Posted by andreas from dtm2-t2-1.mcbone.net (62.104.210.66) on Wednesday, February 12, 2003 at 3:59PM :
Scoop, New Zealand
MEDIAWATCH, Monday, February 10, 2003, 10:06 pm
Lying Us Into War: Exposing Bush and His "Techniques of Deceit"
By Dennis Hans
President George W. Bush and his foreign-policy team have systematically and
knowingly deceived the American people in order to gain support for an
unprovoked attack on Iraq.
Before I catalog the Bush administration’s “Techniques of Deceit,” let me
acknowledge that no U.N. resolution requires the president to be honest with
the American people. The fine print of Resolution 1441 imposes no obligation
to treat Americans as citizens to be informed rather than suckers to be
conned. He may mislead, distort, suppress, exaggerate and lie to his heart’s
content without violating a single sentence in 1441.
So if compliance with 1441 is all that matters to you, read no further. Turn
on the TV and tune in Brokaw, Rather, Jennings, Blitzer or Lehrer, to name
five of the journalistic imposters who control what you hear and see, who
seem psychologically incapable of conceiving of Bush as a liar, and who
wouldn’t have the guts to call him one even if they reached that conclusion.
But if you are an American citizen who believes in the bedrock democratic
principle of “the informed consent of the governed,” read on.
***********
Why lie?
The president and many of his top advisers have wanted to invade and
overthrow the government of Saddam Hussein for a long time. But they knew
they couldn’t sell such a war against Iraq to a majority of Americans and a
majority in both houses of Congress if they acknowledged just how pitifully
weak and unthreatening Iraq really is. If, however, the administration could
portray Iraq as an imminent, mortal threat to the United States — and even a
shadowy accomplice in the terrorist attacks of 9-11 — then a majority of the
population might come to see an invasion of Iraq not as unprovoked U.S.
aggression but as a wholly justified response to what Iraq did to us.
That is precisely what the administration has done. In an October poll by
the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, “66 percent believed
[Saddam] was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.” Yes,
two-thirds of Americans had come to believe a horrible thing about Saddam
that the Bush administration knew for a fact was false, even as it
encouraged its lesser spokespeople to continue to promote the connection.
According to a Knight-Ridder poll conducted in January (
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/4911975.htm), 41 percent of us believe
Iraq has a nuclear weapon RIGHT NOW and another 35 percent are unsure or
refused to answer the question. Only 24 percent know what Bush knows for an
absolute fact: Iraq has no nukes. And even many in that 24 percent might not
realize that Iraq would still be several years away from developing a nuke
even if we did the unthinkable and allowed them to import the vast array of
high-tech equipment needed just to get started.
How do people get such ridiculous thoughts in their head? A dishonest
administration plants them there with a steady drumbeat of exaggerations,
distortions and lies. In a process I call “lie and rely” (
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0301/S00062.htm), the administration
relies on a cowed and craven news media to present their lies to the
American people as fact — or at a minimum, as still-to-be-confirmed
assertions by respected officials with a reputation for truth-telling. A
handful of print reporters occasionally exposing the most egregious lies
can’t begin to overcome the effect of the steady drumbeat of lies reported
as truth day after day on television.
If we factored out of the opinion polls all the people who have internalized
White House disinformation as fact, support for the president’s position
would plummet. Without the support of these misled millions, Bush wouldn’t
have been able to ramrod through Congress a blank-check declaration. He
wouldn’t have had that blank check to use as a bludgeon against the U.N.,
and the U.S. wouldn’t be on the verge of committing an act of unprovoked
aggression.
***********
How Bush lies: The Techniques of Deceit
Although Bush presents himself to the world as a plain-spoken,
straight-shooting friend of the common man, he regularly employs a variety
of techniques to deceive the very people most inclined to trust him.
So far, I have tallied 14 techniques. But there are more to be uncovered,
and there are far more examples than I can include here. Consider this the
tip of a deceitful iceberg.
In the paragraphs that follow I first will describe the technique of deceit.
Then I will illustrate it with one or more quotations or propaganda themes,
placing within brackets that portion of the quote that illustrates the
technique. Then I will explain how the president applied the technique.
Unless otherwise noted, the president’s words are from the State of the
Union address.
