50 FALSE STORIES PLANTED
50 FALSE STORIES PLANTED
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/2003-November/011378.html
America’s Ministry of Propaganda Exposed—Parts 1 - 4
America’s Ministry of Propaganda Exposed
By Gar Smith / The-Edge
November 7, 2003
Part One
A Strategy of Lies: How the White House Fed the Public a Steady Diet of
Falsehoods
Colonel Sam Gardiner (USAF, Ret.) has identified 50 false news stories created and leaked by a secretive White House propaganda apparatus. Bush administration officials are probably having second thoughts about their decision to play hardball with former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Joe Wilson is a contender. When you play hardball with Joe, you better be prepared to deal with some serious rebound.
After Wilson wrote a critically timed New York Times essay exposing as false George W. Bush’s claim that Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger, high officials in the White House contacted several Washington reporters and leaked the news that Wilson’s wife was a CIA agent.
Wilson isn’t waiting for George W. Bush to hand over the perp. In mid-October, the former ambassador began passing copies of an embarrassing internal report to reporters across the US. The-Edge has received copies of this document.
The 56-page investigation was assembled by USAF Colonel (Ret.) Sam Gardiner
“Truth from These Podia: Summary of a Study of Strategic Influence, Perception Management, Strategic Information Warfare and Strategic Psychological Operations in Gulf II” identifies more than 50 stories about the Iraq war that were faked by government propaganda artists in a covert campaign to “market” the military invasion of Iraq.
Gardiner has credentials. He has taught at the National War College, the Air War College and the Naval Warfare College and was a visiting scholar at the Swedish Defense College.
According to Gardiner, “It was not bad intelligence” that lead to the quagmire in Iraq, “It was an orchestrated effort [that] began before the war” that was designed to mislead the public and the world. Gardiner’s research lead him to conclude that the US and Britain had conspired at the highest levels to plant “stories of strategic influence” that were known to be false.
The Times of London described the $200-million-plus US operation as a “meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress, and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein.”
The multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign run out of the White House and Defense Department was, in Gardiner’s final assessment “irresponsible in parts” and “might have been illegal.”
“Washington and London did not trust the peoples of their democracies to come to the right decisions,” Gardiner explains. Consequently, “Truth became a casualty. When truth is a casualty, democracy receives collateral damage.” For the first time in US history, “we allowed strategic psychological operations to become part of public affairs... [W]hat has happened is that information warfare, strategic influence, [and] strategic psychological operations pushed their way into the important process of informing the peoples of our two democracies.”
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced plans to create an Office of Strategic Influence early in 2002. At the same time British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Strategy Director Alastair Campbell was setting up an identical operation in London.
As soon as Pvt. Jessica Lynch was airlifted from her hospital bed, the first call from her “rescue team” went, not to military officials but to Jim Wilkinson, the White House’s top propaganda official stationed in Iraq.
White House critics were quick to recognize that “strategic influence” was a euphemism for disinformation. Rumsfeld had proposed establishing the country’s first Ministry of Propaganda.
The criticism was so severe that the White House backed away from the plan. But on November 18, several months after the furor had died down, Rumsfeld arrogantly announced that he had not been deterred. “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.”
Gardiner’s dogged research identified a long list of stories that passed through Rumsfeld’s propaganda mill. According to Gardiner, “there were over 50 stories manufactured or at least engineered that distorted the picture of Gulf II for the American and British people.” Those stories include:
The link between terrorism, Iraq and 9/11
Iraqi agents meeting with 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta
Iraq’s possession of chemical and biological weapons.
Iraq’s purchase of nuclear materials from Niger.
Saddam Hussein’s development of nuclear weapons.
Aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons
The existence of Iraqi drones, WMD cluster bombs and Scud missiles.
Iraq’s threat to target the US with cyber warfare attacks.
The rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch.
The surrender of a 5,000-man Iraqi brigade.
Iraq executing Coalition POWs.
Iraqi soldiers dressing in US and UK uniforms to commit atrocities.
The exact location of WMD facilities
WMDs moved to Syria.
Every one of these stories received extensive publicity and helped form indelible public impressions of the “enemy” and the progress of the invasion. Every one of these stories was false.
“I know what I am suggesting is serious. I did not come to these conclusions lightly,” Gardiner admits. “I’m not going to address why they did it. That’s something I don’t understand even after all the research.” But the fact remained that “very bright and even well-intentioned officials found how to control the process of governance in ways never before possible.”
A Battle between Good and Evil
Gardiner notes that cocked-up stories about Saddam’s WMDs “was only a very small part of the strategic influence, information operations and marketing campaign conducted on both sides of the Atlantic.”
The “major thrust” of the campaign, Gardiner explains, was “to make a conflict with Iraq seem part of a struggle between good and evil. Terrorism is evil... we are the good guys.
“The second thrust is what propaganda theorists would call the ‘big lie.’ The plan was to connect Iraq with the 9/11 attacks. Make the American people believe that Saddam Hussein was behind those attacks.”
The means for pushing the message involved: saturating the media with stories, 24/7; staying on message; staying ahead of the news cycle; managing expectations; and finally, being prepared to “use information to attack and punish critics.”
Audition in Afghanistan
The techniques that proved so successful in Operation Iraqi Freedom were first tried out during the campaign to build public support for the US attack on Afghanistan.
Rumsfeld hired Rendon Associates, a private PR firm that had been deeply involved in the first Gulf War. Founder John Rendon (who calls himself an “information warrior”) proudly boasts that he was the one responsible for providing thousands of US flags for the Kuwaiti people to wave at TV cameras after their “liberation” from Iraqi troops in 1991.
The White House Coalition Information Center was set up by Karen Hughes in November 2001. (In January 2003, the CIC was renamed the Office for Global Communications.) The CIC hit on a cynical plan to curry favor for its attack on Afghanistan by highlighting “the plight of women in Afghanistan.” CIC’s Jim Wilkinson later called the Afghan women campaign “the best thing we’ve done.”
Gardiner is quick with a correction. The campaign “was not about something they did. It was about a story they created... It was not a program with specific steps or funding to improve the conditions of women.”
The coordination between the propaganda engines of Washington and London even involved the respective First Wives. On November 17, 2001, Laura Bush issued a shocking statement: “Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women’s fingernails for wearing nail polish.” Three days later, a horrified Cherie Blaire told the London media, “In Afghanistan, if you wear nail polish, you could have your nails torn out.”
Misleading via Innuendo
Time and again, US reporters accepted the CIC news leaks without question. Among the many examples that Gardiner documented was the use of the “anthrax scare” to promote the administration’s pre-existing plan to attack Iraq.
In both the US and the UK, “intelligence sources” provided a steady diet of unsourced allegations to the media to suggest that Iraq and Al Qaeda terrorists were behind the deadly mailing of anthrax-laden letters.
It wasn’t until December 18, that the White House confessed that it was “increasingly looking like” the anthrax came from a US military installation. The news was released as a White House “paper” instead of as a more prominent White House “announcement.” As a result, the idea that Iraq or Al Qaeda were behind the anthrax plot continued to persist. Gardiner believes this was an intentional part of the propaganda campaign. “If a story supports policy, even if incorrect, let it stay around.”
In a successful propaganda campaign, Gardiner wrote, “We would have expected to see the creation [of] stories to sell the policy; we would have expected to see the same stories used on both sides of the Atlantic. We saw both. The number of engineered or false stories from US and UK stories is long.”
The US and Britain: The Axis of Disinformation
Before the coalition invasion began on March 20, 2003, Washington and London agreed to call their illegal pre-emptive military aggression an “armed conflict” and to always reference the Iraqi government as the “regime.” Strategic communications managers in both capitols issued lists of “guidance” terms to be used in all official statements. London’s 15 Psychological Operations Group paralleled Washington’s Office of Global Communications.
In a departure from long military tradition, the perception managers even took over the naming of the war. Military code names were originally chosen for reasons of security. In modern US warfare, however, military code names have become “part of the marketing.” There was Operation Nobel Eagle, Operation Valiant Strike, Operation Provide Comfort, Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Uphold Democracy and, finally, Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The “Rescue” of Jessica Lynch
The Pentagon’s control over the news surrounding the capture and rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch receives a good deal of attention in Gardiner’s report. “From the very beginning it was called an ‘ambush’,” Gardiner noted. But, he pointed out, “If you drive a convoy into enemy lines, turn around and drive back, it’s not an ambush. Military officers who are very careful about how they talk about operations would normally not be sloppy about describing this kind of event,” Gardiner complained. “This un-military kind of talk is one of the reasons I began doing this research.”
One of the things that struck Gardiner as revealing was the fact that, as Newsweek reported: “as soon as Lynch was in the air, [the Joint Operations Center] phoned Jim Wilkinson, the top civilian communications aide to CENTCOM Gen. Tommy Franks.”
It struck Gardiner as inexplicable that the first call after Lynch’s rescue would go to the Director of Strategic Communications, the White House’s top representative on the ground.
On the morning of April 3, the Pentagon began leaking information on Lynch’s rescue that sought to establish Lynch as “America’s new Rambo.” The Washington Post repeated the story it received from the Pentagon: that Lynch “sustained multiple gunshot wounds” and fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldier... firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition.”
Lynch’s family confused the issue by telling the press that their daughter had not sustained any bullet wounds. Lynch’s parents subsequently refused to talk to the press, explaining that they had been “told not to talk about it.” (Weeks later, the truth emerged. Lynch was neither stabbed nor shot. She was apparently injured while falling from her vehicle.)
Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers let the story stand during an April 3 press conference although both had been fully briefed on Lynch’s true condition.
“Again, we see the pattern,” Gardiner observed. “When the story on the street supports the message, it will be left there by a non-answer. The message is more important than the truth. Even Central Command kept the story alive by not giving out details.”
Gardiner saw another break with procedure. The information on the rescue that was released to the Post “would have been very highly classified” and should have been closely guarded. Instead, it was used as a tool to market the war. “This was a major pattern from the beginning of the marketing campaign throughout the war,” Gardiner wrote. “It was okay to release classified information if it supported the message.”
Part 2
Transforming Language to Market the ‘Big Lie’
Iraq’s ‘Terrorist Death Squads’
Secretary of State Colin Powell warned the UN General Assembly that Iraq possessed chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Was Mr. Powell merely advancing “stories of strategic influence”? ©Michael Gross / State Department photo To Gardiner, the “most serious transformation of language” involved Washington’s directive to refer to Iraq’s irregular troops as “terrorist death squads.” The order apparently came down on March 25.
