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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GLOBAL 'WAR' ON TERROR (GWOT) Years 1 and 2, ie 9/11-2003
Weapons of Mass Deception by J Stauber & S Rampton (+Reviews) 
The Fog of War Talk John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, AlterNet July 28, 2003 Editor's Note: This is an edited excerpt from the newly released book "Weapons of Mass Deception: the Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq", by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible," George Orwell wrote in 1946. "Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness." Orwell was a shrewd observer of the relationship between politics and language. He did not actually invent the term "doublespeak," but he popularized the concept, which is an amalgam of two terms that he coined in "1984," his greatest novel. Orwell used the term "doublethink" to describe a contradictory way of thinking that lets people say things that mean the opposite of what they actually think. He used the term "newspeak" to describe words "deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them." Hail the Noble Warriors Doublespeak has accompanied war for thousands of years. English professor William Lutz has found examples as early as Julius Caesar, who described his brutal and bloody conquest of Gaul as "pacification." "The military is acutely aware that the reason for its existence is to wage war, and war means killing people and the deaths of American soldiers as well," he states. "Because the reality of war and its consequences are so harsh, the military almost instinctively turns to doublespeak when discussing war." Doublespeak often suggests a noble cause to justify the death and destruction. Practically speaking, a democratic country cannot wage war without the popular support of its citizens. A well-constructed myth, broadcast through mass media, can deliver that support even when the noble cause itself seems dubious to the rest of the world. Consider the now-famous phrase, "axis of evil," which was first used by President Bush in his Jan. 29, 2002 State of the Union address. The concept of an "axis," of course, evokes memories of the "Axis powers" of World War II and suggests an alliance or confederation of states that pose a significant danger precisely because of their common alignment -- a menace greater than the sum of the parts. But, in fact, Iran and Iraq have been bitter adversaries for decades, and there is no pattern of collaboration between North Korea and the other two states. As for being "evil," while all three nations have been involved in horrible violations of human rights, so have many U.S.-supported nations, such as Colombia or Saudi Arabia. In reality, "axis of evil" is a term chosen to selectively stigmatize countries for the purpose of justifying military actions against them. If the bad guys have an "axis," the good guys have a "coalition of the willing," to use the term preferred by Colin Powell and other U.S. officials and often repeated uncritically by major television news outlets. The word "coalition" attempted to evoke the feeling of international unity that existed in during the first Gulf War, when the first Bush administration persuaded the United Nations to endorse a broad international coalition of nations who came together to drive Iraq from Kuwait. At a press briefing on Mar. 20, 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, "This is not a unilateral action, as is being characterized in the media. Indeed, the coalition in this activity is larger than the coalition that existed during the Gulf War in 1991." In truth, the so-called "coalition of the willing" was almost entirely a U.S.-British campaign, with virtually no military contribution from other countries except Australia. The code names used to designate wars have also become part of the branding process through which war is made to seem noble. Rather than referring to the invasion of Panama as simply a war or invasion, it became Operation Just Cause. (Note also the way that the innocuous word "operation" becomes part of the substitute terminology for war.) The war in Afghanistan was originally named Operation Infinite Justice, a phrase that offended Muslims, who pointed out that only God can dispense infinite justice, so the military planners backed down a bit and called it Operation Enduring Freedom instead. For the invasion of Iraq, they chose Operation Iraqi Freedom. In PR Week, columnist Paul Holmes examined the significance of the term. "It's possible, I suppose, that Iraqi freedom might be a by-product of this campaign," he wrote, "but to pretend that it's what the exercise is all about is intellectual dishonesty at its most perverse." However, the phrase served as a powerful framing device. Television networks including Fox and MSNBC used Operation Iraqi Freedom as their tagline for the war, with the phrase appearing in swooshing, 3-D logos accompanied by imagery of flags and other symbols of patriotism. Other phrases favored by the Bush administration -- "the disarmament of Iraq," "coalition forces," the "war on terror," "America strikes back" -- appeared frequently in visual banners, graphics, and bottom-of-the-screen crawls, repeating and reinforcing the government's key talking points in support of war. Neocon Doublespeak Sometimes language is chosen for its ability to avoid the plain meaning of what its writers are talking about. Numerous examples of this can be found in "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century," a report published in 2000 by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose members constitute much of the brain trust for the Bush administration's foreign policy. Criticized overseas as a blueprint for U.S. global domination, the report began by stating that the United States at present is a lone superpower that "faces no global rival. America's grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible." To achieve this goal, it recommended establishing permanent U.S. military bases in the Middle East and in regions of the world where they do not currently exist, including Southeast Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia. Of course, these ideas sound a bit radical if stated too clearly, so PNAC needed to find language that would soften their meaning. The PNAC report, hence, states that the United States needs to "perform the 'constabulary' duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions." The phrase "constabulary duties" is a vague way of transforming U.S. soldiers occupying foreign countries into friendly neighborhood cops. "Shaping the security environment" is polite language for controlling other people at gunpoint, and "critical regions" is a nice way of saying, "countries we want to control." Similarly, U.S. nuclear weapons -- which would be called "weapons of mass destruction" if someone else owned them -- are described as "the U.S. nuclear deterrent," while missiles with global reach are "defenses to defend the American homeland." How do they "defend" us? They "provide a secure basis for U.S. power projection around the world." Doublespeak enables PNAC to be simultaneously candid and ambiguous as it speaks of establishing "an American peace" that "must have a secure foundation on unquestioned U.S. military preeminence," in which U.S. troops are stationed throughout the world as the "first line of defense" of an "American security perimeter." Shocking and Awful War Sometimes doublespeak can seem very vivid and candid while nevertheless obscuring the real meaning of what is being discussed. For example, "shock and awe" was the term the Bush administration used to announce its strategy of massive, high-tech air strikes on Baghdad. As doctrine of