1) Stating as fact what are allegations — often highly dubious ones (this is
a staple of Bush’s speeches and Powell’s U.N. presentation; I’ll limit
myself to three):
a) “From three Iraqi defectors [we know] that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had
several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ
warfare agents and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors.
Saddam Hussein [has not disclosed] these facilities. He [has given no
evidence] that he has destroyed them.”
Comment: What we “know” is that defectors make this unproven claim. We don’t
know if they were paid or coached to make the claim, or volunteered it on
their own. For more on this, see Point 9 of the analysis (
http://www.traprockpeace.org/firstresponse.html) of Powell’s address by Dr.
Glen Rangwala, Lecturer in Politics at Cambridge University, an advisor to
Labor Party opponents of Tony Blair and perhaps the world’s foremost
authority on U.S. claims about Iraq, which may explain why one never sees
him in the U.S. media. Rangwala notes that one defector made no mention of
the labs in his first press conferences. It was several months later, after
“debriefings” by the U.S. and the Iraqi National Congress, that he started
talking about mobile labs. Hans Blix told the Guardian newspaper of Britain
( http://truthout.org/docs_02/020603A.htm) he has seen no evidence that
these mobile labs exist. Acting on tips from the U.S. about labs disguised
as food-testing trucks, he investigated. “Two food-testing trucks have been
inspected and nothing has been found,” he said. That doesn’t mean that such
labs don’t exist, but at this point there simply is no proof of that claim.
It is NOT an established fact.
b) “The British government [has learned] that Saddam Hussein recently sought
significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Comment: Wrong verb. What he should have said is the Brits assert this but
have produced no evidence of its veracity. The Brits have offered no date
for these efforts, but “recently,” in this case, may well mean “the 1980s.”
IAEA director Mohamed Elbaradei has for weeks been asking — so far, in vain
— for the U.S. and Britain to provide “specifics of when and where.” He said
in a Jan. 12 interview, “We need actionable information.” (Interview cited
by Rangwala in his invaluable “Counter-Dossier II,” (
http://traprockpeace.org/weapons.html).
c) “We've [learned] that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making
and poisons and deadly gases.” (Bush’s televised October speech)
Comment: The L.A. Times reported a few days after that speech that CIA
director “Tenet's letter was more equivocal, saying only that there has been
‘reporting’ that such training has taken place. Unlike other passages of the
letter, he did not describe the reporting as ‘solid’ or ‘credible.’”
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/la-na-cia11oct11.story
2) Withholding the key fact that destroys the moral underpinning of an
argument (and, in Powell’s case, reveals him to be a blood-drenched
hypocrite):
“Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction are controlled by a murderous tyrant,
who [has already used chemical weapons to kill thousands of people.]”
(Bush’s October speech)
Comment: The problem here is that much of Bush’s national-security team
aided and abetted those crimes. After the worst attack, on Halabja in 1988
near the end of the Iran-Iraq war, the Reagan team covered for Saddam by
implicating Iran, then prevented Congress from imposing tough sanctions on
Iraq. Joost R. Hiltermann, an official with Human Rights Watch, shows in a
recent column for the International Herald Tribune (
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0117-01.htm) that Saddam was likely
emboldened to use ever more lethal concoctions to polish off the Kurds
because he knew from past gassing experience in 1983, 1984 and 1987 that he
could always count on the support of Reagan, Powell and George H. W. Bush.
The latter’s son has yet to mention this in any of his righteous
condemnations of Saddam. There are any number of governments who have the
moral standing to condemn Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds. The one headed by
George W. Bush does not.
Powell, of course, is the current administration’s knight in shining armor,
the trusted figure who commands the respect even of the European leaders who
cannot stomach Bush. But give a listen to Peter W. Galbraith, former U.S.
ambassador to Croatia and now professor of national-security studies at the
National War College in Washington, D.C.:
“the Kurds have not forgotten that Secretary of State Colin Powell was then
the national security adviser who orchestrated Ronald Reagan's decision to
give Hussein a pass for gassing the Kurds.”
http://www.boston.com/globe/magazine/2002/1215/coverstory_entire.htm
3) Misrepresentation/Invention:
a) “I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and
were denied — finally denied access, a [report] came out of the Atomic — the
IAEA that they were [six months away from developing a weapon]. I don't know
what more [evidence] we need.” (Bush speaking at a news conference Sept. 7
with Tony Blair)
Comment: As Joseph Curl reported three weeks later in the conservative
Washington Times, there was no such IAEA report: “In October 1998, just
before Saddam kicked U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq [actually, they
were withdrawn], the IAEA laid out a case opposite of Mr. Bush’s Sept. 7
declaration: ‘There are no indications that there remains in Iraq any
physical capability for the production of weapon-usable nuclear material of
any practical significance,’ IAEA Director-General Mohammed Elbaradei wrote
in a report to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan” (
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020927-500715.htm). To this day, the
administration has yet to produce a convincing explanation for Bush’s bogus
assertion.
