How the spooks took over the news

How the spooks took over the news

In his controversial new book, Nick Davies argues that shadowy intelligence agencies are pumping out black propaganda to manipulate public opinion – and that the media simply swallow it wholesale

Monday, 11 February 2008

Onthe morning of 9 February 2004, The New York Times carried an exclusive and
alarming story. The paper's Baghdad correspondent, Dexter Filkins, reported
that US officials had obtained a 17-page letter, believed to have been
written by the notorious terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi to the "inner
circle" of al-Qa'ida's leadership, urging them to accept that the best way
to beat US forces in Iraq was effectively to start a civil war.

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

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