LikeFatherLikeSon

Click the pics for videos

.

How the Bush family sells us into war. First a story from Rolling Stone on Iraq, then an article on Desert Storm, then synopsis' of The Panama Deception and Operation Saddam: America's Propaganda War

The Man Who Sold the War

"The road to war in Iraq led through many unlikely places. One of them was a chic hotel nestled among the strip bars and brothels that cater to foreigners in the town of Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand.

On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within the sound of the crashing tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to the ring and index fingers of a man sitting pensively in a padded chair. The officer then stretched a black rubber tube, pleated like an accordion, around the man's chest and another across his abdomen. Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the man's brachial artery, on the inside of his upper arm.

Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced black lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a series of questions, he insisted repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam's men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad.

It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.

The fabrication might have ended there, the tale of another political refugee trying to scheme his way to a better life. But just because the story wasn't true didn't mean it couldn't be put to good use. Al-Haideri, in fact, was the product of a clandestine operation -- part espionage, part PR campaign -- that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling the world a war. And the man who had long been in charge of the marketing was a secretive and mysterious creature of the Washington establishment named John Rendon."

How the Public Relations Industry Sold the Gulf War

"On August 2, 1990, Iraqi troops led by dictator Saddam Hussein invaded the oil-producing nation of Kuwait. Like Noriega in Panama, Hussein had been a US ally for nearly a decade. From 1980 to 1988, he had killed about 150,000 Iranians, in addition to at least 13,000 of his own citizens. Despite complaints from international human rights groups, however, the Reagan and Bush
administrations had treated Hussein as a valuable ally in the US confrontation with Iran."

[...]

"Unlike Grenada and Panama, Iraq had a substantial army that
could not be subdued in a mere weekend of fighting. Unlike the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Hussein was too far away from US soil, too rich with oil money, and too experienced in ruling through propaganda and terror to be dislodged through the psychological-warfare techniques of low-intensity conflict. Waging a war to push Iraq's invading army from Kuwait would cost billions of dollars and require massive US military mobilization. The American public was
notoriously reluctant to send its young into foreign battles on behalf of any cause. Selling war in the Middle East to the American people would not be easy. Bush would need to convince Americans that former ally Saddam Hussein now embodied evil, and that the oil fiefdom of Kuwait was a struggling young democracy.

How could the Bush Administration build US support for "liberating" a country so fundamentally opposed to democratic values? How could the war appear noble and necessary rather than a crass grab to save cheap oil?
"If and when a shooting war starts, reporters will begin to
wonder why American soldiers are dying for oil-rich sheiks," warned Hal Steward, a retired army public relations (PR) official. "The US military had better get cracking to come up with a public relations plan that will supply the answer the public can accept."

Steward needn't have worried. A PR plan was already in place, paid for almost entirely by the "oil-rich sheiks" themselves.

US Congressman Jimmy Hayes of Louisiana -- a conservative
Democrat who supported the Gulf War -- later estimated that the government of Kuwait funded as many as 20 PR, law and lobby firms in its campaign to mobilize US opinion and force against Hussein. Participating firms included the Rendon Group, which received a retainer of $100,000 per month for media work, and Neill & Co., which received $50,000 per month for lobbying Congress. Sam Zakhem,
a former US ambassador to the oil-rich gulf state of Bahrain, funneled $7.7 million in advertising and lobbying dollars through two front groups, the "Coalition for Americans at Risk" and the "Freedom Task Force. The Coalition, which began in the 1980s as a front for the contras in Nicaragua, prepared and placed TV and newspaper ads, and kept a stable of fifty speakers available for pro-war rallies and publicity events."

Can't leave out Hill and Knowlton

"Hill & Knowlton (H&K), then the world's largest PR firm,
served as mastermind for the Kuwaiti campaign. It's activities alone would have constituted the largest foreign-funded campaign ever aimed at manipulating American public opinion. By law, the Foreign Agents Registration Act should have exposed this propaganda campaign to the American people, but the Justice Department chose not to enforce it. Nine days after Saddam's army marched into
Kuwait, the Emir's government agreed to fund a contract under which Hill & Knowlton would represent "Citizens for a Free Kuwait" (CFK) a classic PR front group designed to hide the real role of the Kuwaiti government and its collusion with the Bush administration.

Over the next six months, the Kuwaiti government channeled $11.9 million dollars to Citizens for a Free Kuwait, whose only other funding totalled $17,862 from 78 individuals. Virtually all of CFK's budget -- $10.8 million -- went to Hill & Knowlton in the form of fees."

The Panama Deception

"On December 19, 1989, most Americans were glued to their televisions in disbelief as thousands of U.S. troops prepared to attack Panama with the stated purpose of ousting the man the media loved to hate, General Manuel Noriega. By early morning, they were reassured that Operation "Just Cause" had achieved its goal of hitting twenty-seven targets, thus making Panama safe for Americans living in that country as well as those safely at home in front of their televisions. But the media failed to investigate many crucial issues, including the fate of Panamanian citizens and a detailed explanation of the just cause' for which American troops were fighting. These are the questions The Panama Deception sets out to answer, and, in so doing, it provides a provocative, well-documented analysis of U.S. relations with Panama and a devastating critique of the mainstream media and its complicity with the official government line."

I think this is where they make a good point

"As the film makes clear, the U.S. government was not solely responsible for the deception. The mainstream media was shamefully complicit in passing on government press releases as news. Interviews with media analysts Michael Parenti and Mark Hertsgard discuss the total collaboration of the media in this dress rehearsal of restrictions on the press later repeated during the Gulf War. Several cleverly edited sequences mesh the images and voices of Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, and other arbiters of information as they use virtually the same language to describe the invasion and what it means' to the American public."

Operation Saddam: America's Propaganda War

"'In Iraq, the regime of Saddam Hussein is no more. One month ago, that country was a prison to its people, a haven for terrorists, an arsenal of weapons that endangered the world.' In a televised address from the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington DC, on April 15, 2003, George W. Bush was europhic. 'These are good days in the history of freedom.'

Saddam Hussein had been overthrown – the Second Gulf War was over. However the debate about the causes of the war – and thus about the credibility of US President George W. Bush – has only just begun. According to one former high-ranking US secret service agent, 'the threat to America posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was a propaganda lie used to deceive the public.' The Cutting Edge documentary Operation Saddam: America's Propaganda Battle, screening on SBS Television on Tuesday July 29 at 8.30pm, presents the individual stages of the propaganda battle, by which the American and British governments sought to justify the Second Gulf War.

How does one sell a war? This was a question that weighed heavy on the minds of those in the US administration long before the war had even started. Operation Saddam: America's Propaganda Battle takes a look at the marketing of this war – a cocktail of distortion, lies and forgeries – as shown by former secret service agent Ray McGovern, American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh and best-selling author John MacArthur.

MacArthur, for instance, tells of how the amazing image of an Iraqi man climbing the huge statue of Saddam Hussein in central Bagdad at the end of the war and throwing an American flag over the head of the dictator, was actually a carefully staged publicity stunt dreamed up by an advertising agency in the US. 'I think the Rendon group advised the Pentagon right up through the seizure or the knocking down of the statue in the central square in Bagdad … that was a set piece thought of ahead of time for the Bush re-election campaign.'

The documentary also examines the truths, lies and distortions around the assertions that Saddam Hussein was acquiring and building nuclear weapons, and the pretenses behind the Congressional authorization for the decisive new directions in American foreign and defence policy."