How the spooks took over the news
Monday, 11 February 2008
In his controversial new book, Nick Davies argues that shadowy
intelligence agencies are
pumping out black propaganda to manipulate public opinion – and that the
media simply swallow
it wholesale
The letter argued that al-Qa'ida, which is a Sunni network, should attack
the ****a population
of Iraq: "It is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between
the infidels and us.
If we succeed in dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the
sleepy Sunnis."
Later that day, at a regular US press briefing in Baghdad, US General Mark
Kimmitt dealt with a
string of questions about The New York Times re****t: "We believe the
re****t and the do***ent is
credible, and we take the re****t seriously... It is clearly a plan on the
part of outsiders to
come in to this country and spark civil war, create sectarian violence,
try to expose fissures
in this society." The story went on to news agency wires and, within 24
hours, it was running
around the world.
There is very good reason to believe that that letter was a fake – and a
significant one
because there is equally good reason to believe that it was one product
among many from a new
machinery of propaganda which has been created by the United States and
its allies since the
terrorist attacks of September 2001.
For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to
manipulate global
perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants,
failing both to
resist it and to expose it.
The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work
reflects a creeping
structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news. I've
spent the last two
years researching a book about falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the
global media.
The "Zarqawi letter" which made it on to the front page of The New York
Times in February 2004
was one of a sequence of highly suspect do***ents which were said to have
been written either
by or to Zarqawi and which were fed into news media.
This material is being generated, in part, by intelligence agencies who
continue to work
without effective oversight; and also by a new and essentially benign
structure of "strategic
communications" which was originally designed by doves in the Pentagon and
Nato who wanted to
use subtle and non-violent tactics to deal with Islamist terrorism but
whose efforts are poorly
regulated and badly supervised with the result that some of its
practitioners are breaking
loose and engaging in the black arts of propaganda.
Like the new propaganda machine as a whole, the Zarqawi story was born in
the high tension
after the attacks of September 2001. At that time, he was a painful thorn
in the side of the
Jordanian authorities, an Islamist radical who was determined to overthrow
the royal family.
But he was nothing to do with al-Q'aida. Indeed, he had specifically
rejected attempts by Bin
Laden to recruit him, because he was not interested in targeting the West.
Nevertheless, when US intelligence battered on the doors of allied
governments in search of
information about al-Q'aida, the Jordanian authorities – anxious to please
the Americans and
perhaps keen to make life more difficult for their native enemy – threw up
his name along with
other suspects. Soon he started to show up as a minor figure in US news
stories – stories which
were factually weak, often contradictory and already using the Jordanians
as a tool of
political convenience.
Then, on 7 October 2002, for the first time, somebody referred to him on
the record. In a
nationally televised speech in Cincinnati, President George Bush spoke of
"high-level contacts"
between al-Q'aida and Iraq and said: "Some al-Q'aida leaders who fled
Afghanistan, went to
Iraq. These include one very senior al-Q'aida leader who received medical
treatment in Baghdad
this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and
biological attacks."
This coincided with a crucial vote in Congress in which the president was
seeking authority to
use military force against Iraq. Bush never named the man he was referring
to but, as the Los
Angeles Times among many others soon re****ted: "In a speech [on] Monday,
Bush referred to a
senior member of al-Q'aida who received medical treatment in Iraq. US
officials said yesterday
that was Abu al Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian, who lost a leg during the US
war in Afghanistan."
Even now, Zarqawi was a footnote, not a headline, but the flow of stories
about him finally
broke through and flooded the global media on 5 February 2003, when the
Secretary of State,
Colin Powell, addressed the UN Security Council, arguing that Iraq must be
invaded: first, to
stop its development of weapons of mass destruction; and second, to break
its ties with al-Q'aida.
Powell claimed that "Iraq today harbours a deadly terrorist network headed
by Abu Musab al
Zarqawi"; that Zarqawi's base in Iraq was a camp for "poison and explosive
training"; that he
was "an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Q'aida
lieutenants"; that he
"fought in the Afghan war more than a decade ago"; that "Zarqawi and his
network have plotted
terrorist actions against countries, including France, Britain, Spain,
Italy, Germany and Russia".
Courtesy of post-war Senate intelligence inquiries; evidence disclosed in
several European
trials; and the courageous work of a handful of journalists who broke away
from the pack, we
now know that every single one of those statements was entirely false. But
that didn't matter:
it was a big story. News organisations sucked it in and regurgitated it
for their trusting
consumers.
So, who exactly is producing fiction for the media? Who wrote the Zarqawi
letters? Who created
the fantasy story about Osama bin Laden using a network of subterranean
bases in Afghanistan,
complete with offices, dormitories, arms depots, electricity and
ventilation systems? Who fed
the media with tales of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, suffering brain
seizures and sitting
in stationery cars turning the wheel and making a noise like an engine?
Who came up with the
idea that Iranian ayatollahs have been encouraging *** with animals and
girls of only nine?
