www.the-edge.org
By Gar Smith /
The-Edge
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
After
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
According to Gardiner, "It was not bad intelligence" that lead to the
quagmire in
The Times of London described the $200-million-plus
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."
"
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
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
"The second thrust is what propaganda theorists would call the 'big lie.'
The plan was to connect
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
The techniques that proved so successful in Operation Iraqi Freedom were first
tried out during the campaign to build public support for the
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
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
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
In both the
It wasn't until December 18, that the White House confessed that it was
"increasingly looking like" the anthrax came from a
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
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.
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
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
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 "
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."
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).
For more information contact:
Col. Sam Gardiner's entire 56-page report is available in six PDF files that
can be accessed beginning with:
www.usnews.com/usnews/politics/whispers/documents/truth_1.pdf
On October 21, Col. Gardiner [10/21/03] was interviewed on the Paul Harris
Radio Show on The Big 550 KTRS in St. Louis.
The Real Audio interview (and another link to the PDF files) can be found here:
www.harrisonline.com/audio/listings/samgardiner.htm
|
|
|||
|
