False witness David Leigh Friday April 4, 2003 The Guardian
Varieties of lying in the Iraq conflict · Level 1: Unconfirmed false reports presented as fact to make exciting news stories
Example: "A column of Iraqi tanks ... was heading south from Basra" [Independent and most other British newspapers, March 27]
· Level 2: Disputed events presented as fact for propaganda purposes
Example: "Executed ... Brave British soldiers ... shot by Saddam's brutal thugs" [Daily Mail and several British newspapers, March 28]
· Level 3: Military disinformation
Example: "Saddam silenced - Shock new evidence monster may be dead" [News of the World, March 23]
A young woman in the bank said to me yesterday: "I've stopped listening to any of the war news. It's all just propaganda."
She was, unconsciously perhaps, echoing Samuel Johnson in 1758, who originally noticed that in wartime truth is the first casualty. "Among the calamities of war, may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth," he wrote, "by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages."
Today in Iraq it is the US-UK armies and their political leaders who have the vested interest in falsehoods - and the journalists who, all too often alas, display the credulity. But it isn't just "all propaganda". There are, in fact, three different varieties of lying in this rolling news, live video-action war.
The first level of falsehood - and the least sinister - simply consists of mistakes. On March 27, in a now well-known example, all the newspapers blared out that a huge force of Iraqi tanks was on the attack. The Telegraph was typical. "Saddam Sends Out His Tanks ... The coalition were trying to halt a column of up to 120 armoured vehicles which broke out of the port city of Basra."
Not true, of course. There turned out to be only three tanks. The military said sheepishly after a few days that there had been an error with their "electronic moving target indicators". There is no evidence that they should be disbelieved. The whole piece of false reporting could simply be put down to over-excitability, as low-quality news shot round the world too frequently, too fast.
The second level of falsehood, however, does consist of propaganda. When the Daily Mail filled its front page with the stark word "Executed", it was playing a Tony Blair propaganda game with facts that were, in reality, uncertain.
It transpired that on the morning of March 26, Blair, his ministers and Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's propagandist, anxiously discussed the "propaganda war" and the way al-Jazeera, the Arab TV station, was alleging that Iraqi prisoners had been "executed".
The prime minister then flew to meet President Bush at Camp David. There he announced, in tones of high indignation, that Iraq had "executed" two British soldiers whose bodies had also been displayed on al-Jazeera. This was, he said, an act of "incomprehensible cruelty". It was a clumsy stroke. The evidence - that the bodies on the film were some way from their vehicle, and their helmets and jackets had been removed - was inconclusive. The relatives, it turned out, had been informed to the contrary by the military, who had said they died in action - no doubt more concerned with the feelings of the soldiers' loved ones than with a propaganda agenda.
Blair's air of shock and awe at Saddam's "depravity" played unconvincingly to an audience who had already heard endless gory accounts - from British ministers themselves - of how he had spent years torturing and murdering innocents in their thousands. Nevertheless, the unproven accusation grabbed the headlines.
There has been a similar propaganda pass-the-parcel over the two missiles which fell on Baghdad markets last week, shredding civilians. Saddam, naturally, blamed the invaders. Blair, at question time, continued to insist that at least one of the missiles was an Iraqi misfire. No one is in a position to offer conclusive independent evidence. After all, there's a war on. So the propagandists on both sides bellow speculation that suits themselves, as though it was proven fact.
There is, however, a third level of falsehood beyond this relatively simple spinning which is much more worrying. It is active disinformation.
Some journalists do not seem to realise that the military are trained to use deception. Soldiers are not there to tell the media the truth. It was British "military intelligence" officers who were credited with the false disclosure early in the campaign that there was an "uprising in Basra" - dramatic news which led to a flock of headlines and a stampeding herd of leading articles.
There was no such uprising. Few seemed to realise, however, what an obvious military tactic it was to play up claims of an uprising - in the hope of actually fomenting one among those who might be encouraged to join in.
Similarly, the news of Saddam's death proved to be exaggerated. But it lingered on, given much media space with promises from the military that, if not actually dead, he was at death's door or at the very least needed a blood transfusion.
Few seemed willing to point out that to spread rumours of Saddam's death is a simple military tactic, designed to demoralise the enemy. It doesn't have to be true to do its work. All that's needed is a collusive - or brainless - media.
The run-up to war was - as many now grimly reflect - a time peppered with such pieces of political disinformation which propelled the invasion. The most notorious was the claimed meeting of September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta with an Iraqi agent in Prague, based apparently on one discredited informant's report but blown up by Pentagon hawks into "proof" that Saddam had attacked Manhattan.
This month, veteran US journalist Seymour Hersh is also alleging that MI6 and its "information operations" department were behind the British claim - based, it turned out, on faked documents - that Saddam was building nuclear bombs by buying 500 tons of uranium from the west African state of Niger. Disinformation has a well-documented history as a military tactic. As the war grinds on, headline writers might become more aware of that.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,929319,00.html