4) Delegated lying/Team lying:
Iraq was involved with 9-11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, via an Iraqi agent who
met him in Prague in the spring of 2001, and thus the Iraqi regime may have
participated in some fashion in 9-11. (summary of major, long-lasting
propaganda theme)
Comment: For the most outrageous, easily disproved, yet highly effective
lies, such as the Iraqi connection to 9-11, sometimes the wise course is to
assign personnel far removed from the president to push the lie. That way,
the president’s credibility won’t suffer when the facts — known to the
administration months before it stopped peddling the lie — come out. And in
a perverse fashion, the man at the top of this disinformation pyramid, the
president, GAINS credibility for the disinformation in his own speeches,
because commentators will note what a cautious and careful performance it
was, given that he steered clear of the not-yet-confirmed 9-11 connection.
The farther out of the loop the designated lie-pushers are, the better: The
administration can more easily keep from them the intelligence data that
flat-out refutes the lie, which helps those lie-pushers who are more
convincing when they THINK what they’re saying might be true than when they
know for a fact it’s not true. For our purposes, whether the speaker
believes what he says is irrelevant. What matters is that the administration
is consciously deceiving the public.
The most aggressive pushers of this story have been neoconservative
extremists Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Ken Adelman and Frank Gaffney, who
either serve on the Defense Policy Board or are otherwise tangentially
connected to the administration. (Gaffney has even tried to link Iraq to the
1995 terror bombing in Oklahoma City.) See this article (
http://slate.msn.com/id/2070410/) for details on how this myth stayed alive
long after intelligence pros definitely disproved it. Of course, now that
the Atta link has petered out, another al Qaeda “connection” of comparable
validity is being spread — this time by Powell and Bush.
5) Straw man:
“The risks of doing nothing, the risks of assuming the best from Saddam
Hussein, it’s just not a risk worth taking.”
Comment: Notice that Bush doesn’t name anyone who advocates “doing nothing.”
The whole idea behind DOING inspections and containment is that everyone
knows we can’t take Saddam at his word. Here, for instance, is former
President Jimmy Carter’s eminently sensible and non-violent “do-something”
strategy to ensure the security of Iraq’s neighbors as well as the United
States: http://alternet.org/print.html?StoryID=15084.
6) Withholding the key fact that would alert viewers that the purported
grave threat is non-existent:
“We’ve also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of
manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical
and biological weapons across broad areas. We are concerned that Iraq is
exploring ways of using UAVs for missions [targeting the United States].”
(October speech)
Comment: Bush omits the fact that the vehicles have limited range, thus
requiring Saddam to transport the vehicles to our coast line WITHOUT BEING
DETECTED. The odds of that happening start at a billion to one. (Dana
Millbank exposed this lie last October in the Washington Post. The Post link
has expired, but you can read this summary of the lies Millbank exposed:
http://www.thedubyareport.com/malleablefacts.html.
7) Using mistranslation and misquotation to plant a frightening impression
in the minds of trusting citizens that is the exact opposite of what you
know to be true:
“Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a
group he calls [his ‘nuclear mujahedeen’ -- his nuclear holy warriors].”
(October speech)
Comment: Here Bush plays on two fears of the public: of Islamist holy
warriors and nuclear weapons. But Saddam runs a secular state and has no
ties to Islamist terrorists such as al Qaeda (despite other lies to the
contrary). As for nukes, Iraq’s production capabilities had been destroyed
completely by 1998, and today Elbaradei is in the process of verifying that
Iraq has not taken even the first baby steps in what would be a mammoth
effort to rebuild a nuclear infrastructure — an infrastructure that would be
virtually impossible to hide.