Renaming the Iraqi defenders “terrorists” appears to have been part of the strategic influence campaign since it served to connect the Iraqi fighters with “one of the major themes of Gulf II—Iraq = terrorist = 9/11.”
Gardiner stressed the role repetition plays in the “effective implementation of creating memory in a population” and observed that “this theme was successful by US opinion polls” that show a majority of US citizens now believe, in the absence of evidence, that Iraq “was connected” to 9/11.
Ansar al-Salam
The propaganda artists selected a small Kurdish splinter group called Ansar al-Salam and elevated it into an organized group of Al Qaeda “terrorists” who were “said to be” controlled by Saddam Hussein and “believed to be” producing ricin, a deadly biotoxin.
Since Ansar al-Salam was formed shortly after 9/11, “it was tied to bin Laden.” Because a single source claimed to have seen Republican Guard officers in the region, “it was tied to Saddam Hussein.”
“This was part of the ‘big lie’ to tie Iraq to 9/11,” Gardiner wrote. “The ‘terrorist’ connection took many other forms, many forms but the truth. I don’t see evidenced they cherished the truth.”
Operation TELIC
In the first days of the invasion, a US Marine Corps spokesman made a prophetic statement: “The first image of the war will define the conflict.”
The attempts to control those “first images” were of overriding interest to the coalition’s ministries of propaganda. Because it was believed that the city of Basrah would quickly fall to the coalition troops, the “Battle of Basrah” was heavily scripted long before the first soldiers even entered Iraq.
Marines were given food packets to hand out to Basrah children. Journalists were to be bused to the newly captured city and TV crews were to be flown in to film the “liberated” citizens welcoming coalition soldiers with smiles and flowers. The UK had expected to lead the attack on Basrah but, over Blair’s objections, the US insisted on giving this plum assignment to the US Marines. Gardiner’s sources in Britain told him that the sole reason was that the US “wanted to have their forces lead the victory into Basrah.”
When the residents of Basrah refused to be “liberated,” the carefully planned media event evaporated in a hail of gunfire.
“It was about image,” Gardiner marvels. “So much effort and money on image.”
Salman Pak
In a widely publicized September 12, 2002 briefing paper entitled, “Decade of Deception,” the White House described “a highly secret terrorist training facility in Iraq known as Salman Pak, where both Iraqis and non-Iraqi Arabs receive training on hijacking planes and trains, planting explosives in cities, sabotage, and assassinations.”
“This facility became a major part of the strategic influence marketing effort,” Gardiner writes. Yet, in the invasions aftermath, the Pentgon offered no “compelling evidence” that such a site existed.
In his February 3 presentation to the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell flashed a photo of an Ansar al-Salam “poison factory” in northern Iraq. In September 3, seven months after Powell’s presentation, an Los Angeles Times reporter managed to reach the “poison factory,” which he described as “a small cinderblock building bearing brown granules and ammonia-like scents.” When the Times had the material tested, the granules turned out to be a commercial rat poison.
US Lied about Attacks on Iraq’s Power Grid
Secretary Powell claimed that Iraq possessed mobile trucks designed to produce biological weapons. When invading forces located the trucks it turned out they were actually designed to produce hydrogen for surveillance balloons and Iraq had bought the trucks from the Britain.
When the capital city of Baghdad was blacked out by a power failure during the April bombardment, Pentagon spokesperson Victoria “Tori” Clarke rushed to assure the world that “We did not have the power grid as a target. That was not us.”
The facts would subsequently show that the US had targeted portions of the power grid. In the North, a special operations team staged an attack on the Hadithah Dam on April 1 or 2. Human Rights Watch documented at least two attacks on the power grid south of Baghdad “along Highway 6 [that] included a Tomahawk [missile] strike using carbon fibers.”
The use of a sophisticated carbon-fiber weapons is significant since the deployment of these specialized devices required prior approval from Washington.
Iraq’s “Dirty Bomb”
In June 2002, an Iraqi expatriate named Khidhir Manza told the Wall Street Journal that the situation was “ideal for countries like Iraq to train and support a terrorist operation using radiation weapons.” Manza’s interview with the Journal was arranged by the Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqi exiles that was set up by the Rendon Group and supported financially by agencies of the US government. (See Weapons of Mass Deception, by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton.)
Helping to make Manza’s charges more credible, unnamed intelligence officials earlier had told the International Herald Tribune that “they are kept awake at night by the prospect of a dirty bomb.” Astute readers will note that these anonymous sources never actually said Iraq had a dirty bomb. It was all managed through suggestion and innuendo.
American’s Heroic Hostage
In an episode that recalled the creation of the “Old Shoe, the fictitious hero concocted by Robert deNiro’s ace “perception manager” in the film “Wag the Dog,” Washington’s propaganda artists literally brought someone back from the dead.
Lt. Commander Scott Speicher had been shot down during the first Gulf War in 1991. In an attempt to generate sympathy and support for Bush’s pre-emptive war, “intelligence sources” began circulating a bizarre new story to the US media. In what Gardiner called “a pattern typical of created stories,” these unnamed sources started a rumor that Commander Speicher had not only survived but that he had somehow spent the past decade trapped in an Iraqi prison.
Iraqi officials vehemently denied that they were holding Speicher or, for that matter, any Americans. When asked about the Iraqi denial at a press conference, Rumsfeld’s response was calculatingly oblique. “I don’t believe much the regime puts out,” Rumsfeld stated.
In Gardiner’s estimation, Rumsfeld’s answer “was too clever not to have been formulated to leave the impression that [Speicher] was alive.”
Gardiner was troubled by Rumsfeld’s apparent disinterest in the truth but, as a former military officer, there was another question that bothered Gardiner even more. “Why didn’t [Rumsfeld] consider what he was doing to Speicher’s family?”
On January 11, 2001, Speicher’s status was changed from KIA (Killed in Action) to MIA (Missing in Action). As the invasion forces gathered in the Middle East, Speicher’s status was changed once more, to “captured.” Navy officials who contacted ABC News reported that they had been pressured to make this change.
In January, “intelligence officials” continued to leak information to the media that suggested Speicher was still alive. In April, the secretive ministry of propaganda leaked a report that his initials had been found on the wall of a cell in Iraq. Gardiner found this leak particularly strange since “Military POW recovery personnel are very careful about releasing information that would cause false hope in families.” The release of such information would also, obviously, endanger the captives.
Long after Baghdad fell and the media’s attention had been drawn to the fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction, a reporter thought to ask Rumsfeld about America’s lost hero. The secretary replied vaguely that there was “nothing turned up thus far that I could elaborate on that would be appropriate.” On July 16, a Washington Times investigation belatedly concluded that there was “no evidence” Speicher had survived or had been held captive in Iraq.
Chemical Cluster Bombs
On March 10, administration officials attempted to discredit Hans Blix and UNMOVIC, the UN weapons inspection program. Administration officials told the Boston Globe that “Blix did not give details... of the possible existence of a cluster bomb that could deliver deadly poisons.”
Presidential spokesperson Ari Fleischer claimed that the US was “aware of UNMOVIC’s discovery of Iraqi production of munitions capable of dispensing both chemical and biological weapons.” Videotape was released allegedly showing the Iraqis testing a cluster bomb for dispersing chemical weapons.
“The chemical cluster bomb story certainly didn’t linger,” Gardiner wrote. “It was around only a couple of days, but it still served its purpose at the time.”
Few newspaper readers or TV watchers realized that there was never any evidence that Iraq had such technologically complex weapons. Indeed, the Pentagon had dismissed the possibility of Iraq ever developing these weapons during the first Gulf War.
Iraq’s Planned Computer Attack on America
An alarming White House paper presented by Paul Wolfowitz before a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations warned that Iraqi engineers were preparing a vast attack on the country’s computer networks.
The warning came from a single source who claimed that Iraq’s Intelligence Service was working with the Babylon Software Company to break into US computers, steal documents and spread viruses. There were no such attacks. There was no such program.
Iraqi Troops in US Uniforms
On March 7, White House Deputy Director of Communications Jim Wilkinson, described as “a senior US official,” released a story about Iraq’s alleged acquisition of US and UK military uniforms “identical down to the last detail.” Wilkinson claimed Iraqis in US camouflage were planning to commit battlefield atrocities to cast discredit on coalition troops.
On March 26, Pentagon spokesperson Victoria “Tori” Clarke embellished the story. Clarke told reporters that “we knew they were acquiring uniforms that looked like US and UK uniforms. And the reporting was ... [that Saddam Hussein would] give them to the thugs, as I call them, to go out, carry out reprisals against the Iraqi people, and try to blame it on coalition forces.”
Two days later, Rumsfeld added a new twist, claiming that Saddam Hussein’s troops planned to don UK an US uniforms “to try to fool regular Iraqi soldiers into surrendering to them and then execute them as an example for others.”
There were never any reports of Iraq attempting such stunts. In his report, Gardiner concludes: “The way it was put by Jim Wilkinson (a name that keeps appearing in these questionable stories), it seems to fit a pattern of pre-blaming Iraq. It has the feel of being a created story.”
Iraq’s Scud Missiles
In the lead-up to the war, the British and American people were told repeatedly that Iraq had Scud missiles capable of striking Israel. When the invasion began, Iraq began to fire what the Pentagon called “Scud-type missiles.” As Gardiner discovered, these rockets “were not Scuds and we have found no Scuds, but for three days they kept the story alive.”
In October 2002, a CIA report determined that evidence for the existence of Iraqi Scuds was inconclusive. Nonetheless, by the time Colin Powell stepped up to the plate at the UN, the missiles had become an accepted fact as far as Washington, London and Tel Aviv were concerned.
During the invasion, “American officials” told the New York Times that “the sheer tenacity of the Iraqi fight” near a compound at Al Qa’im had led them to believe that “the Iraqis might be defending Scud missiles” hidden at the site. Gardiner notes laconically: “No Scuds or WMDs were found at Al Qa’im.”
Saddam’s Remote-Controlled Drones
The CIA’s October report also claimed that Iraq had converted some J-29 jet fighters to deliver chemical and biological weapons. George W. Bush quickly seized on this specter for a speech in Cincinnati, where he told the astonished crowd that Saddam’s poison-laden aircraft were capable of hitting US soil.
By the time Powell testified before the UN, the threat had been measurably pared down—the fighter jets had become smaller, remotely piloted drones. Mr. Bush went public with the extraordinary claimed that these tiny drones could strike the US.