warfare, this term was introduced in a 1996 book by military strategists Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade and published by the Command and Control Research Program (CCRP) within the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense of the United States. Titled "Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance," the book describes shock and awe as a strategy "aimed at influencing the will, perception, and understanding of an adversary rather than simply destroying military capability." It points to several examples in which this strategy has been successful in the past, including the dropping of atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Nazi blitzkrieg strategy of World War II. In January 2003, as the Bush administration moved toward war with Iraq, "Shock and Awe" author Harlan K. Ullman again invoked the example of Hiroshima as he explained the concept to CBS News. "You have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes," he said. "You're sitting in Baghdad and all of a sudden you're the general and 30 of your division headquarters have been wiped out. You also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power, water. In two, three, four, five days they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted." Upon the onset of actual war, however, military and media pundits depicted "shock and awe" in sanitary terms, claiming that the high accuracy of laser-guided "smart bombs" would make it possible to decapitate the Iraqi military while leaving the country's infrastructure intact and limiting civilian casualties. Similar claims were made during the first war in the Persian Gulf and were later found to be exaggerated. Like other examples of doublespeak, the concept of "shock and awe" enables its users to symbolically reconcile two contradictory ideas. On the one hand, its theorists use the term to plan massive uses of deadly force. On the other hand, its focus on the psychological effect of that force makes it possible to use the term while distancing audiences from direct contemplation of the human suffering that force creates. The Language of Imperialism Sometimes doublespeak completely reverses the meaning of words. Paul Holmes observed that "the most Orwellian usage of all has been the recent application of the word 'relevance,' as in 'the United Nations faced a test of its relevance, and failed.' Relevance, in this context, means willingness to rubberstamp whatever demands the U.S. makes. If that sounds very much like irrelevance to you, perhaps you don't understand the might-makes-right world in which we are living." In normal times, "diplomacy" refers to the process by which nations seek to resolve their differences peacefully, through negotiations and compromise. During the buildup to war, however, "diplomacy" became the process through which the United States attempted to pressure other nations into supporting the war. When they refused, this became the "failure of diplomacy." Similarly, the Bush administration used the phrase "pre-emptive defense" to describe its decision to attack first, without an overt act of Iraqi provocation -- a phrase that could be used to justify attacking anyone we want on the grounds that they might attack us one day. Note also the substitution of the word "defense" for "war" -- a perennial use of doublespeak that dates back in the United States to 1947, when the Department of War was renamed the "Department of Defense." Sometimes language merely fogs up the meaning of things. "Regime change," another phrase credited to the Project for the New American Century, sanitizes the imperial project of overthrowing a foreign government through a military invasion. It makes the process seem tidy, efficient, and rational. The phrase makes it possible to talk about invading Iraq without even thinking about the human consequences: assassination, occupation, or the deaths of thousands of innocents. And indeed there was no debate in the United States about these realities prior to the war. No questions were raised in the administration or Congress about whether the social cost actually justified the military action. Of course, raising such questions does not necessarily mean you must oppose military action. It is possible to raise these issues and to still argue that the benefits of invading Iraq and overthrowing its government outweigh the costs. In the United States, however, the Bush administration never attempted to make such an argument. Instead, it used language to sidestep addressing the harms caused by war. The Chicago Tribune's Bob Kemper reported that federal civilian employees and military personnel were told by the White House to refer to the invasion of Iraq as a "war of liberation." Iraqi paramilitary forces were to be called "death squads." The War to Never End Wars The idea of a "war on terrorism" is itself a form of doublespeak. It reflects a now-pervasive habit of using war as a metaphor for all sorts of things that are not really wars at all. "Do you ever notice in this country that when we have a problem with something, we always have to declare war on it?," the comedian George Carlin once quipped. "The War on Illiteracy, the War on AIDS, the War on Homelessness, the War on Drugs... We don't actually do anything about it, but we've declared war on it." At the very beginning of the "war on terrorism," a reporter asked Donald Rumsfeld, "Sir, what constitutes a victory in this new environment? I mean, Cap Weinberger in 1987 laid down some pretty clear rules for engaging U.S. forces. One was, clear goals that are militarily achievable, that you can explain that there's an endgame. What's some of your early thinking here in terms of what constitutes victory?" "That's a good question, as to what constitutes victory," Rumsfeld replied. "Now, what is victory? I say that victory is persuading the American people and the rest of the world that this is not a quick matter that's going to be over in a month or a year or even five years. It is something that we need to do so that we can continue to live in a world with powerful weapons and with people who are willing to use those powerful weapons. And we can do that as a country. And that would be a victory, in my view." Rumsfeld is a clever man, and figuring out the meaning behind his words requires careful reading. At first glance, you might be tempted to think that he was saying the United States would win a victory by maintaining its own possession of "powerful weapons." Actually, though, he was admitting that even as a superpower, the United States will not be able to stop the rest of the world from obtaining powerful weapons with which to "impose damage on us." If terrorism itself cannot be ended, Rumsfeld was saying, we therefore need to change the way we think about the problem, so that we know better than to expect an "endgame" to the war on terror. His definition of victory, in short, becomes "persuading the American people" that real victory will never happen, and that the war itself may continue indefinitely. President Bush explained the concept more succinctly in April 2003, after visiting wounded soldiers from the war in Iraq. "I reminded them and their families," he said, "that the war in Iraq is really about peace." Now that's doublespeak. John Stauber, executive editor of PR Watch, and Sheldon Rampton editor of PR Watch, have co-authored three previous books: "Toxic Sludge Is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry," "Mad Cow U.S.A.: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?" and "Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future." Weapons of Mass Deception By Antony Lowenstein August 9, 2003 Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq By Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber