All governments engage in self-promotion and propaganda to influence public opinion and achieve a measure of thought control - overtly so in authoritarian regimes, and more subtley in democracies.
What distinguishes the Bush administration from other democratic governments, is the aggressiveness with which it engaged in propaganda, and the contempt with which it treated the people's democratic right to know the truth.
The Bush administration also co-opted the influential corporate media in its campaign of deception. Newspapers such as the Washington Post acted as a cheerleader for the war.
The New York Times propagated the unfounded allegations of its disgraced reporter Judith Miller to build up a case for war. The New York Times later admitted that it had erred and apologised to its readers, but after the damage was done.
The deception campaign was multi-faceted. Documents revealed to and interviews with the New York Times confirmed that the Bush administration launched a major secretive propaganda war: "The campaign was begun by the White House," wrote the New York Times, "which set up a secret panel soon after the September 11 attacks to coordinate information operations by the Pentagon, other government agencies and private contractors."
The Pentagon hired two public relations firms: The Lincoln Group, and the Rendon Group. The Lincoln Group planted more than a 10,000 pro-American articles in Iraqi and Arab press. The Rendon Group targeted foreign news organisations critical of US policies.
Pentagon documents obtained by Rolling Stone, show that the Pentagon set up, in late 2001, a secret organisation called The Office of Strategic Influence to conduct "covert disinformation and deception operations - planting false news items in the media and hiding their origins".
Secret documents
The Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence was also expected to "coerce" foreign journalists and plant false information overseas. Secret documents also showed that the Office was expected to "find ways to "punish" those who convey the "wrong message." (Rolling Stone, November 27, 2005)
Recently, two major studies further documented the various dimensions of the Bush administration's campaign of deception. In January of this year, a study by the Centre for Public Integrity found that Bush and his senior administration officials made hundreds of false statements about Iraq. Continued . . . |
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