On June 15, an Air Force team in Iraq finally seized the drones. The Los Angeles Times described them as “five burned and blackened 9-foot-wings.” The Air Force captain in charge of the inspection concluded that the drones could have been “a student project or maybe a model.”
A subsequent investigation by the USAF determined that the drones’ only possible mission was to take pictures.
Part 3
America’s Ministry of Propaganda—Part Three
By Gar Smith / The-Edge
November 7, 2003
Targeting Critics, Spreading Lies, and PSYOPS
Protesters in Baghdad lie down in the path of US armored vehicles. The White House Office of Global Communication is not interested in distributing photos of ordinary Iraqi citizens nonviolently demonstration against the US occupation.
The tools of strategic influence were not only wielded against Saddam Hussein, they were also turned against foreign allies and domestic critics who dared to question Bush’s agenda. The French were among the first to feel the sting of these attacks.
Sam Gardiner’s report notes that the French were clearly “the focus of punishment in the strategic influence campaign.” He has identified “at least eight times when false stories or engineered stories were aimed at them, the majority appearing after their lack of support in the UN for US and UK actions.”
In September, government sources informed the New York Times that the French and German governments had provided Iraq with precision switches that could be used to produce nuclear weapons. The Times ran the story before discovering that the France and Germany had both, in fact, refused to provide the switches.
“American intelligence sources” told the Washington Postthat the French possessed illegal strains of smallpox virus. Again, the story was false.
The Washington Times received a tip from “US intelligence sources” that two companies in France had sold equipment to Saddam. The companies denied the charge and no evidence was ever provided to sustain the charge.
On April 9, Brig. Gen. Brooks told the media that his troops had discovered “an underground storage facility containing... Roland-type air defense missiles.” Lt. Greg Holmes, an army intelligence officer, told Newsweek that US soldiers had found “51 Roland-2 missiles, made by a partnership of French and German arms manufacturers.” Holmes also stated that at least one of the Roland missiles “was manufactured last year.”
The story served to further defame the irascible French but, Gardiner writes with a touch of sarcasm, the story “was not very well put together” since it turned out that “the production line for the Roland-2 was shut down in 1993.”
Punishing the French
For the French, the War of the Leaks was just beginning. On May 6, “US intelligence officials” were quoted as telling the Washington Times that “an unknown number of Iraqis who worked for Saddam Hussein’s government were given passports by French officials in Syria.” The story was kept alive by a succession of press leaks attributed to “State Department and intelligence officials,” and a bevy of “Administration officials.”
On May 6, Fox News reported that “Paris had been colluding with Baghdad before and during the coalition invasion.” On May 7, the Washington Times, citing reports from “US officials,” claimed that “officials of the Saddam Hussein government... fled Iraq with French passports.”
The French government angrily denied the allegations and accused Washington of running a “smear campaign.” But when the press confronted Rumsfeld about these accusations, he “followed pattern.” Instead of confirming or denying the charges against the French, he simply smiled and said, “I have nothing to add.”
As Gardiner sees it, the intended effect of that kind of non-answer was that “he wanted people to believe the stories.”
This campaign of Francophobe fibbing eventually contaminated the White House press briefings. On May 14, a reporter asked White House press officer Scott McClellan about the stories accusing the French of selling Iraq arms and issuing passports to fleeing Iraqi officials. “Are those charges valid?” the reporter asked.
McClellan’s response: “Well, I think that those are questions you can address to France.”
Reporter: On that point, Scott, do you have any information that the French did, in fact, issue passports to people so that....”
McClellan: I think—no, I think that’s a question you need to address to France.”
Reporter: Well, no. It’s information the US claims to have.
McClellan: I don’t have anything for you.
“The Secretary of Defense told us before the war he was going to do strategic influence,” Gardiner notes wryly. “It appears as if the French were a target.”
Targeting Domestic Critics: The Galloway Forgeries
The White House claimed that these aluminum tubes were proof that Iraq was attempting to produce nuclear weapons. US intelligence agents knew the truth: the tubes were useless for nuclear processing. In Britain, Labor Member of Parliament George Galloway became an open skeptic of Tony Blair’s rhetoric. In a bold attempt to avoid war, Galloway had gone to Iraq to interview Saddam Hussein in hopes of promoting a diplomatic resolution to the crisis.
Galloway’s skepticism began to gnaw away at Bush-and-Blair’s broad-brush claims that Hussein was only months away from building a nuclear bomb or that he was capable of launching a WMD attack within 45 minutes.
Galloway soon found himself under attack. Government officials leaked a packet of supposedly “classified documents” to the Daily Telegraph. The papers, which were represented as having been seized from Iraq’s Foreign Ministry, suggested MP Galloway had accepted “payoffs” from the Iraqi government.
At he same time, in the US, a “retired general” contacted the Christian Science Monitoron April 25, with similar documents showing that Hussein had given Galloway $10 million.
Galloway’s reputation was seriously sullied. It wasn’t until June 20, that the Monitor disclosed that the “general’s” incriminating documents were forged. The documents released in Britain also turned out to be forgeries.
The White Flag Incidents
On March 24, Pentagon briefing officer Tori Clarke told reporters that “the Iraqi regime is engaged in other deadly deceptions. They are sending forces out carrying white surrender flags... The most serious violations of the laws of war.”
There were only two alleged incidents cited to support this story. One appeared engineered and Gardiner now believes that the other incident was “fabricated to cover a very serious friendly-fire event.”
On March 23, a Marine unit came under artillery fire near Nasiriyah in southern Iraq soon after some Iraqi soldiers had surrendered. Gen. Abizaid, the Deputy Commander of CENTCOM called the surrender “a ruse” to draw the Marines into an ambush. Gardiner finds this difficult to believe since it was well known that “the Iraqi Army had trouble coordinating artillery fire at all.”
The other “White Flag” incident was a widely reported tragedy in which Iraqi soldiers shot civilians who were trying to flee to safety under a white flag. But the Iraqi soldiers were also killed, Gardiner notes.
Other white flag incidents were not mentioned by the Pentagon or Messrs. Bush and Blair. Gardiner recalls one “memorable picture of the war” that showed “British troops standing over two dead Iraqis in a foxhole: they had been holding up a white flag.”
George W. Bush repeated the white flag story on April 5. By then, Bush should have been aware of the real cause of those Marine deaths. Gardiner reports that, according to the surviving Marines, nine of those killed “may have been killed by an A-10 [a US military aircraft] that made repeated passes attacking their position.”
A report released in October indicates that these deaths were being investigated as a “friendly fire accident.” At least one of the young Marines caught in the supposed Iraqi “ruse” was, in fact, killed by a round fired from an A-10 gun that hit him directly in the chest.
The Execution of Prisoners
At a joint news conference with Mr. Bush at Camp David on March 27, British PM Tony Blair informed the media that the Iraqis had executed two British prisoners. “If anyone needs any further evidence of the depravity” of Hussein’s reign, Blair suggested, this was it.
Unfortunately, further evidence was exactly what Blair lacked. The very next day the sister of one of the dead soldiers told the Daily Mirrorthat her brother’s colonel “told us he was not executed. We just can’t understand why people are lying.”
Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clarke also told reporters that the Iraqis had killed “Americans who had either surrendered or were attempting to surrender.” This report turned out to be “unconfirmed.”
A week after the British press had attacked the “executions” story as a total fabrication, and Blair’s press spokesperson had been forced to admit that there was no “absolute evidence” to support the story, George W. Bush told the American Forces Press Service: “They have executed prisoners of war.” Bush repeated the falsehood on April 5 and Rumsfeld echoed the lie on April 7.
The US press attempted to catch up to their British counterparts by questioning Rumsfeld on April 7. As usual, Rumsfeld’s defense was the non-answer.
Reporter: Mr. Secretary, you stated flatly that American POWs have been executed. On what basis do you make that statement?
Rumsfeld: I think I said they have executed prisoners of war.
Reporter: Are you saying that there have not been American prisoners executed then?
Rumsfeld: I’m not saying that either. There may very well have been, but I’m not announcing that, if that’s what you’re asking... We do know that they executed a lot of prisoners of war over the years.”
The Shula District Bombing
On March 29, an explosion in an open-air market in Baghdad’s Shula District killed more than 50 Iraqi civilians. The Iraqi government condemned the attack and blamed it on coalition bombers. US military spokespersons tried to turn the blame back on Iraq, suggesting that the civilians were killed by Iraqi artillery or anti-aircraft rockets that went awry.
British journalist Robert Fisk reachned the site soon after the massacre and uncovered a 30-centimeter shard of shrapnel that showed the serial number of the weapon that caused the massacre. It was a HARM missile built by the US military contractor Raytheon.
On April 3, CENTCOM issued a new story claiming to have received “reliable information” that the Hussein regime was planning to bomb Shiite Muslim neighborhoods in Baghdad so that it could blame the damage on the US-UK coalition.
“The CENTCOM cover story came from Jim Wilkinson,” Gardiner discovered. The British, however, refused to support this argument. They continued to claim (rightly, it now appeared) that no British bombs had caused the death and devastation in the Shula District.
PSYOPS—The Darkest Face of Deception
“Strategic influence is aimed at international audiences (and maybe domestic audiences),” Gardiner explains, while PSYOPS (Psychological Operations) “are targeted at the bad guys.”
The disturbing thing about this war, Gardiner found, was that “PSYOPS became a major part of the relationship between the governments of the US and the UK and the free press.”
The record reveals how the Pentagon, State Department and White House all relied on PSYOPS techniques to manipulate the media as a psychological weapon against the Iraqis.
When Rumsfeld declared that “The days of Saddam Hussein are numbered,” that the “regime is starting to lose control of their country,” and that “The outcome is clear. The regime of Saddam Hussein is gone. It’s over,” he was really using the US media to send a message to the people in Iraq.
On March 24, British Air Marshall Brian Burridge told the press that the old regime was “crumbling” and encouraged Saddam’s opponents to “develop greater levels of courage” and rise up against the dictator.
There was no better example of PSYOPS “distorting the free press with false information,” Gardiner claims, than the alleged surrender of Iraq’s 51st Division.
On March 21, Reuters (citing “defense officials, who asked not to be identified”) reported the stunning news that an entire Iraqi division had surrendered en mass to US Marines in southern Iraq.
CBS News followed with a report the next day claiming that “an entire division of the Iraqi army, numbering 8,000 soldiers, surrendered to coalition forces.” CBS’s source: unnamed “Pentagon officials.”
The surrender of the 51st became a major news story that truly seemed to confirm the Pentagon’s predictions of a quick and easy victory. “It was told as if it were a truth,” Gardiner writes. “It was told on both sides of the Atlantic. It had been coordinated. It was not true.”