Equally insidious on Bush’s part is the mistranslation and misquotation. In
“Counter-Dossier II” ( http://traprockpeace.org/weapons.html), Dr. Glen
Rangwala, observes that the speech Bush is referring to was delivered by
Saddam “on 10 September 2000 and was about, in part, nuclear energy. The
transcription of the speech was made at the time by the BBC monitoring
service. Saddam Hussein actually refers to ‘nuclear energy mujahidin,’ and
doesn’t mention the development of weaponry. In addition, the term
‘mujahidin’ is often used in a non-combatant sense, to mean anyone who
struggles for a cause. Saddam Hussein, for example, often refers to the
mujahidin developing Iraq's medical facilities. There is nothing in the
speech to indicate that Iraq is attempting to develop or threaten the use of
nuclear weapons.”
Was Bush aware of the mistranslation and misquotation? We’d have to inject
him with truth serum to find out. Even if some senior intelligence official
did the deed and kept the accurate quote and translation from Bush, it’s
obvious who is setting the deceitful tone in the administration. The
official would have every reason to believe that this is just the sort of
dirty trick — played on the unsuspecting American citizenry, not Saddam
Hussein — that this president would love.
8) Putting the most frightening interpretation on a piece of evidence while
pretending that no other interpretation exists:
“Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase
high-strength aluminum tubes [suitable for nuclear weapons production].”
Comment: Those tubes, unaltered, happen to be a perfect fit for a
conventional artillery rocket program. For details, see the tubes section in
my essay “An Open Letter to the U.N. About Colin Powell” (
http://commondreams.org/views03/0204-07.htm).
The Washington Post’s Joby Warrick (
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35360-2003Jan23.html) adds
this: “The tubes were made of an aluminum-zinc alloy known as 7000-series,
which is used in a wide range of industrial applications. But the dimensions
and technical features, such as metal thickness and surface coatings, made
them an unlikely choice for centrifuges, several nuclear experts said. Iraq
used a different aluminum alloy in its centrifuges in the 1980s before
switching to more advanced metals known as maraging steel and carbon fibers,
which are better suited for the task, the experts said. Significantly, there
is no evidence so far that Iraq sought other materials required for
centrifuges, such as motors, metal caps and special magnets, U.S. and
international officials said.”
Following Powell’s address, Susan Taylor Martin of the St. Petersburg Times
(
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/02/06/Worldandnation/A_strong_case__but_is.shtml)
reported this: “Powell's speech was 'not quite accurate' on two points,
according to the Institute for Science and International Security, a
nonpartisan organization in Washington that deals with technical aspects of
nuclear proliferation. Contrary to Powell's claim, anodized tubes are not
appropriate for centrifuges and the anodization, designed to prevent
corrosion, would have to be removed before the tubes could be used, said
Corey Hinderstein, assistant director: 'It's not to say it would be
impossible to use anodized tubes for centrifuges but it adds an extra step.'
She also challenged Powell's comment that the tubes must be intended for a
nuclear program because they meet higher specifications than the United
States sets for its own rocketry. 'In fact, we found European-designed
rockets that had exactly this high degree of specificity,' Hinderstein
said.”
9) Withholding highly relevant information that would weaken your case,
because what you really want to obtain from the citizenry is “the UNINFORMED
consent of the governed”:
North Korea’s “secret” nuclear-weapons program wasn’t a secret to the
administration last fall. Yet it kept the information to itself, waiting
till very late in the congressional debate over Iraq to inform not the
entire public and Congress, but merely a relative few members of Congress.
Thus, the Bush team didn’t have to explain — well before each House even
began to debate the various Iraq resolutions — exactly why the
administration had no problem seeking a non-invasion solution to a crisis
far more grave and imminent than Iraq.
10) Bold declarations of hot air:
a) “[The only possible explanation], the only possible use he could have for
those weapons, is to dominate, intimidate or attack.”
Comment: “Deterrence” is also a generally understood reason to develop WMD.
Just ask the leaders of North Korea, Israel, Pakistan, India, Russia and the
U.S. Deterrence and regional “balance of power” considerations were obvious
factors in Saddam’s efforts in the 1980s to develop nuclear weapons. Not the
only factors, but factors nonetheless.
b) “Every chemical and biological weapon that Iraq has or [makes] is a
direct violation of the truce that ended the Persian Gulf War in 1991.”
