Media, War, and Propaganda During the 2003 Iraq War

[Deleted]

    I'm posting this research abstract in reference to recent U.S. mainstream media reporting on the Syrian chemical weapons incident.


Media, War, and Propaganda: Strategies of Information Management During the 2003 Iraq War

www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14791420500505650



August 6, 2006


Abstract

It is now widely acknowledged that the Bush administration used faulty and false information to justify the 2003 war on Iraq, and that the mainstream media, by not adequately investigating the case for war, assisted with the project. In this paper, I outline the particular strategies employed by the media–military industrial complex to ensure a dominance of pro-war arguments in the public sphere. I conclude by arguing that the failure of the media in the US to meet the democratic needs of this society places enormous responsibility on intellectuals to produce scholarship critical of the new imperialism.

[frmthegrav]

Govt And Media Doing Exact Same Thing It Did To Start Iraq War, And Americans Are Buying It

www.activistpost.com/2017/04/govt-media-exact-thing-start-iraq-war-americans-buying.html


In May 2004, one year after the U.S. commenced a full-scale invasion of Iraq, the New York Times issued a half-baked apology for its abysmal coverage of the “intelligence” used to convince America that Iraq was a threat.

“Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge,” wrote the NYT editors. They also lamented their dependence on Iraqi defectors who made spurious claims to further the goal of regime change.

It was a grudging admission that the famous newspaper played a critical role in pushing lies and propaganda, to lead the U.S. into a ‘pre-emptive’ war of choice. Other corporate media outlets, including those in the neoconservative (i.e. The Weekly Standard) and liberal interventionist camps, apparently felt no remorse at betraying the public.

To be fair, it wasn’t all the fault of ‘patriotic’ American media. In Sept. 2002, the Bush-Cheney cabal installed a special Pentagon intelligence unit to create the web of lies and spin needed to bring forth the Iraq war drums.

The Office of Special Plans (OSP), led by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, used their imagination and hard-line neocon belief in “regime change” to create Iraqi WMD and ties to terror out of thin air. With the “war on terror” as an excuse and Dick Cheney as their cover, OSP bypassed normal intelligence routes and brought what they wanted straight to President Bush.

In January 2004, Mother Jones exposed the workings of this “secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department’s war-planning task force,” made up of “a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion.”

An essential part of this operation was input from the infamous defector, Ahmed Chalabi, and the Iraqi National Congress.

Mother Jones reported:

According to multiple sources, Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress sent a steady stream of misleading and often faked intelligence reports into U.S. intelligence channels. That information would flow sometimes into NESA/OSP directly, sometimes through Defense Intelligence Agency debriefings of Iraqi defectors via the Defense Human Intelligence Service, and sometimes through the INC’s own U.S.-funded Intelligence Collection Program, which was overseen by the Pentagon. The INC’s intelligence “isn’t reliable at all,” according to Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counterterrorism. “Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice presidential speeches.

Fast-forward to 2017, and the U.S. is backing other “rebel” groups in other Middle Eastern countries long targeted for regime change – and using bogus intel.

The 2013 sarin gas attack that killed at least 281 Syrian civilians was immediately blamed on Assad, trumpeted by Establishment media as a “red line” meaning Assad should be forcefully removed. But it turns out the chemicals most likely came from Turkish intelligence and were fired from rebel-controlled territory.

Soon after President Trump made the comment that regime change in Syria was no longer the goal, the April 4, 2017 sarin gas attack took place in Khan Sheikhoun, killing at least 74 Syrian people. Yet again, American corporate media parroted the government line. No skepticism, no questioning.

With the Tomahawk missile response, Trump had finally come around to the neocon/liberal interventionist agenda – and the MSM were positively thrilled.

Pundits were quick to cement the narrative that ‘Assad did it’ before people could think too much, despite quickly mounting evidence that the official narrative was suspect. Former CIA agents were questioning the rationale, and then video proof emerged of evidence tampering at the chemical attack site.

