The letter argued that al-Qa'ida, which is a Sunni network, should attack the Shia population of Iraq: "It is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and us. If we succeed in dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis."

Later that day, at a regular US press briefing in Baghdad, US General Mark Kimmitt dealt with a string of questions about The New York Times report: "We believe the report and the document is credible, and we take the report seriously... It is clearly a plan on the part of outsiders to come in to this country and spark civil war, create sectarian violence, try to expose fissures in this society." The story went on to news agency wires and, within 24 hours, it was running around the world.

There is very good reason to believe that that letter was a fake – and a significant one because there is equally good reason to believe that it was one product among many from a new machinery of propaganda which has been created by the United States and its allies since the terrorist attacks of September 2001.

For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it.

The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news. I've spent the last two years researching a book about falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media.

The "Zarqawi letter" which made it on to the front page of The New York Times in February 2004 was one of a sequence of highly suspect documents which were said to have been written either by or to Zarqawi and which were fed into news media.

This material is being generated, in part, by intelligence agencies who continue to work without effective oversight; and also by a new and essentially benign structure of "strategic communications" which was originally designed by doves in the Pentagon and Nato who wanted to use subtle and non-violent tactics to deal with Islamist terrorism but whose efforts are poorly regulated and badly supervised with the result that some of its practitioners are breaking loose and engaging in the black arts of propaganda.

Like the new propaganda machine as a whole, the Zarqawi story was born in the high tension after the attacks of September 2001. At that time, he was a painful thorn in the side of the Jordanian authorities, an Islamist radical who was determined to overthrow the royal family. But he was nothing to do with al-Q'aida. Indeed, he had specifically rejected attempts by Bin Laden to recruit him, because he was not interested in targeting the West.

Nevertheless, when US intelligence battered on the doors of allied governments in search of information about al-Q'aida, the Jordanian authorities – anxious to please the Americans and perhaps keen to make life more difficult for their native enemy – threw up his name along with other suspects. Soon he started to show up as a minor figure in US news stories – stories which were factually weak, often contradictory and already using the Jordanians as a tool of political convenience.

Then, on 7 October 2002, for the first time, somebody referred to him on the record. In a nationally televised speech in Cincinnati, President George Bush spoke of "high-level contacts" between al-Q'aida and Iraq and said: "Some al-Q'aida leaders who fled Afghanistan, went to Iraq. These include one very senior al-Q'aida leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks."

This coincided with a crucial vote in Congress in which the president was seeking authority to use military force against Iraq. Bush never named the man he was referring to but, as the Los Angeles Times among many others soon reported: "In a speech [on] Monday, Bush referred to a senior member of al-Q'aida who received medical treatment in Iraq. US officials said yesterday that was Abu al Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian, who lost a leg during the US war in Afghanistan."

Even now, Zarqawi was a footnote, not a headline, but the flow of stories about him finally broke through and flooded the global media on 5 February 2003, when the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, addressed the UN Security Council, arguing that Iraq must be invaded: first, to stop its development of weapons of mass destruction; and second, to break its ties with al-Q'aida.

Powell claimed that "Iraq today harbours a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al Zarqawi"; that Zarqawi's base in Iraq was a camp for "poison and explosive training"; that he was "an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Q'aida lieutenants"; that he "fought in the Afghan war more than a decade ago"; that "Zarqawi and his network have plotted terrorist actions against countries, including France, Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany and Russia".

Courtesy of post-war Senate intelligence inquiries; evidence disclosed in several European trials; and the courageous work of a handful of journalists who broke away from the pack, we now know that every single one of those statements was entirely false. But that didn't matter: it was a big story. News organisations sucked it in and regurgitated it for their trusting consumers.

So, who exactly is producing fiction for the media? Who wrote the Zarqawi letters? Who created the fantasy story about Osama bin Laden using a network of subterranean bases in Afghanistan, complete with offices, dormitories, arms depots, electricity and ventilation systems? Who fed the media with tales of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, suffering brain seizures and sitting in stationery cars turning the wheel and making a noise like an engine? Who came up with the idea that Iranian ayatollahs have been encouraging sex with animals and girls of only nine?

Some of this comes from freelance political agitators. It was an Iranian opposition group, for example, which was behind the story that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was jailing people for texting each other jokes about him. And notoriously it was Iraqi exiles who supplied the global media with a dirty stream of disinformation about Saddam Hussein.