Hodder, 254pp, $19.95 What a difference a few months can make. Not so long ago the leaders of the United States, Britain and Australia were continually talking up the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. We were informed, through dossiers, satellite photos and defector interviews, that it was imperative to invade Iraq to save the world from imminent nuclear, chemical or biological attack. Weapons of Mass Deception is the first comprehensive attempt to explain the PR offensive and media complicity in selling the "necessity" of invasion. Co-authors Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber are from the US-based Centre for Media and Democracy, a non-profit organisation founded by Stauber in 1993 to name and shame suspect public relations campaigns and propaganda by multinationals and governments. Rampton and Stauber weren't among the millions blindly accepting the symbolism of Saddam's falling statue in Firdos Square in Baghdad on April 9. Images were beamed around the world of the Iraqis being "liberated"; as a Fox News commentator said, "If you don't have goose bumps now, you will never have them in your life." But what if the media overplayed the significance of the event? And what if only a small number of Iraqis were present? The authors highlight the media's need for a happy ending by giving the startling example of John Rendon, a PR consultant hired by the Pentagon and CIA on Iraq-related projects. In 1996, before cadets at the US Air Force Academy, he said: "I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician. I am a politician ... I am an information warrior and a perception manager." He asked the cadets if they remembered when victorious US troops rolled into Kuwait City after the first Gulf War and were met by hundreds of Kuwaitis waving American flags. "Did you ever stop to wonder," Rendon asked, "how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hold of American flags? Well, you know the answer. That was one of my jobs then." The book is filled with similar eye-openers. Take the example of Andrew Card jnr, White House chief of staff, who said that because "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August", the Bush Administration couldn't release its reasons in mid-2002 for wanting to overthrow Saddam. In other words, it was hardly coincidental that Washington began its Operation Iraqi Freedom PR offensive to coincide with the first anniversary of al-Qaeda's attacks on New York and Washington. The background to these facts leaves you with the horrible suspicion that a grand plan existed to reshape the Middle East, and terrifying threats had to be found or conjured to fulfil those aims. The authors systemically debunk every claim put forward by George Bush in his justification for war. The pattern that emerges is not unlike the message delivered by Mike Moore in Bowling for Columbine: if you keep the masses fearful, you can persuade them to follow anything. This is where a questioning media should come in, but Rampton and Stauber expose the failure of virtually all media organisations in America to make even the most basic checks of government claims. The record in Britain and Australia is depressingly similar. Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector, recently asked: "What was the basis of the affirmation by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld? He said there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - nobody asked him to prove it. The press just printed it. We now have to demand the proof." To suggest, like many pro-war advocates, that Saddam's human rights abuses more than justified the invasion is highly disingenuous. Bush, Blair and Howard gave WMDs as their major reason, with human rights almost an afterthought. This book is a major step towards holding our elected officials accountable for telling tales. Antony Lowenstein is a Fairfax online journalist. This story was found at:
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber Kari Lydersen Wednesday, August 13 2003, 11:24 PM
Nukes and chemical and biological weapons may be capable of wreaking a lot of havoc, but when it comes to war today, they aren't the real big guns. The real powers, it turns out, are the PR agencies. Winning the hearts and minds of not only residents of the "enemy" country but even more so, America's own citizens, as well as the populations of other countries around the world, has been a key part of military strategy in every major conflict of the past 15 years. This is nothing new - slick and professional public relations campaigns go back at least as far as World War I if not farther, and obviously the battle to influence U.S. public opinion was a major factor in the Vietnam War. But the extent to which private, corporate public relations firms have become major defense industry players is a relatively recent development, and one that has yet to be reported widely or deeply in the mainstream media. A new book by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, writers and editors of the non-profit journal PR Watch, aims to change that. Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq uses extensive documentation to prove what many in the general public are starting to suspect -- that the Bush administration knew full well that there was no viable evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or ties to Al Qaeda, yet pulled out all the stops to convince the public otherwise in a rush to war that had been planned long before the Sept. 11 attacks. Even for seasoned skeptics and critics of the Bush administration, the audacity of the repeated lies and deceptions outlined in the book are shocking. Along with the play by play narrative of the PR war against Iraq, the book traces the history of PR's role in the U.S.'s involvement in the Middle East from before the Gulf War. Among other things Rampton and Stauber describe the infamous concocted story about Iraqis yanking hundreds of Kuwaiti babies out of incubators and leaving them on the floor to die. This testimony, given by a teenage girl who turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S., was proven completely false after being feverishly reported by everyone from mainstream media to human rights groups. As it turned out, there weren't even enough incubators in Kuwait to make the story feasible. But more chilling than the release of the story itself is the way, a decade later, the fact that the government and PR agencies cooked up the story has faded from public consciousness while the actual story itself has not. It seems all too likely that current skepticism aside, concocted and manipulated stories from the recent invasion of Iraq -- the sensationalized rescue of Private Jessica Lynch, for example -- will be remembered just as the administration wants them to be. Already, current media stories about Lynch tend to make not even a mention of the fact that Iraqi doctors, the BBC and other investigators basically debunked the U.S. government's version of her story. Weapons of Mass Deception also does a skillful job of showing how public relations has been used to cover up the fickle nature of American relations with Middle Eastern countries and regimes. For example, the public might not be as accepting of a war if it were clearer that the dictator we are bombing today was recently our friend; that the feared weapons of mass destruction he is supposedly harboring were in fact sold to him by the U.S. in the first place. Again the babies in incubators story comes into play here. The authors note that if the U.S. wanted to demonize Saddam Hussein's forces for brutalizing innocent children, there were plenty of true examples for them to use. The majority of the 5,000 Iraqi Kurds he