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Mass Deception: How The Media Helped The Government Deceive The People
by
David Edwards and Media Lens
Dissident Voice
June
7, 2003
Among The Knowledgeable
The
media have erupted with outrage at the allegation that Tony Blair “duped” the
public and parliament into fighting a war that had been secretly agreed with
George Bush last September. Equally outrageous, however, was the stubborn
refusal of the media to discuss these issues before senior politicians blew the
whistle.
Martin
Woollacott summarised the standard pre-war media view in the Guardian on
January 24:
“Among
those knowledgeable about Iraq there are few, if any, who believe he [Saddam]
is not hiding such weapons. It is a given." ('This drive to war is one of
the mysteries of our time - We know Saddam is hiding weapons. That isn't the
argument', Martin Woollacott, The Guardian, January 24, 2003)
This
was nonsense but because it was rarely challenged Blair’s “passionate
sincerity” about the supposed Iraqi threat also became “a given”. The
Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley described how Blair was “genuinely disturbed - it
would not be going too far to say petrified - about Saddam Hussein's potential
ability to use weapons of mass destruction." ('How to deal with the
American goliath', Andrew Rawnsley, The Observer, February 24, 2002)
The
BBC’s Laura Trevelyan declared that Tony Blair “passionately believes” that
Saddam had to be confronted if future generations were not to be haunted by our
inaction. (BBC News at One, January 14, 2003)
The
editors of the anti-war Mirror wrote the day after Blair’s crucial March 18
speech to parliament:
"Even
though the Mirror disagrees strongly with Tony Blair over his determination to wage
war on Iraq, we do not question his belief in the rightness of what he is
doing.”
The
Daily Telegraph’s editors wrote:
"Any
fair-minded person who listened to [the] debate... must surely have concluded
that Mr Blair was right, and his opponents were wrong."
The
Independent’s editors wrote:
“Tony
Blair's capacities as a performer and an advocate have never been in doubt. But
this was something much more... this was the most persuasive case yet made by
the man who has emerged as the most formidable persuader for war on either side
of the Atlantic. The case against President Saddam's 12-year history of
obstructing the United Nation's attempts at disarmament has never been better
made."
Remarkably,
this praise across the media spectrum was heaped on a speech packed full of
lies and deceptions that could easily have been exposed by journalists.
Cambridge
academic Glen Rangwala has analysed the first reference in Blair's speech to an
Unmovic working document of March 6, 2003, entitled ‘Unresolved Disarmament
Issues’. Blair noted that Iraq "had had far reaching plans to weaponise
VX". The quotation used by Blair was from a "background" section
of the Unmovic report on Iraq's policy before 1991. In the key +new+ section on
VX in the same report, Unmovic reported that the method used by Iraq to produce
1.5 tonnes of VX before 1990 - a ‘threat’ repeatedly mentioned by US-UK
politicians - did +not+ lead to stable results. According to the weapons
inspectors:
"VX
produced [by the Iraqi method] must be used relatively quickly after production
(about 1 to 8 weeks)."
Rangwala
explains the sheer audacity of Blair’s deception:
“In
other words, Blair's first piece of ‘evidence’ was about a substance that the
weapons inspectors consider to have been no threat since early 1991. Tony Blair
didn't tell the MPs that.” (Glen Rangwala, ‘Evidence
And Deceit: How The Case For War Became Unstuck’, Dissident Voice, June 02,
2003)
This
could be mistaken for ignorance, except that it fits a consistent pattern of
careful distortion. The government’s September 2002 dossier on Iraqi WMD
contained four mentions of the claim that Iraq was able to deploy WMD within 45
minutes of the order being given. Senior intelligence officials outraged at
the abuse of their work - have told the BBC’s Newsnight programme (June 4) that
the original mention of a 45-minutes response time referred to the length of
time it might have taken the Iraqis to fuel and fire a Scud missile, or to load
and fire a multiple rocket launcher. The original intelligence said nothing
about whether Iraq possessed the chemical or biological weapons to use in these
weapons. The government had turned a purely hypothetical threat into an immediate
and deadly threat to make war possible.