But clearly a great deal of this carries the fingerprints of officialdom. The Pentagon has now designated "information operations" as its fifth "core competency" alongside land, sea, air and special forces. Since October 2006, every brigade, division and corps in the US military has had its own "psyop" element producing output for local media. This military activity is linked to the State Department's campaign of "public diplomacy" which includes funding radio stations and news websites. In Britain, the Directorate of Targeting and Information Operations in the Ministry of Defence works with specialists from 15 UK psyops, based at the Defence Intelligence and Security School at Chicksands in Bedfordshire.

In the case of British intelligence, you can see this combination of reckless propaganda and failure of oversight at work in the case of Operation Mass Appeal. This was exposed by the former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter, who describes in his book, Iraq Confidential, how, in London in June 1998, he was introduced to two "black propaganda specialists" from MI6 who wanted him to give them material which they could spread through "editors and writers who work with us from time to time".

In interviews for Flat Earth News, Ritter described how, between December 1997 and June 1998, he had three meetings with MI6 officers who wanted him to give them raw intelligence reports on Iraqi arms procurement. The significance of these reports was that they were all unconfirmed and so none was being used in assessing Iraqi activity. Yet MI6 was happy to use them to plant stories in the media. Beyond that, there is worrying evidence that, when Lord Butler asked MI6 about this during his inquiry into intelligence around the invasion of Iraq, MI6 lied to him.

Ultimately, the US has run into trouble with its propaganda in Iraq, particularly with its use of the Zarqawi story. In May 2006, when yet another of his alleged letters was handed out to reporters in the Combined Press Information Centre in Baghdad, finally it was widely regarded as suspect and ignored by just about every single media outlet.

Arguably, even worse than this loss of credibility, according to British defence sources, the US campaign on Zarqawi eventually succeeded in creating its own reality. By elevating him from his position as one fighter among a mass of conflicting groups, the US campaign to "villainise Zarqawi" glamorised him with its enemy audience, making it easier for him to raise funds, to attract "unsponsored" foreign fighters, to make alliances with Sunni Iraqis and to score huge impact with his own media manoeuvres. Finally, in December 2004, Osama bin Laden gave in to this constructed reality, buried his differences with the Jordanian and declared him the leader of al-Q'aida's resistance to the American occupation.

JONATHAN GRUN, EDITOR,PRESS ASSOCIATION

The Press Association's wire service has a long-standing reputation for its integrity and fast, fair and accurate reporting. Much of his criticism is anonymously sourced – which is something we strive to avoid.

ANDREW MARR, BROADCASTER AND JOURNALIST

Thanks to the internet there's a constant source of news stories pumping into newsrooms. Stories are simply rewritten. It produces an airless cycle of information. Papers too rarely have news stories of their own.

IAN MONK, PR

The media has ceded a lot of the power of setting the agenda; the definition of news has broadened to include celebrities and new products (the iPhone is a big story). But I don't join in the hand-wringing or say it's desperate that people outside newspapers have got a say.

JOHN KAMPFNER, EDITOR, NEW STATESMAN

Davies is right to point to the lack of investigative rigour: the primary purpose of journalism is to rattle cages. I was always struck at the extent to which political journalists yearned to be spoon fed. Having said that, I think he uses too broad a brush.

DOMINIC LAWSON, FORMER EDITOR SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

I'm not saying this is a golden age, but there's a strong investigative drive in the British press. A lot of papers put a strong value on such stories. I suspect we're about the most invigilated establishment in Europe.

CHRIS BLACKHURST, CITY EDITOR, EVENING STANDARD

I'm disappointed that a book which has as its premise the dictation of the news agenda by PRs should contain in it an anonymous quote from a PR criticising theStandard's coverage of the Natwest Three.

HEATHER BROOKE, JOURNALIST

It's not entirely true what Davies is saying. In the past, we just got scrutiny from newspapers and now think tanks publish results of investigations. But there's an assumption that the public aren't interested in government, just Amy Winehouse.

FRANCIS WHEEN, JOURNALIST/ AUTHOR

Davies is spot on. It's reasonable that newspapers carry PA accounts of court hearings, but he's right that there's more "churn" now. Reporters don't get out of the office the way they did once – partly a reflection of reduced budgets.



