Weapons of Mass Deception
A short history of a Big Lie
GNN: Thanks for talking with us today, John. Tell us about your new book, "Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq."
Stauber: It's the story of how the Bush Administration sold the War on Iraq to the American people and it's, like all our books, a case study in the use of propaganda.
GNN: It's almost eerie how so much of what you've been covering at PR Watch is starting to become unraveled.
Stauber: It's extremely frustrating that the book isn't out right now ["Weapons of Mass Deception" hits the stores July 19], informing the current discussion and debate over the massive campaign of deception, because what we are seeing is that the Republican control of the House and Senate is preventing an investigation into what a very large and growing percentage of the American public now recognize as a deceptive sell-job that embroiled our nation in a war of occupation. But at the same time, it's this bizarre Orwellian situation where the word "investigation," through a gentlemen's agreement between the Democrats and Republicans, isn't even being used to describe what's happening in Washington. The Democrats don't have a majority in either house and even if they wanted to, they aren't able to push through open hearings and an investigation. There have been some outspoken figures in politics and the media - Senator Byrd, for example.
GNN: He even joked the other day about the word investigation…
Stauber: I think that's why I just said that. I happened to be watching Democracy Now! on the cable channel and they were showing a still photo of the Senator and playing his brilliant and of course under-covered [by the media] talk, in which he joked about using the 'i' word. But I think as the 'q' word - quagmire - becomes more and more used to describe the current mess in Iraq, there is going to be a growing clamor at the grassroots for an investigation and much more. Some mainstream level of journalists like Paul Krugman are saying that this huge deception that sold the war is arguably the worst political scandal of our lifetimes, and I think there is a good case to be made for that.
GNN: Give us a short history of how propaganda and war in Iraq.
Stauber: Where to begin… I think if you step back and you look at how the U.S. came to attack Iraq based on phony assertions of that country's involvement in 9/11, that country's connections with the terrorist group Al Qaeda, that country's possession of weapons of mass destruction, this whole deception really traces back to the first Gulf War, and it's very important to understand that Saddam Hussein did desire nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein did use chemical and biological weapons, as we hear so often, against Iranians and Kurdish Iraqis, and that those weapons came from western countries - especially U.S. and France - and that Saddam Hussein was a close ally of the U.S. right up to the moment that he invaded Kuwait to take over their oil fields, and that precipitated a complete sea change…
GNN: Right, what is amazing is that those arms sales - this was a scandal in the late 80s that they called Iraq-gate that Ted Koppel himself said, quite possibly, could be worse than Watergate. But people forget that - that we were selling arms to Saddam. It never really carried over. The first Gulf War happened and there was a collective amnesia about it.
Stauber: Right. And a lot of that is just due to the abysmal reporting on foreign policy issues in the American media and the tendency of the American media to take its lead on foreign policy from the U.S. government. I think one of the most interesting media tidbits that we dug up in researching this book was the editorial writing in The Washington Post essentially making light of Iraq's use of chemical and biological weapons against Iranians - sort of saying, "What's the big deal here? Weapons of war are really nasty, and do some weapons deserve to be considered nastier than others?" Again I hate to keep using the term Orwellian, but on the 100th birthday of the George Orwell, things seem to be getting more and more Orwellian because, of course, the idea now that The Washington Post would make light of Saddam's use of these weapons is almost treasonous. When April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador, was meeting with Saddam shortly before he invaded Kuwait and took over their oil fields back in 1990, they were reportedly discussing how they could improve the dictator's image in the United States, because the press was beginning to report more and more on his atrocities and this was a political problem for the U.S. Well, that problem suddenly disappeared when Saddam invaded Kuwait, and many analysts think that Glaspie apparently unwittingly gave Saddam indications that the U.S. wouldn't be too concerned if Saddam happened to take over those oil fields. But once that happened, of course, everything changed, and then Saddam had to be turned into the great evil - a Satanic or Hitler-like character.
I think one of the interesting things we discovered doing our research is that the scandal that surrounded the Hill & Knowlton campaign that sold the first Gulf War to the people of the U.S. involving phony testimony before a phony Congressional hearing by a 15 year-old girl who claimed that Iraqi soldiers were murdering babies in hospitals in occupied Kuwait by throwing them out of incubators, now we see in a new light. That was a bizarre story that came to light a year after the U.S. drove Iraq out of Kuwait. We reported on that in our first book, "Toxic Sludge is Good for You." John MacArthur of Harper's, the CBC show The Fifth Estate and ABC News all did excellent reporting, unfortunately a year after the fact, revealing that this testimony, which helped precipitate the first U.S. decision to go to war against Iraq, was the creation of the Hill & Knowlton PR firm, and the American people were duped into thinking that Saddam was a baby killer.
One of the mysteries has always been: Why do these PR people always have to invent these atrocities and foist them upon the American people? I mean Saddam committed plenty of atrocities.
