well. Six months have passed since planes full of terrified civilians plowed into the twin towers, the Pentagon, and a field in western Pennsylvania. The US has launched a "global war on terror" with no end in sight, countless memorial services have been held, various monuments to the dead are on the drawing table, and the lives mercilessly and unjustly extinguished last September are being commemorated in songs by Neil Young, in special television features, as well as in the pages of the New York Times. No American would stand for the heartless, unjust, and inhumane scenario depicted above. Nor should they--or anyone.
That scenario, however absurd and obscene, is not a hypothetical one, but rather, the daily reality for survivors of one of the most shocking war crimes committed during the last half of the 20th century: the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres in Beirut. Over 1000 unarmed individuals--women, men, children, and the aged--were brutally tortured, raped and slaughtered in September 1982 by Lebanese militiamen allied with and supplied by the Israeli Defense Forces, which, at the time of the massacre, were in complete control of Beirut and under the command of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon. As Israel's top general at the time of the massacres, Sharon had command responsibility, according to the Geneva Conventions and international law, for anything that happened in Beirut. Israeli units controlled access to and from the camps while the massacre unfolded. The IDF allowed the Lebanese militia to enter the camps and then launched flares into the night skies to assist the killers in their gruesome tasks. The burden of the massacres rests ultimately on Sharon's shoulders, and indeed, a 1983 Israeli commission of inquiry (which was not legally binding and lacked judicial force) found that Sharon bore "personal responsibility" for the deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians.
The survivors of Sabra and Shatila watched in mute horror, powerless to stop marauding militiamen from exterminating, mutilating, and raping their children, parents, husbands, wives, and friends. The lucky ones know where their loved ones' bodies are buried; many more, however, still have no clue about the final resting place of their dead. And in the hours and days after the massacres, many Palestinian men and boys were rounded up and trucked away, never to be seen again, most notably from a sports stadium near the refugee camps where Israeli military and intelligence officers were present. A mass grave site at the edge of the refugee camp now does double duty as a garbage dump and an occasional soccer field. Nearly 20 years after the massacre, not a single permanent memorial has been erected to commemorate the dead, not a single person--Israeli or Lebanese--has stood trial for the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the camps of Sabra and Shatila in September 1982. Such impunity is not only morally reprehensible and psychologically unbearable, but also politically dangerous because of the precedent it sets and the hearts and minds it poisons.
For those who covered the Sabra and Shatila massacre as journalists, no less than for those who served as medical workers in the camps' hospitals that scorching September twenty years ago, this week's televised images of Israeli tanks surrounding refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza and the photographs of young men lined up, blindfolded and separated from their families as Israeli soldiers point guns at them, are chillingly familiar. Those who have witnessed massacres fear another may unfold at any minute. Those who survived the massacres are incredulous that it might happen again, but this time with the entire world witnessing the killings on prime time television. Those who have followed Ariel Sharon's biography closely--from the cold-blooded attack on the village of Qibya in 1953 that he orchestrated as leader of the notorious Unit 101, resulting in the deaths of nearly 70 innocent civilians, to his latest threats to wreak large scale destruction and collective punishment on Palestinians who have been trapped in their towns and villages under a long siege--urgently warn that Sharon must be stopped before mass graves are dug again in other refugee camps.
The disturbing events of the last week in the West Bank and Gaza Strip underline the pressing need to dismantle the settlements, end the occupation, and most importantly, to consolidate the rule of law by ensuring international oversight of the occupied territories. What the alarming increase in killings and the disturbing trends in IDF strategy also indicate is an urgent need to end Ariel Sharon's impunity for war crimes once and for all. And if the recent legal efforts of 23 survivors of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre bear fruit, that may happen sooner than many imagine.
A judicial forum for raising these issues and attaining justice did not exist in September 1982. It does now. On May 15, 2002 arguments will continue before a Belgian court concerning a complaint lodged by massacre survivors accusing Sharon and other Israelis and Lebanese with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and international law. In the 1990s, Belgium incorporated into its criminal law system the principle of Universal Jurisdiction for war crimes, which is embodied in the Geneva Conventions and international customary law. This has enabled the bereaved sons, daughters, parents, sisters, brothers, and widows of those killed in September 1982 to seek justice, not revenge; to aim for closure, not retaliation; and to honor their dead by taking their case before a court of law and thereby affirming an international order based on universal principles of justice, not a world blinded by the ancient and fruitless principle of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."