This is an edited extract from "Flat Earth News: an award-winning reporter exposes falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media", published by Chatto & Windus, price £17.99. To order this title for the special price of £16, including postage and packaging, call Independent Books Direct: 08700 798 897

Search Query: Independent.co.uk The Web Go

See:

http://la.indymedia.org/news/2007/05/198569_comment.php

Quicksilver Times: a study in the infiltration and manipulation of alternative media

by history buff Wednesday, May. 09, 2007 at 5:42 AM

Some things change, some don't.

It is inconceivable that Indymedia has not been infiltrated, not just by freelance, self-serving opportunists, and amoral, social climbing careerists, but by paid agents of a variety of various governments' intelligence services. Infiltration of alternative media is nothing new. Au contrair. By now, most modern activists have an at least passing acquaintance with the FBI's Sixties era dirty tricks campaign against the anti-war and civil rights movements, called COINTELPRO. Less well known is the CIA's Operation MHCHAOS. Since it was focused on domestic targets, it was technically illegal, and as such, was heavily covered up. It features prominently in Angus Mackenzie's Secrets: The CIA's War At Home, the definitive study of the CIA's resistance to the Freedom of Information Act, and a must read for any activist who wants to stay out of trouble and still be effective. IMCistas can learn much that is useful today from the history of how alternative media was infiltrated and manipulated back in the day. So let's examine one such case, that of the Quicksilver Times. As you read the following passage from Mackenzie's book, keep in mind how much more sophisticated their techniques must be, now that they have had four decades to refine them:

(snip)

* * * * *

Continued at:

http://la.indymedia.org/news/2007/05/198569_comment.php

Speech at the conference “The First Casualty? War, Truth and the Media Today”, London School of Economics, November 17, 2007. Nick Davies is an award-winning investigative reporter who writes regularly for the Guardian.

I’m not an expert on Iran or Iraq. I think I’m here partly because I’ve been a hack, a reporter, not just a journalist but a guy running around with a notebook and a pen, for an extraordinarily, ridiculously long time, but also because in the last couple of years I’ve decided to do something rather weird which is to interrogate my colleagues, which has turned into a book to be published next year called Flat Earth News.

The reason it has that title is that for hundreds of years everyone knew the Earth was flat. Indeed it was a heresy to challenge that statement. Eventually someone, Galileo or Copernicus, bothered to check and discovered they were wrong. But if you look at the way the mass media functions today you’ll see we are riddled with “flat earth” statements.

The most notorious, deadly one of those, or collection of those, was everything we were told in the build up to the invasion of Iraq. It was that in particular which made me want to do this. What I want to try to convey is that we can’t understand what went wrong with the media in the build-up to Iraq unless we understand that what went wrong is part of a much bigger picture in which the media now routinely, consistently convey falsehood, distortion and propaganda. Although this has always happened to some extent, I want to argue that this is now happening on a far greater and destructive scale than it has done previously. Speakers in an earlier session talked about systemic weakness, and that’s what I want to try to explain to you – why we are delivering so much flat earth news.

Remember the Millennium bug story? That’s a classic piece of flat earth news. The global media just consuming falsehood and distortion, pumping out this stuff. It’s wonderful, to look back on the cuttings – utterly unreliable. Most of the scandal surrounding Bill Clinton was, to use the technical term, bollocks. Just pushed out on this huge scale.

And there’s flat earth policy. I’ve done loads of work over the years on criminal justice, drugs policy, education, digging deep down into government policy, looking at the factual foundations on which this policy is built, the evidence. And what do you find? Nothing. Just a black hole of populist misconception and self-serving politics. It’s terrifying. Routine, small stories flowing through the media. The scale of it is huge.

If you say that to people outside the media on the whole they’ll rapidly they’ll sign up to the idea that you can’t believe everything you read, but what worries me is that if you ask them why you tend to get flat earth stories back about the media itself. So for example there’s been quite a bit of talk today about proprietor interference. The likes of Rupert Murdoch do interfere, it’s part of the picture, it’s disgusting and immoral that they do, perhaps even more disgusting and immoral that it’s so easy for them to do so. You’ll hear people talking about corporate advertising influencing the content of the media. Maybe it happens. I’ve really tried to find evidence of them doing that successfully. You find it in local papers, you find it in specialist magazines like fashion mags, but in the national media that ain’t where it is.