The story was intended to break the fighting will of the Iraqi army. On March 23, reporters from Agence France-Presse and Al-Jazeera TV managed to reach Col. Khaled al-Hashemi, the commander of the 51st. He replied in no uncertain terms that he not only had not surrendered but he would remain in Basrah and “continue to defend the people.”
The surrender of an entire division would have been a powerful blow to the will of the Iraqi army. The perception managers knew this. It is clear to Gardiner that this story “was not an intelligence failure. You would know if you have an entire division” suddenly surrendering. The story was a PSYOPS hoax.
Other PSYOPS hoaxes were to follow. Stories were leaked that Hussein had made secret plans to spirit his family out of Iraq to safety. It was rumored that Hussein had deposited $3.5 billion in Libyan banks.
Part 4
America’s Ministry of Propaganda—Part Four
By Gar Smith / The-Edge
November 7, 2003
Black Programs and the Future of Propaganda
Gardiner claims that the Pentagon was behind the creation of the “EmpowerPeace” website. Gardiner says the site was pulled because it violated US laws against domestic propaganda but the site can still be found on the Web (www.empowerpeace.org). The-Edge has invited EmpowerPeace to respond to Gardiner’s assertions.
The bogus “surrender” of Iraq’s 51st division raised a “profound question” for Gardiner: “If we would manipulate truth, would we also manipulate evidence? That would be very serious. Is that what the Secretary of Defense meant when he said he was going to be doing strategic influence?”
Milt Bearden, a former CIA manager for clandestine operations has a related question: “It will be important to learn who was behind the fake Niger document [alleging Iraq’s attempt to obtain uranium ore] and why and what other information driving American policies might carry their fingerprints.”
The falsehoods about Iraq’s alleged attempt to purchase African uranium turned out to be based on a forged document. Gardiner wonders why no one in the administration is asking who forged the document? Who stood to gain from this unconscionable act of “creating evidence”? Gardiner believes that the American people have “a need to know.”
Another probable “black program” identified by Gardiner involved the planting of a false story that Saddam Hussein had taken refuge in the Russian Embassy in Baghdad. The story served to slime the Russians, who had refused to back Bush’s pre-emptive invasion.
In the oddest example of perception management, Pentagon media masters actually created a website to promote world peace. The “EmpowerPeace” website appeared to represent a citizen’s anti-war movement. The goal seemed to be to foster the impression that the US people (and especially US children) were essentially peace-loving. “It looked like a grassroots effort,” Gardiner recalls. “It seems to have been aimed at the Arab audience set.”
The EmpowerPeace website didn’t last long. The reason, Gardiner suspects, is that its creation probably violated the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which bans the domestic dissemination of government propaganda.
Gardiner found another “strange website” called “The Iraq Crisis Bulletin,” which offered daily updates and reports from around the world. The site was recommended by the American Press Institute but there was “absolutely no indication of the sponsor of the site.” With a little research, Gardiner discovered that “the articles were [written] by Voice of America correspondents.”
The problem with this, Gardiner notes, is that “the Voice of America is prohibited from doing communications for the American press. But, during Gulf II, it was getting the message to them.” The VOA refused to respond to Gardiner’s requests for information on “The Iraq Crisis Bulletin.”
Collateral Damage
Mapping the Ministry of Propaganda, a historic merging of politics, militarism and public “perception management.” The Coalition Information Center with offices in the London, Islamabad and the White House started work in mid-2002 (six months before it was officially authorized by an Executive Order). In 2003, the CIC morphed into the Office of Global Communications, staffed by Tucker Eskew, Dan Bartllett, Jeff Jones, Peter Reid. The OGC works closely with the White House Iraq Group, which consists of Karl Rove, Condi Rice, Jim Wilkinson, Stephen Hadley, Scooter Libby, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, and Nicholas Callo.
Gardiner wraps up his 56-page investigation with a series of charts that assess several Defense Department press briefings to determine the role played by PSYOPS, false or engineered information, and non-informative responses. His conclusion: “Even if you give them slack for not giving any information, it turns out that more than half the answers were not truth... Maybe a better way to say it would be that if an American (or Brit) were diligent about wanting to understand the war, he could not rely on the statements made by the US Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
Perhaps the penultimate example of the non-responsive response came in an April 7 DOD press briefing when General Myers was asked about the status of the chemical missile unit cited by Secretary Powell during his UN testimony. Powell had told the world that Iraq had outfitted a group of rockets on the outskirts of Baghdad with warheads filled with WMD and was prepared to fire them at a moment’s notice.
According to Gardiner, Myers “was very evasive, saying that he did not recall ever having heard about such a unit.”
The Future: The OGC, the Roadmap and ‘Strategic Fusion’
Perception management (the art of propaganda, misdirection and lies, if you will) is no longer discreetly hidden away in some dark wing of the intelligence or defense establishments: It has become firmly enshrined right down the hall from the Oval Office.
The Office of Global Communications (OGC) is centered in the White House. If there is a Ministry of Propaganda in the Bush administration, the OGC is it. As Gardiner notes: “The White House is at the center of the strategic communications process.”
The OGC has two components: One committee deals with conducting the perception of the war on terrorism while a second committee concentrates on “more general” propaganda projects.
According to the Times of London, the exact dispensation of the OGC’s $200 million operating budget is largely a mystery. It is known that the OGC spent $250,000 on its military pressroom in Doha.
Gardiner discovered that “at times there were as many as three Brits associated with the Office of Global Communications. These assets were networked. To insure the military would be a willing part of the network, three people from the White House Office of Global Communications were sent to work with Central Command. Jim Wilkinson became General Franks’ Director of Strategic Communications.
“The war was handled like a political campaign. Everyone in the message business was from the political communications community. In London, there was a parallel organization and a parallel coordination process. They kept the coordination with secure video teleconferences.”
The system worked well but, as John Rendon revealed at a London conference on July 3, there was still room for improvement. Rendon told his fellow conferees that the idea of using “embedded journalists” was quite successful and worked just as they hoped it would from tests they had run to gauge how reporters would perform once they bonded with the soldiers in their assigned units.
One of the mistakes, Rendon said, was that while they had taken command of the story, they had “lost control of the context.” The problem was the veteran newsmen in the networks: they had “too much control of context,” Rendon complained. “That has to be fixed for the next war,” Rendon declared.
At the same conference, Captain Gerald Mauer, the Joint Staff Assistant Deputy Director for Information Operations, observed that public diplomacy and public affairs are slowly morphing into a single combined information operation. Mauer envisions a Strategic Fusion Center that “brings everything together.” The Pentagon is already hard at work crafting an Information Operations Roadmap.
Mauer also told his fellow perception managers that “We hope to make more use of Hollywood and Madison Avenue in the future.” The overall goal remains the same Mauer explained: to allow the men who now control Washington to “disrupt, corrupt or usurp adversarial... decision-making.”
Gardiner finds that the future envisioned by Rendon and Mauer is fundamentally “frightening.” The phrase “adversarial... decision-making will be disrupted” reportedly was added by Douglas Feith, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. What it means, Gardiner warns, is that “we will even go after friends if they are against what we are doing or want to do.”
Criticism, questioning and debate are now defined as “adversarial” and the new watchword out of Washington is: “If you don’t agree with us, you could be the target of an information attack.” The new reality is that “punishment of those who disagree is a dimension of the strategy.”
“If the democracies of the United States and the United Kingdom are based upon informed, open debate of the issues,” Gardiner states, “we’ve got some fixing to do.
“It’s not enough to look at the arguments about weapons of mass destruction before the war,” Gardiner argues. “There needs to be an inquiry of the broader question of how spin got to be more important than substance. What roles did information operations and strategic psychological operations play in the war” What controls need to be placed on information operations?”
Solutions Are Needed to Control Information Warfare
Sam Gardiner has become the Paul Revere of our generation. He has raised a cry: It is no longer “The Redcoats are coming!” but “The PSYOPS are coming!”
“We need a major investigation,” Gardiner insists. “We need restrictions on which parts of the government can do information operations. We should not do information operations against friends. We have to get this back in control.”
One remedy is the Smith-Mundt Act, which was created in the aftermath of WWII with the intent of protecting American citizens from brainwashing by covert government propaganda campaigns. Unfortunately, Gardiner has discovered, the Smith-Mundt Act “no longer works.” We became collateral damage, a target group of messages intended for other groups.”
Gardiner’s findings have not yet received due attention from the US media and with good cause. Gardiner’s investigation revealed that the mainstream media not only failed to stand up to the government and insist on the truth, they all too often submitted in complicit cooperation with the government. Even in peacetime, the corporate media is an “embedded” media.
Gardiner has some hard questions for America’s press barons:
“How was it that the Washington Post took classified information on the Jessica Lynch story and published it just the way the individual leaking it in the Pentagon wanted?”
“Why did the New York Times let itself be used by ‘intelligence officials’ on stories?”
“Why did the Washington Times never seem to question a leak they were given?”
“Why were newspapers in the UK better than those in the US in raising questions before and during the war?”
Since releasing his study, Gardiner has had the opportunity to talk with many people in the print media. While many have appeared “quite interested” in his findings, Gardiner admits that he has “not heard any self-criticism from reporters to whom I have talked.” In conversations with TV producers and reporters, Gardiner found the prevailing reaction was that “the whole story is just too complex to tell.”
Gardiner’s most disheartening reaction came during a presentation at “a major Washington think tank.” Most of the Washington veterans in the audience kept asking, “So, what’s new?” And when Gardiner opined that there was “no passion for truth in those who were taking us to war,” he distinctly heard callous laughter breaking out among his listeners.
It is the sound of that brittle laughter that keeps Sam Gardiner going.
Things must be changed. The dragons of information warfare must be slain.
As Gardiner says: “I pain for our democratic process when I find individuals not angered at being deceived.”
Gar Smith is Editor Emeritus of Earth Island Journal, Roving Editor at The-Edge (www.the-edge.org) and co-founder of Environmentalists Against War (www.envirosagainstwar.org).
Sam Gardiner’s complete report is available online in six PDF files at :
www.indybay.org/news/2003/10/1653148.php
Sam Gardiner may be reached at: SamGard at aol.com
For more information on the Bush administration’s use of propaganda to misinform the public and promote wars of domination, see Weapons of Mass Deception, by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton and visit the website of PRWatch: www.prwatch.org/books/wmd.html.
For more information contact:
(510) THE-EDGE (843-3343)
E-mail us at gsmith at earthisland.org
THE-EDGE is a project of Earth Island Institute.
