Entrevista de Amy Goodman y Juan González, anfitriones del programa de radio norteamericano "Democracy Now!" realizada el 8 de agosto de 2003 a Sheldon Rampton y John Stauber sobre su nuevo libro titulado "Armas de decepción masiva: El uso de la propaganda en la guerra de Bush contra Iraq". Las citas que aparecen aquí fueron transmitidas por Bernie Dwyer de Radio Habana Cuba el pasado 11 de agosto.
A pesar del hecho de que el libro estuviera mas de dos semanas en la lista de "bestsellers" del portal Amazon.com, ningún medio de prensa masiva norteamericano (con excepción del "San Francisco Chronicle") ha hecho un análisis profundo ni ha ofrecido entrevistas a los escritores. Por el contrario, en el Reino Unido y Australia el libro ha sido bien recibido por los principales periódicos y revistas y los autores han sido entrevistados por la televisión y la radio nacionales.
"Es sorprendente", dijo John Stauber, "el ver cómo este libro incomoda a la prensa masiva norteamericana".
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August 8th, 2003
This interview is from the August 8, 2003, edition of the popular US daily radio show "Democracy Now!" with host Amy Goodman along with Juan González talking to Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber about their new book, "Weapons of Mass Deception: the Use of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq". The excerpts from this interview that appear here were aired by Bernie Dwyer of Radio Havana Cuba on August 11th.
In spite of the fact that the book spent most of its first two weeks on the Amazon.com best-seller list and is fourth on the San Francisco Chronicle's paperback best-seller list, no mainstream U.S. media has done an in-depth review or sought out the offers for interviews. In the United Kingdom and Australia, the book has been well-reviewed by major newspapers and magazines, and the authors interviewed on many syndicated TV and radio programs. Not so the U.S., where major TV and radio networks are ignoring the book, and the San Francisco Chronicle being practically the only major newspaper to have reviewed it. "It is striking," says John Stauber, "to see how uncomfortable this book makes many in the mainstream U.S. media feel." John Stauber is co-author with Sheldon Rampton of "Toxic Sludge is Good for You" as well as "Trust Us, We're Experts."
One of the most interesting things about the book are the specific details of the public relations company hired by the government to run a deliberate, aggressive, and highly successful campaign that sold the Iraqi war to the U.S. public. Amy Goodman begins the interview by asking John Stauber about the latest news of The Rendon Group, a public relations firm with offices in Boston and Washington. Rendon worked for the government of Kuwait in the early 1990's, and the firm made a lot of money by contracting with the C.I.A. to do media work for the Iraqi National Congress, an organization seeking to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
[John Stauber] Well, Sheldon and I very much like talking about The Rendon Group because most people in the United States have never heard of this firm. In fact, The Rendon Group is a very powerful, secretive public relations firm started by John W. Rendon way back in 1991, '92, '93, after the initial Gulf War when they began receiving a great deal of money - especially from the C.I.A. - to create the Iraqi National Congress. Now most people in the U.S. who turn on a news show see Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, and he's treated as if he's the next George Washington of Iraq, and in fact, that's sort of a term that has been promoted to describe him.
The Iraqi National Congress was very much created by the C.I.A. John Rendon actually claims to have come up with the name "Iraqi National Congress," and in our book we do the best job we can - it's a highly secretive organization - of looking at Rendon's fingerprints. One interesting development in the war that was, to my knowledge, completely unreported here in the mainstream U.S. press, was the death of an Australian journalist by the name of Paul Moran, who was killed by a suicide bomber in northern Iraq. He was an Australian Broadcasting Corporation cameraman and TV journalist. At his funeral in Adelaide, Australia, who shows up but John Rendon. And so we learn that Paul Moran the journalist was also Paul Moran the employee of Rendon P.R., working for the Iraqi National Congress, the C.I.A. front group in Iraq. After our book came out with this there's been some good investigative reporting in Australia, looking exactly at the sort of thing Paul Moran the journalist/C.I.A. Public Relations guy did for the Iraqi National Congress, and one thing he did was promote one of these many so-called "defectors" with inside information on the weapons of mass destruction, getting that person into the press. He was the person in the electronic media who pushed it.
[Juan González] You also talk about the P.R. agencies that the government of Saudi Arabia as well as The Carlisle Group felt they needed to also contract immediately after 9/11 to clean up their image. Could you talk a little about that?
[Sheldon Rampton] Sure. Of course, the United States is not the only government that employs public relations firms; and in the immediate aftermath of September 11 attacks - three days afterwards - Burson-Marsteller, one of the biggest public relations firms in the world, was hired by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to conduct what they called "issues counseling and crisis management," which consisted initially of the kingdom publishing advertisements in newspapers expressing their sympathy for the victims and so forth.