In fact, an MIT weapons expert and former DoD science advisor released his analysis, saying the evidence for the April sarin gas attack was tampered with or staged. Theodore Postol stated that the White House’s supposed proof “does not provide any evidence whatsoever that the US government has concrete knowledge that the government of Syria was the source of the chemical attack in Khan Sheikhoun.”

The parallels are easy to draw between Syrian war propaganda and Iraq war propaganda, and no less troubling in their potential to draw the U.S. into launching another “regime change” invasion. Countless lives lost and unimaginable destruction.

Neocons and liberal interventionists are gnashing their teeth at the prospect of bringing Syria into the Western fold through military might.

The Wolfowitz of today appears to be National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster – a darling of the neocon cabal and “golden child” of disgraced General David Petraeus. It was recently revealed that McMaster is “manipulating intelligence reports given to President Donald Trump” and “seeking to involve the U.S. in a full scale war in Syria” with 150,000 American ground troops.

McMaster may not have the Office of Special Plans (or he may have something else entirely), but the threat of bogus intelligence to justify full-scale war is just as real.

If the mainstream media have an ounce of credibility, they will begin questioning the government narrative instead of immediately reporting it as fact. We cannot be led into another war based on government propaganda and the abandonment of skepticism.

[Deleted]

Graver,

    I wish we could chalk this up to piss poor journalism, but I believe something far more insidious is going on.

    Robert Parry published a good article at Consortium News today about the New York Times' deliberate disinformation regarding the recent Syrian chemical weapons incident.

[frmthegrav]

doc, the military/neocon group is running the government now, doing the bidding of the israelis. jared kushner is the conjoined twin of netanyahu. i guess theyre back on the greater israel project. theyll get their war in syria for various other reasons as well.

trump is either a neocon himself or not making any of the calls since he knows himself to be ignorant of warfare, leaving it up to the generals. hes lost all credibility with people like me. only die hard believers are trying to rationalize his behaviour.

doesnt matter who is POTUS. hillarys admin would be doing the same shit.

[Deleted]

Apr 18, 2017 23:14:08 GMT -5 frmthegrav said:

doc, the military/neocon group is running the government now, doing the bidding of the israelis. jared kushner is the conjoined twin of netanyahu. i guess theyre back on the greater israel project. theyll get their war in syria for various other reasons as well.

trump is either a neocon himself or not making any of the calls since he knows himself to be ignorant of warfare, leaving it up to the generals. hes lost all credibility with people like me. only die hard believers are trying to rationalize his behaviour.

doesnt matter who is POTUS. hillarys admin would be doing the same shit.

  Yep.  Hillary has cooperated with the Neocon/CIA stuff all along, as seen in her State Department Emails.

  As I mentioned in our discussion about Trump and Hillary last summer, the one positive thing about Trump, at the time, IMO, was that he intended to pull the plug on the U.S. taxpayer-funded Neocon wars in Syria and Iraq.

   Now, Trump seems to have flip-flopped into the Neocon camp-- even at the risk of triggering a WWIII conflict with Russia.

[Deleted]

     It's happening again, people.  Wake up...


Public relations and propaganda in framing the Iraq war: a preliminary review
www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036381110300047X


Abstract

Techniques of public relations and propaganda were an essential part of the 2003 war in Iraq. The government framed the issues, story line, and slogans to serve its purposes. Embedding journalists, staging showy briefings, emphasizing visual and electronic media, and making good television out of it were all important to fighting the war.

Propaganda of all shades was evident, and the trend toward deception in the future is likely to continue, since the current administration succeeded to such a large extent with its own electorate. But while it seemed to win the public relations war at home, it probably lost it abroad. All strategies at the White House and Pentagon seem designed for more public relations and propaganda in future wars. The government will have to keep wars short, at least somewhat clean, and to give the impression at least of some transparency, lest the public will to fight withers, as it did in Vietnam.

[Deleted]

Here we go again, folks...  This false flag CIA jingoism pisses me off bigly... 