Blair
has consistently rubbished any notion that the war was motivated by oil. In
February, Blair said:
"No,
let me just deal with the oil thing because this is one of the - we may be
right or we may be wrong - I mean people have their different views about why
we're doing this thing. But the oil conspiracy theory is honestly one of the
most absurd when you analyse it.” (Blair On Iraq A Newsnight Special, BBC2,
February 6, 2003)
By
contrast, when asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated
differently from Iraq, where no weapons of mass destruction have been found, US
deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, said this week:
"Let's
look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq
is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea
of oil." (‘Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil’, George Wright, The
Guardian, June 4, 2003)
Other
lies include repeated claims that inspectors were thrown out of Iraq in 1998
(they were withdrawn), and that inspectors were forced to leave because the
Iraqi regime had completely failed to cooperate (cooperation had resulted in
near-total disarmament). Blair has also blamed the Saddam regime for the mass
death of Iraqi children under sanctions (the UN and aid agencies have blamed
Gulf War damage to infrastructure and the effects of sanctions).
To
create the proper black and white contrast between our noble leader forced to
confront his children with the prospect that his principled stand might cost
him his job the public was told that Saddam was surrounded by “a rogue’s
gallery of the world’s most wanted men”, in the words of ITN’s Nicholas Owen
(ITN, Lunchtime News, April 3, 2003). Skulking in the shadows was ‘Chemical
Ali’, described by ITN’s Tom Bradby as “a diabetic with a high-pitched whine”
(ITN Lunchtime News, April 3, 2003). Another senior Iraqi figure was described
as “an unstable psychopath who suffers from hyper-tension”.
Even
when our leaders were clearly responsible for major loss of civilian life, the
media managed to sanitise the horror. Standing beside a deep crater that had
once been a restaurant and residential area in the heart of Baghdad - destroyed
in a US attempt to kill Saddam Hussein - ITN reporter John Irvine said merely:
“It’s
the Americans who are setting the agenda.” (ITN Evening News, April 7, 2003)
As
though auditioning for a part in a Hollywood action movie, Irvine concluded:
“After
this, Saddam Hussein is a dead man walking.”
Silencing
Dissent The War We Could Have Stopped
It
was only possible to be persuaded of Blair’s sincerity by ignoring highly
credible experts who argued that Iraq had no significant WMD capability, and that
the US-UK case for war was therefore an audacious fraud. Former chief Unscom
weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, has long insisted that Iraq was
"fundamentally disarmed" between 1991-98, with 90-95% of its WMD
eliminated by December 1998. Of the remaining capability, Ritter wrote last
year:
"It
doesn't even constitute a weapons programme. It constitutes bits and pieces of
a weapons programme which in its totality doesn't amount to much, but which is
still prohibited." (War On Iraq, Scott Ritter and William Rivers Pitt,
Profile Books, 2002, p.24)
Responding
to Colin Powell’s infamous February 5 speech to the United Nations, Ritter
said:
"He
just hits you, hits you, hits you with circumstantial evidence, and he confuses
people — and he lied, he lied to people, he misled people... The Powell
presentation is not evidence... It's a very confusing presentation. What does
it mean? What does it represent? How does it all link up? It doesn't link
up." ('Ritter dismisses Powell report', Kyodo News, February 7, 2003)
Unscom’s
executive chairman Rolf Ekeus reported to the Security Council in April 1997
that “not much is unknown about Iraq's retained proscribed weapons
capabilities". (Quoted, Glen Rangwala, ‘A Threat to the World?: The facts
about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction’, April 4, 2002.
(http://middleeastreference.org.uk/latw020404.html)
In
May 2000, Ekeus added, "I would say that we felt that in all areas we have
eliminated Iraq's [WMD] capabilities fundamentally".
(http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/2000/msg00701.html)
Ritter,
the CIA, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and others, also
pointed out that their extremely limited shelf lives meant that any remaining
WMD would long since have become “harmless sludge”.