[JG] And the crisis presumably was because so many of the hijackers were Saudis...
[SR] Right. Crisis management is a specific P.R. discipline that deals with how you manage a problem or your reputation, so if, for example, your plant's had a toxic spill, or your chief executive officer has been caught engaging in sexual harassment, then you bring in a crisis management team. So their crisis was 9/11 and so that was the first thing they did. But in November of 2001, just a couple of months after the attacks, they also hired another P.R. firm, Qorvis Communications, and they put them on retainer for $200,000 per month to do similar work, reputation management, crisis management. During the first nine months of 2002 alone, they spent more than $20,000,000.
Other P.R. firms went to work for the Saudis. Hill and Knowlton, for example, which is the P.R. firm that did the work for the government of Kuwait in the first war, courted the Saudis. They did a fawning interview in The Arab News, which is a publication owned by the monarchy, in which they basically said, "Gee, who's to blame for September 11? Well, no one is: It's just the world we live in," and were rewarded with contracts in excess of $77,000 a month with various Saudi-owned, state-owned companies such as the oil company Saudi Aramco.
Another P.R. firm, The Gallagher Group, which is headed by a Republican policy analyst, Jamie Gallagher, signed a $300,000, one-year deal early this year to assist Qorvis Communications in its P.R. campaign for the kingdom.
[AG] Did anyone refuse?
[SR] Not for the Saudis, no. Another P.R. firm, called "Attention America," which is run by a guy named Steven Goldstein, was approached by the family of Osama bin Laden for P.R. assistance in the immediate aftermath of September 11. Goldstein is Jewish and pro-Israel, and by trying to hire them, of course, they were doing the same thing that someone who's accused of rape does when they try and hire a female attorney. They wanted to have a Jew on the payroll, basically, and Goldstein turned them down, said he didn't want to work with the bin Ladens; so they went and found another P.R. firm, called Hullin Metz and Company. There's always a P.R. firm available to represent anyone.
[AG] I'm Amy Goodman, here with Juan González as we continue our conversation with Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, authors of "Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq." Juan?
[JG] Many of the American people, obviously, actually still believe that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. Could you talk about what were some of the key elements that you were able to dissect and how the Bush administration got that amazing piece of propaganda into the American consciousness?
[SR] Well, one of the interesting things about that - and it's true of a lot of propaganda - one of the bywords of people who work in P.R. is "never tell a lie." Well, they interpret that instruction very liberally, but they do try to avoid telling outright lies, and you don't find a lot of outright lies that the Bush administration told about al-Queda.
One of the stories that they promoted quite a bit is a story that circulated as a rumor immediately after 9/11 to the effect that one of the hijackers, Mohammed Atta, had met in Prague with an Iraqi diplomat. This is a story that originated with someone in Prague who had seen a picture of Mohammed Atta after 9/11 and thought he looked like someone that he recognized. It turns out that there's no basis for the story other than this one person's rather shaky memory. It also happens that the diplomat in question, this Iraqi diplomat, had some business dealings with a car dealer who bore an interesting resemblance to Mohammed Atta, so maybe that's what he saw.
But in any case, the FBI investigated this rumor extensively. They reviewed thousands of pages of documents, tracked Mohammed Atta's movements with a great deal of detail and found out that he was in the United States throughout the period when this person thought he might have seen him in Prague. Moreover, Vaclav Havel, the president of the Czech Republic, investigated the story personally and reported back to the Bush administration that there was no basis for it. And so the Bush administration certainly knew that there was no truth to this story about Mohammed Atta supposedly having met with an Iraqi official, but they continued to repeat it and insinuate it. So, for example, Paul Wolfowitz gives an interview, and the interviewer asks him, "Well, you've been talking about this story about Mohammed Atta in Prague, but that's been called into question, hasn't it?" and Wolfowitz said, "Well, that gets us into classified areas and we can't go into the details." So every time a specific question is asked, he uses that excuse of classification to avoid answering specifics and insinuates strongly that there's still a basis for it.
[AG] What about the history of public relations when it comes to Iraq and Saddam Hussein and the P.R. campaign that was anti-Communist and pro-Ba'athist?
