| -Caveat Lector-
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=8278&mode=nested&order=0 Marcia W. Macmullan: 'Pentagon reloading propaganda' Posted on Tuesday, September 24 @ 09:07:07 EDT 1990-91 international disinformation campaign, U.S. censorship during Persian Gulf War provide bad precedent By Marcia W. Macmullan, Ann Arbor News President Bush promises that he will give the nation a full explanation of the need to change the regime in Iraq. We can reasonably expect that this time around team Bush II will not bungle the opener as team Bush I did with the infamous April Glaspie interview with Saddam Hussein, July 25, 1990, eight days before Iraq invaded Kuwait. Glaspie, then Ambassador to Kuwait, told Saddam Hussein that "I have a direct instruction from the president to seek better relations with Iraq..." Moreover, she said, "we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." A month later, British journalists challenged Glaspie: "You encouraged this aggression - his invasion. What were you thinking?" Glaspie replied: "Obviously, I didn't think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait." Can we expect a re-run of the tactics used in 1990-91 to pump U.S. support for Desert Storm? After that war, the truth came out about the lies told to Congress and the American people - lies tacitly supported by Bush I's administration, concocted by the advertising firm of Hill & Knowlton, under contract to the Kuwaiti government. The most notorious of these lies was the testimony given by an alleged Kuwaiti nurse who actually was a princess and daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. She claimed to have seen Iraqi soldiers throw babies out of their incubators, a story that received enormous media play in the United States and is credited by some with tilting a narrow majority of the Senate in favor of Desert Storm. The outrageously illegal, unregistered propaganda campaign of the Kuwaiti government, in 1990, was ignored by the Department of Justice at the time. At least the millions of dollars expended to the enrichment of Hill & Knowlton came from Kuwait. Now, however, it is our State Department that is sponsoring - i.e. funding - propaganda training of Iraqis willing to be flacks for U.S. war policy. In 1990, such techniques included totally bogus video news releases, which the gullible - or merely lazy - U.S. media fed to the American public without attribution or scrutiny. It is a safe bet that when Iraq invasion No. 2 begins, the Pentagon will spoon feed information and prohibit the media from verifying actual events with first-hand observation. That sort of censorship has been going on in Afghanistan for several months. A comparable form of censorship has been going on at home in the United States. Readers who closely follow such matters know that Bush II's administration, under the pretext of security, blatantly disregards the First Amendment regarding free speech and peaceable assembly as it protects itself against public protest, especially the protests that follow "W" as he goes around the country giving speeches at fund raisers. Most recently in Portland and Stockton, local police and federal agents imposed extreme restrictions on protesters, in order to keep them visually out of sight of the presidential party and the TV cameras. Of course, the pro-Bush crowd was given front-row access, as shown on TV. In Portland, the police resorted to pepper spraying a crowd estimated by local radio at 1,500, but national media attention to actual events there is hard to find. It begins to appear that the administration is following the same script used in 1990 to get us to support Desert Storm, allegedly a grand success that resulted in few U.S. casualties and only about 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths. In 1990, Hill & Knowlton extensively surveyed public opinion to identify messages most likely to motivate the American people to support the war against Iraq. They found that the most successful motivational messages emphasized "the fact that Saddam Hussein was a madman who had committed atrocities even against his own people, and had tremendous power to do further damage, and he needed to be stopped." ("Toxic Sludge is Good for You" by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, 1995) Recently Vice President Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz have been recycling the 1988 report that Saddam gassed rebellious Kurds. The "he gassed his own people" claim has never been proven to the satisfaction of such scholars as Steven Pelletier, professor of national security at the United States Army War College, who concluded that the Iranians were more plausibly the perpetrators. ("Iraq's Chemical Warfare," The New Your Review of Books, November 1990) In conclusion, a disclaimer: I do not personally support either a war in Iraq or Saddam Hussein, nor am I employed by any PR firm or agency advocating for or against a war in Iraq. I am, however, deeply concerned that the American public is becoming the last to know what is going on. "When a research team from the communications department of the University of Massachusetts surveyed public opinion and correlated it with knowledge of basic facts about U.S. policy in the region, they drew some sobering conclusions: The more television people watched, the fewer facts they knew; and the less people knew in terms of basic facts, the more likely they were to back the Bush administration." ("Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media" Martin Lee and Norman Solomon, 1991) Marcia W. MacMullan is an Ann Arbor resident who was formerly trained and employed as a propaganda analyst. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html <A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html">Archives of [EMAIL PROTECTED]</A> http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om |
