SHELDON RAMPTON
Weapons of Mass Deception - True Lies
Fri Aug 1 06:01:42 2003
64.140.158.18

July 31, 2003
Weapons of Mass Deception - True Lies

By SHELDON RAMPTON and JOHN STAUBER
http://www.counterpunch.org/


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).
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1585422762/counterpunchmaga

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.
FULL STORY:

http://www.counterpunch.org/

Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq (Tarcher/Penguin)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1585422762/counterpunchmaga

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