ZGram - 10/8/2001 - "The Disinformation Campaign"

[Ingrid Rimland]

Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

October 8, 2001

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

A ZGram reader wrote:

"Bush is Hitler, Arafat is Hitler, Clinton is Hitler.  Haider is Hitler,
Sharon is Hitler. Le Pen is Hitler."

You get the drift.  It seems that Hitler has replaced the devil, as more
than one wit pointed out.  And this in some 50+ years' worth of "peace
time"!  It doesn't matter who is who - if anger is to be expressed, and if
a villain is required, one villain is always at hand.  Does anybody wonder
WHY?

In that mode, please read on:

[START}

The disinformation campaign | Phillip Knightley

 Western media follow a depressingly familiar formula when it comes to the
preparation of a nation for conflict

 The Guardian | October 4, 2001 - http://www.guardian.co.uk/

 The way wars are reported in the western media follows a depressingly
predictable pattern: stage one, the crisis; stage two, the demonisation of
the enemy's leader; stage three, the demonisation of the enemy as
individuals; and stage four, atrocities. At the moment we are at stages two
and three: efforts to show that not only Osama bin Laden and the Taliban
are fanatical and cruel but that most Afghans - even many Muslims - are as
well. We are already through stage one, the reporting of a crisis which
negotiations appear unable to resolve. Politicians, while calling for
diplomacy, warn of military retaliation. The media reports this as "We're
on the brink of war", or "War is inevitable".

 News coverage concentrates on the build up of military force, and
prominent columnists and newspaper editorials urge war. But there are
usually sizable minorities of citizens concerned that all avenues for peace
have not been fully explored and although the mainstream media ignores or
plays down their protests, these have to be dampened down unless they gain
strength.

 We now enter stage two of the pattern - the demonisation of the enemy's
leader. Comparing the leader with Hitler is a good start because of the
instant images that Hitler's name provokes. So when George Bush Sr likened
Iraq's takeover of Kuwait with the Nazi blitzkrieg in Europe in the 1930s,
the media quickly took up the theme. Saddam Hussein was painted as a second
Hitler, hated by his own people and despised in the Arab world. Equally, in
the Kosovo conflict, the Serbs were portrayed as Nazi thugs intent on
genocide and words like "Auschwitz-style furnaces" and "Holocaust" were
used.

 The crudest approach is to suggest that the leader is insane. Saddam
Hussein was "a deranged psychopath", Milosevic was mad, and the Spectator
recently headlined an article on Osama bin Laden: "Inside the mind of the
maniac". Those who publicly question any of this can expect an even
stronger burst of abuse. In the Gulf war they were labelled "friends of
terrorists, ranters, nutty, hypocrites, animals, barbarians, mad, traitors,
unhinged, appeasers and apologists". The Mirror called peace demonstrators
"misguided, twisted individuals always eager to comfort and support any
country but their own. They are a danger to all us - the enemy within."
Columnist Christopher Hitchens, in last week's Spectator article, Damn the
doves, says that intellectuals who seek to understand the new enemy are no
friends of peace, democracy or human life.

 The third stage in the pattern is the demonisation not only of the leader
but of his people. The simplest way of doing this is the atrocity story.
The problem is that although many atrocity stories are true - after all,
war itself is an atrocity - many are not.

 Take the Kuwaiti babies story. Its origins go back to the first world war
when British propaganda accused the Germans of tossing Belgian babies into
the air and catching them on their bayonets. Dusted off and updated for the
Gulf war, this version had Iraqi soldiers bursting into a modern Kuwaiti
hospital, finding the premature babies ward and then tossing the babies out
of incubators so that the incubators could be sent back to Iraq.

 The story, improbable from the start, was first reported by the Daily
Telegraph in London on September 5 1990. But the story lacked the human
element; it was an unverified report, there were no pictures for television
and no interviews with mothers grieving over dead babies.

 That was soon rectified. An organisation calling itself Citizens for a
=46ree Kuwait (financed by the Kuwaiti government in exile) had signed a $10=
m
contract with the giant American public relations company, Hill & Knowlton,
to campaign for American military intervention to oust Iraq from Kuwait.

 The Human Rights Caucus of the US Congress was meeting in October and Hill
& Knowlton arranged for a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl to tell the babies'
story before the congressmen. She did it brilliantly, choking with tears at
the right moment, her voice breaking as she struggled to continue. The
congressional committee knew her only as "Nayirah" and the television
segment of her testimony showed anger and resolution on the faces of the
congressmen listening to her. President Bush referred to the story six
times in the next five weeks as an example of the evil of Saddam's regime.

 In the Senate debate whether to approve military action to force Saddam
out of Kuwait, seven senators specifically mentioned the incubator babies
atrocity and the final margin in favour of war was just five votes. John R
Macarthur's study of propaganda in the war says that the babies atrocity
was a definitive moment in the campaign to prepare the American public for
the need to go to war.

 It was not until nearly two years later that the truth emerged. The story
was a fabrication and a myth, and Nayirah, the teenage Kuwaiti girl,
coached and rehearsed by Hill & Knowlton for her appearance before the
Congressional Committee, was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador
to the United States. By the time Macarthur revealed this, the war was won
and over and it did not matter any more.

 So what should we make of the stories in the British press this week about
torture in Afghanistan? A defector from the Taliban's secret police told a
reporter in Quetta, Pakistan, that he was commanded to "find new ways of
torture so terrible that the screams will frighten crows from their nests".
The defector then listed a series of chilling forms of torture that he said
he and his fellow officers developed. "Nowhere else in the world has such
barbarity and cruelty as Afghanistan."

 The story rings false and defectors of all kinds are well-known for
telling interviewers what they think they want to hear. On the other hand,
it might be true. The trouble is, how can we tell? The media demands that
we trust it but too often that trust has been betrayed.

 =95 Phillip Knightley is the author of The First Casualty, a history of war
reporting (Prion).

[END]

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Thought for the Day:

)oamng our heads in the sand."rt"We do not help ourselves by
hiding our heads in the sand."

(Noam Chomsky in his MSNBC interview Oct 2, 2001)