[JS] Well, let me take the first part of that question. Of course, Saddam Hussein was the beloved ally of the senior Bush and the Reagan administration, right up to the point where he made the mistake of deciding that he could go in and take over the Kuwaiti oil fields. As Sheldon and I wrote in our first book, "Toxic Sludge is Good for You," April Glassby, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, was meeting with Saddam, apparently to discuss how the U.S. administration could do a better job of massaging his image in the U.S. We've heard so much in this campaign to go to war about how Saddam gassed and used chemical and biological weapons against his own citizens, and that's absolutely true - he killed thousands of women, men, and children. The problem is he did that when he was our wondrous ally, and we looked the other way. So part of the P.R. campaign against Saddam was to turn somebody who the senior Bush administration had embraced into an evil dictator.
It wasn't that difficult because he was an evil dictator, but rather than talk about the things that the second Bush administration has talked about--the gassing of his own people--they relied on P.R. firms like Hill and Knowlton to invent this phony baby-killing story that was so successful in getting the first Gulf War going.
[AG] This was the story of Iraqi soldiers going in and pulling babies out of incubators...
[JS] Yes, I often take for granted that people know that story, but the problem is, because it received tremendous coverage, people usually know the phony story as something real. Tom Shales bid on that in the lead-up to war again, in reviewing this HBO documentary about the event, where in his Washington Post preview of the HBO movie, he sort of said as an aside, "Of course, we all remember the baby-killing testimony..." Well, unfortunately, people remember it as real. A 15-year-old girl falsely testified before a rigged Congressional hearing. It looked like a Congressional hearing, it was treated like one, but it wasn't -noone was under oath. And that became the dominant news story in Washington, about how she had seen Iraqi soldiers ripping babies out of incubators, leaving them to die on the cold floor. That was in October 1990, when she was rehearsed in the phony story by the Hill and Knowlton P.R. firm. She turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S....
[AG] But was never identified...
[JS] ...but was never identified until much later. This was really the event that helped Congress decide, "Yes, let's go to war. This man is a brutal, evil, heinous criminal," and of course, he is.
[JG] But propaganda has always been part of government policy. Many governments, especially the United States from World War I through World War II, made use of Hollywood film makers to assist building public opinion. What is particularly different in this, in the current environment, in this particular war, from what has been attempted in the past, the uses of public relations firms or Hollywood film makers?
[SR] Probably the scale of it is more massive, but the other thing is that it's happening at a different point in history. I mean, one of the things that was striking to me right after September 11 was to see a parade of Washington politicians express amazement at the idea that anyone would be angry at the United States or hate the United States, and people like Henry Hyde and George Bush said, "The problem is we just haven't solved our case in the Middle East. We need to bring in this talent from Hollywood and, you know we're the country that invented Madison Avenue; we should be able to sell ourselves to the Arabs."
The fact is, the United States has been doing this all along, and we talk about the history of U.S. propaganda in the Middle East in our book, as back in the 1950's, the central theme of U.S. propaganda in the Middle East was anti-Communism. And so, for example, they went to Walt Disney and asked him if he would make a cartoon, the idea, and the script for the cartoon was actually written by the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, and it was going to feature a menacing bear--a symbol of the Soviet Union--terrifying some primitive cave people.
I guess it was intended to symbolize Arabs or something. And they also worked with the then Ministry of Propaganda in Iraq to promote anti-Communist ideology; and on advice from the Ministry of Propaganda in Iraq, they decided that the best way to spread that message was by alleging links between Communism and Zionism. That's the way it was stated in a memorandum from the embassy at the time, which is now declassified, in which the ministry stated that the feeling of the Director General of Propaganda is that this is the best anti-Communist approach; and so they actually worked with the then-government to spread the idea that support for Zionism is what Communism is all about, but they know that a potential to backfire on the United States, since the United States was involved in supporting Israel, and this would probably also promote anti-U.S. sentiment in the region, and in fact, anti-Communist students spread the pan-Arab ideology of the Ba'ath party to the military, which then became the basis for the Ba'ath party rise to power and the rise to power of Saddam Hussein; so there's been a long history of propaganda by the United States in the region.
But when I say it's a different moment in history now, we're now at a moment in history when we're facing the backlash, the consequences of our earlier propaganda; and in a sense, we've already lost the propaganda war for hearts and minds in the Middle East in a way that we hadn't lost it previously. At the beginning of the campaign by the United States to sell this better image of the United States right after September 11, one of the editors of an Arab-American newspaper commented that, at this point, the United States could have the prophet Mohammed doing public relations for them and it wouldn't help.
[AG] Victoria Clark and Charlotte Beers: let's talk about public relations executives who then become a part of the U.S. government and the Pentagon and the State Department.
[JS] Well, Amy, let me mention Victoria Clark because I was talking earlier about the role of the Hill and Knowlton firm in selling the first Gulf War and in concocting this deception about baby-killing.