gassed in the village of Halabja in 1988 were women and children, for example. But these and many other spectacular atrocities occurred while Saddam was actually being supported by the U.S. "The problem was that the Halabja incident and other uses of chemical weapons occurred while Iraq was receiving military aid and economic support from the United States," the book says. A similar bait and switch, friend-turned-foe strategy was central to American interventions in Latin America and Asia throughout the Cold War, and there too public relations played a major role in keeping U.S. citizenry supportive and confused. But one could argue that the PR industry and the government's use of it today has gotten much slicker and more systematic. Weapons of Mass Deception documents the specific PR agencies hired by the U.S. and American allies like the Saudis during the Iraq war and the buildup to it, and exposes the vast amounts of money involved in these PR contracts. For example, shortly after the Sept. 11th attacks, the Saudis launched a PR campaign to disassociate themselves from the attacks and convince Americans of their support for the war on terrorism, employing U.S. PR firms including Qorvis Communications and Burston-Marsteller to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. Stauber and Rampton also describe how despite the huge expenditures of money and brain power on PR, these efforts have often backfired, especially where attempts to reach Arab and other foreign populations are concerned. The book describes the debacle of the rise and fall of Charlotte Beers as the U.S.'s PR guru for the invasion of Iraq. She was known as the "queen of Madison Avenue" for her campaigns promoting, among other things, Head & Shoulders shampoo and Uncle Ben's Rice. Beers was hired as the Defense Department's Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and launched into campaigns including a series of ads showing idyllic lives being led by Muslims in the U.S., called "Shared Values," and "Next Chapter," a supposedly hip, MTV-style T.V. program aimed at youth and broadcast by satellite into Iran. Beers had a budget of over half a billion dollars to launch these campaigns around the world and to conduct extensive polls and surveys to gauge Arab opinion of the U.S. But, the book notes, these polls were meant only as a measure of the ad campaign's success rather than a genuine effort to hear the opinions of Arabs. "Notwithstanding all the money being planned for 'listening' activities, there was little evidence that the U.S. had heard or was prepared to respond in a substantive way to any of the strongly-expressed opinions coming from the Arab world." These same polls showed Beers's efforts to be a miserable failure, and she eventually stepped down "for health reasons" amidst a cloud of disgrace. Weapons of Mass Deception also delves into the fascinating topic of "doublespeak," the process often used by officials in wartime to avoid lying while obscuring the true meaning of what is being said. The "shock and awe" tactic used in Iraq is a perfect example -- while this military term is actually defined as causing maximum physical and structural damage in a short time to stun the enemy into submission, the Bush administration spun it in more psychological terms, minimizing any allusions to actual casualties and creating the impression that Iraqi forces would be so impressed with U.S. might that they would simply lay down their arms and surrender. Weapons of Mass Deception also includes various amusing examples of reporters calling Donald Rumsfeld or other officials on their use of doublespeak, selective amnesia or other deceptive practices, for example when a CNN reporter confronts Rumsfeld with the existence of CNN videotape showing him shaking Saddam Hussein's hand in 1983. Though these examples of the failure and transparency of the administration's public relations efforts are out there, the fact is that the way things are going, these incidents will continue to be buried in the public consciousness by the ongoing onslaught of "weapons of mass deception." Unless there is a massive public outcry of people unwilling to buy the hype, the U.S. seems intent on continuing a foreign policy parallel to the most common corporate strategies for dealing with scandal and dissent -- putting its resources into altering public perception rather than unpopular behavior. "Rather than changing the way we actually relate to the people of the Middle East," the book says, "they still dream of fixing their image through some new marketing campaign dreamed up in Hollywood or Madison Avenue." Buzzflash interview with one of the authors:
BUZZFLASH: In your book, "Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq," you quote a comment by the Nazi Hermann Goering. Some people might see it as inappropriate to quote a Nazi in reference to any activity undertaken by an American president. But we've used this quote before in BuzzFlash at least a couple of times. During the Nuremberg trials, Goering was interviewed by a psychologist and talked about how they convinced people to go to war. He pointed out that people naturally don't want to go to war, but it's up to the leaders of the country who determine the policy to persuade them that the war is necessary. "It is always a simple matter to drag the people along," he said, "whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship." Goering's interviewer challenged the Nazi deputy Reich Führer. He told Goering that there is one difference: in a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States, only Congress can declare war. Goering responded, "Oh, that is all well and good. But voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them that they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism in exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." You include this quote in your book. How do you think it applies to what happened after September 11th? SHELDON RAMPTON: We used that passage as part of a chapter in "Weapons of Mass Deception" entitled "The Uses of Fear," in which we examine the ways that fear played a role in the buildup to the war with Iraq. We begin by discussing Osama bin Laden's use of fear as propaganda. Obviously, fear is his main weapon with which to confront the United States. They call him a terrorist for good reason. And terrorism as a form of warfare is rather striking because it's an approach to fighting that begins with the assumption that you don't have the physical resources with which to confront your enemy on the battlefield, so instead you have to attack him emotionally. Terrorism is the only form of warfare we know of in which controlling the emotions of your adversary is the primary goal of the combatants. In most other forms of warfare, including even guerilla war, your goal ultimately is to control territory, to control productive resources and other physical assets. By controlling or destroying those assets of the enemy, you destroy their physical ability to wage war. But terrorism as a form of warfare targets primarily the emotions of the adversary and attempts to defeat them psychologically rather than through combat. One of the striking things about the past half-century is the rise of this sort of thing, largely as a result of the growing significance of the mass media in our lives. A century ago, a terrorist attack like the one carried out by Osama bin Laden would not have had the emotional resonance that it has today, because today we watch it live on television. The images are seen by millions if not billions of people, and the visceral gripping, emotional quality of the attacks becomes much more significant. And terrorists have learned to exploit that. But they're not the only ones, of course, who