In the US Army manual on counterinsurgency, the
American commander General David Petraeus describes
Afghanistan as a "war of perception... conducted
continuously using the news media". What really
matters is not so much the day-to-day battles against
the Taliban as the way the adventure is sold in
America where "the media directly influence the
attitude of key audiences". Reading this, I was
reminded of the Venezuelan general who led a coup
against the democratic government in 2002. "We had a
secret weapon," he boasted. "We had the media,
especially TV. You got to have the media."
Never has so much official energy been expended in
ensuring journalists collude with the makers of
rapacious wars which, say the media-friendly generals,
are now "perpetual". In echoing the west's more
verbose warlords, such as the waterboarding former US
vice-president Dick Cheney, who predicated "50 years
of war", they plan a state of permanent conflict
wholly dependent on keeping at bay an enemy whose name
they dare not speak: the public.
At Chicksands in Bedfordshire, the Ministry of
Defence's psychological warfare (Psyops)
establishment, media trainers devote themselves to the
task, immersed in a jargon world of "information
dominance", "asymmetric threats" and "cyberthreats".
They share premises with those who teach the
interrogation methods that have led to a public
inquiry into British military torture in Iraq.
Disinformation and the barbarity of colonial war have
much in common.
Of course, only the jargon is new. In the opening
sequence of my film, The War You Don't See, there is
reference to a pre-WikiLeaks private conversation in
December 1917 between David Lloyd George, Britain's
prime minister during much of the first world war, and
CP Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian. "If
people really knew the truth," the prime minister
said, "the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of
course they don't know, and can't know."
In the wake of this "war to end all wars", Edward
Bernays, a confidante of President Woodrow Wilson,
coined the term "public relations" as a euphemism for
propaganda "which was given a bad name in the war". In
his book, Propaganda (1928), Bernays described PR as
"an invisible government which is the true ruling
power in our country" thanks to "the intelligent
manipulation of the masses". This was achieved by
"false realities" and their adoption by the media.
(One of Bernays's early successes was persuading women
to smoke in public. By associating smoking with
women's liberation, he achieved headlines that lauded
cigarettes as "torches of freedom".)
I began to understand this as a young reporter during
the American war in Vietnam. During my first
assignment, I saw the results of the bombing of two
villages and the use of Napalm B, which continues to
burn beneath the skin; many of the victims were
children; trees were festooned with body parts. The
lament that "these unavoidable tragedies happen in
wars" did not explain why virtually the entire
population of South Vietnam was at grave risk from the
forces of their declared "ally", the United States. PR
terms like "pacification" and "collateral damage"
became our currency. Almost no reporter used the word
"invasion". "Involvement" and later "quagmire" became
staples of a news vocabulary that recognised the
killing of civilians merely as tragic mistakes and
seldom questioned the good intentions of the invaders.
On the walls of the Saigon bureaus of major American
news organisations were often displayed horrific
photographs that were never published and rarely sent
because it was said they were would "sensationalise"
the war by upsetting readers and viewers and therefore
were not "objective". The My Lai massacre in 1968 was
not reported from Vietnam, even though a number of
reporters knew about it (and other atrocities like
it), but by a freelance in the US, Seymour Hersh. The
cover of Newsweek magazine called it an "American
tragedy", implying that the invaders were the victims:
a purging theme enthusiastically taken up by Hollywood
in movies such as The Deer Hunter and Platoon. The war
was flawed and tragic, but the cause was essentially
noble. Moreover, it was "lost" thanks to the
irresponsibility of a hostile, uncensored media.
Although the opposite of the truth, such false
realties became the "lessons" learned by the makers of
present-day wars and by much of the media. Following
Vietnam, "embedding" journalists became central to war
policy on both sides of the Atlantic. With honourable
exceptions, this succeeded, especially in the US. In
March 2003, some 700 embedded reporters and camera
crews accompanied the invading American forces in
Iraq. Watch their excited reports, and it is the
liberation of Europe all over again. The Iraqi people
are distant, fleeting bit players; John Wayne had
risen again.