Some of this comes from freelance political agitators. It was an Iranian
opposition group, for
example, which was behind the story that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was
jailing people for
texting each other jokes about him. And notoriously it was Iraqi exiles
who supplied the global
media with a dirty stream of disinformation about Saddam Hussein.
But clearly a great deal of this carries the fingerprints of officialdom.
The Pentagon has now
designated "information operations" as its fifth "core competency"
alongside land, sea, air and
special forces. Since October 2006, every brigade, division and corps in
the US military has
had its own "psyop" element producing output for local media. This
military activity is linked
to the State Department's campaign of "public diplomacy" which includes
funding radio stations
and news websites. In Britain, the Directorate of Targeting and
Information Operations in the
Ministry of Defence works with specialists from 15 UK psyops, based at the
Defence Intelligence
and Security School at Chicksands in Bedford****re.
In the case of British intelligence, you can see this combination of
reckless propaganda and
failure of oversight at work in the case of Operation Mass Appeal. This
was exposed by the
former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter, who describes in his book, Iraq
Confidential, how, in
London in June 1998, he was introduced to two "black propaganda
specialists" from MI6 who
wanted him to give them material which they could spread through "editors
and writers who work
with us from time to time".
In interviews for Flat Earth News, Ritter described how, between December
1997 and June 1998,
he had three meetings with MI6 officers who wanted him to give them raw
intelligence re****ts on
Iraqi arms procurement. The significance of these re****ts was that they
were all unconfirmed
and so none was being used in *****sing Iraqi activity. Yet MI6 was happy
to use them to plant
stories in the media. Beyond that, there is worrying evidence that, when
Lord Butler asked MI6
about this during his inquiry into intelligence around the invasion of
Iraq, MI6 lied to him.
Ultimately, the US has run into trouble with its propaganda in Iraq,
particularly with its use
of the Zarqawi story. In May 2006, when yet another of his alleged letters
was handed out to
re****ters in the Combined Press Information Centre in Baghdad, finally it
was widely regarded
as suspect and ignored by just about every single media outlet.
Arguably, even worse than this loss of credibility, according to British
defence sources, the
US campaign on Zarqawi eventually succeeded in creating its own reality.
By elevating him from
his position as one fighter among a mass of conflicting groups, the US
campaign to "villainise
Zarqawi" glamorised him with its enemy audience, making it easier for him
to raise funds, to
attract "unsponsored" foreign fighters, to make alliances with Sunni
Iraqis and to score huge
impact with his own media manoeuvres. Finally, in December 2004, Osama bin
Laden gave in to
this constructed reality, buried his differences with the Jordanian and
declared him the leader
of al-Q'aida's resistance to the American occupation.
JONATHAN GRUN, EDITOR,PRESS ASSOCIATION
The Press Association's wire service has a long-standing reputation for
its integrity and fast,
fair and accurate re****ting. Much of his criticism is anonymously sourced
– which is something
we strive to avoid.
ANDREW MARR, BROADCASTER AND JOURNALIST
Thanks to the internet there's a constant source of news stories pumping
into newsrooms.
Stories are simply rewritten. It produces an airless cycle of information.
Papers too rarely
have news stories of their own.
IAN MONK, PR
The media has ceded a lot of the power of setting the agenda; the
definition of news has
broadened to include celebrities and new products (the iPhone is a big
story). But I don't join
in the hand-wringing or say it's desperate that people outside newspapers
have got a say.
JOHN KAMPFNER, EDITOR, NEW STATESMAN
Davies is right to point to the lack of investigative rigour: the primary
purpose of journalism
is to rattle cages. I was always struck at the extent to which political
journalists yearned to
be spoon fed. Having said that, I think he uses too broad a brush.
DOMINIC LAWSON, FORMER EDITOR SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
I'm not saying this is a golden age, but there's a strong investigative
drive in the British
press. A lot of papers put a strong value on such stories. I suspect we're
about the most
invigilated establishment in Europe.
CHRIS BLACKHURST, CITY EDITOR, EVENING STANDARD
I'm disappointed that a book which has as its premise the dictation of the
news agenda by PRs
should contain in it an anonymous quote from a PR criticising
theStandard's coverage of the
Natwest Three.
HEATHER BROOKE, JOURNALIST
It's not entirely true what Davies is saying. In the past, we just got
scrutiny from newspapers
and now think tanks publish results of investigations. But there's an
assumption that the
public aren't interested in government, just Amy Winehouse.
FRANCIS WHEEN, JOURNALIST/ AUTHOR
Davies is spot on. It's reasonable that newspapers carry PA accounts of
court hearings, but
he's right that there's more "churn" now. Re****ters don't get out of the
office the way they
did once – partly a reflection of reduced budgets.
This is an edited extract from "Flat Earth News: an award-winning re****ter
exposes falsehood,
distortion and propaganda in the global media", published by Chatto &
Windus, price £17.99. To
order this title for the special price of £16, including postage and
packaging, call
Independent Books Direct: 08700 798 897
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/how-the-spooks-took-over-the-news-780672.html
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