use emotions such as fear to manipulate people. In "The Uses of Fear," we talk about other uses of fear by various parties ranging from commercial marketers, like the automobile industry, who've used the heightened military sensibilities of the American people to promote the idea that people should be driving around in these huge, oversize SUVs. The auto industry itself, in its marketing strategies, says that it is intentionally marketing SUVs to the public as "urban assault vehicles." What they're doing is capitalizing on our fear of terrorism, telling people that they can feel safer from their fears by driving around in a big, aggressive vehicle. In a similar fashion, you can bring people to do the bidding of politicians and go to war by telling them that they will feel safer if they do something aggressive. That's the point, of course, that Goering was making, and on this particular point, he knew what he was talking about. Fear is one of the most primitive emotions that people have. If you can induce fear in people, you bypass their more rational thinking facilities and can get them to respond and behave in predictable ways. That's always one of the goals of a propagandist: to be able to motivate people to behave in ways that you can predict. It's not that easy to do, because people are fairly complex creatures, and we have a lot of intelligence and diversity in the way we look at the world. There aren't that many ways of pushing people's buttons that get people to respond in a uniform, predictable way. Fear is one of the emotions that has the ability to do that, and that's why it's such a powerful propaganda tool. BUZZFLASH: We'll play a little devil's advocate here. The Bush administration would argue: Look, this horrific act occurred on September 11th. More than 3,000 people were killed -- Americans and foreigners -- in this attack on our home soil. And so we took all appropriate responses, including wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. What essentially is your claim that this administration used weapons of mass deception to lead us through a propaganda campaign into the war? RAMPTON: To justify the notion that the war on Iraq is an appropriate component of the struggle against terrorism or that it is a response to the events of September 11, you have to make certain claims, which in fact the Bush administration did make. First, they claimed that there were ties between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. Second, they claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that could be used in future terrorist attacks against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. Those were the two primary claims that provided the rationale for saying we had to go to war. There is a third claim -- that this was a war to liberate the people of Iraq, but this was really made up as an afterthought. It's a claim that I don't think would ever have been terribly persuasive to the people in the United States. The reality is that people in the United States don't care that much about the people of Iraq. You can see that fact reflected every day in the type of news coverage we get, where there's very little attention paid to even attempting an estimate of the number of Iraqis who have been killed thus far in the war, whereas we get fairly frequent updates on the number of U.S. soldiers who have been killed in combat. There isn't any basis, either in history or in recent news coverage or discussions, to support the idea that the American people are so motivated by concern for the people of Iraq that they would send their own sons and daughters into danger to try to liberate them. That's not the reason we went there. The reason people were willing to accept the war is that the American people were persuaded by the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Al-Qaeda, and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was willing to carry out even worse attacks on American civilians if we did not invade. We go into quite a bit of detail in Weapons of Mass Deception to show how each of those claims was false, and had to have been known to be false, by the Bush administration at the time that they made those claims. BUZZFLASH: As we speak, the Bush administration, in an unprecedented admission for them, yesterday quietly acknowledged that the uranium claim in relation to Niger of a potential uranium transfer to Iraq was indeed a false claim. And that's the first time they've admitted that, although they didn't admit that it was done intentionally. RAMPTON: Something very similar is happening in the United Kingdom. The claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger is a good example of how both the United Kingdom and the United States worked as an echo chamber so that claims could be repeated without anyone having to take responsibility for them. That claim from Niger was first made by the United States and was then cited in British intelligence briefings. The United States in turn cited the British as its source for the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium in Niger. By the time you unravel where this fabrication originated, no one has to take responsibility for the fact that it's a completely unsupported claim and that the documents upon which it was based were known to be forgeries at the time that Bush and Blair made their claims. BUZZFLASH: You point out in your book, as others have done, that if one were to want to come to terms with the financiers, chief supporters, mentors, and harborers of Al-Qaeda, one would have to look at Saudi Arabia rather than Iraq. One of the pieces of propaganda that floated out there was the erroneous notion that some of the hijackers were Iraqi, in fact none were, and that, indeed, 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals. Among many other facts that you note in your book, you point out a little piece of information, the type that gets lost in an avalanche of news every day, namely that the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the United States had financially supported a roommate of one of the hijackers. The Bush administration responded to this disclosure by saying that the financial support provided by the Saudi Ambassador's wife was simply an act of benevolence on her part, that she had no idea that there might be any connection to the terrorist plot. This response was emblematic of how the Bushes have actually protected Saudi Arabia whenever any evidence of possible Saudi involvement with terrorism comes up. By contrast, the administration took every hint or vague relationship that might link Iraq to terrorism and blew it up into an exaggeration or lie. They said Saudi Arabia is our great buddy in the war on terrorism, but they did just the opposite with a country that seemed to have far fewer, if any real ties to Al-Qaeda. What was the Bush administration's motivation in not really dealing with the country that's the spiritual, religious and family home of Al-Qaeda, and actually protecting people who seem to have some relationship to the financing of the terrorists? That's a betrayal of the war on terrorism. RAMPTON: We go into quite a bit of detail about the double standard employed with respect to Saudi Arabia vs. Iraq. Saudi Arabia, of course, is an important source of oil. The oil industry is obviously very influential within the Bush administration, and top officials in the first Bush administration, including the President's father, have personal financial relationships with companies like the Carlyle Group that have business dealings with top Saudis, so they don't want to go after those people. They basically look the other way when evidence of Saudi connections to Al-Qaeda appears. On the other hand, they didn't have those