[R-G] How the Spooks Took over the News

[Anthony Fenton]

How the Spooks Took over the News

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/77281/?page=entire

By Nick Davies, The Independent UK. Posted February 19, 2008.

A controversial new book argues that shadowy intelligence agencies  
are pumping out black propaganda and the media simply swallow it  
wholesale.

Editor's note: This is an edited excerpt from Nick Davies' book, Flat  
Earth News: An Award-Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion  
and Propaganda in the Global Media (Chatto & Windus). Davies' book  
has created enormous controversy in the UK, where many of the  
newsmakers Davies discusses in the book have fired back with op-eds  
accusing Davies of relying on the same anonymous sourcing that he  
condemns the commercial press for using in the lead-up to the  
invasion of Iraq.

It’s not surprising that the book strikes a tender spot among many a  
news-maker. It is the deepest examination of the links between the  
"public diplomacy" -- sometimes known as propaganda -- pushed by the  
Bush administration and its allies, and the media’s uncritical  
repetition of the claims made to justify the invasion.

It's easy to forget just how easy it was to sell an unprovoked attack  
on a sovereign state. It was the media, after all, that promulgated  
the novel idea that if Saddam Hussein possessed "weapons of mass  
destruction," that was in and of itself a justification to go to war.  
How did the issue of "WMD" become a proxy for the more important  
question of whether Iraq was a credible threat to the United States  
and its allies. At the time of the invasion, there were close to 40  
countries suspected of having an illicit weapons program. Twelve of  
them were considered "hostile" to the United States and its allies.  
Yet, the administration claimed that possession of old chemical or  
biological munitions was a de facto justification for attacking the  
only country among the twelve that was well-contained; a country  
whose air-space and imports and exports were under international  
control. The media embraced the idea uncritically, never mind that  
Saddam Hussein had not been rattling his saber or threatening any  
offensive action against another state.

Hussein was in a great position for a tin-pot dictator -- he and his  
cronies had extracted over $10 billion in corporate kick-backs and  
bribes which the Right spun as a UN scandal rather that what it was:  
the largest corporate bribery scandal in history -- and he was able  
to blame all of his country’s domestic woes on the U.S./British  
sanctions program that strangled the country.

It’s always been a curiosity that public opinion could be manipulated  
so comprehensively, and Davies provides one more piece of the puzzle  
explaining where our media culture is today.

***

How the Spooks Took Over the News

by Nick Davies

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 October 7, 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 harbors 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 organizations 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 Defense works  
with specialists from 15 UK psyops, based at the defense 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 Center 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 defense 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 maneuvers. 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.

Nick Davies is a veteran journalist and author of Flat Earth News: An  
Award-Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda  
in the Global Media (Chatto & Windus).