Time
and again government spokespeople like Blair, Jack Straw, John Reid and Mike
O’Brien made damning references to thousands of litres of missing anthrax. They
asked, ironically, if we were supposed to believe that Saddam had simply
mislaid them. Not once did an interviewer respond with the basic facts: that
Iraq is only known to have produced liquid bulk anthrax, which has a shelf life
of just three years. The last known batch of liquid anthrax was produced in
1991 at a state-owned factory blown up in 1996.
Crucially,
Ritter pointed out that any attempts to reconstitute the WMD programmes would
have been immediately detected by the most intense and sophisticated
surveillance operation in history it just couldn’t have been done without
Western awareness.
If
these arguments had been granted the exposure they merited, public support for
the war would surely have collapsed. What is so remarkable, and so damning, is
that these elementary but obviously crucial points were almost literally never
raised in our media before the attack on Iraq.
According
to the Guardian/Observer website, Iraq has been mentioned in 7,118 articles
this year (as of June 6, 2003), with 961 articles mentioning ‘Iraq and weapons
of mass destruction’. Out of these, Scott Ritter has received 12 mentions and
Rolf Ekeus 2. The Independent’s website records 5,872 articles mentioning Iraq,
with 931 mentions of ‘Iraq and weapons of mass destruction’. Ritter records 24
mentions, Ekeus 4. There have been no mentions of Ritter or Ekeus in either
paper in May or June the period covering the current media furore on WMD.
Ritter,
the most outspoken whistleblower, was not interviewed by BBC TV News,
Newsnight, or ITN ahead of the war this year. He was last interviewed on a
terrestrial BBC channel by David Frost on 29 September last year. When asked
why Newsnight had failed to interview such an important source, editor George
Entwistle answered: "I don't particularly have an answer for that; we just
haven't." (Interview with David Edwards, March 31, 2003) By contrast,
Newsnight “just has” interviewed war supporters like Ken Adelman, Richard Perle
and James Rubin endlessly over the last six months.
We
are living in a time when the propaganda function of even our most respected
media is clear for all to see. In October 2001, as Britain helped the US pound
Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries on earth, into rubble, the Guardian’s
editors commented on a speech by Blair:
“The
core of the speech - intellectual as well as moral - came when he contrasted
the west's commitment to do everything possible to avoid civilian casualties
and the terrorists' proven wish to cause as many civilian casualties as
possible, a point which Jack Straw followed up powerfully in the Commons
yesterday. Let them do their worst, we shall do our best, as Churchill put it.
That is still a key difference.” (‘Blair plays it cooler - A new tone, but few
new answers’, Leader, The Guardian, October 31, 2001)
With
tens of thousands dead, injured and sickening in Iraq, with the country’s
health and social systems looted and wrecked, and with clear proof of “the
west's commitment to do everything possible” to wage war, regardless of the
cost in human life, this is surely one conceit “the country’s leading liberal
newspaper” will not be repeating any time soon.
SUGGESTED
ACTION:
The
goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for
others. In writing letters to journalists, we strongly urge readers to maintain
a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Write
to the BBC's director of news, Richard Sambrook: Email: richard.sambrook@bbc.co.uk
Write
to Newsnight editor George Entwistle:
Email:
george.entwistle@bbc.co.uk
Write
to Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger:
Email:
alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk
Ask
them why they have given so little attention to the views of credible experts
who exposed the fraudulence of the US-UK case for war long before the invasion
of Iraq. Why did they wait for ministers and intelligence officers to speak out
before making even the most elementary challenges to the government’s claims on
Iraqi WMD?
**
Note: Media Lens issued the following
correction to the above article on June 9
David Edwards is the editor of Media Lens, and the author of Burning All
Illusions: A Guide to Personal and Political Freedom (South End
Press, 1996). Feel free to respond to Media Lens alerts: editor@medialens.org. Visit the Media
Lens website: http://www.MediaLens.org
* See also DV News Service’s Compilation:
“Bush Administration's
Lies About Iraq's WMD Unraveling”
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