- How The Spooks Took Over the News
http://disc.yourwebapps.com/discussion.cgi?disc=149495;article=124834;title=APFN
How The Spooks Took Over the News
In his controversial new book, Nick Davies argues that shadowy
intelligence agencies are pumping out black propaganda to manipulate
public opinion – and that the media simply swallow it wholesale
By Nick Davies
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22824.htm
June 13, 2009 "The Independent" -- On the morning of 9 February 2004,
The New York Times carried an exclusive and alarming story. The paper's
Baghdad correspondent, Dexter Filkins, reported that US officials had
obtained a 17-page letter, believed to have been written by the
notorious terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi to the "inner circle" of
al-Qa'ida's leadership, urging them to accept that the best way to beat
US forces in Iraq was effectively to start a civil war.
The letter argued that al-Qa'ida, which is a Sunni network, should
attack the Shia population of Iraq: "It is the only way to prolong the
duration of the fight between the infidels and us. If we succeed in
dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis."
Later that day, at a regular US press briefing in Baghdad, US General
Mark Kimmitt dealt with a string of questions about The New York Times
report: "We believe the report and the document is credible, and we
take the report seriously... It is clearly a plan on the part of
outsiders to come in to this country and spark civil war, create
sectarian violence, try to expose fissures in this society." The story
went on to news agency wires and, within 24 hours, it was running
around the world.
There is very good reason to believe that that letter was a fake – and
a significant one because there is equally good reason to believe that
it was one product among many from a new machinery of propaganda which
has been created by the United States and its allies since the
terrorist attacks of September 2001.
For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to
manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its
compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it.
The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work
reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the
production of our news. I've spent the last two years researching a
book about falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media.
The "Zarqawi letter" which made it on to the front page of The New York
Times in February 2004 was one of a sequence of highly suspect
documents which were said to have been written either by or to Zarqawi
and which were fed into news media.
This material is being generated, in part, by intelligence agencies who
continue to work without effective oversight; and also by a new and
essentially benign structure of "strategic communications" which was
originally designed by doves in the Pentagon and Nato who wanted to use
subtle and non-violent tactics to deal with Islamist terrorism but
whose efforts are poorly regulated and badly supervised with the result
that some of its practitioners are breaking loose and engaging in the
black arts of propaganda.
Like the new propaganda machine as a whole, the Zarqawi story was born
in the high tension after the attacks of September 2001. At that time,
he was a painful thorn in the side of the Jordanian authorities, an
Islamist radical who was determined to overthrow the royal family. But
he was nothing to do with al-Q'aida. Indeed, he had specifically
rejected attempts by Bin Laden to recruit him, because he was not
interested in targeting the West.
Nevertheless, when US intelligence battered on the doors of allied
governments in search of information about al-Q'aida, the Jordanian
authorities – anxious to please the Americans and perhaps keen to make
life more difficult for their native enemy – threw up his name along
with other suspects. Soon he started to show up as a minor figure in US
news stories – stories which were factually weak, often contradictory
and already using the Jordanians as a tool of political convenience.
Then, on 7 October 2002, for the first time, somebody referred to him
on the record. In a nationally televised speech in Cincinnati,
President George Bush spoke of "high-level contacts" between al-Q'aida
and Iraq and said: "Some al-Q'aida leaders who fled Afghanistan, went
to Iraq. These include one very senior al-Q'aida leader who received
medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated
with planning for chemical and biological attacks."
This coincided with a crucial vote in Congress in which the president
was seeking authority to use military force against Iraq. Bush never
named the man he was referring to but, as the Los Angeles Times among
many others soon reported: "In a speech [on] Monday, Bush referred to a
senior member of al-Q'aida who received medical treatment in Iraq. US
officials said yesterday that was Abu al Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian,
who lost a leg during the US war in Afghanistan."
Even now, Zarqawi was a footnote, not a headline, but the flow of
stories about him finally broke through and flooded the global media on
5 February 2003, when the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, addressed
the UN Security Council, arguing that Iraq must be invaded: first, to
stop its development of weapons of mass destruction; and second, to
break its ties with al-Q'aida.
Powell claimed that "Iraq today harbours a deadly terrorist network
headed by Abu Musab al Zarqawi"; that Zarqawi's base in Iraq was a camp
for "poison and explosive training"; that he was "an associate and
collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Q'aida lieutenants"; that he
"fought in the Afghan war more than a decade ago"; that "Zarqawi and
his network have plotted terrorist actions against countries, including
France, Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany and Russia".
Courtesy of post-war Senate intelligence inquiries; evidence disclosed
in several European trials; and the courageous work of a handful of
journalists who broke away from the pack, we now know that every single
one of those statements was entirely false. But that didn't matter: it
was a big story. News organisations sucked it in and regurgitated it
for their trusting consumers.
So, who exactly is producing fiction for the media? Who wrote the
Zarqawi letters? Who created the fantasy story about Osama bin Laden
using a network of subterranean bases in Afghanistan, complete with
offices, dormitories, arms depots, electricity and ventilation systems?
