Weapons of Mass Deception
By Ruth Rosen, San Francisco Chronicle
June 9, 2003

The Bush administration faces a growing credibility gap that may turn into one of the most serious political scandals in our nation's history. Watergate may one day seem minor-league by comparison.

What I'm about to describe is not a conspiracy. It is the story of a group of men determined to implement a long-held vision.

In 1997, years before George W. Bush entered office, Donald H. Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz founded the Project for the New American Century, a neo-conservative think tank. As part of their larger published vision for "Rebuilding America's Defenses," they repeatedly lobbied for "regime change" in Iraq in order to extend America's influence in the Middle East.

Shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, they began to build a case for invading Iraq. Many people, puzzled and confused, asked: What on earth does Iraq have to do with al Qaeda?

Since the CIA didn't provide evidence for any connection, the answers would have to come from a new intelligence agency established by Rumsfeld, now secretary of defense, in the fall of 2001. Called the Office of Special Plans, it would be independent of both the CIA and Pentagon and headed by his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.

The selling of the war turned out to be a huge success. The vast majority of Americans believed Iraq had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction and harbored nests of al Qaeda terrorists. Many Americans also believed that the Sept. 11 terrorists had included Iraqi men.

By now, many Americans probably also believe that U.S. forces have found WMDs in Iraq. President Bush declared as much when he described two trailers that "were probably used as mobile biological weapons labs."

But none of the above is true. So far, no WMDs have been found. No Iraqis were involved in Sept. 11. No outposts of al Qaeda terrorists have been uncovered in Iraq. No traces of chemical or biological weapons have been detected in the two trailers.

In an interview with the magazine Vanity Fair, Wolfowitz now admits that the Bush administration focused on WMDs because it was politically expedient. "The truth," he says, "is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction. . . ." He also discloses another justification that was "almost unnoticed but huge" – the prospect of withdrawing American forces from Saudi Arabia once Saddam Hussein had been removed.

In other words, WMDs were the one argument that could convince a public traumatized by terrorism that a pre-emptive war would save American lives.

And, it worked. The war in Iraq, therefore, was not the result of some colossal intelligence failure. It happened because our leaders were given tainted evidence to convince a skeptical public that an immediate invasion of Iraq was necessary:

When he addressed the U.N. Security Council, Sec. of State Colin Powell offered "updated" information on Iraq plagiarized from a 10-year-old paper posted on the Internet.

In his State of the Union Address, President Bush claimed that Iraq had imported enriched uranium from Nigeria. The document proved to be a clumsy forgery.

According to intelligence sources cited in the British Sunday Herald, just one Iraqi defector claimed that Iraq had huge stocks of WMDs ready for activation on 45-minutes notice. Tony Blair publicized this information, but not the disclaimer and doubts he also received from British intelligence.

The foreign press has accused the Bush administration of having lied to the world. In the United States, however, people have been reluctant to ask: What did the president and other officials know, and when did they know it?

"Truth has a way of asserting itself despite all attempts to obscure it," Sen. Robert W. Byrd, D-W.V., said in a recent speech. Let's hope so. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Armed Services Committee will conduct a joint re-evaluation of prewar intelligence.

It's a good start. Rep. Jane Harman of Rancho Palos Verdes, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has warned that "This could conceivably be the greatest intelligence hoax of all time. I doubt it, but we have to ask."

We also need to do more. Intelligence cannot always be examined in public. Congress must now hold the kind of public hearings that unmasked the secrets in the Watergate scandal.

At issue is not whether the war was right or wrong. The question Congress must answer is whether our leaders abused their political power and knowingly deceived the American people.



From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August,” White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card told the New York Times last September. “Card was explaining,” say John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton in their new book, Weapons of Mass Deception, “what the Times characterized as a ‘meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress, and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein.’” Timing is key in marketing. In their book, Stauber and Rampton show how it was far from coincidental that the president asked the United Nations Security Council for the resolution the White House needed for war with Iraq on the first anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Many Americans may not be aware that the U.S. government employs behind-the-scenes public relations firms and propaganda techniques—from disinformation to lies—to push its political objectives. Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq, due in bookstores July 28, will be the first book to expose the Bush administration’s sophisticated public relations campaign promoting the invasion of Iraq in what was actually termed a “product launch” by the White House. PR Watch, a leading watchdog organization on public relations practices, says that in the book Rampton and Stauber “take no prisoners as they reveal—headline by headline, news show by news show, press conference by press conference—the deliberate, aggressive and highly successful public relations campaign that sold the Iraqi war to the American public.”