kinds of ties with Iraq by the time that the Bush administration decided to go to war, so it was easy to stigmatize and single out Iraq and try to turn them into the instigators of the September 11 attack. I think the financial motive is the primary explanation for the double standard. BUZZFLASH: And the American oil companies have an excellent relationship with Saudi Arabia. But in Iraq, it was Russia and France that were primarily responsible for oil, and the British and the Americans now will have the Iraqi oil concession. RAMPTON: Right. And that's certainly one factor -- not the only factor, but an important factor in explaining the decisions that have been made by the Bush administration. BUZZFLASH: You deal with propaganda in its broadest sense here. You have an interesting section on the failed Bush attempt -- which, of course, is going largely unnoticed in the press -- to convince the Arab world that America is really promoting democracy for them and is not conducting a war against them. And the woman who was appointed to run that campaign, Charlotte Beers, resigned after just a year because her efforts had been a catastrophic failure. We interviewed Naomi Klein last year, and she said the whole idea of trying to brand democracy, which is what the Bush administration was trying to do, was doomed to failure, because democracy, by its very nature, should be celebrating a diversity of voices, not a uniform, branded product. What's your take on that? RAMPTON: I think Naomi Klein's insight is really very good. In fact, we quote her on that point in our book -- I think we may have quoted her from the BuzzFlash interview. The point that she makes underscores the historical relationship that has existed between commercial advertising and propaganda. Commercial advertising, like public relations and other forms of propaganda, is ultimately about controlling the message. There's an emphasis on ensuring consistency and uniformity of messages, which is very much at odds with the democratic model of communicating. The democratic model aims at ensuring a diversity of voices and that different points of view get heard. When they try to apply branding techniques to deliver the message -- and the main message that they were trying to deliver was that America stands for freedom -- then the very technique they were using to deliver the message contradicted the message itself. And that's part of the reason for its failure. The other reason for the failure of the message is that the Arab and Muslim worlds simply are not prepared to believe that the United States stands for freedom and democracy in their region. They're basing that belief on their own experience. One of the long-standing and interesting facts about propaganda is that it is often much less effective than the propagandists think it's going to be, especially at influencing the thinking of hostile populations. The reason is that those people are not predisposed to believe it, and they have their antenna up, looking for the propaganda. And they tend to detect it and dismiss it quite easily. We've seen that very strikingly in the case of U.S. propaganda connected to the war on Iraq. The propaganda has mostly been successful within U.S. borders. If you step across the border into Canada, you find a very different environment, let alone if you step into the Arab and Muslim world where the net effect of Charlotte Beers' campaign and U.S. policy has been to drive the U.S. image even lower than it was before they began. I think the decline in U.S. standing in world opinion, especially in Arab and Muslim countries, is unprecedented. This failure is largely a result of the fact that the Bush administration has been selling a message that no one is prepared to buy. You can only do so much with propaganda, and often times what happens is that propagandists end up mostly indoctrinating themselves. I think that's what has happened here. BUZZFLASH: Fear was used to do everything, as you point out, from selling SUVs to arguing that we should drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Fear was used even to justify tax cuts. It's almost as though the Bush administration and the Republican majority in Congress just got carried away and they couldn't stop themselves. They were using terrorism to achieve any and almost every unpalatable domestic goal, in addition to trying to persuade people to go to war against Iraq. They were besotted with peddling fear to achieve their radical goals. RAMPTON: One of the stories we tell in Weapons of Mass Deception is the attempt by Arianna Huffington awhile back to use similar propaganda to criticize SUVs (See: LINK). The United States attempted to use a fear appeal as part of its war on drugs by running those TV ads with people saying, "I bought drugs and I funded a terrorist." Huffington created some very similar ads that showed people saying, "I bought an SUV and I funded a terrorist." While the anti-drug advertisements were broadcast widely on U.S. television, a number of stations actually refused to broadcast the Arianna Huffington ads, saying that they were inappropriate, that she hadn't proven her case that buying an SUV funds terrorism. There's at least as much basis for believing that buying SUVs supports terrorism as there is for believing that buying marijuana supports terrorism. But there's a double standard in the type of propaganda that's acceptable. If it happens to be something that supports U.S. policy objectives -- in this case, the drug war -- then it goes through without critical scrutiny. But if it's something like the Arianna Huffington ads, the stations say there's a much higher standard of evidence that has to be met, and they won't even let her buy the right to broadcast her message to the American people. BUZZFLASH: We should point out, as we have on the BuzzFlash website, that Afghanistan, since the U.S. invaded it, is now back to being the largest opium producer -- a dubious distinction for a war that was supposed to wipe out terrorism and drugs. If drugs are the mother's milk of terrorism, then Bush has allowed Afghanistan to once again become the big cow, as far as funding terrorism is concerned. And yet he's running ads that say buying marijuana promotes terrorism, and it seems to be a bit hypocritical. RAMPTON: Consistency between words and reality has never been his strong suit, has it? BUZZFLASH: You have a section here on the opinionated press. It's been said that what has happened with cable television, in particular Bill O'Reilly, Chris Matthews, and Fox in general, is that Americans are now getting more opinion than news. O'Reilly doesn't really tell you news. He's like a guy, as Joe Conason has said, who's drunk on a barstool and is just telling you what his gripes are. At Fox, even the news division is more opinion than news, and it's opinion that is almost invariably consistent with the White House propaganda. And it's not just Fox: There are, of course, the rather well-documented allegations that Judith Miller of the New York Times basically became a stenographer for the Pentagon in reporting prematurely that two rather threadbare and skeletal tractors were really mobile germ laboratories. Mainstream reporters also seemed to be consciously or unconsciously doing the bidding of the Pentagon. Today there are polls that show nearly 40% of Americans believe that weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq. What's the role of the media in terms of being a conveyor of the propaganda? RAMPTON: Well, frankly I think the media in just about any country -- and the United States is no exception -- tends to follow the lead of its government, especially when covering topics related to foreign policy. It happens for different reasons in different countries. Sometimes