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Viewpoint - March 3, 2011
Empire of Lies: Why Our Media Betrays Us
By Jonathan Cook
Palestine Chronicle
Last week the Guardian, Britain's main liberal newspaper,
ran an exclusive report on the belated confessions of an
Iraqi exile, Rafeed al-Janabi, codenamed 'Curveball' by
the CIA. Eight years ago, Janabi played a key behind-the-
scenes role -- if an inadvertent one -- in making possible
the US invasion of Iraq. His testimony bolstered claims
by the Bush administration that Iraq's president, Saddam
Hussein, had developed an advanced programme producing
weapons of mass destruction.
Curveball's account included the details of mobile bio-
logical weapons trucks presented by Colin Powell, the US
Secretary of State, to the United Nations in early 2003.
Powell's apparently compelling case on WMD was used to
justify the US attack on Iraq a few weeks later.
Eight years on, Curveball revealed to the Guardian that
he had fabricated the story of Saddam's WMD back in 2000,
shortly after his arrival in Germany seeking asylum. He
told the paper he had lied to German intelligence in the
hope his testimony might help topple Saddam, though it
seems more likely he simply wanted to ensure his asylum
case was taken more seriously.
For the careful reader -- and I stress the word careful
-- several disturbing facts emerged from the report.
One was that the German authorities had quickly proven his
account of Iraq's WMD to be false. Both German and British
intelligence had travelled to Dubai to meet Bassil Latif,
his former boss at Iraq's Military Industries Commission.
Dr Latif had proven that Curveball's claims could not be
true. The German authorities quickly lost interest in
Janabi and he was not interviewed again until late 2002,
when it became more pressing for the US to make a convinc-
ing case for an attack on Iraq.
Another interesting disclosure was that, despite the vital
need to get straight all the facts about Curveball's test-
imony -- given the stakes involved in launching a pre-
emptive strike against another sovereign state -- the
Americans never bothered to interview Curveball themselves.
A third revelation was that the CIA's head of operations
in Europe, Tyler Drumheller, passed on warnings from
German intelligence that they considered Curveball's
testimony to be highly dubious. The head of the CIA,
George Tenet, simply ignored the advice.
With Curveball's admission in mind, as well as these other
facts from the story, we can draw some obvious conclusions
-- conclusions confirmed by subsequent developments.
Lacking both grounds in international law and the backing
of major allies, the Bush administration desperately needed
Janabi's story about WMD, however discredited it was, to
justify its military plans for Iraq. The White House did
not interview Curveball because they knew his account of
Saddam's WMD programme was made up. His story would unravel
under scrutiny; better to leave Washington with the option
of "plausible deniability".
Nonetheless, Janabi's falsified account was vitally useful:
for much of the American public, it added a veneer of
credibility to the implausible case that Saddam was a
danger to the world; it helped fortify wavering allies
facing their own doubting publics; and it brought on board
Colin Powell, a former general seen as the main voice of
reason in the administration.
In other words, Bush's White House used Curveball to
breathe life into its mythological story about Saddam's
threat to world peace.
So how did the Guardian, a bastion of liberal journalism,
present its exclusive on the most controversial episode in
recent American foreign policy?
Here is its headline: "How US was duped by Iraqi fantasist
looking to topple Saddam".
Did the headline-writer misunderstand the story as written
by the paper's reporters? No, the headline neatly encapsul-
ated its message. In the text, we are told Powell's present-
ation to the UN "revealed that the Bush administration's
hawkish decisionmakers had swallowed" Curveball's account.
At another point, we are told Janabi "pulled off one of
the greatest confidence tricks in the history of modern
intelligence". And that: "His critics -- who are many and
powerful -- say the cost of his deception is too difficult
to estimate."
In other words, the Guardian assumed, despite all the
evidence uncovered in its own research, that Curveball
misled the Bush administration into making a disastrous
miscalculation. On this view, the White House was the
real victim of Curveball's lies, not the Iraqi people --
more than a million of whom are dead as a result of the
invasion, according to the best available figures, and
four million of whom have been forced into exile.
There is nothing exceptional about this example. I chose
it because it relates to an event of continuing and
momentous significance.
Unfortunately, there is something depressingly familiar
about this kind of reporting, even in the West's main
liberal publications. Contrary to its avowed aim, main-
stream journalism invariably diminishes the impact of new
events when they threaten powerful elites.
We will examine why in a minute. But first let us consider
what, or who, constitutes "empire" today? Certainly, in
its most symbolic form, it can be identified as the US
government and its army, comprising the world?s sole super-
power.
Traditionally, empires have been defined narrowly, in
terms of a strong nation-state that successfully expands
its sphere of influence and power to other territories.
