[lbo-talk] Seth Ackerman: The WMD disinformation campaign

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Wed Aug 6 11:19:25 PDT 2003


Perhaps the definitive case study of the most recent successful use of the once-famous Big Lie technique:

http://www.fair.org/extra/0307/wmdhunt.html

Excerpt:

So how had the media come to be so convinced of the weapons'

existence? And could they have seen past the White House spin had

they chosen to?

"Parroting the so-called experts"

In part, journalists absorbed their aura of certainty from a

battery of "independent" weapons experts who repeated the mantra

of Iraq concealment over and over. Journalists used these experts

as outside sources who could independently evaluate the

administration's claims. Yet often these "experts" were simply

repeating what they heard from U.S. officials, forming an endless

loop of self-reinforcing scare mongering.

Take the ubiquitous David Albright, a former U.N. inspector in

Iraq. Over the years, Albright had been cited in hundreds of news

articles and made scores of television appearances as an authority

on Iraqi weapons. A sample prewar quote from Albright (CNN,

10/5/02): "In terms of the chemical and biological weapons, Iraq

has those now. How many, how could they deliver them? I mean,

these are the big questions."

But when the postwar weapons hunt started turning up empty,

Albright made a rather candid admission (L.A. Times, 4/20/03): "If

there are no weapons of mass destruction, I'll be mad as hell. I

certainly accepted the administration claims on chemical and

biological weapons. I figured they were telling the truth. If

there is no [unconventional weapons program], I will feel taken,

because they asserted these things with such assurance."

(Recently, Albright has become a prominent critic of the

government's handling of prewar intelligence on Iraq.)

A similar case was Kenneth Pollack, the influential and heavily

cited war advocate at the Brookings Institution. Before the war,

Pollack had absolutely no doubt Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons.

"Does he have the ability to attack us here in the United States?"

Oprah Winfrey asked him on her talkshow (10/9/02). "He certainly

does," Pollack explained. "He has biological and chemical agents

that he could employ, but he'd have to use terrorist means to do

so, which he's done in the past.... Right now, his capabilities to

do so are fairly limited. The problem is that we know that he is

building new capabilities as fast as he can."

As Pollack is a former CIA analyst who specialized in Persian Gulf

military issues, many reporters no doubt took these as first-hand

assessments. Yet in a post-war interview, when asked to defend his

claims about Iraq's arsenal, Pollack demurred (CITE): "That was

the consensus of opinion among the intelligence community. It was

hearing things like that that brought me to the conclusion that,

you know, 'Boy, if this is the case, we've got to do something

about this guy.' That was not me making that claim; that was me

parroting the claims of so-called experts."

Some "experts" had a political axe to grind. Charles Duelfer,

another former inspector, had been a State Department functionary

for years before joining the UNSCOM inspection team. At the U.N.

Security Council, critics of U.S. policy viewed him with suspicion

as a Trojan horse. Once his U.N. tour of duty was over, he became

a "resident scholar" at the conservative Center for Strategic and

International Studies in Washington, appearing on TV news shows as

an impartial authority. He answered technical questions on

subjects like liquid bulk anthrax and aerial satellite photos,

offering his considered judgment that Iraq unquestionably was

hiding a huge arsenal.

But off-camera, Duelfer admitted he was a committed proponent of

regime change whether Saddam was harboring illegal weapons or not

(Endgame, Scott Ritter): "I think it would be a mistake to focus

on the issue of weapons of mass destruction. To do so ignores the

larger issue of whether or not we want this dictator to have

control over a nation capable of producing 6 billion barrels of

oil per day.... If you focus on the weapons issue, the first thing

you know, Iraq will be given a clean bill of health."

"Inactionable intelligence"

The U.S. and British governments were proactive in managing the

media on the weapons issue. Beginning in the fall of 1997, the

British intelligence agency MI6 ran a disinformation campaign to

promote the idea that Iraq was still hiding banned arms, according

to sources cited by Seymour Hersh (New Yorker, 3/31/03). MI6

secretly arranged for an unidentified UNSCOM official sympathetic

to Anglo-American policy to funnel false or unverifiable

information--so-called "inactionable intelligence"--to the spy

agency, which then planted the stories in newspapers in Britain

and abroad.

"It was intelligence that was crap, and that we couldn't move on,

but the Brits wanted to plant stories," a former U.S. intelligence

official told Hersh. An unnamed former Clinton administration

official said the U.S. approved the operation: "I knew that was

going on," he told Hersh. "We were getting ready for action in

Iraq, and we wanted the Brits to prepare."



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