How Propaganda Conquers
Democracy
In recent decades, the U.S. propaganda
system has grown more and more sophisticated
in the art of “perception management,” now
enlisting not only government PR specialists
but careerist journalists and aspiring
bloggers to push deceptions on the public.
By Nicolas J S Davies
Do we live in a country
where citizens are critically informed on
the issues of the day by media that operate
independently of the government? Or do our
political leaders deliberately plant a false
view of events and issues in the mind of the
public that complicit media then broadcast
and amplify to generate public consent for
government policy?
This is a basic test of
democracy for the citizens of any
country. But the very nature of modern
propaganda systems is that they masquerade
as independent while functioning as the
opposite, so the question is not as
straightforward as it seems.
In
Democracy Incorporated; Managed Democracy
and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism,
political scientist
Sheldon Wolin examined how
America’s “managed democracy” has devolved
into “inverted totalitarianism,”
concentrating power and wealth in the hands
of a small ruling class more efficiently and
sustainably than 20th Century “classical
totalitarianism” ever succeeded in doing.
Instead of sweeping away
the structures of constitutional government
like the Fascists, Nazis or Soviets, this
“political coming-of-age of corporate power”
has more cleverly preserved and co-opted
nominally democratic institutions and
adapted them to its own purposes.
Self-serving politicians
and parties compete for funding in election
campaigns run by the advertising industry,
to give political investors the most corrupt
President, administration and Congress that
money can buy, while courts uphold new
corporate and plutocratic political rights
to ward off challenges to the closed circle
of wealth and political power.
Oligarchic corporate
control of the media is a critical element
in this dystopian system. Under the genius
of inverted totalitarianism, a confluence of
corrupt interests has built a more effective
and durable propaganda system than direct
government control has ever achieved.
The editor or media
executive who amplifies government and
corporate propaganda and suppresses
alternative narratives is not generally
doing so on orders from the government, but
in the interest of his own career, his
company’s success in the corporate oligarchy
or “marketplace,” and his responsibility not
to provide a platform for radical or
“irrelevant” ideas.
In this context, a common
pattern in five recent cases illustrates how
the U.S. government and media systematically
deceive the public on critical foreign
policy issues, to generate public hostility
toward foreign governments and to suppress
domestic opposition to economic sanctions
and to the threat and use of military force.
1. Non-Existent WMDs in
Iraq. This is the case we all know
about. U.S. officials made claims they knew
were false when they made them, and the
media faithfully and uncritically amplified
them to make the case for war. The result
was the destruction of Iraq in a war based
on lies. At meetings in 2001, according to
Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, CIA
Director George Tenet consistently told the
National Security Council (NSC) that that
the CIA had no “confirming
intelligence” that Iraq possessed
nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
When Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld laid out the Pentagon’s
plans to invade Iraq, Tenet reiterated that
it was still only speculation that Iraq
possessed weapons of mass destruction. Eying
the junior staffers in the room,
Rumsfeld replied, “I’m not sure
everyone here has clearance to hear this.”
Senior officials knew
their case for war was weak and
unsubstantiated, but they treated the
weakness of their case as a closely guarded
state secret to be kept from the public, up
to and including staffers at NSC
meetings. They set up the
Office of Special Plans at the
Pentagon to “stovepipe” unvetted
intelligence directly to senior officials to
bolster the case for war, bypassing the
review process that is supposed to filter
intelligence for accuracy and reliability.
As
the
head of MI6 told the British cabinet
in July 2002, “the intelligence and the
facts were being fixed around the policy.”
Chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter
revealed how
MI6
planted unsubstantiated stories in
newspapers around the world to make the case
for war. In June 2002, the CIA-backed Iraqi
National Congress revealed that its “Information
Collection Program” was the
primary source for 108 media reports on
Iraq’s WMDs and links to terrorism over the
past eight months.
In July 2002,
Ritter told CNN, “No one has
substantiated the allegations that Iraq
possesses weapons of mass destruction,” but
CNN enthusiastically – and profitably –
joined the rush to war.
When Congress debated the
2002 Iraq war resolution, the administration
gave members a 25-page document it
advertised as a summary of a new National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq. The
document was pure propaganda,
produced months before the NIE, and included
false claims that were nowhere to be found
in the NIE, such as that the CIA knew the
location of 550 sites in Iraq where chemical
and biological agents were stored.
Sen. Bob Graham,
D-Florida, chair of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, begged his colleagues to instead
read the classified NIE, dramatically
warning them, “Blood is going to be on your
hands.”
Only six Senators and a handful
of Representatives did so, but the media
clung to the propaganda narrative that the
White House and Congress
had
seen “the same intelligence.”
