http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,860723,00.html Spinners are now out of control
Our leaders' weapons of mass assertion deny us access to the truth Peter Preston Monday December 16, 2002 The Guardian Your first pre-Christmas quiz starts here. Questions: what puts Cherie Blair and Saddam Hussein together in a single bubbling stewpot? Why are Peter Foster and Osama bin Laden peas from the same squishy pod? Answer: sources, sources, sources. Consider the dichotomy and the dislocation here. For over two weeks we've been trying to decide who, around and about No 10, lied to or economically misled the great British press. Alastair, Godric, Mrs B? The usual cover-up carnival. Unless, apparently, we're told the whole truth in every minute detail, Downing Street can never be trusted again: a fount of rancid stories tainted by evasion, duplicity, puppydogs' tails may be solemnly rejected. This could be the end of everything. Moral stomp-out time. Meanwhile, from an air- or seaport near you, more of our boys - like many, many more of Uncle Sam's - are heading for the Gulf. Is it peace or war? Is the evidence there, the link of prospective mass destruction? Better go off and ask a "senior intelligence source". Better call on the Ministry of Defence when you leave Number 10; or wander down the Embankment to MI5. Or maybe meet up in the snug at the usual club, old son? There's the essential proposition. Press relations with this government and its information regime have never been viler; Cheriegate is a supposedly defining moment of disillusion. Yet we'll still toddle cheerily off for our off-the-record and off-the-radar doses of smallpox, backpack nukes and assorted numbers from the gassy horror show. Accountability fades as you cross Parliament Square. It's an absurd conjunction. So absurd that hoarse laughs flow easily. But not everything along the road from peace to war is a laughing matter. One respected columnist, Douglas Turner of the Buffalo News, has just stopped chuckling, for instance. The Associated Press serves 1,500 US newspapers and 5,000 broadcasting stations. It is hugely influential. It speaks to America minute by minute. But Turner says that its guidebook for reporters deems that one anonymous source (and not two) is enough. So sources talk to the AP "on condition of anonymity". The AP November 18 story reporting that "US intelligence has concluded that an audiotape of Osama bin Laden is real and was recently recorded" came from "one US official" speaking anonymously. The October 2 AP story which said that, "a top al-Qaida operative was in Baghdad two months ago, and US officials suspect his presence was known to the government of Saddam Hussein", arrived attributed only to "a defence official". And so on and so mystically forth. If there's a struggle between Pentagon hawks and State Department doves, one wily bird keeping his head down is enough to set a yarn running in 1,500 papers at home and thousands more abroad. If you want to bind Saddam and Osama together - most evidence notwithstanding - then a solitary briefer, carrying personal authority but no can, will get the job done. But surely the top sources, the Rumsfelds, the Wolfowitzes, the Tenets of the CIA, wouldn't actually lie? Of course not, subject to a properly nuanced interpretation of the word. There's a telling episode featuring Tenet in Bob Woodward's new book about the aftermath of September 11. Do you remember the radiological bomb which might or might not have been heading for Washington or New York or somewhere, and the "global alert" that went with it? George Tenet, Woodward writes, "believed a good form of deterrence was to try to give the terrorists the idea that the US was aware of things being planned - since they didn't know what the US knew or didn't know, it was a potential deterrent to find a way to 'tell them we know'." Perhaps that's a justifiable use of the mass alert gambit. Perhaps, after Bali, there'll be countless more quasi-specific alerts (just as there have countless Met Office gale alerts since the debacle of 1987). But truth - hard truth with hard proof - doesn't enter into this equation. Truth is what you (deniably, generally) tell your citizenry for unspecified purposes. Thus, if you privately believe that Saddam is a menace, firmly or infirmly linked to al-Qaida, and about to spread terror worldwide, there's a reason to try to spin the public along with you. There's a reason to scoff at Iraq's 12,000-page guide to its non-weapons of mass destruction handed to the UN. There's a reason to talk about "black holes" in the evidence and prepare for invasion. There's a reason, when Iraqi opposition exiles are gathered in London at the weekend, to send a signal to the Baghdad military, telling them they can either be zapped - or heroes, if they zap Saddam themselves. Why do the briefers, from Whitehall to the White House, want to stay anonymous? For the best and the worst of reasons: confusion, protection, advantage, manipulation. They serve a media growth industry, adding correspondents and experts by the minute; all of them reliant - to some extent - on sources we can't see and whose motives we can't judge. They won't quite put up. Observe how abnormally slow the CIA is to release its precise case against Saddam, to say where the weaponry may actually be housed. No details, no pictures, no intercepts. But that doesn't mean they have to shut up. We're going to war on their say-so. Except they won't say-so. We're asked to decide on the evidence. Except we can't see it. Here come the weapons of mass assertion without attribution ... Now that does sound like Cherie swinging from her absurd gate all over again. [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht _______________________________________________ Leninist-International mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