Who fed the media with tales of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar,
suffering brain seizures and sitting in stationery cars turning the
wheel and making a noise like an engine? Who came up with the idea that
Iranian ayatollahs have been encouraging sex with animals and girls of
only nine?
Some of this comes from freelance political agitators. It was an
Iranian opposition group, for example, which was behind the story that
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was jailing people for texting each other
jokes about him. And notoriously it was Iraqi exiles who supplied the
global media with a dirty stream of disinformation about Saddam Hussein.
But clearly a great deal of this carries the fingerprints of
officialdom. The Pentagon has now designated "information operations"
as its fifth "core competency" alongside land, sea, air and special
forces. Since October 2006, every brigade, division and corps in the US
military has had its own "psyop" element producing output for local
media. This military activity is linked to the State Department's
campaign of "public diplomacy" which includes funding radio stations
and news websites. In Britain, the Directorate of Targeting and
Information Operations in the Ministry of Defence works with
specialists from 15 UK psyops, based at the Defence Intelligence and
Security School at Chicksands in Bedfordshire.
In the case of British intelligence, you can see this combination of
reckless propaganda and failure of oversight at work in the case of
Operation Mass Appeal. This was exposed by the former UN arms inspector
Scott Ritter, who describes in his book, Iraq Confidential, how, in
London in June 1998, he was introduced to two "black propaganda
specialists" from MI6 who wanted him to give them material which they
could spread through "editors and writers who work with us from time to
time".
In interviews for Flat Earth News, Ritter described how, between
December 1997 and June 1998, he had three meetings with MI6 officers
who wanted him to give them raw intelligence reports on Iraqi arms
procurement. The significance of these reports was that they were all
unconfirmed and so none was being used in assessing Iraqi activity. Yet
MI6 was happy to use them to plant stories in the media. Beyond that,
there is worrying evidence that, when Lord Butler asked MI6 about this
during his inquiry into intelligence around the invasion of Iraq, MI6
lied to him.
Ultimately, the US has run into trouble with its propaganda in Iraq,
particularly with its use of the Zarqawi story. In May 2006, when yet
another of his alleged letters was handed out to reporters in the
Combined Press Information Centre in Baghdad, finally it was widely
regarded as suspect and ignored by just about every single media outlet.
Arguably, even worse than this loss of credibility, according to
British defence sources, the US campaign on Zarqawi eventually
succeeded in creating its own reality. By elevating him from his
position as one fighter among a mass of conflicting groups, the US
campaign to "villainise Zarqawi" glamorised him with its enemy
audience, making it easier for him to raise funds, to attract
"unsponsored" foreign fighters, to make alliances with Sunni Iraqis and
to score huge impact with his own media manoeuvres. Finally, in
December 2004, Osama bin Laden gave in to this constructed reality,
buried his differences with the Jordanian and declared him the leader
of al-Q'aida's resistance to the American occupation.
JONATHAN GRUN, EDITOR,PRESS ASSOCIATION
The Press Association's wire service has a long-standing reputation for
its integrity and fast, fair and accurate reporting. Much of his
criticism is anonymously sourced – which is something we strive to
avoid.
ANDREW MARR, BROADCASTER AND JOURNALIST
Thanks to the internet there's a constant source of news stories
pumping into newsrooms. Stories are simply rewritten. It produces an
airless cycle of information. Papers too rarely have news stories of
their own.
IAN MONK, PR
The media has ceded a lot of the power of setting the agenda; the
definition of news has broadened to include celebrities and new
products (the iPhone is a big story). But I don't join in the
hand-wringing or say it's desperate that people outside newspapers have
got a say.
JOHN KAMPFNER, EDITOR, NEW STATESMAN
Davies is right to point to the lack of investigative rigour: the
primary purpose of journalism is to rattle cages. I was always struck
at the extent to which political journalists yearned to be spoon fed.
Having said that, I think he uses too broad a brush.
DOMINIC LAWSON, FORMER EDITOR SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
I'm not saying this is a golden age, but there's a strong investigative
drive in the British press. A lot of papers put a strong value on such
stories. I suspect we're about the most invigilated establishment in
Europe.
CHRIS BLACKHURST, CITY EDITOR, EVENING STANDARD
I'm disappointed that a book which has as its premise the dictation of
the news agenda by PRs should contain in it an anonymous quote from a
PR criticising theStandard's coverage of the Natwest Three.
HEATHER BROOKE, JOURNALIST
It's not entirely true what Davies is saying. In the past, we just got
scrutiny from newspapers and now think tanks publish results of
investigations. But there's an assumption that the public aren't
interested in government, just Amy Winehouse.
FRANCIS WHEEN, JOURNALIST/ AUTHOR
Davies is spot on. It's reasonable that newspapers carry PA accounts of
court hearings, but he's right that there's more "churn" now. Reporters
don't get out of the office the way they did once – partly a reflection
of reduced budgets.
This is an edited extract from "Flat Earth News: an award-winning
reporter exposes falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global
media", published by Chatto & Windus, price £17.99. To order this
title for the special price of £16, including postage and packaging,
call Independent Books Direct: 08700 798 897
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