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/2003-November/011378.html
America’s Ministry of Propaganda Exposed—Parts 1 - 4
America’s Ministry of Propaganda Exposed
By Gar Smith / The-Edge
November 7, 2003
Part One
A Strategy of Lies: How the White House Fed the Public a Steady Diet of
Falsehoods
Colonel Sam Gardiner (USAF, Ret.) has identified 50 false news stories created and leaked by a secretive White House propaganda apparatus. Bush administration officials are probably having second thoughts about their decision to play hardball with former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Joe Wilson is a contender. When you play hardball with Joe, you better be prepared to deal with some serious rebound.
After Wilson wrote a critically timed New York Times essay exposing as false George W. Bush’s claim that Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger, high officials in the White House contacted several Washington reporters and leaked the news that Wilson’s wife was a CIA agent.
Wilson isn’t waiting for George W. Bush to hand over the perp. In mid-October, the former ambassador began passing copies of an embarrassing internal report to reporters across the US. The-Edge has received copies of this document.
The 56-page investigation was assembled by USAF Colonel (Ret.) Sam Gardiner
“Truth from These Podia: Summary of a Study of Strategic Influence, Perception Management, Strategic Information Warfare and Strategic Psychological Operations in Gulf II” identifies more than 50 stories about the Iraq war that were faked by government propaganda artists in a covert campaign to “market” the military invasion of Iraq.
Gardiner has credentials. He has taught at the National War College, the Air War College and the Naval Warfare College and was a visiting scholar at the Swedish Defense College.
According to Gardiner, “It was not bad intelligence” that lead to the quagmire in Iraq, “It was an orchestrated effort [that] began before the war” that was designed to mislead the public and the world. Gardiner’s research lead him to conclude that the US and Britain had conspired at the highest levels to plant “stories of strategic influence” that were known to be false.
The Times of London described the $200-million-plus US operation as a “meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress, and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein.”
The multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign run out of the White House and Defense Department was, in Gardiner’s final assessment “irresponsible in parts” and “might have been illegal.”
“Washington and London did not trust the peoples of their democracies to come to the right decisions,” Gardiner explains. Consequently, “Truth became a casualty. When truth is a casualty, democracy receives collateral damage.” For the first time in US history, “we allowed strategic psychological operations to become part of public affairs... [W]hat has happened is that information warfare, strategic influence, [and] strategic psychological operations pushed their way into the important process of informing the peoples of our two democracies.”
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced plans to create an Office of Strategic Influence early in 2002. At the same time British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Strategy Director Alastair Campbell was setting up an identical operation in London.
As soon as Pvt. Jessica Lynch was airlifted from her hospital bed, the first call from her “rescue team” went, not to military officials but to Jim Wilkinson, the White House’s top propaganda official stationed in Iraq.
White House critics were quick to recognize that “strategic influence” was a euphemism for disinformation. Rumsfeld had proposed establishing the country’s first Ministry of Propaganda.
The criticism was so severe that the White House backed away from the plan. But on November 18, several months after the furor had died down, Rumsfeld arrogantly announced that he had not been deterred. “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.”
Gardiner’s dogged research identified a long list of stories that passed through Rumsfeld’s propaganda mill. According to Gardiner, “there were over 50 stories manufactured or at least engineered that distorted the picture of Gulf II for the American and British people.” Those stories include:
The link between terrorism, Iraq and 9/11
Iraqi agents meeting with 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta
Iraq’s possession of chemical and biological weapons.
Iraq’s purchase of nuclear materials from Niger.
Saddam Hussein’s development of nuclear weapons.
Aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons
The existence of Iraqi drones, WMD cluster bombs and Scud missiles.
Iraq’s threat to target the US with cyber warfare attacks.
The rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch.
The surrender of a 5,000-man Iraqi brigade.
Iraq executing Coalition POWs.
Iraqi soldiers dressing in US and UK uniforms to commit atrocities.
The exact location of WMD facilities
WMDs moved to Syria.
Every one of these stories received extensive publicity and helped form indelible public impressions of the “enemy” and the progress of the invasion. Every one of these stories was false.
“I know what I am suggesting is serious. I did not come to these conclusions lightly,” Gardiner admits. “I’m not going to address why they did it. That’s something I don’t understand even after all the research.” But the fact remained that “very bright and even well-intentioned officials found how to control the process of governance in ways never before possible.”
A Battle between Good and Evil
Gardiner notes that cocked-up stories about Saddam’s WMDs “was only a very small part of the strategic influence, information operations and marketing campaign conducted on both sides of the Atlantic.”
The “major thrust” of the campaign, Gardiner explains, was “to make a conflict with Iraq seem part of a struggle between good and evil. Terrorism is evil... we are the good guys.
“The second thrust is what propaganda theorists would call the ‘big lie.’ The plan was to connect Iraq with the 9/11 attacks. Make the American people believe that Saddam Hussein was behind those attacks.”
The means for pushing the message involved: saturating the media with stories, 24/7; staying on message; staying ahead of the news cycle; managing expectations; and finally, being prepared to “use information to attack and punish critics.”
Audition in Afghanistan
The techniques that proved so successful in Operation Iraqi Freedom were first tried out during the campaign to build public support for the US attack on Afghanistan.
Rumsfeld hired Rendon Associates, a private PR firm that had been deeply involved in the first Gulf War. Founder John Rendon (who calls himself an “information warrior”) proudly boasts that he was the one responsible for providing thousands of US flags for the Kuwaiti people to wave at TV cameras after their “liberation” from Iraqi troops in 1991.
The White House Coalition Information Center was set up by Karen Hughes in November 2001. (In January 2003, the CIC was renamed the Office for Global Communications.) The CIC hit on a cynical plan to curry favor for its attack on Afghanistan by highlighting “the plight of women in Afghanistan.” CIC’s Jim Wilkinson later called the Afghan women campaign “the best thing we’ve done.”
Gardiner is quick with a correction. The campaign “was not about something they did. It was about a story they created... It was not a program with specific steps or funding to improve the conditions of women.”
The coordination between the propaganda engines of Washington and London even involved the respective First Wives. On November 17, 2001, Laura Bush issued a shocking statement: “Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women’s fingernails for wearing nail polish.” Three days later, a horrified Cherie Blaire told the London media, “In Afghanistan, if you wear nail polish, you could have your nails torn out.”
Misleading via Innuendo
Time and again, US reporters accepted the CIC news leaks without question. Among the many examples that Gardiner documented was the use of the “anthrax scare” to promote the administration’s pre-existing plan to attack Iraq.
In both the US and the UK, “intelligence sources” provided a steady diet of unsourced allegations to the media to suggest that Iraq and Al Qaeda terrorists were behind the deadly mailing of anthrax-laden letters.
It wasn’t until December 18, that the White House confessed that it was “increasingly looking like” the anthrax came from a US military installation. The news was released as a White House “paper” instead of as a more prominent White House “announcement.” As a result, the idea that Iraq or Al Qaeda were behind the anthrax plot continued to persist. Gardiner believes this was an intentional part of the propaganda campaign. “If a story supports policy, even if incorrect, let it stay around.”
In a successful propaganda campaign, Gardiner wrote, “We would have expected to see the creation [of] stories to sell the policy; we would have expected to see the same stories used on both sides of the Atlantic. We saw both. The number of engineered or false stories from US and UK stories is long.”
The US and Britain: The Axis of Disinformation
Before the coalition invasion began on March 20, 2003, Washington and London agreed to call their illegal pre-emptive military aggression an “armed conflict” and to always reference the Iraqi government as the “regime.” Strategic communications managers in both capitols issued lists of “guidance” terms to be used in all official statements. London’s 15 Psychological Operations Group paralleled Washington’s Office of Global Communications.
In a departure from long military tradition, the perception managers even took over the naming of the war. Military code names were originally chosen for reasons of security. In modern US warfare, however, military code names have become “part of the marketing.” There was Operation Nobel Eagle, Operation Valiant Strike, Operation Provide Comfort, Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Uphold Democracy and, finally, Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The “Rescue” of Jessica Lynch
The Pentagon’s control over the news surrounding the capture and rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch receives a good deal of attention in Gardiner’s report. “From the very beginning it was called an ‘ambush’,” Gardiner noted. But, he pointed out, “If you drive a convoy into enemy lines, turn around and drive back, it’s not an ambush. Military officers who are very careful about how they talk about operations would normally not be sloppy about describing this kind of event,” Gardiner complained. “This un-military kind of talk is one of the reasons I began doing this research.”
One of the things that struck Gardiner as revealing was the fact that, as Newsweek reported: “as soon as Lynch was in the air, [the Joint Operations Center] phoned Jim Wilkinson, the top civilian communications aide to CENTCOM Gen. Tommy Franks.”
It struck Gardiner as inexplicable that the first call after Lynch’s rescue would go to the Director of Strategic Communications, the White House’s top representative on the ground.
On the morning of April 3, the Pentagon began leaking information on Lynch’s rescue that sought to establish Lynch as “America’s new Rambo.” The Washington Post repeated the story it received from the Pentagon: that Lynch “sustained multiple gunshot wounds” and fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldier... firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition.”
Lynch’s family confused the issue by telling the press that their daughter had not sustained any bullet wounds. Lynch’s parents subsequently refused to talk to the press, explaining that they had been “told not to talk about it.” (Weeks later, the truth emerged. Lynch was neither stabbed nor shot. She was apparently injured while falling from her vehicle.)
Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers let the story stand during an April 3 press conference although both had been fully briefed on Lynch’s true condition.
“Again, we see the pattern,” Gardiner observed. “When the story on the street supports the message, it will be left there by a non-answer. The message is more important than the truth. Even Central Command kept the story alive by not giving out details.”
Gardiner saw another break with procedure. The information on the rescue that was released to the Post “would have been very highly classified” and should have been closely guarded. Instead, it was used as a tool to market the war. “This was a major pattern from the beginning of the marketing campaign throughout the war,” Gardiner wrote. “It was okay to release classified information if it supported the message.”
Part 2
Transforming Language to Market the ‘Big Lie’
Iraq’s ‘Terrorist Death Squads’
Secretary of State Colin Powell warned the UN General Assembly that Iraq possessed chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Was Mr. Powell merely advancing “stories of strategic influence”? ©Michael Gross / State Department photo To Gardiner, the “most serious transformation of language” involved Washington’s directive to refer to Iraq’s irregular troops as “terrorist death squads.” The order apparently came down on March 25.
