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The ‘prop-agenda’ at war
By Miren Gutierrez
Rome, Italy, June 27 (IPS) — In an interview with Arabic
broadcaster Al-Jazeera, President George W. Bush’s national security
adviser Condoleezza Rice said in 2001 that she did not want US networks
to show Osama bin Laden tapes because “it was not a matter of news,
it was a matter of propaganda.”
Is the US government above propaganda?
As former Salvadoran guerrilla leader Joaquin Villalobos put it in an
interview with IPS, winning wars is also about winning the minds of
people. Throughout history, propaganda has been used in warfare to do
exactly that; and the United States has also practiced it extensively
with its own twist, that of a democracy that has a free press and therefore
has to disguise propaganda better.
Contrary to what Rice’s words suggest, two recent books imply that
a more intensive, perhaps more deceitful, use of propaganda was in place
recently. An embedded, internet-age propaganda, piggybacking on brand
name credibility.
It means that if you use CNN or the New York Times to selectively present
segmented realities, then the effectiveness of propaganda is tremendously
increased by these trademarks.
In their widely quoted book Weapons of Mass Deception, Sheldon Rampton
and John Stauber argued in 2003 that the US government used the shock
of the Sept. 11 attacks to justify an invasion of Iraq. Bush counter-terrorism
coordinator Richard Clarke further denounces President Bush for using
the attacks as a pretext for the war in his book Against All Enemies
published last March.
For propaganda expert Nancy Snow, in terms of purpose, “Propaganda
is still used more as an antecedent to war; in other words, if war is
the paint, then propaganda is the paint primer that makes possible the
total devotion of the public to the just cause of the state in wartime.”
Once the masses have chosen sides, “propaganda is used to reinforce
existing attitudes more than it is used to change attitudes,” Snow,
assistant professor at the College of Communications at California State
University told IPS in an e-mail interview.
“The primary change is in technology rather than method,”
says Randall Bytwerk, a specialist in propaganda, and professor of communication
at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “It is now possible
to spread much more information much faster.”
A second change is that the mass of information has made it more difficult
for citizens to make sense of what is going on, Bytwerk told IPS. “The
result is that, perhaps even more than in the past, we look for shorthand
ways of making sense of it all.”
In their book Rampton and Stauber also imply that many independent media
cooperated in the deception.
Embedded journalism showed a partial, patriotic image of the “war
on terrorism” during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Almost 600 journalists
were “embedded” with the US and British troops in the campaign
against Saddam, reporting what they saw from the coalition lines.
The “war on terror” was the starting point for a standardization
of set phrases like “weapons of mass destruction,” “axis
of evil,” “shock and awe,” and “war of liberation.”
Simple, repetitious and emotional, so the propagandistic concept does
not get lost in the midst.
To forge the message, the Pentagon acknowledged hiring a Washington
PR firm, the Rendon Group. It was Rendon who provided the US flags for
hundreds of Kuwaitis to wave when US troops entered Kuwait City in the
first Gulf War, Rampton and Stauber say. In an article titled “How
To Sell a War” published in the magazine In These Times last August,
the authors suggest that some of the images of the war in Iraq may have
been cooked by PR specialists and “perception managers.”
While that could be true, Bytwerk says “such an approach is usually
not necessary, and a bad idea. It is not necessary because there is
usually so much information that something can be found to fit. It is
a bad idea because, if found out, which it often is, it reduces the
overall credibility.”
This war was more “about not seeing images,” contends Snow.
“People in the US didn’t see the same war as people outside
the US or as did viewers of al-Jazeera — it’s all about the
disparate perceptions by the news media in the US, Middle East, and
Europe.”
When on Apr. 9, 2003 the statue of Saddam was finally brought down in
Baghdad’s Firdos Square, US media commentators rushed to assign
iconic connotations to the toppling, ranking it alongside the fall of
the Berlin Wall or the protesters opposing tanks at Tiananmen Square.
But a BBC photo sequence of the statue’s fall displayed a sparse
crowd of approximately 200 people; a Reuters long-shot photo of Firdos
Square showed that it was nearly empty, sealed off by US tanks.
The New York Times admitted in a May 26, 2004 editorial that after reviewing
their Iraq coverage “we have found a number of instances of coverage
that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information
that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently
qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged.”
The awkward articles depended at least in part on information from Iraqi
informants, defectors and exiles set on “regime change” in
Iraq, people whose integrity has come under public debate in recent
weeks, the paper said.