Bringing Ariel Sharon and others to trial for the heinous crimes committed in Sabra and Shatila twenty Septembers ago is just and proper compensation for the victims, and a long overdue remedy for the survivors. They have inhabited a limbo of grief, fear, and bitterness for two decades, suffering not only the horrifying deaths of their loved ones, but the denial of any psychological, moral, or legal closure. But bringing Sharon to trial is equally imperative for those now living under the threat of new massacres in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as the IDF, again under Sharon's command, displays utter disregard for international law.
The innocents who perished in the camps of Sabra and Shatila in September 1982 are no less human, no less worthy, than the innocents incinerated in New York City, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania in September 2001. After 20 years of waiting, it is time to lay the dead of Sabra and Shatila to rest, it is time to honor the murdered by holding the murderers accountable. No one would expect Americans to forget the dead of 9/11 and "just get over it and move on," nor should Americans accept that those directly responsible for the crimes of September 2001 might escape justice before a court of law. If the universal principles undergirding international law are to have any meaning and substance for the coming generations, we should not allow those who committed the crimes of September 1982 to enjoy impunity either.
Please support the global campaign against impunity for war crimes. If you are in the USA, demand that your congressperson and senators take a stand on this issue; write letters to the editor and ask why newspapers and the electronic media in the US have not addressed Ariel Sharon's long history of war crimes; raise these important issues of justice, morality, and human rights with your colleagues, friends, and neighbors. Join with all those throughout the world who are demanding that the trial in Belgium go forward until justice is done. Ariel Sharon and others must be held accountable for the grave crimes against humanity committed in Sabra and Shatila in 1982.
Laurie King-Irani
North American Coordinator of the International
Campaign for Justice for the Victims of Sabra and Shatila.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Signs of An Early Spring, by John Passacantando, published 14 February 2002
I noticed last week the tips of my tulips already starting to break through the earth. Maybe it is a result of this mild winter, maybe even global warming, which we know makes winter come later and spring earlier. But it may be a sign of hope too.
Nevertheless, it feels dark and gloomy in the Nation's Capital. A long lineup of grim, gray men are testifying as to how much money they stole or diverted or transferred or whatever the heck it was they did at Enron. Grim, gray senators are tripping over themselves trying to project such an image of propriety that we the people might not notice all the bribes they took from Enron and a list of hundreds of other companies who paid them for favorable policy, weakened environmental laws and access to foreign markets.
Heck, it looks like Congress might even slip in a campaign finance reform bill for more image buffing -- while their money men are already plotting ways around it.
The White House is refusing to make public the notes from their energy task force meetings held last year at which numerous energy companies are reputed to have designed the energy plan, by and for the likes of those who had access -- Enron and Exxon to name just two.
Ah yes, the war effort. No time to criticize, right? Shall we behave ourselves while corporate men take over our government, our laws? Can we allow the White House to hide behind the flag?
Consider this quote:
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." That was said by my favorite Republican, Teddy Roosevelt in 1918.
The point is, we are witnessing a temporary phenomenon. The Bush administration and their supplicants in Congress are trying to create their own corrupt system whereby politicians and select corporations can run the game, free from competition, oversight or environmental, health and labor regulations.
But, I promise you it is spring. A closed and corrupt system couldn't even be held together by the former Soviet Union. The White House cannot run this racket for long before the public catches on. We want real energy security, safe, renewable energy that creates jobs, not targets. While it is darkest before the dawn, there is no American flag large enough for this mob to hide behind. Enron, Exxon, Congress and the Bush administration, come out. Spring will be here sooner than you know and we will hold you accountable for your actions.
Tulips are soft and gentle, but they always break through.
-------------------------- With more than ten years in the public interest sector, John Passacantando came to Greenpeace after co-founding Ozone Action, a grassroots organization dedicated to stopping global warming. From The Desk Of... is a periodic column written by Passacantando, Greenpeace USA's Executive Director.