Propaganda

Former navy public affairs office Lt. John Oliveira told Democracy Now! that he didn't realize how stressful his military oath would be for him when aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt last year. "I had to get on television every day to talk to the American people and the international public and continue to sell them on the administration's policies, which I did not believe in," Oliveira said. He oversaw embedded journalists on the aircraft carrier, which at the time was in the eastern Mediterranean. "I'm [now] doing what I can to support our troops.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) has released a report and database that identifies 237 specific misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq uttered by the five Administration officials most responsible for providing public information and shaping public opinion on Iraq: President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.

"We have won without lies," chanted the crowd outside the Madrid headquarters of Spain's socialist party, PSOE, which swept to victory in the country's March 14 elections. "Spin was indeed at the centre of PSOE's extraordinary, unexpected triumph," notes reporter David Mathieson. "There is no word in Spanish for 'spin,' but there has been no absence of the practice in Madrid over the last year - and especially in the past few days. The spectacular gains made by PSOE ...

"When David Kay, the CIA's former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, announced earlier this year that his team had found no stockpiled weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he touched off an explosion of blame, finger-pointing, denial, and hasty 'clarifications' about the extent and accuracy of the intelligence that the Bush Administration used to buttress its decision to invade Iraq. Kay's startling conclusion, though, came as no surprise to many analysts in the U.S.