(October speech, national television)
Comment: As Rahul Mahajan correctly observes (
http://www.accuracy.org/bush/), “There are no credible allegations that Iraq
produced chemical or biological agents while inspectors were in the country,
until December 1998. The reason we don’t know whether they are producing
those agents or not since then is that inspectors were withdrawn at the U.S.
behest preparatory to the Desert Fox bombing campaign.” Visit the Institute
for Public Accuracy website ( http://www.accuracy.org) for detailed
critiques of Bush’s major addresses on Iraq.
11) Creating in the public mind an intense but unfounded fear:
“[Knowing these realities], America must not ignore the threat gathering
against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final
proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a [mushroom
cloud].” (October speech)
Comment: Iraq cannot turn American cities into mushroom clouds because it
has no nuclear weapons and no long-range missiles to fire the nukes it does
not have. The world is not about to let Iraq under Saddam resurrect its
nuclear-weapons program. But even if the world did, Iraq would still be
several years away from being able to develop that bomb.
12) Citing old news as if it’s relevant today, while leaving out the reason
it’s not:
a) “The International Atomic Energy Agency [confirmed] in the 1990s that
Saddam Hussein [had] an advanced nuclear weapons development program, [had]
a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of
enriching uranium for a bomb.”
Comment: IAEA has also confirmed, that they shut the program down and
destroyed all the production facilities – seemingly relevant facts: In
October 1998, Elbaradei reported to the U.N: “There are no indications that
there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of
weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance” (
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020927-500715.htm).
13) Transference:
“[This nation fights reluctantly], because [we] know the cost, and [we]
dread the days of mourning that always come.”
Comment: Bush is deliberately confusing the sensible, compassionate American
people with his bellicose, bullying self.
14) Hallucinatory lying:
Bush’s assertion, based on absolutely no evidence, that Saddam hopes to
deploy al Qaeda as his “forward army” against the West: “We need to think
about Saddam Hussein using al Qaeda to do his dirty work, to not leave
fingerprints behind,” he told a Republican audience in Michigan prior to the
congressional elections. (See David Corn’s report at The Nation’s website:
http://thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=124.)
Comment: “We need to think about” Bush using Adelman, Woolsey, Perle and
Gaffney to do Bush’s dirty work, so as to not leave presidential
fingerprints on the hoariest lie of all — that Iraq was an accomplice in
9-11.
15) Withholding the key fact that would show your principled pose to be a
pose devoid of principle:
“Saddam Hussein [attacked Iran in 1980] and Kuwait in 1990.” (U.N. speech,
Sept. 12, 2002)
Comment: The Swedish government is entitled to condemn Iraq for invading
Iran. The current U.S. government — featuring key players from the very
Reagan administration that supported Iraqi aggression through much of the
1980s— is not. If you surround yourself with officials who supported the
aggression in real time, you’re not entitled to be angered by it 20 years
later.
***********
Conclusion: What to do with a president who is trying to lie us into a war
It is not one single lie that has an effect on the public. It is the
cumulative effect of dozens of lies, big and small, reiterated daily and
challenged rarely. That is the effect that has brought us to where we are
today.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, speaking January 19 on ABC (
http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/03/01/25_rumsfeld.html),
offered the media splendid advice on how they should handle in their
broadcasts and articles a leader that lies:
“Well, first, Saddam Hussein is a liar. He lies every single day. . . . He
is still claiming that he won the war. His people are being told every day
that they won. It was a great victory in 1991 when he was thrown out of
Kuwait and chased back to Baghdad. Now, it seems to me that almost every
time you quote something from him, you should preface it by saying ‘here’s a
man who has lied all the time and consistently.’”
That’s good advice for Brokaw and company, but what about the citizenry?
What should we do?
Do we as a nation want to follow our dishonest president into an aggressive,
unnecessary war? I say the wiser course is to stop the war train in its
tracks and intensify inspections, which will give the American people the
breathing space to decide what exactly we should do with a leader who has
sunk this low.
# # #
- Bio: Dennis Hans is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the New
York Times, Washington Post, National Post (Canada) and online at
TomPaine.com, Slate and The Black World Today (tbwt.com), among other
outlets. He has taught courses in mass communications and American foreign
policy at the University of South Florida-St. Petersburg, and can be reached
at HANS_D@popmail.firn.edu.
-- andreas
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