Renaming the Iraqi defenders “terrorists” appears to have been part of the strategic influence campaign since it served to connect the Iraqi fighters with “one of the major themes of Gulf II—Iraq = terrorist = 9/11.”
Gardiner stressed the role repetition plays in the “effective implementation of creating memory in a population” and observed that “this theme was successful by US opinion polls” that show a majority of US citizens now believe, in the absence of evidence, that Iraq “was connected” to 9/11.
Ansar al-Salam
The propaganda artists selected a small Kurdish splinter group called Ansar al-Salam and elevated it into an organized group of Al Qaeda “terrorists” who were “said to be” controlled by Saddam Hussein and “believed to be” producing ricin, a deadly biotoxin.
Since Ansar al-Salam was formed shortly after 9/11, “it was tied to bin Laden.” Because a single source claimed to have seen Republican Guard officers in the region, “it was tied to Saddam Hussein.”
“This was part of the ‘big lie’ to tie Iraq to 9/11,” Gardiner wrote. “The ‘terrorist’ connection took many other forms, many forms but the truth. I don’t see evidenced they cherished the truth.”
Operation TELIC
In the first days of the invasion, a US Marine Corps spokesman made a prophetic statement: “The first image of the war will define the conflict.”
The attempts to control those “first images” were of overriding interest to the coalition’s ministries of propaganda. Because it was believed that the city of Basrah would quickly fall to the coalition troops, the “Battle of Basrah” was heavily scripted long before the first soldiers even entered Iraq.
Marines were given food packets to hand out to Basrah children. Journalists were to be bused to the newly captured city and TV crews were to be flown in to film the “liberated” citizens welcoming coalition soldiers with smiles and flowers. The UK had expected to lead the attack on Basrah but, over Blair’s objections, the US insisted on giving this plum assignment to the US Marines. Gardiner’s sources in Britain told him that the sole reason was that the US “wanted to have their forces lead the victory into Basrah.”
When the residents of Basrah refused to be “liberated,” the carefully planned media event evaporated in a hail of gunfire.
“It was about image,” Gardiner marvels. “So much effort and money on image.”
Salman Pak
In a widely publicized September 12, 2002 briefing paper entitled, “Decade of Deception,” the White House described “a highly secret terrorist training facility in Iraq known as Salman Pak, where both Iraqis and non-Iraqi Arabs receive training on hijacking planes and trains, planting explosives in cities, sabotage, and assassinations.”
“This facility became a major part of the strategic influence marketing effort,” Gardiner writes. Yet, in the invasions aftermath, the Pentgon offered no “compelling evidence” that such a site existed.
In his February 3 presentation to the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell flashed a photo of an Ansar al-Salam “poison factory” in northern Iraq. In September 3, seven months after Powell’s presentation, an Los Angeles Times reporter managed to reach the “poison factory,” which he described as “a small cinderblock building bearing brown granules and ammonia-like scents.” When the Times had the material tested, the granules turned out to be a commercial rat poison.
US Lied about Attacks on Iraq’s Power Grid
Secretary Powell claimed that Iraq possessed mobile trucks designed to produce biological weapons. When invading forces located the trucks it turned out they were actually designed to produce hydrogen for surveillance balloons and Iraq had bought the trucks from the Britain.
When the capital city of Baghdad was blacked out by a power failure during the April bombardment, Pentagon spokesperson Victoria “Tori” Clarke rushed to assure the world that “We did not have the power grid as a target. That was not us.”
The facts would subsequently show that the US had targeted portions of the power grid. In the North, a special operations team staged an attack on the Hadithah Dam on April 1 or 2. Human Rights Watch documented at least two attacks on the power grid south of Baghdad “along Highway 6 [that] included a Tomahawk [missile] strike using carbon fibers.”
The use of a sophisticated carbon-fiber weapons is significant since the deployment of these specialized devices required prior approval from Washington.
Iraq’s “Dirty Bomb”
In June 2002, an Iraqi expatriate named Khidhir Manza told the Wall Street Journal that the situation was “ideal for countries like Iraq to train and support a terrorist operation using radiation weapons.” Manza’s interview with the Journal was arranged by the Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqi exiles that was set up by the Rendon Group and supported financially by agencies of the US government. (See Weapons of Mass Deception, by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton.)
Helping to make Manza’s charges more credible, unnamed intelligence officials earlier had told the International Herald Tribune that “they are kept awake at night by the prospect of a dirty bomb.” Astute readers will note that these anonymous sources never actually said Iraq had a dirty bomb. It was all managed through suggestion and innuendo.
American’s Heroic Hostage
In an episode that recalled the creation of the “Old Shoe, the fictitious hero concocted by Robert deNiro’s ace “perception manager” in the film “Wag the Dog,” Washington’s propaganda artists literally brought someone back from the dead.
Lt. Commander Scott Speicher had been shot down during the first Gulf War in 1991. In an attempt to generate sympathy and support for Bush’s pre-emptive war, “intelligence sources” began circulating a bizarre new story to the US media. In what Gardiner called “a pattern typical of created stories,” these unnamed sources started a rumor that Commander Speicher had not only survived but that he had somehow spent the past decade trapped in an Iraqi prison.
Iraqi officials vehemently denied that they were holding Speicher or, for that matter, any Americans. When asked about the Iraqi denial at a press conference, Rumsfeld’s response was calculatingly oblique. “I don’t believe much the regime puts out,” Rumsfeld stated.
In Gardiner’s estimation, Rumsfeld’s answer “was too clever not to have been formulated to leave the impression that [Speicher] was alive.”
Gardiner was troubled by Rumsfeld’s apparent disinterest in the truth but, as a former military officer, there was another question that bothered Gardiner even more. “Why didn’t [Rumsfeld] consider what he was doing to Speicher’s family?”
On January 11, 2001, Speicher’s status was changed from KIA (Killed in Action) to MIA (Missing in Action). As the invasion forces gathered in the Middle East, Speicher’s status was changed once more, to “captured.” Navy officials who contacted ABC News reported that they had been pressured to make this change.
In January, “intelligence officials” continued to leak information to the media that suggested Speicher was still alive. In April, the secretive ministry of propaganda leaked a report that his initials had been found on the wall of a cell in Iraq. Gardiner found this leak particularly strange since “Military POW recovery personnel are very careful about releasing information that would cause false hope in families.” The release of such information would also, obviously, endanger the captives.
Long after Baghdad fell and the media’s attention had been drawn to the fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction, a reporter thought to ask Rumsfeld about America’s lost hero. The secretary replied vaguely that there was “nothing turned up thus far that I could elaborate on that would be appropriate.” On July 16, a Washington Times investigation belatedly concluded that there was “no evidence” Speicher had survived or had been held captive in Iraq.
Chemical Cluster Bombs
On March 10, administration officials attempted to discredit Hans Blix and UNMOVIC, the UN weapons inspection program. Administration officials told the Boston Globe that “Blix did not give details... of the possible existence of a cluster bomb that could deliver deadly poisons.”
Presidential spokesperson Ari Fleischer claimed that the US was “aware of UNMOVIC’s discovery of Iraqi production of munitions capable of dispensing both chemical and biological weapons.” Videotape was released allegedly showing the Iraqis testing a cluster bomb for dispersing chemical weapons.
“The chemical cluster bomb story certainly didn’t linger,” Gardiner wrote. “It was around only a couple of days, but it still served its purpose at the time.”
Few newspaper readers or TV watchers realized that there was never any evidence that Iraq had such technologically complex weapons. Indeed, the Pentagon had dismissed the possibility of Iraq ever developing these weapons during the first Gulf War.
Iraq’s Planned Computer Attack on America
An alarming White House paper presented by Paul Wolfowitz before a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations warned that Iraqi engineers were preparing a vast attack on the country’s computer networks.
The warning came from a single source who claimed that Iraq’s Intelligence Service was working with the Babylon Software Company to break into US computers, steal documents and spread viruses. There were no such attacks. There was no such program.
Iraqi Troops in US Uniforms
On March 7, White House Deputy Director of Communications Jim Wilkinson, described as “a senior US official,” released a story about Iraq’s alleged acquisition of US and UK military uniforms “identical down to the last detail.” Wilkinson claimed Iraqis in US camouflage were planning to commit battlefield atrocities to cast discredit on coalition troops.
On March 26, Pentagon spokesperson Victoria “Tori” Clarke embellished the story. Clarke told reporters that “we knew they were acquiring uniforms that looked like US and UK uniforms. And the reporting was ... [that Saddam Hussein would] give them to the thugs, as I call them, to go out, carry out reprisals against the Iraqi people, and try to blame it on coalition forces.”
Two days later, Rumsfeld added a new twist, claiming that Saddam Hussein’s troops planned to don UK an US uniforms “to try to fool regular Iraqi soldiers into surrendering to them and then execute them as an example for others.”
There were never any reports of Iraq attempting such stunts. In his report, Gardiner concludes: “The way it was put by Jim Wilkinson (a name that keeps appearing in these questionable stories), it seems to fit a pattern of pre-blaming Iraq. It has the feel of being a created story.”
Iraq’s Scud Missiles
In the lead-up to the war, the British and American people were told repeatedly that Iraq had Scud missiles capable of striking Israel. When the invasion began, Iraq began to fire what the Pentagon called “Scud-type missiles.” As Gardiner discovered, these rockets “were not Scuds and we have found no Scuds, but for three days they kept the story alive.”
In October 2002, a CIA report determined that evidence for the existence of Iraqi Scuds was inconclusive. Nonetheless, by the time Colin Powell stepped up to the plate at the UN, the missiles had become an accepted fact as far as Washington, London and Tel Aviv were concerned.
During the invasion, “American officials” told the New York Times that “the sheer tenacity of the Iraqi fight” near a compound at Al Qa’im had led them to believe that “the Iraqis might be defending Scud missiles” hidden at the site. Gardiner notes laconically: “No Scuds or WMDs were found at Al Qa’im.”
Saddam’s Remote-Controlled Drones
The CIA’s October report also claimed that Iraq had converted some J-29 jet fighters to deliver chemical and biological weapons. George W. Bush quickly seized on this specter for a speech in Cincinnati, where he told the astonished crowd that Saddam’s poison-laden aircraft were capable of hitting US soil.
By the time Powell testified before the UN, the threat had been measurably pared down—the fighter jets had become smaller, remotely piloted drones. Mr. Bush went public with the extraordinary claimed that these tiny drones could strike the US.
On June 15, an Air Force team in Iraq finally seized the drones. The Los Angeles Times described them as “five burned and blackened 9-foot-wings.” The Air Force captain in charge of the inspection concluded that the drones could have been “a student project or maybe a model.”