there's explicit censorship and control. Sometimes it's through more subtle means of influence, like advertising or various forms of political pressure, which is mostly the way the agenda gets set here. But in most countries, you'll find a certain amount of correspondence between the policies of their government and the way information gets presented to the public. However, in the United States post-9/11, the degree of media conformity to the government line became much more pronounced. There's a sort of a filter of hyper-patriotism put on everything, to the point where you have fluttering American flags and the Star Spangled Banner playing in the background of war coverage. And there's also a very hostile, vitriolic tone when dealing in any way with the views of people who dissent from the administration's position. It's possible to be biased in favor of your government without necessarily shouting someone down or calling them names, or, ordering your producer to turn off someone's microphone in the middle of an interview, which is what Bill O'Reilly did to one of his guests in an interview that we quote in our book. A level of emotional cheerleading has taken over -- most noticeably in cable television, but it's affected a lot of the rest of the media as well. It tends to break down rationality. Instead of examining arguments on their merits, people take up sides and they cheerlead. The question isn't whether someone's arguments are factual or internally consistent; the question is which side are you on. A lot of television like Fox News has more of the character of a wrestling show or a sports show than any sort of attempt to engage in factual consideration of the issues at hand. We quote a number of Bill O'Reilly's fans after that exchange in which he basically shouted down his guest -- screamed at him to shut up, and then had his producer cut off the guy's microphone. And O'Reilly's viewers, on a web-based discussion forum, were saying things like: "This is great entertainment. He should have punched the guy. He should have spat on him. He should have had his security people physically throw the guy out of the studio." They had all sorts of ideas for things that O'Reilly should have done to literally physically injure and humiliate his guest. And that's a level of intensity of hostility that goes well beyond disagreeing with someone or wanting to debate them. What you're really watching is combat television in which Bill O'Reilly as the interviewer becomes a combatant whose mission is not simply to interrogate the guest about his views, but literally to defeat him in some sort of battle. That's what people are tuning in to watch: the entertainment of the combat. BUZZFLASH: The guest in question during the interview you're describing was the relative of someone who was killed on September 11. RAMPTON: Right. O'Reilly's guest was the son of a Port Authority worker who died at the World Trade Towers, but he opposed the war. BUZZFLASH: The Bush administration and the right wing claims to be acting on behalf of the victims of 9/11, but when the son of one of those victims differs from their perspective, O'Reilly psychologically brutalizes and humiliates him on national television. RAMPTON: One of O'Reilly's fans wrote that if she had been in the studio, she would have killed this guy -- literally killed him. And she went on to state, "No jury in the land would have convicted me." BUZZFLASH: This was in reference to killing someone who had lost a relative in the 9/11 terrorist attack. RAMPTON: He lost his father. BUZZFLASH: And yet they're saying kill the guy because he disagrees with Bill O'Reilly about the war. RAMPTON: Right. There's something in all of this that's rather reminiscent, I think, of the old Roman gladiator days where the audience is watching the combat and waiting for the moment when they get to give the thumbs signal to say OK, now kill the guy. BUZZFLASH: Have we reached the point in our society where, in a perverted sort of way, the Bush administration is the perfect administration for the moment when news and entertainment have combined to the point where you can't distinguish between them? The Iraq war was really, in some ways, a form of info-tainment in which we had a Hollywood type of propaganda scripting. We had the Jessica Lynch story. And it was all as if it were from a "B" studio script. People seem to have a hard time distinguishing between the reality and the entertainment qualities of the event. RAMPTON: And the Bush administration has certainly been very successful in exploiting the historical moment, and the mood of the American people following September 11. But the Clinton administration was also very successful at doing propaganda and exploiting images to its own advantage. I rather prefer the Clinton administration's propaganda because we were living in a bubble economy with an illusion of prosperity, but at least we had the illusion of it. One of the striking successes of the Clinton administration in retrospect is that worldwide hostility to the United States did not coalesce, whereas the Bush administration's international propaganda has been a striking failure. The cost and consequences of that are going to be increasingly felt by the American people. They are already. We're seeing a growing chorus of reports coming out of Iraq saying that the troops that remain stationed there are experiencing morale problems. Word is trickling back to their families at home. There was a report recently in the New York Times about a shouting match that occurred at a U.S. Army base where some 800 wives of soldiers stationed in Iraq basically started screaming at a hapless officer saying: Bring our men home. So the consequences of the Bush administration's policies do get felt and do have an impact on people's feelings and perceptions. I think that will ultimately be their undoing. The question is how long it will take for that realization to set in with people at home. But it's hard to remain permanently entertained by the spectacle of watching Bill O'Reilly beat up people on Fox News, when simultaneously you're worried about your son or daughter who is sleeping in a ditch somewhere and being shot at by Iraqis. It's not so entertaining anymore when it's your son or daughter over there. The propaganda can do a certain amount to influence people, but ultimately I think Abraham Lincoln was right when he said that you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. BUZZFLASH: Well, let's end with a final follow-up question to that. Karl Rove, who is the acknowledged Svengali of the Bush administration, seems to believe that you can fool the people indefinitely. In the book "Bush's Brain," Rove is quoted as saying that he devises events for television thinking about how the images will look to people who might watch television with the sound turned off, so events become visually crafted to convey the message of the day. He sells the visual image of the smiling, confident George Bush surrounded by soldiers so that he can brand Bush as the hero of the war on terror, a great leader, a man who put money back in your pockets. The branding identity will be so consistent and so overwhelming with nearly a half-billion dollars in campaign funding to put the desired images on television, that other niggling points won't matter in 2004. The selling of the brand identity of George Bush will be so strong that anything that tries to detract from that image simply will not stick. RAMPTON: That's Rove's theory, and Rove is currently being fairly successful with it, but the real question is how this is going to play out over the long term. If you look at past wars, the war in Vietnam was initially a popular war in the United States and remained that way for a