The disinformation campaign
Western media follow a depressingly familiar formula when it comes to
the preparation of a nation for conflict
Phillip Knightley
Thursday October 4, 2001
The Guardian
The way wars are reported in the western media follows a depressingly
predictable pattern: stage one, the crisis; stage two, the demonisation
of the enemy's leader; stage three, the demonisation of the enemy as
individuals; and stage four, atrocities. At the moment we are at stages
two and three: efforts to show that not only Osama bin Laden and the
Taliban are fanatical and cruel but that most Afghans - even many
Muslims - are as well. We are already through stage one, the reporting
of a crisis which negotiations appear unable to resolve. Politicians,
while calling for diplomacy, warn of military retaliation. The media
reports this as "We're on the brink of war", or "War is
inevitable".
News coverage concentrates on the build up of military force, and
prominent columnists and newspaper editorials urge war. But there are
usually sizable minorities of citizens concerned that all avenues for
peace have not been fully explored and although the mainstream media
ignores or plays down their protests, these have to be dampened down
unless they gain strength.
We now enter stage two of the pattern - the demonisation of the
enemy's leader. Comparing the leader with Hitler is a good start because
of the instant images that Hitler's name provokes. So when George Bush
Sr likened Iraq's takeover of Kuwait with the Nazi blitzkrieg in Europe
in the 1930s, the media quickly took up the theme. Saddam Hussein was
painted as a second Hitler, hated by his own people and despised in the
Arab world. Equally, in the Kosovo conflict, the Serbs were portrayed as
Nazi thugs intent on genocide and words like "Auschwitz-style
furnaces" and "Holocaust" were used.
The crudest approach is to suggest that the leader is insane. Saddam
Hussein was "a deranged psychopath", Milosevic was mad, and
the Spectator recently headlined an article on Osama bin Laden:
"Inside the mind of the maniac". Those who publicly question
any of this can expect an even stronger burst of abuse. In the Gulf war
they were labelled "friends of terrorists, ranters, nutty,
hypocrites, animals, barbarians, mad, traitors, unhinged, appeasers and
apologists". The Mirror called peace demonstrators "misguided,
twisted individuals always eager to comfort and support any country but
their own. They are a danger to all us - the enemy within."
Columnist Christopher Hitchens, in last week's Spectator article, Damn
the doves, says that intellectuals who seek to understand the new enemy
are no friends of peace, democracy or human life.
The third stage in the pattern is the demonisation not only of the
leader but of his people. The simplest way of doing this is the atrocity
story. The problem is that although many atrocity stories are true -
after all, war itself is an atrocity - many are not.
Take the Kuwaiti babies story. Its origins go back to the first world
war when British propaganda accused the Germans of tossing Belgian
babies into the air and catching them on their bayonets. Dusted off and
updated for the Gulf war, this version had Iraqi soldiers bursting into
a modern Kuwaiti hospital, finding the premature babies ward and then
tossing the babies out of incubators so that the incubators could be
sent back to Iraq.
The story, improbable from the start, was first reported by the Daily
Telegraph in London on September 5 1990. But the story lacked the human
element; it was an unverified report, there were no pictures for
television and no interviews with mothers grieving over dead babies.
That was soon rectified. An organisation calling itself Citizens for
a Free Kuwait (financed by the Kuwaiti government in exile) had signed a
$10m contract with the giant American public relations company, Hill
& Knowlton, to campaign for American military intervention to oust
Iraq from Kuwait.
The Human Rights Caucus of the US Congress was meeting in October and
Hill & Knowlton arranged for a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl to tell the
babies' story before the congressmen. She did it brilliantly, choking
with tears at the right moment, her voice breaking as she struggled to
continue. The congressional committee knew her only as "Nayirah"
and the television segment of her testimony showed anger and resolution
on the faces of the congressmen listening to her. President Bush
referred to the story six times in the next five weeks as an example of
the evil of Saddam's regime.
In the Senate debate whether to approve military action to force
Saddam out of Kuwait, seven senators specifically mentioned the
incubator babies atrocity and the final margin in favour of war was just
five votes. John R Macarthur's study of propaganda in the war says that
the babies atrocity was a definitive moment in the campaign to prepare
the American public for the need to go to war.
It was not until nearly two years later that the truth emerged. The
story was a fabrication and a myth, and Nayirah, the teenage Kuwaiti
girl, coached and rehearsed by Hill & Knowlton for her appearance
before the Congressional Committee, was in fact the daughter of the
Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. By the time Macarthur revealed
this, the war was won and over and it did not matter any more.
So what should we make of the stories in the British press this week
about torture in Afghanistan? A defector from the Taliban's secret
police told a reporter in Quetta, Pakistan, that he was commanded to
"find new ways of torture so terrible that the screams will
frighten crows from their nests". The defector then listed a series
of chilling forms of torture that he said he and his fellow officers
developed. "Nowhere else in the world has such barbarity and
cruelty as Afghanistan."
The story rings false and defectors of all kinds are well-known for
telling interviewers what they think they want to hear. On the other
hand, it might be true. The trouble is, how can we tell? The media
demands that we trust it but too often that trust has been betrayed.
• Phillip Knightley is the author of The First Casualty, a history
of war reporting (Prion).