A subsequent investigation by the USAF determined that the drones’ only possible mission was to take pictures.
Part 3
America’s Ministry of Propaganda—Part Three
By Gar Smith / The-Edge
November 7, 2003
Targeting Critics, Spreading Lies, and PSYOPS
Protesters in Baghdad lie down in the path of US armored vehicles. The White House Office of Global Communication is not interested in distributing photos of ordinary Iraqi citizens nonviolently demonstration against the US occupation.
The tools of strategic influence were not only wielded against Saddam Hussein, they were also turned against foreign allies and domestic critics who dared to question Bush’s agenda. The French were among the first to feel the sting of these attacks.
Sam Gardiner’s report notes that the French were clearly “the focus of punishment in the strategic influence campaign.” He has identified “at least eight times when false stories or engineered stories were aimed at them, the majority appearing after their lack of support in the UN for US and UK actions.”
In September, government sources informed the New York Times that the French and German governments had provided Iraq with precision switches that could be used to produce nuclear weapons. The Times ran the story before discovering that the France and Germany had both, in fact, refused to provide the switches.
“American intelligence sources” told the Washington Postthat the French possessed illegal strains of smallpox virus. Again, the story was false.
The Washington Times received a tip from “US intelligence sources” that two companies in France had sold equipment to Saddam. The companies denied the charge and no evidence was ever provided to sustain the charge.
On April 9, Brig. Gen. Brooks told the media that his troops had discovered “an underground storage facility containing... Roland-type air defense missiles.” Lt. Greg Holmes, an army intelligence officer, told Newsweek that US soldiers had found “51 Roland-2 missiles, made by a partnership of French and German arms manufacturers.” Holmes also stated that at least one of the Roland missiles “was manufactured last year.”
The story served to further defame the irascible French but, Gardiner writes with a touch of sarcasm, the story “was not very well put together” since it turned out that “the production line for the Roland-2 was shut down in 1993.”
Punishing the French
For the French, the War of the Leaks was just beginning. On May 6, “US intelligence officials” were quoted as telling the Washington Times that “an unknown number of Iraqis who worked for Saddam Hussein’s government were given passports by French officials in Syria.” The story was kept alive by a succession of press leaks attributed to “State Department and intelligence officials,” and a bevy of “Administration officials.”
On May 6, Fox News reported that “Paris had been colluding with Baghdad before and during the coalition invasion.” On May 7, the Washington Times, citing reports from “US officials,” claimed that “officials of the Saddam Hussein government... fled Iraq with French passports.”
The French government angrily denied the allegations and accused Washington of running a “smear campaign.” But when the press confronted Rumsfeld about these accusations, he “followed pattern.” Instead of confirming or denying the charges against the French, he simply smiled and said, “I have nothing to add.”
As Gardiner sees it, the intended effect of that kind of non-answer was that “he wanted people to believe the stories.”
This campaign of Francophobe fibbing eventually contaminated the White House press briefings. On May 14, a reporter asked White House press officer Scott McClellan about the stories accusing the French of selling Iraq arms and issuing passports to fleeing Iraqi officials. “Are those charges valid?” the reporter asked.
McClellan’s response: “Well, I think that those are questions you can address to France.”
Reporter: On that point, Scott, do you have any information that the French did, in fact, issue passports to people so that....”
McClellan: I think—no, I think that’s a question you need to address to France.”
Reporter: Well, no. It’s information the US claims to have.
McClellan: I don’t have anything for you.
“The Secretary of Defense told us before the war he was going to do strategic influence,” Gardiner notes wryly. “It appears as if the French were a target.”
Targeting Domestic Critics: The Galloway Forgeries
The White House claimed that these aluminum tubes were proof that Iraq was attempting to produce nuclear weapons. US intelligence agents knew the truth: the tubes were useless for nuclear processing. In Britain, Labor Member of Parliament George Galloway became an open skeptic of Tony Blair’s rhetoric. In a bold attempt to avoid war, Galloway had gone to Iraq to interview Saddam Hussein in hopes of promoting a diplomatic resolution to the crisis.
Galloway’s skepticism began to gnaw away at Bush-and-Blair’s broad-brush claims that Hussein was only months away from building a nuclear bomb or that he was capable of launching a WMD attack within 45 minutes.
Galloway soon found himself under attack. Government officials leaked a packet of supposedly “classified documents” to the Daily Telegraph. The papers, which were represented as having been seized from Iraq’s Foreign Ministry, suggested MP Galloway had accepted “payoffs” from the Iraqi government.
At he same time, in the US, a “retired general” contacted the Christian Science Monitoron April 25, with similar documents showing that Hussein had given Galloway $10 million.
Galloway’s reputation was seriously sullied. It wasn’t until June 20, that the Monitor disclosed that the “general’s” incriminating documents were forged. The documents released in Britain also turned out to be forgeries.
The White Flag Incidents
On March 24, Pentagon briefing officer Tori Clarke told reporters that “the Iraqi regime is engaged in other deadly deceptions. They are sending forces out carrying white surrender flags... The most serious violations of the laws of war.”
There were only two alleged incidents cited to support this story. One appeared engineered and Gardiner now believes that the other incident was “fabricated to cover a very serious friendly-fire event.”
On March 23, a Marine unit came under artillery fire near Nasiriyah in southern Iraq soon after some Iraqi soldiers had surrendered. Gen. Abizaid, the Deputy Commander of CENTCOM called the surrender “a ruse” to draw the Marines into an ambush. Gardiner finds this difficult to believe since it was well known that “the Iraqi Army had trouble coordinating artillery fire at all.”
The other “White Flag” incident was a widely reported tragedy in which Iraqi soldiers shot civilians who were trying to flee to safety under a white flag. But the Iraqi soldiers were also killed, Gardiner notes.
Other white flag incidents were not mentioned by the Pentagon or Messrs. Bush and Blair. Gardiner recalls one “memorable picture of the war” that showed “British troops standing over two dead Iraqis in a foxhole: they had been holding up a white flag.”
George W. Bush repeated the white flag story on April 5. By then, Bush should have been aware of the real cause of those Marine deaths. Gardiner reports that, according to the surviving Marines, nine of those killed “may have been killed by an A-10 [a US military aircraft] that made repeated passes attacking their position.”
A report released in October indicates that these deaths were being investigated as a “friendly fire accident.” At least one of the young Marines caught in the supposed Iraqi “ruse” was, in fact, killed by a round fired from an A-10 gun that hit him directly in the chest.
The Execution of Prisoners
At a joint news conference with Mr. Bush at Camp David on March 27, British PM Tony Blair informed the media that the Iraqis had executed two British prisoners. “If anyone needs any further evidence of the depravity” of Hussein’s reign, Blair suggested, this was it.
Unfortunately, further evidence was exactly what Blair lacked. The very next day the sister of one of the dead soldiers told the Daily Mirrorthat her brother’s colonel “told us he was not executed. We just can’t understand why people are lying.”
Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clarke also told reporters that the Iraqis had killed “Americans who had either surrendered or were attempting to surrender.” This report turned out to be “unconfirmed.”
A week after the British press had attacked the “executions” story as a total fabrication, and Blair’s press spokesperson had been forced to admit that there was no “absolute evidence” to support the story, George W. Bush told the American Forces Press Service: “They have executed prisoners of war.” Bush repeated the falsehood on April 5 and Rumsfeld echoed the lie on April 7.
The US press attempted to catch up to their British counterparts by questioning Rumsfeld on April 7. As usual, Rumsfeld’s defense was the non-answer.
Reporter: Mr. Secretary, you stated flatly that American POWs have been executed. On what basis do you make that statement?
Rumsfeld: I think I said they have executed prisoners of war.
Reporter: Are you saying that there have not been American prisoners executed then?
Rumsfeld: I’m not saying that either. There may very well have been, but I’m not announcing that, if that’s what you’re asking... We do know that they executed a lot of prisoners of war over the years.”
The Shula District Bombing
On March 29, an explosion in an open-air market in Baghdad’s Shula District killed more than 50 Iraqi civilians. The Iraqi government condemned the attack and blamed it on coalition bombers. US military spokespersons tried to turn the blame back on Iraq, suggesting that the civilians were killed by Iraqi artillery or anti-aircraft rockets that went awry.
British journalist Robert Fisk reachned the site soon after the massacre and uncovered a 30-centimeter shard of shrapnel that showed the serial number of the weapon that caused the massacre. It was a HARM missile built by the US military contractor Raytheon.
On April 3, CENTCOM issued a new story claiming to have received “reliable information” that the Hussein regime was planning to bomb Shiite Muslim neighborhoods in Baghdad so that it could blame the damage on the US-UK coalition.
“The CENTCOM cover story came from Jim Wilkinson,” Gardiner discovered. The British, however, refused to support this argument. They continued to claim (rightly, it now appeared) that no British bombs had caused the death and devastation in the Shula District.
PSYOPS—The Darkest Face of Deception
“Strategic influence is aimed at international audiences (and maybe domestic audiences),” Gardiner explains, while PSYOPS (Psychological Operations) “are targeted at the bad guys.”
The disturbing thing about this war, Gardiner found, was that “PSYOPS became a major part of the relationship between the governments of the US and the UK and the free press.”
The record reveals how the Pentagon, State Department and White House all relied on PSYOPS techniques to manipulate the media as a psychological weapon against the Iraqis.
When Rumsfeld declared that “The days of Saddam Hussein are numbered,” that the “regime is starting to lose control of their country,” and that “The outcome is clear. The regime of Saddam Hussein is gone. It’s over,” he was really using the US media to send a message to the people in Iraq.
On March 24, British Air Marshall Brian Burridge told the press that the old regime was “crumbling” and encouraged Saddam’s opponents to “develop greater levels of courage” and rise up against the dictator.
There was no better example of PSYOPS “distorting the free press with false information,” Gardiner claims, than the alleged surrender of Iraq’s 51st Division.
On March 21, Reuters (citing “defense officials, who asked not to be identified”) reported the stunning news that an entire Iraqi division had surrendered en mass to US Marines in southern Iraq.
CBS News followed with a report the next day claiming that “an entire division of the Iraqi army, numbering 8,000 soldiers, surrendered to coalition forces.” CBS’s source: unnamed “Pentagon officials.”
The surrender of the 51st became a major news story that truly seemed to confirm the Pentagon’s predictions of a quick and easy victory. “It was told as if it were a truth,” Gardiner writes. “It was told on both sides of the Atlantic. It had been coordinated. It was not true.”