Victoria Clark came out of the Hill and Knowlton firm. To my knowledge, she didn't work on that particular campaign, but she ran their Washington office, and this is one of the most powerful public relations lobby firms in the world. She's credited as Undersecretary of Defense for Public Affairs with inventing and promoting this brilliant idea of embedding journalists with the troops. Now, that sounds like something that's really going to help the media cover the war, but as we know, looking back on the war coverage, it worked just the way she thought it would. The media really identified closely with the war campaign to the point where many of these reports, the journalists were sort of fumbling over words, talking about "we are now lobbing shells on..." You've reported extensively on the problem with the embedded.
What's interesting right now, I think, with Victoria Clark is: where is she now? You know, as we report in "Weapons of Mass Deception," this whole propaganda campaign is falling apart.
Apparently, there are no weapons of mass destruction as they were identified by this administration. The links between al-Queda and Saddam are nonexistent. Saddam was not behind the attacks on September 11. These were the reasons why the American people supported this war.
These were the lies and deceptions and falsehoods that people like Victoria Clark and the rest in the administration helped spread, that the media has repeated over and over and over, and that's why the American people are so confused. So now it's time for the chickens to come home to roost, and one chicken that's flown the coop is Victoria Clark. She's gone: She resigned in June. Ari Fleischer, gee, he decided this is a good time to leave government also: He's off to the private sector. And Tony Blair's top flak, Alistair Campbell, same thing: He's about to leave. And one thing Sheldon and I know from covering propaganda campaigns for the last 10 years is when the public relations flaks in charge start to jump ship, the entire propaganda campaign begins to collapse.
[AG] Charlotte Beers?
[JS] Well, Charlotte Beers is an advertising executive who was brought in right after September 11, and her mission was specifically to promote a better image of the United States in the Arab and Muslim world. Beers was known as the "The Queen of Madison Avenue": She'd headed two major ad agencies before going to work for the government in this campaign, too. And she was known as a specialist in what they call "brand management." "Branding" is this sort of quasi-alchemical process of creating an emotional bond between people and a product. One of the things that she represented, for example, was Uncle Ben's rice. You know, if you look at Uncle Ben's rice, on every package you'll see a picture of this amiable-looking black man. Well, there is no actual Uncle Ben who has ever been affiliated with the company, so what they want to do is create some kind of an emotional bond with you, like, and a lot of companies do that: Betty Crocker and so forth.
That was her specialty, so her approach to branding America was to try to do a similar thing. She tried to bring in celebrity athletes with a Muslim connection, like Mohammed Ali, too, and she ran these very fuzzy advertisements as part of what they called "a shared values campaign": They would, for example, show a smiling Arab or Muslim-American school teacher, you know, talking about how wonderful her life was in the United States and how tolerant everyone was of Islam in the United States. They printed these pretty pictures of mosques in America and turned them into posters, and so that the message they tried to sell us with is the idea that the United States is tolerant of Islam here at home.
Well, the problem with that is that they weren't even listening to what people were actually concerned with in the Arab and Muslim world. People in that part of the world are aware that there's some religious tolerance here, and they approve of that. What they're upset about is U.S. support for Israel and our support for repressive and autocratic regimes like the regime of Saudi Arabia.
And so her campaign, like a lot of propaganda campaigns, suffered from the problem of talking and not listening, and failed miserably. By the time she resigned, about a year after taking the job, the United States' reputation in the Arab and Muslim world had plummeted dramatically: In Kuwait, only 28% of people polled said they had a favorable opinion of the United States; and in Saudi Arabia, it was 18%.
[AG] Tell us about the reception of your book, the difference between those that are trying to buy it and those that will not cover it.
[JS] This has been an interesting book. A major publisher contacted us and said, "Can you write a book in six weeks on the war? We want to get it out there so it can inform the debate." The book has been incredibly reviewed in Australia and Britain, where it's come out. It got a great review in the San Francisco Chronicle. Here were are in New York City, the media capital of the United States, and our publisher, Penguin, of course, has been flogging the book incredibly, trying to get the media interested in telling the story, but, you know, we're forced to do the best news show in the United States, "Democracy Now!" but we can't get on sort of second-tier shows like "The Today Show" and those others that people might have heard of.
The media sold this war. There wouldn't have been a war had not the media taken these insinuations, passed them on as fact, confused the American people; and so I guess to expect the major media that did that to have on couple of guys who have documented the propaganda campaign might be asking too much.
(Thanks to Yolanda Fisher, who sent us the program and Michael Semon, Radio Havana Cuba listener, who transcribed the interview).