number of years. News coverage in the United States of the war in Vietnam was initially sanitized and full of celebration and unquestioned acceptance of the Johnson administration's goals, much the same way that current coverage of the Bush administration's war in Iraq has been sanitized. Over time, as morale disintegrated among U.S. soldiers and as the American people began to raise questions independently of the media, their concerns were eventually reflected in a more critical type of coverage that appeared in the media. The media certainly play a big role in influencing the way people think about the world, but people still have minds of their own, and the force of reality ultimately does intrude on people's consciousness. If the U.S. occupation of Iraq continues for an extended period of time, which appears increasingly likely, I think you're going to see growing dissent and growing questioning of the administration's policies and motives. A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW October 01, 2003 Interview with the authors of "Weapons of Mass Deception" from salon.com It seemed like an auspicious debut: The new magazine Hi was just off the presses and it generated heavy buzz. It was glossy. It was young. It was fresh and hip and just a little bit sexy. The multimillion-dollar launch across 14 countries got headlines worldwide. And for the U.S. State Department that seemed to be good news, because Hi is a government publication issued to win hearts and minds in the Arab and Muslim world. While produced by a private company, Hi is just one part of a U.S. campaign to convince citizens of Arab and Muslim countries to look a little more favorably on the United States. Critics have called it "soft-sell propaganda"; press reports from the Middle East have suggested that much of the young-adult target audience finds it laughable. All of which suggests that it will have little impact in offsetting long-held negative attitudes toward the United States -- suspicions worsened almost universally by the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. In "Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War in Iraq," co-authors Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber explain why efforts like Hi have almost inevitably failed. "The United States lost the propaganda war a long time ago," Rampton told Salon, citing the wisdom of an Arab-American news executive. "They could have the prophet Mohammed doing their public relations, and it wouldn't help." That hasn't stopped the Bush administration from trying. Last Thursday, the White House announced its plan to launch a round-the-clock television station, a competitor to the al-Jazeera network -- albeit with a slightly different perspective. Congress has approved $32 million to fund the project, with another $30 million to follow soon. But to Stauber and Rampton, projects like Hi and the new TV station prove only that the Bush administration understands neither the Middle East nor the art of communication. Aided by Roger Ailes' flag-waving "news" crew at the Fox network and the timidity of the mainstream press, the propaganda campaign at home has been relatively effective, they say. But though Bush doesn't seem to realize it, the Middle East isn't Texas. Across the Middle East and throughout the Muslim world, people loathe America for its Israel policy and for its decades of manipulation and arrogance. No glossy magazine or advertising campaign is going to change that. What might work, Stauber and Rampton say, is having a real dialogue with the Middle East -- not just talking, but listening, too. "Weapons of Mass Deception" is a readable, witty, fact-filled catalog of the U.S. government's attempts to counter the tide of anti-U.S. sentiment that the Bush administration abruptly discovered in the Muslim world after Sept. 11, 2001. It starts with the story of Charlotte Beers, former chairwoman and CEO of two of the world's top ad agencies, J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather. She was hired after 9/11, as Colin Powell explained, "to change from just selling the U.S. ... to really branding foreign policy." Efforts like these eventually cost $1 billion a year. Where did the money go? A $5 million failed "Shared Values" advertising campaign was a typical Beers project. The TV commercial showed average Muslim Americans going about their daily lives, enjoying the lack of religious and racial discrimination in the U.S. Meant to be broadcast in Islamic countries, the "Shared Values" ad prominently featured a woman running in shorts. Deemed offensive to Muslims, the ad was not permitted to be broadcast on many important television stations in Egypt and other largely Islamic countries. Another Beers' idea was Radio Sawa, a station playing music by corn-fed American superstars. Radio Sawa broadcasts plenty of pop, but also features hourly news with a distinctly pro-America perspective. Rampton and Stauber admit that Radio Sawa has had a certain level of popularity -- but they say that most of its audience simply tunes out the talking. Early this year, polls by the Pew Research Center indicated that the United States' public image had plummeted around the globe, including in the Arab countries targeted by Beers and her "public diplomacy" crew. When Egyptians were asked in the poll if they had a "favorable" view of the United States, only 6 percent said yes. With her campaign subject to critical harpooning, Beers resigned in March of this year, citing "health reasons." Much of the media was surprisingly explicit in calling her State Department work a failure. Much of the research for "Weapons of Mass Deception" came from their Web site, PR Watch, and their "Disinfopedia," an "encyclopedia of propaganda" about "public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts." Previous joint projects by the former investigative journalists include the books "Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future" and "Toxic Sludge Is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry." Rampton and Stauber spoke with Salon by phone from Madison, Wis. They explained why American pop radio isn't going to prevent future al-Qaida attacks, how the Pentagon may be falling for its own propaganda, and why Bush turned the "war on terror" into the war in Iraq. What's the difference between government-sponsored P.R. and propaganda? Sheldon Rampton: From the very outset, public relations was steeped in propaganda, but the term "public relations" sounds less offensive to most ears, so it's the term they prefer. Public relations is constantly looking for new euphemisms for itself, because every term they use for it eventually becomes synonymous with manipulation or deception in the public's eyes. So they come up with other terms, like "community relations" or "reputation management" or "perception management." What does a "perception manager" -- or, more specifically, Charlotte Beers -- do? Rampton:They spend their days planning propaganda. [laughs] The job of someone who's doing "public diplomacy" is to try to come up with ways of influencing the opinions of people outside of the United States to view the U.S. and its policies in a more favorable light. That description of their task is not terribly different from the way most scholars would define propaganda. In the book, you describe the P.R. efforts of Charlotte Beers in Arab and Muslim countries. Can you describe her tenure in the State Department a bit here? Rampton: Charlotte Beers' task was not to promote the war in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan. Her specific task was to create a more favorable impression of the United States overseas, especially in Arab and Muslim cou |
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