The story was intended to break the fighting will of the Iraqi army. On March 23, reporters from Agence France-Presse and Al-Jazeera TV managed to reach Col. Khaled al-Hashemi, the commander of the 51st. He replied in no uncertain terms that he not only had not surrendered but he would remain in Basrah and “continue to defend the people.”
The surrender of an entire division would have been a powerful blow to the will of the Iraqi army. The perception managers knew this. It is clear to Gardiner that this story “was not an intelligence failure. You would know if you have an entire division” suddenly surrendering. The story was a PSYOPS hoax.
Other PSYOPS hoaxes were to follow. Stories were leaked that Hussein had made secret plans to spirit his family out of Iraq to safety. It was rumored that Hussein had deposited $3.5 billion in Libyan banks.
Part 4
America’s Ministry of Propaganda—Part Four
By Gar Smith / The-Edge
November 7, 2003
Black Programs and the Future of Propaganda
Gardiner claims that the Pentagon was behind the creation of the “EmpowerPeace” website. Gardiner says the site was pulled because it violated US laws against domestic propaganda but the site can still be found on the Web (www.empowerpeace.org). The-Edge has invited EmpowerPeace to respond to Gardiner’s assertions.
The bogus “surrender” of Iraq’s 51st division raised a “profound question” for Gardiner: “If we would manipulate truth, would we also manipulate evidence? That would be very serious. Is that what the Secretary of Defense meant when he said he was going to be doing strategic influence?”
Milt Bearden, a former CIA manager for clandestine operations has a related question: “It will be important to learn who was behind the fake Niger document [alleging Iraq’s attempt to obtain uranium ore] and why and what other information driving American policies might carry their fingerprints.”
The falsehoods about Iraq’s alleged attempt to purchase African uranium turned out to be based on a forged document. Gardiner wonders why no one in the administration is asking who forged the document? Who stood to gain from this unconscionable act of “creating evidence”? Gardiner believes that the American people have “a need to know.”
Another probable “black program” identified by Gardiner involved the planting of a false story that Saddam Hussein had taken refuge in the Russian Embassy in Baghdad. The story served to slime the Russians, who had refused to back Bush’s pre-emptive invasion.
In the oddest example of perception management, Pentagon media masters actually created a website to promote world peace. The “EmpowerPeace” website appeared to represent a citizen’s anti-war movement. The goal seemed to be to foster the impression that the US people (and especially US children) were essentially peace-loving. “It looked like a grassroots effort,” Gardiner recalls. “It seems to have been aimed at the Arab audience set.”
The EmpowerPeace website didn’t last long. The reason, Gardiner suspects, is that its creation probably violated the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which bans the domestic dissemination of government propaganda.
Gardiner found another “strange website” called “The Iraq Crisis Bulletin,” which offered daily updates and reports from around the world. The site was recommended by the American Press Institute but there was “absolutely no indication of the sponsor of the site.” With a little research, Gardiner discovered that “the articles were [written] by Voice of America correspondents.”
The problem with this, Gardiner notes, is that “the Voice of America is prohibited from doing communications for the American press. But, during Gulf II, it was getting the message to them.” The VOA refused to respond to Gardiner’s requests for information on “The Iraq Crisis Bulletin.”
Collateral Damage
Mapping the Ministry of Propaganda, a historic merging of politics, militarism and public “perception management.” The Coalition Information Center with offices in the London, Islamabad and the White House started work in mid-2002 (six months before it was officially authorized by an Executive Order). In 2003, the CIC morphed into the Office of Global Communications, staffed by Tucker Eskew, Dan Bartllett, Jeff Jones, Peter Reid. The OGC works closely with the White House Iraq Group, which consists of Karl Rove, Condi Rice, Jim Wilkinson, Stephen Hadley, Scooter Libby, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, and Nicholas Callo.
Gardiner wraps up his 56-page investigation with a series of charts that assess several Defense Department press briefings to determine the role played by PSYOPS, false or engineered information, and non-informative responses. His conclusion: “Even if you give them slack for not giving any information, it turns out that more than half the answers were not truth... Maybe a better way to say it would be that if an American (or Brit) were diligent about wanting to understand the war, he could not rely on the statements made by the US Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
Perhaps the penultimate example of the non-responsive response came in an April 7 DOD press briefing when General Myers was asked about the status of the chemical missile unit cited by Secretary Powell during his UN testimony. Powell had told the world that Iraq had outfitted a group of rockets on the outskirts of Baghdad with warheads filled with WMD and was prepared to fire them at a moment’s notice.
According to Gardiner, Myers “was very evasive, saying that he did not recall ever having heard about such a unit.”
The Future: The OGC, the Roadmap and ‘Strategic Fusion’
Perception management (the art of propaganda, misdirection and lies, if you will) is no longer discreetly hidden away in some dark wing of the intelligence or defense establishments: It has become firmly enshrined right down the hall from the Oval Office.
The Office of Global Communications (OGC) is centered in the White House. If there is a Ministry of Propaganda in the Bush administration, the OGC is it. As Gardiner notes: “The White House is at the center of the strategic communications process.”
The OGC has two components: One committee deals with conducting the perception of the war on terrorism while a second committee concentrates on “more general” propaganda projects.
According to the Times of London, the exact dispensation of the OGC’s $200 million operating budget is largely a mystery. It is known that the OGC spent $250,000 on its military pressroom in Doha.
Gardiner discovered that “at times there were as many as three Brits associated with the Office of Global Communications. These assets were networked. To insure the military would be a willing part of the network, three people from the White House Office of Global Communications were sent to work with Central Command. Jim Wilkinson became General Franks’ Director of Strategic Communications.
“The war was handled like a political campaign. Everyone in the message business was from the political communications community. In London, there was a parallel organization and a parallel coordination process. They kept the coordination with secure video teleconferences.”
The system worked well but, as John Rendon revealed at a London conference on July 3, there was still room for improvement. Rendon told his fellow conferees that the idea of using “embedded journalists” was quite successful and worked just as they hoped it would from tests they had run to gauge how reporters would perform once they bonded with the soldiers in their assigned units.
One of the mistakes, Rendon said, was that while they had taken command of the story, they had “lost control of the context.” The problem was the veteran newsmen in the networks: they had “too much control of context,” Rendon complained. “That has to be fixed for the next war,” Rendon declared.
At the same conference, Captain Gerald Mauer, the Joint Staff Assistant Deputy Director for Information Operations, observed that public diplomacy and public affairs are slowly morphing into a single combined information operation. Mauer envisions a Strategic Fusion Center that “brings everything together.” The Pentagon is already hard at work crafting an Information Operations Roadmap.
Mauer also told his fellow perception managers that “We hope to make more use of Hollywood and Madison Avenue in the future.” The overall goal remains the same Mauer explained: to allow the men who now control Washington to “disrupt, corrupt or usurp adversarial... decision-making.”
Gardiner finds that the future envisioned by Rendon and Mauer is fundamentally “frightening.” The phrase “adversarial... decision-making will be disrupted” reportedly was added by Douglas Feith, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. What it means, Gardiner warns, is that “we will even go after friends if they are against what we are doing or want to do.”
Criticism, questioning and debate are now defined as “adversarial” and the new watchword out of Washington is: “If you don’t agree with us, you could be the target of an information attack.” The new reality is that “punishment of those who disagree is a dimension of the strategy.”
“If the democracies of the United States and the United Kingdom are based upon informed, open debate of the issues,” Gardiner states, “we’ve got some fixing to do.
“It’s not enough to look at the arguments about weapons of mass destruction before the war,” Gardiner argues. “There needs to be an inquiry of the broader question of how spin got to be more important than substance. What roles did information operations and strategic psychological operations play in the war” What controls need to be placed on information operations?”
Solutions Are Needed to Control Information Warfare
Sam Gardiner has become the Paul Revere of our generation. He has raised a cry: It is no longer “The Redcoats are coming!” but “The PSYOPS are coming!”
“We need a major investigation,” Gardiner insists. “We need restrictions on which parts of the government can do information operations. We should not do information operations against friends. We have to get this back in control.”
One remedy is the Smith-Mundt Act, which was created in the aftermath of WWII with the intent of protecting American citizens from brainwashing by covert government propaganda campaigns. Unfortunately, Gardiner has discovered, the Smith-Mundt Act “no longer works.” We became collateral damage, a target group of messages intended for other groups.”
Gardiner’s findings have not yet received due attention from the US media and with good cause. Gardiner’s investigation revealed that the mainstream media not only failed to stand up to the government and insist on the truth, they all too often submitted in complicit cooperation with the government. Even in peacetime, the corporate media is an “embedded” media.
Gardiner has some hard questions for America’s press barons:
“How was it that the Washington Post took classified information on the Jessica Lynch story and published it just the way the individual leaking it in the Pentagon wanted?”
“Why did the New York Times let itself be used by ‘intelligence officials’ on stories?”
“Why did the Washington Times never seem to question a leak they were given?”
“Why were newspapers in the UK better than those in the US in raising questions before and during the war?”
Since releasing his study, Gardiner has had the opportunity to talk with many people in the print media. While many have appeared “quite interested” in his findings, Gardiner admits that he has “not heard any self-criticism from reporters to whom I have talked.” In conversations with TV producers and reporters, Gardiner found the prevailing reaction was that “the whole story is just too complex to tell.”
Gardiner’s most disheartening reaction came during a presentation at “a major Washington think tank.” Most of the Washington veterans in the audience kept asking, “So, what’s new?” And when Gardiner opined that there was “no passion for truth in those who were taking us to war,” he distinctly heard callous laughter breaking out among his listeners.
It is the sound of that brittle laughter that keeps Sam Gardiner going.
Things must be changed. The dragons of information warfare must be slain.
As Gardiner says: “I pain for our democratic process when I find individuals not angered at being deceived.”
Gar Smith is Editor Emeritus of Earth Island Journal, Roving Editor at The-Edge (www.the-edge.org) and co-founder of Environmentalists Against War (www.envirosagainstwar.org).
Sam Gardiner’s complete report is available online in six PDF files at :
www.indybay.org/news/2003/10/1653148.php
Sam Gardiner may be reached at: SamGard at aol.com
For more information on the Bush administration’s use of propaganda to misinform the public and promote wars of domination, see Weapons of Mass Deception, by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton and visit the website of PRWatch: www.prwatch.org/books/wmd.html.
For more information contact:
(510) THE-EDGE (843-3343)
E-mail us at gsmith at earthisland.org
THE-EDGE is a project of Earth Island Institute.
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