The apogee was the victorious entry into Baghdad, and
the TV pictures of crowds cheering the felling of a
statue of Saddam Hussein. Behind this façade, an
American Psyops team successfully manipulated what an
ignored US army report describes as a "media circus
[with] almost as many reporters as Iraqis". Rageh
Omaar, who was there for the BBC, reported on the main
evening news: "People have come out welcoming [the
Americans], holding up V-signs. This is an image
taking place across the whole of the Iraqi capital."
In fact, across most of Iraq, largely unreported, the
bloody conquest and destruction of a whole society was
well under way.
In The War You Don't See, Omaar speaks with admirable
frankness. "I didn't really do my job properly," he
says. "I'd hold my hand up and say that one didn't
press the most uncomfortable buttons hard enough." He
describes how British military propaganda successfully
manipulated coverage of the fall of Basra, which BBC
News 24 reported as having fallen "17 times". This
coverage, he says, was "a giant echo chamber".
The sheer magnitude of Iraqi suffering in the
onslaught had little place in the news. Standing
outside 10 Downing St, on the night of the invasion,
Andrew Marr, then the BBC's political editor,
declared, "[Tony Blair] said that they would be able
to take Baghdad without a bloodbath and that in the
end the Iraqis would be celebrating, and on both of
those points he has been proved conclusively right...
" I asked Marr for an interview, but received no
reply. In studies of the television coverage by the
University of Wales, Cardiff, and Media Tenor, the
BBC's coverage was found to reflect overwhelmingly the
government line and that reports of civilian suffering
were relegated. Media Tenor places the BBC and
America's CBS at the bottom of a league of western
broadcasters in the time they allotted to opposition
to the invasion. "I am perfectly open to the
accusation that we were hoodwinked," said Jeremy
Paxman, talking about Iraq's non-existent weapons of
mass destruction to a group of students last year.
"Clearly we were." As a highly paid professional
broadcaster, he omitted to say why he was hoodwinked.
Dan Rather, who was the CBS news anchor for 24 years,
was less reticent. "There was a fear in every newsroom
in America," he told me, "a fear of losing your job...
the fear of being stuck with some label, unpatriotic
or otherwise." Rather says war has made "stenographers
out of us" and that had journalists questioned the
deceptions that led to the Iraq war, instead of
amplifying them, the invasion would not have happened.
This is a view now shared by a number of senior
journalists I interviewed in the US.
In Britain, David Rose, whose Observer articles played
a major part in falsely linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida
and 9/11, gave me a courageous interview in which he
said, "I can make no excuses... What happened [in
Iraq] was a crime, a crime on a very large scale."
"Does that make journalists accomplices?" I asked him.
"Yes... unwitting perhaps, but yes."
What is the value of journalists speaking like this?
The answer is provided by the great reporter James
Cameron, whose brave and revealing filmed report, made
with Malcolm Aird, of the bombing of civilians in
North Vietnam was banned by the BBC. "If we who are
meant to find out what the bastards are up to, if we
don't report what we find, if we don't speak up," he
told me, "who's going to stop the whole bloody
business happening again?"
Cameron could not have imagined a modern phenomenon
such as WikiLeaks but he would have surely approved.
In the current avalanche of official documents,
especially those that describe the secret machinations
that lead to war – such as the American mania over
Iran – the failure of journalism is rarely noted. And
perhaps the reason Julian Assange seems to excite such
hostility among journalists serving a variety of
"lobbies", those whom George Bush's press spokesman
once called "complicit enablers", is that WikiLeaks
and its truth-telling shames them. Why has the public
had to wait for WikiLeaks to find out how great power
really operates? As a leaked 2,000-page Ministry of
Defence document reveals, the most effective
journalists are those who are regarded in places of
power not as embedded or clubbable, but as a "threat".
This is the threat of real democracy, whose
"currency", said Thomas Jefferson, is "free flowing
information".
In my film, I asked Assange how WikiLeaks dealt with
the draconian secrecy laws for which Britain is
famous. "Well," he said, "when we look at the Official
Secrets Act labelled documents, we see a statement
that it is an offence to retain the information and it
is an offence to destroy the information, so the only
possible outcome is that we have to publish the
information." These are extraordinary times.
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