Astonishing Tales?
Disinformation has always been a primary tool of foreign policy
By Mick Farren
"If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination."
-Thomas de Quincey
am constantly surprised by all the surprise. Each time our president - or one of his crew - is caught with his hand in the ethical cookie jar, Democrats, liberals, and large sections of the media express stunned amazement: How could it be? How could they do such a thing? A typical furor arose over the recent admissions that not only was the U.S. military planting stories in the Iraqi press, but the Pentagon had hired the Washington, D.C.-based Lincoln Alliance Corporation, a "business intelligence company" with connections to Ahmed Chalabi, to handle this propaganda offensive and other "psychological operations to improve foreign public opinion about the United States, particularly the military," for reported fees of up to $300 million over five years.
Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) was one of the first to issue a stunned, widely quoted press release. "From Armstrong Williams to fake TV news, we know this White House has tried multiple times to buy the news at home. Now, we need to find out if they've exported this practice to the Middle East."
On its website, Lincoln is described as "bringing a unique combination of expertise in collecting and exploiting information; structuring transactions; and mitigating risks through due diligence and legal strategies." The corporate doublespeak may be mind-boggling in its obfuscation, and the price tag unbelievably excessive for a nation that's going broke, but it's totally absurd for a mass media that's been spun like a top by Karl Rove since the beginning of the decade to feign astonishment at our government indulging in covert propaganda. The CIA, ever since there was a CIA, has infiltrated both domestic and overseas press. Disinformation has always been a primary tool of foreign policy, and the only real difference today is that, under Bush, instead of being handled by the usual spooks in Langley, it's now contracted out to weird and unsupervised private consultancy firms, which might easily be owned by someone's inept crony, brother-in-law, or fraternity buddy.
The whole business of a free press in post-invasion Iraq has been an entirely bizarre chapter in the catalog of Mesopotamian disaster. In the brief honeymoon, right after the "Mission Accomplished" sign was hung out on May 2, 2003, more than 100 newspapers and magazines sprang up in Iraq. Back home, the TV news proudly ran footage of Baghdad newsstands as a sign of the new freedom flourishing in the wake of Shock & Awe. By early July, however, the Iraqi free press was becoming too rambunctious. L. Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority started closing down newspapers, most notably the extremist al-Mustaqilla (The Independent), and later Muqtada Sadr's Al Hawza, for supposedly inciting readers to violence. The protests over the closures - especially those in the hotbed slums of Baghdad's Sadr City - were among the first steps that led to the general insurrection, and the deepening of the quagmire.
But even without this background, astonishment at anything the Bush White House might do is still hard to believe. The quote from Thomas de Quincey at the top of this column says it all. De Quincey may have enjoyed his opium, but he had a very precise perception of the banality of corruption and would have immediately grasped how a president of the United States - after invading a sovereign nation, bombing its capital, killing its citizens, and torturing prisoners - might sink to messing with the local press. Indeed, de Quincey would have instantly recognized the clear pattern of moral arrogance in the antics of the Bush Administration, and for us to view it as anything but Washington business as usual exhibits, to put it delicately, a disturbing naïveté.
Published: 12/15/2005
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