Sami Ramadani was really interesting about ideology earlier today. But if you take proprietor influence, advertising and ideology and say those are factors that perniciously influence the media and then ask how much of the total picture are they responsible for I want to argue that it’s 5 or 10 per cent. That isn’t where the problem is. There’s a much, much bigger problem at work here.

Let me try to explain. I raised a lot of money from the Rowntree Foundation and gave it to some academics at Cardiff University. One of the things I got them to do was to go back through the annual reports of every Fleet Street company going back to 1985. 1985 is an important year because in January 1986 Rupert Murdoch moved his newspapers into Wapping and broke the print unions. He broke the resistance, such resistance as there was in Fleet Street, to the logic of commercialism, to what those big corporations which had taken all those newspapers over wanted to do.

The academics did two things. Year by year they looked at what happened to the editorial staffing levels of those Fleet Street papers over the next 20 years. The second thing they did was they measured the space which those editorial staff were filling, how many column inches of news. You crunch all those numbers for all these companies and you come up with something that is really important – essentially, your average Fleet Street reporter now is filling three times as much space as he or she was 20 years ago. Turn that round, look at it from the reporter’s point of view: we only have one third of the time to do our job. That’s terribly important.

If you take time away from some processes, like if you’re manufacturing cars and you take time out so you do it quicker you can argue that this improves the process, it makes it cheaper so you can sell more and put more money back into production. But if you take time away from reporters you take away our most important working asset. We cannot do our jobs properly if they won’t give us the time to do it. It’s as simple as that. We’ve been caught in this pincer movement where our staffing levels have been cut, our output has been increased – all the newspapers have extra supplements, you have 24-hour broadcasting – the whole nature of being a reporter and the back-up journalists involved has changed: instead of being active news gatherers we’ve become passive processors. Most reporters nowadays don’t have contacts, we don’t go out and find stories, we don’t check facts.

We did a huge analysis with these Cardiff researchers of the extent to which you can look at factual statements in Fleet Street stories and find evidence of whether or not they’ve been checked. The answer was that there is evidence in 12 per cent of those statements. 12 per cent. It’s pathetic. But that’s the reality. It’s not because the journalists are dishonest. It’s not because they’re being told to do so by advertisers or Rupert Murdoch. It’s because we’re not allowed to do our job. I call this “churnalism”. That’s the first part of the picture.

Nevertheless we’ve got to fill all these supplements, all these 24 hours of broadcasting. Where are we going to get our material from? While we’ve been losing our jobs, somebody else has been getting more and more jobs. Which is the PR industry. There was an invisible moment at some point in the last decade when the number of PR people in this country finally exceeded the number of journalists.

When we’re talking about PR, first it’s the whole magical world of Alastair Campbell in central government, which has flowed down into every local authority in the country, and the police and the health service, every limb of the state now has press officers working for it. Even when I started, 30-odd years ago, it wasn’t like that. When I started on local papers, if you wanted to write a story about a hospital you phoned the hospital you talked to the hospital manager or a doctor. Now you deal with a PR. Across the public sector – and across the private sector. All corporations now defend themselves. And charities and even terrorist groups! Everybody has PR people.

Whereas you should have a system where journalists, working honestly and independently, make what used to be called news judgments and say this story is important, this angle needs to be expressed, this research needs to be done, instead now we sit there passively and those decisions are made by Alastair Campbell and the whole magic world of PR and the public and private and the charity sector and the terrorist groups. They write the press releases and we bung ‘em in.

And it isn’t just about press releases. It’s about deeply manipulative behaviour. So for example, PR companies work very assiduously to set up front groups. These are phony grass-roots groups. There are so many phony grass-roots groups in the US that they have a nice little term for them, they call them Astroturf, because their not real grass.

A classic example of an Astroturf group is the Iraqi National Congress, the INC. The INC didn’t just emerge out of nowhere, it was invented and created by a man called John Rendon, a PR guy who used to work for the Democrats, he ran Jimmy Carter’s PR campaign. And since the American invasion of Panama in 1987 has been working on contract for American intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, running PR campaigns to change the way we think and feel about the world. And it’s very easy. Once you’ve reduced journalists to churnalism, all they have to do is feed us stories. So John Rendon says okay, we’re going to change the way the world looks at Iraq, I need a story, I’ve got a huge budget from the State Department, I’ll create the INC, I’ll hire Ahmed Chalabi and all these other guys, we’ll hold conferences in Vienna and London, we’ll invite the hacks, the hacks will write the story, we get them to put it across. It’s easy.