In his
2003 State of the Union speech,
President George W. Bush cited gaps in
Iraq’s accounting for weapons it destroyed
in 1991 as a continuing threat, from 25,000
liters of anthrax to 500 tons of Sarin, VX
nerve agent and mustard gas. Of all these,
only mustard gas would have
still been potent 12 years later
– if it had existed.
Bush pretended that 81-mm
aluminum rocket casings were tubes for
centrifuges, a claim
already dismissed by the International
Atomic Energy Agency, and that
Iraq was buying uranium in Niger
based on a forgery that the IAEA
spotted within hours. But Bush’s deceptive
fear-mongering was uncritically
embraced and amplified by the
U.S. media.
Secretary of State Colin
Powell’s presentation to the UN
Security Council in February 2003 contained
at least a dozen categorical but false
statements about Iraqi weapons, based on
recordings and photographs deliberately
misinterpreted by the Iraqi National
Congress and CIA agents. Security Council
members were unconvinced, but the U.S. media
uniformly and
enthusiastically endorsed
Powell’s
“slam-dunk” case for war.
Fairness and Accuracy in
Reporting (FAIR) found that U.S. media
coverage was
unashamedly pro-war during the
critical weeks leading up to the invasion,
with only three anti-war voices among 393
“expert” interviews on major TV networks. A
total of 76 percent of interviewees were
present or former government officials, of
whom only 6 percent were critical of the
case for war, even as a CBS poll found that
61 percent of the public wanted to “wait and
give the United Nations and weapons
inspectors more time.”
The election of President
Barack Obama was a chance for the U.S. to
make a clean break from the destructive and
deceptive policies of the Bush
administration. But the U.S. propaganda
system has instead evolved to embrace even
more sophisticated techniques of branding
and image-making, not least to build a deep
sense of trust into the iconic image of a
hip celebrity-in-chief with roots in
African-American and modern urban culture.
The contrast between image
and reality, so essential to Obama’s role,
represents a new achievement in managed
democracy, enabling him to maintain and
expand policies that are the polar opposite
of the change his supporters thought they
were voting for.
2. Non-Existent WMDs in
Iran. Incredibly, after their exposure and
embarrassment over Iraq, the U.S. government
and media didn’t skip a beat but immediately
recycled their WMD narrative to justify a
similar campaign of sanctions and threats
against Iran.
We are finally on a more
promising diplomatic trajectory, but it is
still taboo for U.S. politicians or media to
admit that Iran has almost certainly never
had a nuclear weapons program, and the U.S.
propaganda narrative still insists that a
decade of brutal economic warfare has played
a constructive role to “bring Iran to the
table.” Nothing could be farther from the
truth.
A 2012 study by the
International Crisis Group found
that ever-tightening sanctions had “almost
no chance of producing an Iranian climb-down
any time soon,” and could end up leading to
war, not offering an alternative to it –
just as in Iraq.
As Iranian Foreign
Minister
Mohammad Zarif remarked in
November 2014, “The effect of sanctions can
be seen in how many centrifuges are spinning
in Iran. When we began the sanctions
process, Iran had less than 200 centrifuges.
Today it has over 20,000.” Zarif also
reiterated Iran’s long-standing position
that, “Nuclear weapons don’t serve our
strategic interests and are against the core
principles of our faith.”
Trita Parsi (president of
the National Iranian American Council),
Mohammed ElBaradei (former IAEA
director-general), and Gareth Porter (an
award-winning investigative
reporter/historian) have each written
enlightening books that demolish critical
elements of the U.S. propaganda campaign
against Iran:
In
A
Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy
With Iran, Trita Parsi
explained that Obama’s “dual-track
approach”, combining negotiations with
sanctions, was a political compromise to
appease doves and hawks in Washington. But
this was a prescription for failure in the
real world, because the two tracks were
incompatible and the sanctions track gave
the hardliners on both sides the upper hand.
After Brazil and Turkey
persuaded Iran to agree to a comprehensive
proposal offered by the U.S. only months
earlier, the U.S. rejected its own plan
because it would undermine its efforts to
pass new sanctions in the UN Security
Council. A senior State Department official
told Parsi that the main obstacle to
resolving the crisis was the U.S. inability
to take “Yes” for an answer.
In
The
Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in
Treacherous Times, ElBaradei
recounted how the CIA and other Western
intelligence agencies kept providing the
IAEA with supposed “evidence” of an Iranian
nuclear weapons program, but, just as in
Iraq, there was nothing there to find.
Despite the
“Key Lessons” of UNMOVIC’s final
report on Iraq that UN inspection agencies
should not be used “to support other agendas
or to keep the inspected party in a
permanent state of weakness,” nor be given
the impossible political task of “proving
the negative,” ElBaradei found himself back
in exactly that position, even as the IAEA
was already fulfilling its legitimate task
of monitoring all Iran’s nuclear material
and facilities.
