Iraq

Big Lie On Iraq Comes Full Circle

Submitted by Laura Miller on

"Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief (director of communications, in the current parlance), once said that if you are going to lie, you should tell a big lie," Chicago Sun-Times' Andrew Greeley writes. "That may be good advice, but the question remains: What happens when people begin to doubt the big lie? Herr Goebbels never lived to find out. Some members of the Bush administration may be in the process of discovering that, given time, the big lie turns on itself. ... 'War on terror' is a metaphor. It is not an actual war, like the World War or the Vietnamese or Korean wars.

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Main Source: 
Chicago Sun-Times, September 19, 2003
Topics: 
Iraq
Rhetoric
U.S. Government

No Proof Connects Iraq to 9/11, Bush Says (Finally)

Submitted by Laura Miller on

"President Bush said Wednesday that there was no proof tying Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11 attacks, amid mounting criticism that senior administration officials have helped lead Americans to believe that Iraq was behind the plot," the Los Angeles Times' Greg Miller writes. "Bush's statement was the latest in a flurry of remarks this week by top administration officials after Vice President Dick Cheney resurrected a number of contentious allegations about Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda in an appearance on NBC's 'Meet the Press' on Sunday. ...

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Main Source: 
Los Angeles Times, September 18, 2003
Topics: 
Iraq
Rhetoric
U.S. Government

Colin Powell, Secretary of PR, and His Halabja Hypocrisy

Submitted by John Stauber on

US Secretary of State Colin Powell was a military PR man in Vietnam. One of his assignments was to help manage the image crisis created by the massacre of civilians by US troops at My Lai. Now, as the Bush government increasingly uses Saddam Hussein's brutality as its primary rationalization for the war, Powell is revising and spinning history by traveling to Halabja, the site of Saddam's gassing of Iraqi Kurds. Powell dedicated a memorial and declared that the world should have acted sooner against Saddam after the 1988 massacre.

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Main Source: 
Voice of America, September 15, 2003
Topics: 
Iraq
Ethics
Rhetoric

Republicans Highlight 'Progress' In Iraq

Submitted by Laura Miller on

"Determined to change the tone of the national debate over Iraq, the White House and Republicans in Congress launched a tightly coordinated effort last week to begin providing the media with stories of American progress in the still-turbulent country," PR Week's Douglas Quenqua reports.

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Main Source: 
PR Week, September 15, 2003
Topics: 
Iraq
Propaganda
U.S. Government

The Incredible Shrinking Big Impact

Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on

In August, the White House announced what it called a "big impact" plan to overwhelm and silence critics of its failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, with former UNSCOM inspector David Kay assigned to compile a big, impactful report that would answer questions once and for all. According to a Monday report on ABC News, however, a draft version of Kay's report provides no solid evidence that Iraq had such arms when the United States invaded.

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Main Source: 
ABC News, September 15, 2003
Topics: 
Iraq
Propaganda
U.S. Government

The Muzzled Press

Submitted by Laura Miller on

"CNN's top war correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, says that the press muzzled itself during the Iraq war. And, she says CNN 'was intimidated' by the Bush administration and Fox News, which 'put a climate of fear and self-censorship,'" USA Today's Peter Johnson writes. Appearing on CNBC's "Topic A With Tina Brown" with other guests comedian Al Franken and former Pentagon spokeswoman Torie Clarke, Amanpour told Brown that is wasn't a question of being able to do certain stories and not do others. "It's a question of being rigorous. It's really a question of really asking the questions.

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Main Source: 
USA Today, September 14, 2003
Topics: 
Iraq
Journalism

Flooding the Zone

Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on

"Some time in the next two weeks, David Kay, head of the Iraqi Survey Group, is expected to finally release a crucial report on his findings so far in his search for weapons of destruction," writes Greg Mitchell. "Since no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) have been found in Iraq, close observers now report that Kay is likely to drop on the media a massive weapon of his own: hundreds or thousands of pages of summaries and documents purporting to prove that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. ...

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Main Source: 
Editor & Publisher, September 9, 2003
Topics: 
Iraq
Propaganda
U.S. Government

The Post-Modern President

Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on

"Every president deceives. But each has his own style of deceit," writes Joshua Micah Marshall. The Bush administration, he says, specializes in "a particular form of deception: The confidently expressed, but currently undisprovable assertion. ... Many of the administration's policy arguments have amounted to predictions - tax cuts will promote job growth, Saddam is close to having nukes, Iraq can be occupied with a minimum of U.S. manpower - that most experts believed to be wrong, but which couldn't be definitely disproven until events played out in the future."

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Main Source: 
Washington Monthly, September 2003
Topics: 
Iraq
Rhetoric
U.S. Government

Americans Remain Dead Wrong About Saddam and 9/11

Submitted by John Stauber on

"Sixty-nine percent of Americans said they thought it at least likely that [Iraq's Saddam] Hussein was involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, according to the latest Washington Post poll. That impression, which exists despite the fact that the hijackers were mostly Saudi nationals acting for al Qaeda, is broadly shared by Democrats, Republicans and independents. ... The poll's findings are significant because they help to explain why the public continues to support operations in Iraq despite the setbacks and bloodshed there.

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Main Source: 
Washington Post, September 6, 2003
Topics: 
Iraq

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