There are many types of propaganda, and people related to it. There
are “spin doctors” who seek to ensure that others interpret
an event from a particular point of view. The US Department of Defense
Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms speaks of “perception
managers” in charge of “psychological operations,” a
concept originated by the US military that combines “truth projection,”
security, and deception, designed to “convey or deny selected information
to foreign audiences” and their leaders to “influence their
emotions and objective reasoning” ultimately resulting in actions
favorable to the originator’s objectives.
“We must remember that in time of war what is said on the enemy’s
side of the front is always propaganda, and what is said on our side
of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a
crusade for peace,” said Walter Lippmann, former advisor to President
Woodrow Wilson.
Lippmann, a journalist and a renowned expert on modern mass communications
theory, believed that perception often is more important that reality.
Many followed suit.
There are also differences between the propaganda deployed in totalitarian
regimes, where the sole source of information is the state, and in democracies,
where the media and other sources, including non-governmental organizations,
can counterbalance the government propagandistic efforts.
But Bytwerk, author of several books on Nazi and Marxist propaganda,
says that “even Joseph Goebbels lied rarely. He preferred to mislead
by selection or by ignoring unfavorable information rather than by outright
fabrication. I think fabrication can sometimes be justified to deceive
the enemy, but not to deceive one’s own public.”
The government rationale behind the invasion was: Saddam had backed
the Sept. 11 attacks; he was also hiding weapons of mass destruction;
the Iraqi people would eventually see the United States as their rescuer.
Now the bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks
reported “no credible evidence” that al-Qaida and Iraq cooperated
in attacks against the United States. Banned biological, chemical and
nuclear weapons are yet to be found. But in an April 2003 opinion survey
by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, 63 percent of people
interviewed said they believed the war in Iraq would help the “war
on terrorism.”
“You may wonder why it is that a majority of Americans still link
Saddam to 9/11,” says Snow. “The reason for such a belief
is because the American people were repeatedly told by the president
and his inner circle that Saddam’s evil alone was enough to be
linked to 9/11 and that given time, he would have used his weapons against
us. With propaganda, you don’t need facts per se, just the best
facts put forward. If these facts make sense to people, then they don’t
need proof like one might need in a courtroom.”
According to Snow, the US government succeeded in “driving the
agenda” and “milking the story” (maximizing media coverage
of a particular issue by the careful use of briefings, leaking pieces
of a jigsaw to different outlets, journalists gradually piece together
the story and their sense of discovery drives the story up the news
agenda).
For Snow, the funny thing is that “the American public succumbed
more to the stupid propaganda tricks than did the rest of the world.
I think we are a gullible public. We wanted to believe the best about
ourselves and it seemed beyond our capacity to imagine that we would
go to war with a country without a solid reason.”
While the US government campaign had an impact on the US public, the
“perception management” was a failure at influencing foreign
audiences.
According to Bytwerk, “it is far easier to make propaganda at home
than abroad. One has more credibility at home, and much more in common
with the audience. Although Nazi propaganda was not completely believed
by Germans, they believed what their government said far more than the
British believed German propaganda, for example.”
Events also conspired to create a PR catastrophe.
Iraqis started rallying to oppose the US military presence; the Shias
joined the Sunni Muslims in fighting against the US occupation (when
news reports made us believe that the Shia majority in Iraq, crushed
by Saddam’s regime, would welcome the US troops); then Iraqi leader
Ahmed Chalabi, previously tagged by some “analysts” as the
“George Washington of Iraq,” fell into disgrace when it was
reported that he had leaked information to the Iranians. Finally, pictures
from Abu Ghraib prison, showing US soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners,
created a global outrage.
Both the Bush administration and al-Qaida typecast the struggle for
the mindset as a fight between good and evil. And it looked like US
opponents learnt a few communication tricks, including the well-timed
release of Saddam and bin Laden tapes.
Last April four Italians were captured in Iraq. The Arabic television
channel al-Arabiya showed three of the hostages (one of them, Fabrizio
Quattrocchi, had already been executed) apparently in good health. In
the footage, the kidnappers promised to liberate them if the Italians
-- who have already held massive anti-war demonstrations throughout
the country -- joined in a demonstration against the presence of foreign
troops in Iraq and against Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi’s
stand on Iraq.
On the eve of Bush’s visit to Rome and the European parliament
elections, thousands of people gathered in Rome headed by the kidnapped
soldiers’ relatives to protest against the war.