Gareth Porter has maybe
done more than anyone to expose the
bankruptcy of the U.S. propaganda narrative
on Iran. In
Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the
Iran Nuclear Scare, he
explained how this entire campaign has been
based on falsehoods and fabrications for two
decades.
There is no real evidence
that Iran has ever taken the first step
toward weaponizing its civilian nuclear
program, and each suggestion that it has is
based on sloppy analysis poisoned by
mistrust and false assumptions, or in some
cases on evidence actually fabricated by
Iran’s enemies, like the infamous “laptop
documents” that were most likely supplied by
the Mujahedeen-e-Kalq (MEK).
And yet mainstream media
reports in the U.S. still parrot the false
premises of an unjust campaign of economic
warfare that has
devastated Iran’s economy and the
lives of its people, to say nothing of
cyber-warfare, the
assassinations of four innocent Iranian
scientists, and
threats of war.
In the U.S. media
narrative, we are still the “good guys,” and
the Iranians are still the “bad guys” who
can’t be trusted. But, of course, that’s the
whole point. The underlying purpose of
campaigns like this is to frame U.S.
disputes with other countries in Manichean
terms to justify brutally unfair and
dangerous policies.
3. Sarin Attack at Ghouta
in Syria. Hundreds of Syrian civilians were
killed by a missile filled with about 60 kg
of the nerve agent Sarin on Aug. 21,
2013. U.S. officials immediately blamed the
Syrian Army and President Bashar Al-Assad.
President Obama was soon ready to launch a
massive assault on Syria’s air defenses and
other targets, a major escalation of the
covert, proxy war he had been
waging since 2011.
Three weeks after the
Sarin attack, Obama declared in a
televised speech, “Assad’s
government gassed to death over a thousand
people… we know the Assad regime was
responsible.” Following reports by UN
investigators and investigative journalists
with good access to U.S. military and
intelligence sources, it now seems almost
certain that the chemical attack was
conducted by Jabhat Al-Nusra (al-Qaeda’s
affiliate in Syria) or other rebel forces,
with help from either Turkish or Qatari
military intelligence.
The missile was fired from
a rebel-held area 2 km from its point of
impact, only a fraction of the distance to
the Syrian military base from where U.S.
officials claimed it was fired, and the
chemical impurities in the Sarin suggest
that it was improvised, not military-grade.
The question of motive
suggests that this was a rebel “false-flag”
attack that almost succeeded in drawing the
U.S. deeper into the war, acting as the air
force of Al-Nusra and its allies. On the
other side, there is no plausible reason why
the Syrian government could have expected to
gain by conducting such an attack
(especially since UN inspectors had just
arrived in Damascus to begin a study of
another chemical attack that had been blamed
on the rebels).
The “Who
Attacked Ghouta?” web site is a
good effort to bring together and analyze
all the evidence, and both
Seymour Hersh and
Robert Parry have written good
articles based on U.S. intelligence sources.
But
U.S. officials and
media pundits still talk as if
their dangerous and irresponsible charges
are beyond question.
Their assertions are so
well established in the U.S.
media that they have effectively become part
of American popular culture. When Americans
think of President Assad, they think “gassed
his own people.”
When we examine the words
and actions of President Obama, Secretary
Kerry and other U.S. officials, only one
thing is certain: that their expressions of
certainty regarding responsibility for the
chemical attack were false, both then and
now. Like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell,
they simply lied when they told the world
that the intelligence pointed only in one
direction.
As in other cases, this
was a deliberate propaganda strategy to so
strongly establish a false narrative in the
mind of the public that it would be hard to
dislodge, even once evidence emerged that it
was probably just plain wrong.
As we watch this strategy
play out in each of these cases, we can see
that Iraq was the exception that proved the
rule, the case where U.S. propagandists were
caught out and embarrassed before the
American public and the whole world. But
this has not stopped them or their
successors from doubling down on the same
propaganda strategy, nor has its exposure in
Iraq rendered it ineffective as a means of
misleading the public in other cases.
4. Who shot down Malaysian
Airlines MH17? President Vladimir Putin is
the latest foreign leader to be targeted by
a classic U.S. vilification campaign.
Since the State Department
and CIA engineered a
violent coup in Ukraine that
literally tore that country apart, U.S.
politicians and media have marched in
lockstep to pretend that the crisis was
caused, not by the U.S.-backed overthrow of
the elected government, but by Russia’s
subsequent reintegration of the Crimea based
on a popular referendum.
Almost 5,000 people (with
some estimates even higher) have been killed
as the Western-backed government that seized
power in Kiev has dispatched its Army and
new National Guard units to attack cities in
Eastern Ukraine. It recruited some of them,
like the
Azov Brigade, from the neo-Nazi
Svoboda and
Right Sektor militias who
provided the muscle for the coup in
February.
