UPDATED - ColdType

statesman overnight.
9/11 provided the opening for rolling out a prepackaged
and orchestrated strategy of deception
and demagoguery, which would be amplified on
the airwaves, endlessly recycled and repeated.
When the decision to go to war was made, in
early September 2002, the media offensive
began. The country was prepared for the
“inevitable” in a rollout that resembled a product
launch. Speech after speech hit the same
themes positioning a strategy of aggression into
a posture of defense and victimization. The
alarmist note was enunciated by the President in
Cincinatti on Oct. 7, 2002, “The Iraqi dictator
must not be permitted to threaten America and
the world with horrible poisons and diseases and
gases and atomic weapons.”
Was America and the world at large ever so
threatened? Were there horrible poisons, and
diseases and gases and atomic weapons just
waiting to be deployed? Were there other
weapons of mass destruction being hidden for
later use? Was there a link between Saddam
Hussein’s secular regime and the 9/11 Islamic
jihad junkies presumably following orders from
Osama bin Laden?
GOVERNMENT MEDIA MANAGEMENT
AS preparations for a war with Iraq moved up on
the Administration’s agenda, plans were made to
sell the story. Journalists were easy prey for
media savvy ideologues in Washington who had
perfected a strategy of perception management,
and knew how to play the media as an orchestra
conductor directs different instruments.
The Administration understood how to get its
message out and did so relentlessly. Corporate
WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?
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PR techniques were implanted early on with the
Iraq war “rolled out’ like a product with a multitiered
campaign to sell the policy to the public
through the media. Sheldon Rampton and John
Staunber of PR Watch tell this story in detail in a
new book on “the uses of propaganda in Bush’s
War on Iraq.” Like this one, it is about weapons
of mass deception; only their emphasis is on the
PR campaign and media management techniques
used by the Administration and the Pentagon
through a network of PR firms, think
tanks, lobbying groups, disinformation specialists
military operators and international marketing
efforts. Among their findings:
“ ● Top Bush officials advocated the invasion of
Iraq even before he took office, but waited until
September 2002 to inform the public, through
what the White House termed a “product
launch.”
“ ● White House officials used repetition and
misinformation – the “big lie” tactic – to create
the false impression that Iraq was behind the
September 11th terrorist attacks . . .
“ ● Forged documents were used to “prove”
that Iraq possessed huge stockpiles of banned
weapons.
“ ● A secretive PR firm working for the Pentagon
helped create the Iraqi National Congress
(INC), which became one of the driving forces
behind the decision to go to war.”
From a war fighting perspective, media is now
viewed as a target for IO – Information Operations
– a key component of what military people
call Psy-ops. “Information is the currency of victory,”
says one military manual. Winning the
media war is as important as winning on the
battlefield.
And, hence, the deployment of a well-trained