Snow thinks they are “not necessarily using propaganda techniques
more successfully, but rather they are waking up to the reality that
if you want to challenge the status quo, then you need to study and
apply similar techniques of mass persuasion.”
The price of web surfing can be prison
By George Baghdadi
Damascus, Syria, June 25 (IPS)— When he downloaded some material
on Syria and emailed it to his friends, Abdel Rahman al-Shaghouri did
not think he would end up in prison.
Al-Shaghouri, 32, already in prison since February 2003 for his “offense,”
was sentenced this week to two-and-a-half years imprisonment by the
security court.
He was held guilty of “disseminating false and exaggerated news
that saps the morale of the nation.” He cannot appeal against the
sentence.
The articles he downloaded from the web site, This is Syria were found
by the authorities to contain “ideas and views opposed to the system
of government in Syria.”
The Human Rights Association of Syria has called for the immediate release
of Shaghouri, and condemned his imprisonment as “a dangerous precedent
against Internet users, and another step backwards.”
The association called on interior minister Ali Hammoud “not to
ratify the verdict of the court and release Shaghouri and all political
detainees in Syria.”
Amnesty International has described the trial as “grossly unfair”
and highlighted the cases of other men held on similar charges.
Brothers Muhammed Qutaysh and Haytham Qutaysh, and Yahia al-Aws face
trial in August on charges of “sending false information abroad
to an electronic newspaper based in the United Arab Emirates.”
They also face charges of “receiving secret information on behalf
of a foreign state which threatens the security of Syria.”
A fourth detainee, student Masoud Hamid, is in prison for “unlawful”
use of the Internet after he posted photographs of a Kurdish demonstration
in Damascus on a website. Amnesty says he is being held in solitary
confinement.
Anwar al-Buni, lawyer and member of the Human Rights Association in
Syria, told IPS that the sentence was “a political decision that
quells the right of expression in Syria... and aims at keeping the Syrian
society backward.”
Hardliners who support such actions have been strengthened by recent
developments such as the faltering US-led occupation of Iraq, near-unconditional
US support for Israel’s plans in the occupied West Bank and Gaza,
and the growing global protest over the Bush administration’s international
adventurism.
The new Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Act passed by
the US Congress which has led to sanctions against Syria has also strengthened
hardliners and brought many moderates to their fold.
Three years ago Syrian President Bashar Assad authorized independent
newspapers for the first time since the ruling Ba’ath Party came
to power in 1963. A new law guaranteed “freedom of the press”
and approved “unrestricted publication of journals, magazines,
and newspapers.”
But the new law did impose restrictions. Publishers had to be Syrian
nationals, and not “in the service or on the payroll of any foreign
country.”
All printed material must “abide by Syrian law.” The executive,
judiciary, and legislative branches are “above criticism”
and any insult is punishable by up to three months in prison and a fine
between $200 to $1,000.
Journalists who produce “false and undocumented material”
could face prison terms of up to three years, and fines of up to $40,000.
Journalists cannot be “subsidized” by any “public elements”
including unions, syndicates, and societies.
Assad allowed the independent newspapers because he said he wanted to
hear “the opinion of the other.”
Many independent newspapers came up. Among them was the Communist Party
weekly Sawt al-Shaab (Voice of the People); al-Domari (The Lamplighter),
published by renowned Syrian cartoonist Ali Firzat; al-Wehdawi (The
Unionist), a weekly published by the Unionist Socialist Party; and al-Jktisadiyya
(The Economist), a weekly published by Waddah Abdrabboh, editor-in-chief
of the Paris-based magazine al-Shahr.
There are other signs of change. Popular plays and TV series crack jokes
about matters that Syrians had for years only dared to whisper about.
A recent play, Permitted in Syria, makes jokes about how the dreaded
Mukhabarat – the intelligence service – has penetrated every
aspect of society. Another shows how trivial accusations against political
dissidents can quickly become serious criminal charges. A third satirizes
the privileges enjoyed by Syrian officials and their children.
In one episode in the serial Hakaya il-Maraya coffee shop owner Abu
Shaher is watching a speech by a government bigwig on television but
the sound packs up. He bangs on the TV to make it work, but a customer
turns him over to intelligence agents saying Abu Shaher was expressing
anger at the official. Off goes Abu Shaher to jail, without an investigation.
Many see these shows as signs that they are freer now to criticize the
government under President Assad. A joke or a misplaced word will not
send them to jail the way it used to. But downloading and emailing an
Internet article can.
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