CBS - "60 Minutes"
Selling The Iraq War To The U.S.
Mon Dec 9 04:34:19 2002
208.152.73.1

Selling The Iraq War To The U.S.
CBS - "60 Minutes" - Dec. 6, 2002

Politicians have had to sell the public on going to war since Colonial
times, but they never had the arsenal of advertising and communications
techniques the Bush administration is using to sell a possible war on
Iraq. Bob Simon reports on those techniques and those employed by the
elder Bush prior to the 1991 Gulf War Sunday, Dec. 8 at 7 p.m., ET/PT.

Simon reminds viewers that a horrible story spread widely by the first
Bush administration prior to the Gulf War about Kuwaiti babies pulled
from incubators by invading Iraqis turned out not to be true. The current
Bush administration may be also misinforming the public in its efforts to
justify a possible second war with Saddam Hussein.

One example of misinformation, according to physicist and former weapons
inspector David Albright, was the Bush administration’s leak to the media
in September about Iraq’s attempt to import aluminum tubes which
administration officials claimed were headed for Iraq’s nuclear program.

“I think it was very misleading,” says Albright, who directs the
Institute for Science and International Security. Albright says the tubes
could be possibly used for a nuclear program, but were more suited to
conventional weapons production. Government experts thought that too,
Albright tells Simon, but administration officials “were selectively
picking information to bolster a case that the Iraqi nuclear threat was
more imminent than it is, and, in essence, scare people.”

Simon’s report examines the administration’s use of Madison Avenue to
produce an ad campaign aimed at improving the image of America in the
Muslim world. He also interviews a former CIA agent who investigated the
oft-mentioned report that hijacker Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi
intelligence official in Prague several months before the deadly attacks
on 9/11.

Despite a lack of evidence that the meeting took place, the item was
cited by administration officials as high as Vice President Dick Cheney
and ended up being reported so widely that two-thirds of Americans polled
by the Council on Foreign Relations believe Iraq was behind the terrorist
attacks of 9/11.

© MMII, CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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