CIA False Flag Likely in Drone Attack on Russia’s Syrian Bases
www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2018/january/17/cia-false-flag-likely-in-drone-attack-on-russia-s-syrian-bases/


Trump Vows ‘Big Price’ for Syria Attack, Raising Prospect of Another Missile Strike Against Syria

www.nytimes.com/2018/04/08/us/politics/trump-syria-chemical-attack.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news


April 8, 2018

[Deleted]

Jul 23, 2018 12:26:30 GMT -5 DrSchadenfreude said:

     I'm re-posting this old reference to the 2003 Iraq War propaganda machinery in the U.S. media in response to the latest Neocon/Trump propaganda push to start a war with Iran before the 2018 elections.

     Trolls who don't remember history are destined to make all of us repeat it... 

[Deleted]

This Denver Dumbass prison bitch has to smear his hatred and lies all over the forum, and Wimpy Wanky Walt does NOTHING to rein him in.

[Deleted]

      Unbeknownst to most people in America, one of the central characters behind the Iraq War was the Neocon Douglas Feith-- Donald Rumsfeld's #3 man at the Pentagon, behind #2 Paul Wolfowitz.  Feith was eventually accused of falsifying intelligence to promote the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.*

      Feith was involved with Wolfowitz and Richard Perle in developing the "clean break"/Wolfowitz Doctrine in the 1990s, to use the U.S. military to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and to destabilize Israel's other Muslim neighbors-- Syria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Iran.

      Since leaving the Bush-Cheney Pentagon, Douglas Feith has been working on plans to start a U.S. war against Iran.

      Will Trump and the mainstream U.S. media now run with the Neocon's false intelligence about Iran?

*   In February 2007, the Pentagon's inspector general issued a report that concluded that Feith's office "developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al Qaida relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers." This repeated Feith's earlier involvement with Team B as a postgraduate, when alternative intelligence assessments exaggerating threats to the United States turned out to be wrong on nearly every point.

[Deleted]

   This week, elements of the mainstream media (including the NYT) are reprising their 2003 role in promoting the PNAC war agenda in the Middle East.

   It's the old 2003 PNAC "Iraq WMDs" de ja vu all over again-- publishing Bolton's latest falsified "intelligence" about Iran.

   Will the American sheeple get fooled by the Neocons again?

John "Falsified Intelligence" Bolton Blames Iran For Oil Tanker Sabotage Off UAE Coast

oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Bolton-Blames-Iran-For-Oil-Tanker-Sabotage-Off-UAE-Coast.html

May 29, 2019

The attacks on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf earlier this month were caused by “naval mines almost certainly from Iran,” U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton said on Wednesday from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as the tension between the U.S. and Iran continues to escalate.

Earlier this month, Saudi Arabia said that two of its oil tankers were attacked by saboteurs near the UAE, while the UAE said that a total four vessels were attacked off its coast at the port of Fujairah, which is the world’s second-largest bunkering port.

Speaking to reporters in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday, Bolton said, as carried by Reuters:

“I think it is clear these (tanker attacks) were naval mines almost certainly from Iran.”

“There is no doubt in anybody’s mind in Washington who is responsible for this and I think it’s important that the leadership in Iran know that we know,” the U.S. national security advisor said.

A few days ago, the Pentagon accused Iran’s Revolutionary Guard of sabotaging four vessels at the Fujairah port.

“The attack against the shipping in Fujairah, we attribute it to the IRGC,” Vice Adm. Michael Gilday, Director of the Joint Staff, said on a briefing on Iran on Friday.

Iran immediately rejected Bolton’s “absurd claim”, Iranian media report.

“It is not surprising to see Bolton make such a ludicrous claim in a meeting with two members of a team with a long track record of anti-Iran policies,” Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Abbas Mousavi said today, quoted by the Mehr news agency.

Iran is blaming what it calls a ‘B-team’—comprised of Bolton, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan—for plotting anti-Iranian “destructive policies.”

“[T]he strategic patience, high vigilance and full defensive readiness of the Islamic Republic of Iran” will prevent “Bolton and other warmongers and crisis-seekers” “from hatching their sinister plots to cause chaos in the region,” Iran says.

[Deleted]

I'm re-posting these historical facts for Mutt.

Hard to believe that Muttley still denies that the Bush-Cheney administration promoted the 2003 Iraq invasion with falsified "intelligence."

Some guys are very slow learners...