While PR has become so huge and so sophisticated and so successful in effectively writing our stories for us and doing our work for us, alongside that, almost unnoticed since September 11, 2001, there has been a significant increase in old-fashioned propaganda activities. PR on the whole doesn’t deal in fiction. Alastair Campbell and his ilk will lie to you if you put them in a corner, but they don’t really want to lie. Really what it’s about is making our judgments for us, picking which story, which angle, which quote, but often it’s in the realm of truth. Propaganda is about fiction.

There’s always been a threat of propaganda, for years and years going back to Elizabethan times, certainly it was active during the Cold War. That’s got much bigger and institutionalised. The problem with propaganda is that it doesn’t tell the truth about itself. The expression it uses is “strategic communication”, so you find that military, foreign affairs and intelligence agencies, particularly in the United States but also in Britain, France and all the NATO countries, are grouped together in order to manipulate us vulnerable hacks into running stories that are fiction.

There are marvellous examples of it. You can see them running on Iran now. I love the Zarqawi story. Remember Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq? Huge chunks of the Zarqawi story were produced by this strategic communications machine. Absolute bollocks, to use that technical term again. Remember when he first surfaced Zarqawi only had one leg? Then later on when he was on video cutting people’s heads off miraculously he had sprouted a second one. They’d lost their own story line!

If you’re trying to understand what needs to be done to get the media to tell the truth, it’s not just about the traditional explanations about advertising, owners and ideology. They are there, I’m not denying that, and they are pernicious and wrong. But it’s to do with the structural weakness of our profession. Our jobs are being taken away, our output has been increased, we are now almost infinitely vulnerable to being manipulated – and so we are. And that’s why we are seeing the same thing happening about Iran as you earlier saw with Iraq.

In this book that I have written I did a chapter on the Observer. It’s fascinating and scary. It’ was a model of manipulation of a newspaper in the build-up to Iraq where all of this was at work. The PR people, particular from Downing Street, Alastair Campbell’s people working on Kamal Ahmed, the political editor. He resigned a few weeks ago because of the book, he doesn’t want to tell the truth about it. The intelligence agencies producing the anthrax story were working through David Rose. Very interesting. David Rose is actually a very good, experienced reporter, he was completely flipped over on his head, writing absolute crap because he was being manipulated by MI6 and the CIA. And I’ve traced it all. That’s the propaganda element. It’s just scary.

The impact of that was huge, because that’s the paper that’s read by backbench Labour MPs who had to vote in the House of Commons on the Blair resolution. It really mattered. It’s the sickening ease with which it now happens.

If you want to understand what’s going wrong it’s fascinatingly complex.
The internal procedural workings, the operational pressures that incline us towards more falsehood and distortion – it really is interesting how you look at it and find how rotten it is at its core.

The other thing that concerns this meeting is what we can do to improve it. I’m very pessimistic. I think we’ve lost it, I’m afraid we’ve lost the idea of the mass media are anything like a reliable source of information. In an imaginary world I’d like the media to be put through the same sort of regulation as foodstuffs, so that you have to label the content of a newspaper, so you would need some institution to be funded and set up to test the extent to which a particular media outlet produces falsehood and distortion. So the Guardian would have to run its running average – over say the preceding six months, for example, and say, 56 per cent of this newspaper’s output turned out to be not true.

The trouble is that this is an imaginary world. There is no way that I can see that there is anywhere in this country the political power to engineer that kind of change. The question is whether that’s politically possible. I think everyone who has been critical of the Press Complaints Commission is entirely right. I did a huge analysis of their last 10 years of operation and it’s embarrassing to be told as a professional that this organisation is responsible for holding you to standards. It does absolutely nothing. It is an outrage.

don't forget Project MOCKINGBIRD since the early 50's when the CIA took over the content control of the major media outlets.

don't forget Project MOCKINGBIRD since the early 50's when the CIA took over the content control of the major media outlets.