The answer I think now, as we discovered in writing this book, is that because Saddam was so much an ally of the U.S. and because the U.S. basically looked the other way when he was using poisonous gas against Iranians and against Iraqi Kurds - drudging up those true atrocities where thousands and thousands of people were killed by Saddam - innocent civilians, women and children - would have really reflected badly on the U.S. since the weapons components came from us and he was our ally.
So back then, they had to not only turn an ally into a demon but create some trumped up charges to do it because the truth would have revealed the extent to which he was certainly a demon, but that he was our demon… So in looking at what's going on here, the way it was sold and the deceptions, we step all the way back into looking not just at Saddam, but back at the whole use of propaganda by the U.S. in middle east foreign policy going back to the 50s (to sort of answer the question of why are we so hated). But to answer your question about the Muslim group created by the State Department to supposedly build bridges and better feelings and understanding about the U.S. in the Muslim world, what we see is that after 9/11, there were created and resurrected a variety of organizations to achieve different purposes and one of those purposes was to sell America, sell its image - actually brand its image and improve the perception of that brand among Muslim citizens worldwide.
And we tell the story of Charlotte Beers, the Madison Avenue wizard who was brought in to work for the State Department to oversee this massive propaganda campaign that involved the Rendon PR firm and all sorts of advertising and PR professionals, and the State Department has been absolutely an abysmal failure because the problem of course with the perception of the U.S. around the world isn't something that can be solved with PR or advertising. People aren't stupid. They form their opinions on the basis of our policies, and rather than addressing the problems with our policies, the idea that we can instead simply spend money on PR and media monitoring and advertising is a typically American stupidity that has been one of the colossal failures since 9/11.
GNN:This whole campaign was built around these false perceptions of how an invasion was going to affect the Middle East, how the Iraqis would react to American troops coming in. It's almost like there was this huge façade of lies that they were telling themselves.
Stauber: I think that's exactly right. And one of the problems with propaganda is that governments and corporations that use it tend to believe their own propaganda and really cut themselves adrift from reality. And the story of the war against Iraq is a story very much of hardcore neo-conservatives, neo-Reaganites who have for a decade wanted to see the U.S. attack Iraq and topple Saddam and assert U.S. power in the middle east and really create a new American empire. And the Project for the New American Century - PNAC- which was begun by Bill Kristol was a much under analyzed under publicized organization that really seized power with the election of George Bush and 9/11.
People like Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld and others who have their ideological roots in PNAC and the neo-con movement, within hours of the 9/11 attacks, were seizing on the attacks as a green light to attack Iraq. And if you look today at the current situation in the U.S. with public opinion and the incredible ignorance and misunderstanding that surveys are picking up regarding Iraq's role in 9/11, Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction, Iraq's relations with Al Qaeda, what you see is that the 'big lie tactics' that were employed by the Bush Administration beginning with 9/11 to create the false beliefs that are held by Americans to justify the war, those big lie tactics were tremendously successful. The history of the Big Lie tactic (and we don't go into this in the book because we had to cut so much out of it) is simply that if those in authority repeat a falsehood over and over enough and it remains unchallenged by the media, it will become the truth. The history is that this was a tactic extensively employed by the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. And it's especially disturbing that something as crude as the big lie tactic could be used effectively to rally support for a pre-emptive war by the U.S.
GNN: Going back to the idea of believing their own hype, one of the lightning rods of controversy is that a lot of people within the CIA in particular have been leaking information anonymously about the Iraqi National Congress (INC). A lot of people in the U.S. Government are sort of split. A lot of people who were behind Ahmed Chalabi (INC leader) now view his information regarding Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction as part of the problem. They worked closely with a big PR firm, tell me about that.
Stauber: The Rendon Group. If we had a more sane political situation in this country where we were pursuing aggressive investigations of the selling of this war, the Rendon group and its head John Rendon, would be called as one of the very first witnesses, probably along with Torie Clarke, former head of the Hill & Knowlton office in Washington DC, who suddenly in June resigned as the under secretary of defense for public relations, or public affairs as they call it. The Rendon Group is a favorite CIA Pentagon public relations firm. Exactly what they do is top secret. They have received and spent tens of millions of dollars in the last decades working on foreign policy for the Pentagon and the CIA and a lot of that work has been in Iraq.
The Iraqi National Congress is actually in many ways a creation of the CIA through the Rendon Group, although it certainly seems to have taken on a life of its own, and as you say, it seems to fall out of favor with people in the CIA but remain in favor with people in the Pentagon. The name 'Iraqi National Congress' obviously is a knockoff name copying the 'African National Congress' of Nelson Mandella and that name was dreamed up by John Rendon. One of the interesting little footnotes that occurred during this war was that an Australian Broadcasting Corporation reporter named Paul Moran was killed by a suicide bomber in northern Iraq, and it turned out that while Moran really did work for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, he was also on the payroll of the CIA's PR firm Rendon. And John Rendon himself flew to Australia for this poor man's funeral.