Not only has the U.S. military been unable to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, evidence is mounting that the government trumped up and even forged “evidence” to justify the preemptive attack. Given a choice between verifiable information and politically spun sound bites with a feel-good coating, will Americans begin to look further than their TVs for the truth? As Noam Chomsky says of Weapons of Mass Deception, “Their work is a major contribution for those who want to take control of their own future, not be passive subjects of manipulation and control.”

—Anne Geske

While there are a great many publications addressing the disinformation campaigns around the Iraq war, the merit of this book lies in its timeliness and clarity, but above all in the wealth of sources it uses and fully documents for readers to verify and pursue. The book shows how Bush’s War on Iraq was so closely intertwined with monstrous disinformation campaigns carried out by the US government with the support of PR agencies and mainstream media that it seems hard to tell whether the war itself was not merely the hardware component of the PR campaign. But in spite of all this, the book manages to avoid apocalyptic undertones, addressing its subject in a surprisingly sober language that contrasts sharply with the book’s flashy cover."

It was a day for the history books. On April 9th, 2003, millions of Americans sat glued to their television sets as U.S. soldiers and Iraqi citizens joined together to topple the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square. Like the fall of the Berlin wall, the fall of Saddam’s statue appeared to be one of those iconic moments that proved - spontaneously and undeniably - that democracy would always triumph over totalitarianism, that freedom was the great equalizer.

“If you don’t have goose bumps now,” said Fox News anchor David Asman as the extraordinary footage rolled, “you will never have them in your life.”

“Jubilant Iraqis Swarm the Streets of Capital,” read the New York Times headline.

Or did they?

In their eye-opening new exposé, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq, Rampton and Stauber take no prisoners as they reveal - headline by headline, news show by news show, press conference by press conference - the deliberate, aggressive, and highly successful public relations campaign that sold the Iraqi war to the American public. April 9th seemed to confirm what Washington and pro-war pundits had been saying for months: that the Iraqi people would eventually come to see America as their liberator, not their enemy. Yet the American media chose to focus on headlines such as “Iraqis Celebrate in Baghdad” (Washington Post) rather than on a Reuters long-shot photo of Firdos Square showing it to be nearly empty, or the Muslim cleric who was assassinated by an angry crowd in Najaf for being too friendly to the Americans, or the 20,000 Iraqis in Nasiriyah rallying to oppose the U.S. military presence.

We’ve always known what good PR and advertising could do for a new line of sneakers, cosmetics, or weight-loss products. In Weapons of Mass Deception, Rampton and Stauber show us a brave new shocking world where savvy marketers, “information warriors,” and “perception managers” can sell an entire war to consumers. Indeed, Washington successfully brought together the world’s top ad agencies and media empires to create “Operation: Iraqi Freedom” - a product no decent, patriotic citizen could possibly object to. With meticulous research and documentation, Rampton and Stauber deconstruct this and other “true lies” behind the war:

Top Bush officials advocated the invasion of Iraq even before he took office, but waited until September 2002 to inform the public, through what the White House termed a “product launch.”

White House officials used repetition and misinformation - the “big lie” tactic - to create the false impression that Iraq was behind the September 11th terrorist attacks on the United States, especially in the case of the alleged meeting in Prague five months earlier between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence officials.

The “big lie” tactic was also employed in the first Iraq war when a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah told the horrific - but fabricated - story of Iraqi soldiers wrenching hundreds of premature Kuwaiti babies from their incubators and leaving them to die. Her testimony was printed in a press kit prepared by Citizens for a Free Kuwait, a PR front group created by Hill and Knowlton, then the world’s largest PR firm.

In order to achieve “third party authenticity” in the Muslim world, a group called the Council of American Muslims for Understanding launched its own web site, called OpenDialogue.com. However, its chairman admitted that the idea began with the State Department, and that the group was funded by the U.S. government.

Forged documents were used to “prove” that Iraq possessed huge stockpiles of banned weapons.

A secretive PR firm working for the Pentagon helped create the Iraqi National Congress (INC), which became one of the driving forces behind the decision to go to war.

Weapons of Mass Deception is the first book to expose the aggressive public relations campaign used to sell the American public on the war with Iraq. It is a must-read for those who want to know how and why they bought this war.

“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly... it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”
— Joseph Goebbels

Nazi Propaganda Minister

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