The Russian-speaking
people in the eastern Ukraine expect no
mercy or justice from these anti-Russian
Ukrainian nationalists, so they fight on
despite heavy losses and dire conditions,
with limited support from Russia. Like the
chemical weapons attack in Syria,
U.S. officials and media
immediately blamed the shoot-down of
Malaysia Airlines MH-17 on U.S. enemies and
claimed once again that the evidence pointed
only in one direction. But once again, the
only thing that is sure is that
they can’t be sure of that.
A Dutch team is leading an
investigation, as each side accuses the
other of responsibility. Concerns about the
impartiality of the investigation have led
to calls for a fully independent
investigation, including a public
online petition.
U.S. officials and media claim
that the airliner was shot down by a Russian
surface-to-air missile fired by Ukrainian
rebels.
An alternative narrative
is that it was shot down by one of
two
Ukrainian fighter planes that
were reported to be tailing it. The cockpit
appears to be
riddled with bullet-holes, but
these might have been caused by shrapnel
from an exploding missile. But the only
forces known to have deployed such missiles
in the area were Ukrainian government
forces, so the Western narrative remains
doubtful at best.
Even if the rebels
captured and fired a Ukrainian missile,
there is
no
evidence of Russian
involvement. Yet the U.S. used Russia’s
presumed guilt to trigger new U.S. and
European Union sanctions against Russia,
taking the world ever closer to the
“new Cold War” that Mikhail
Gorbachev warned of recently in Berlin.
The petition for an
independent inquiry reads, “With the U.S.
and Russia in possession of 15,000 of the
world’s 16,400 nuclear weapons, humanity can
ill-afford to stand by and permit these
conflicting views of history and opposing
assessments of the facts on the ground to
lead to a 21st century military
confrontation between the great powers and
their allies.”
But by engineering a coup
in Ukraine and rejecting reasonable
Russian proposals to resolve the
crisis, U.S. leaders have deliberately
provoked such a confrontation. The U.S.
media have provided political cover, blaming
everything on Russia and President Putin, to
give U.S. leaders the political space to
play the most dangerous game known to
mankind: nuclear brinksmanship.
5. North Korea vs. Sony?
Now the U.S. is imposing
new
sanctions on North Korea based on
claims that it is behind a cyber-attack on
the Sony Corporation. Once again, U.S.
officials claim to be sure of their
accusations. And once again, the only sure
thing is that they’re only pretending to be
sure, in this case risking a new conflict
with a government whose actions they’ve
consistently failed to accurately predict or
understand for decades.
Cyber-security experts are
already challenging the U.S. narrative. Marc
Rogers of Cloudflare, who manages
cyber-security at hacker conferences, thinks
the attack on Sony was probably the work of
a vengeful ex-employee. He wrote in an
article for Daily Beast, “I am no fan of the
North Korean regime. However I believe that
calling out a foreign nation over a
cyber-crime of this magnitude should never
have been undertaken on such weak evidence.”
But calling out foreign
nations on weak evidence is an essential
core element of U.S. propaganda
strategy. U.S. officials quickly and loudly
establish the narrative they want the public
to believe, and leave it to the echo chamber
of the complicit U.S. media system to do the
rest. The media’s roles are then to “work
the story” through rote repetition and
supporting analysis, and to suppress and
ridicule alternative narratives.
U.S. officials believe
they can win a global propaganda war, much
as they think they won the Cold War. But
they seem to be losing the global struggle
for hearts and minds. The Obama charm
offensive is
wearing thin and worldwide
opinion polls consistently identify the U.S.
as the
greatest threat to peace.
On the domestic front, as
the lies that clothe our emperor and our
empire become ever more transparent,
Americans are inevitably growing more
skeptical than ever of politicians and the
media. Skepticism in the face of propaganda
is vital, but the post-WW II
record low turnout in the
November 2014 election (36.4 percent)
suggests that more Americans are reacting to
the corruption of our political and media
environment with disengagement than with the
kind of activism that could awaken the
sleeping giant of democracy.
But this is only one stage
of a long and complex history. Growing
democratic activism and independent media
are the green shoots of a grassroots renewal
of democratic politics that offers real
solutions to our country’s problems, not
least to rein in its dangerous and
destabilizing foreign policy and the web of
lies that sustains it.
One thing we can do, in
the words of
Bob
Dylan, is to let the masters of
war and their media hacks know we can see
through their masks.
Nicolas J. S. Davies is the
author of Blood On Our Hands: The
American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
Davies also wrote the chapter on “Obama At
War” for the book, Grading the 44th
President: A Report Card on Barack Obama’s
First Term as a Progressive Leader.