GNN: Makes you wonder how many embeds are really embedded!
Stauber: Really! And this to my knowledge has gotten no publicity whatsoever…
GNN: Our reporter actually was very close to that incident. I mean, nobody on the ground knew his associations…
Stauber: And it should be a huge ethical controversy for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation but they've just sort of glossed over it. And again going back to the fact that the big lie was the primary tactic used to sell this war, it's impossible for the big lie tactic to work if the news media and the press is doing its job. The misperceptions that allowed the Administration to launch this war and that persist in the minds of the American people, don't exist in the minds of the British populace, for instance, and it's really quite interesting to contrast the very appropriate investigation and holy hell that Tony Blair is being subjected to with the kid glove handling that Bush is getting here - both from the media and most of the Democrats. And if you look at the current coverage of these questions - where are the weapons of mass destruction, why can't we find any evidence linking Al Qaeda with Saddam, why did you use information that you knew was falsified and inaccurate - the parameters of the media's investigation are extremely narrow, and the reason for that is that they are as much to blame as the neo-cons in the Bush Administration for this war, because if the media had been doing its investigative job, instead of, in the case of the Fox network for example, cheerleading and leading the charge for war, the war wouldn't have taken place!
GNN: Exactly - I mean it's an indictment of both institutions.
Stauber: And Bush has been tossing around this sort of revisionist history charge, which is hilarious because most people are now realizing that the war didn't end when he engaged in his publicity stunt at taxpayer's expense, landing on the deck of that carrier. The war is very much ongoing. It's now a guerrilla war and we are not going to see the major media publicizing this information in a book. We are not going to see the major media calling for a thorough investigation of the deception and the selling of the war because they were so involved in promoting the war.
GNN: Right. So wrapping up here, what do you see as the next move in this PR spin battle? What's going on right now in terms of the reorganization of the message?
Stauber: If you look at what the Republicans are saying, they are sort of letting their longtime pollster Frank Luntz talk to them, and basically he is saying, "Look, people in the U.S. don't care, it was a good war, we didn't lose many troops, it played well on TV, it avenged 9/11, everyone loves the president and maybe we got into it for the wrong reasons, but once people found out how truly evil Saddam Hussein was, just overthrowing Saddam was reason enough." So the big spin now from the Republicans is that the American people loved this war, it was great theatre and was definitely worth it, and any Democrats who dare call for investigations or question the heroic struggle that overthrew the brutal dictator, are just setting themselves and their party up for defeat. Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, since so many Democrats voted for the war, that message does resonate within the Democratic Party.
Exactly where this all is going to go, I think, is going to be answered in large part by the peace movement. And what I find interesting is that so far, the peace movement has sort of sat back on its haunches and seems to be somewhat in disarray and coalescing more around the political theme of 'anybody but Bush,' and hoping that somehow one of these Democratic candidates will pull a rabbit out of the hat and topple this dastardly regime a year from November. I think that is a strategy for losing, because back in Vietnam, the term 'hearts and minds' was used by the military and the Johnson and Nixon Administrations - they realized the importance of winning the hearts and minds. And what I really feel the peace movement needs to do in the U.S. is to gain the offensive and become very proactive and educate our fellow citizens to the ways in which we were masterfully duped by the Administration and by the media, and to force politicians to investigate this outrageous political scandal. And since it is becoming pretty clear that, with the Republicans in control of both Houses and the Democrats somewhat divided and really afraid to do the right thing, I would like to see the peace movement organize commissions of inquiry at the grassroots. I am old enough to remember the war in Vietnam.
I was in high school when Bertrand Russell was convening public inquiries into U.S. atrocities and war crimes in Vietnam, and eventually that was picked up here in the U.S. and that helped heighten a lot of contradictions, and veterans of that war came forward and talked about the reality as opposed to the government media sell job. And it really took the peace movement mobilizing and educating the populace to get out the message of what was going down in Vietnam. I think that if the peace movement doesn't coalesce and force the media and force the politicians to fully investigate the selling of this war, it is unlikely that there will be any regime change in the U.S. in 2004 because the incredible misinformation campaign that got the U.S. into this war will simply continue to cloud the minds of a majority of citizens.
I really think that the next move is up to the anti-war movement. It's all well and good to run virtual primaries and get excited about the former governor of Vermont or whomever, but no Democrat on a white horse with a tremendous cash disadvantage is going to topple this regime here in the U.S. I think - I am hoping in the months ahead as the scales fall from the eyes of the American public, we will be seeing a new peace and justice movement galvanizing and really leading a movement for democratic regime change here in the U.S. But it's gonna take a mobilization at the grassroots and so far the peace movement still seems a little stunned. And hoping that just casting a flag for whatever Democrat manages to stumble forward is going to be enough, won't be enough.
GNN: Thanks John.