Empire's aim is to make those territories dependent, and
then either exploit their resources in the case of poorly
developed countries, or, with more developed countries,
turn them into new markets for its surplus goods. It is
in this latter sense that the American empire has often
been able to claim that it is a force for global good,
helping to spread freedom and the benefits of consumer
culture.
Empire achieves its aims in different ways: through force,
such as conquest, when dealing with populations resistant
to the theft of their resources; and more subtly through
political and economic interference, persuasion and mind-
control when it wants to create new markets. However it
works, the aim is to create a sense in the dependent
territories that their interests and fates are bound to
those of empire.
In our globalised world, the question of who is at the
centre of empire is much less clear than it once was.
The US government is today less the heart of empire than
its enabler. What were until recently the arms of empire,
especially the financial and military industries, have
become a transnational imperial elite whose interests
are not bound by borders and whose powers largely evade
legislative and moral controls.
Israel's leadership, we should note, as well its elite
supporters around the world -- including the Zionist
lobbies, the arms manufacturers and Western militaries,
and to a degree even the crumbling Arab tyrannies of
the Middle East -- are an integral element in that
transnational elite.
The imperial elites' success depends to a large extent on
a shared belief among the western public both that "we"
need them to secure our livelihoods and security and that
at the same time we are really their masters. Some of the
necessary illusions perpetuated by the transnational
elites include:
-- That we elect governments whose job is to restrain the
corporations;
-- That we, in particular, and the global workforce in
general are the chief beneficiaries of the corporations'
wealth creation;
-- That the corporations and the ideology that underpins
them, global capitalism, are the only hope for freedom;
-- That consumption is not only an expression of our
freedom but also a major source of our happiness;
-- That economic growth can be maintained indefinitely and
at no long-term cost to the health of the planet;
-- And that there are groups, called terrorists, who want
to destroy this benevolent system of wealth creation and
personal improvement.
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These assumptions, however fanciful they may appear when
subjected to scrutiny, are the ideological bedrock on
which the narratives of our societies in the West are
constructed and from which ultimately our sense of
identity derives. This ideological system appears to
us -- and I am using "we" and "us" to refer to western
publics only -- to describe the natural order.
The job of sanctifying these assumptions -- and ensuring
they are not scrutinised -- falls to our mainstream media.
Western corporations own the media, and their advertising
makes the industry profitable. In this sense, the media
cannot fulfil the function of watchdog of power, because
in fact it is power. It is the power of the globalised
elite to control and limit the ideological and imaginative
horizons of the media's readers and viewers. It does so to
ensure that imperial interests, which are synonymous with
those of the corporations, are not threatened.
The Curveball story neatly illustrates the media's role.
His confession has come too late -- eight years too late,
to be precise -- to have any impact on the events that
matter. As happens so often with important stories that
challenge elite interests, the facts vitally needed to
allow western publics to reach informed conclusions were
not available when they were needed. In this case, Bush,
Cheney and Rumsfeld are gone, as are their neoconservative
advisers. Curveball's story is now chiefly of interest to
historians.
That last point is quite literally true. The Guardian's
revelations were of almost no concern to the US media,
the supposed watchdog at the heart of the US empire. A
search of the Lexis Nexis media database shows that
Curveball's admissions featured only in the New York
Times, in a brief report on page 7, as well as in a news
round-up in the Washington Times. The dozens of other
major US newspapers, including the Washington Post, made
no mention of it at all.
Instead, the main audience for the story outside the UK
was the readers of India?s Hindu newspaper and the Khaleej
Times.
But even the Guardian, often regarded as fearless in taking
on powerful interests, packaged its report in such a way
as to deprive Curveball's confession of its true value.
The facts were bled of their real significance. The
presentation ensured that only the most aware readers
would have understood that the US had not been duped by
Curveball, but rather that the White House had exploited
a "fantasist" -- or desperate exile from a brutal regime,
depending on how one looks at it -- for its own illegal
and immoral ends.
Why did the Guardian miss the main point in its own
exclusive? The reason is that all our mainstream media,
however liberal, take as their starting point the idea
both that the West's political culture is inherently
benevolent and that it is morally superior to all
existing, or conceivable, alternative systems.
In reporting and commentary, this is demonstrated most
clearly in the idea that "our" leaders always act in good
faith, whereas "their" leaders -- those opposed to empire
or its interests -- are driven by base or evil motives.
It is in this way that official enemies, such as Saddam
Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic, can be singled out as
personifying the crazed or evil dictator -- while other
equally rogue regimes such as Saudi Arabia's are described
as "moderate" -- opening the way for their countries to
become targets of our own imperial strategies.
States selected for the "embrace" of empire are left with
a stark choice: accept our terms of surrender and become
an ally; or defy empire and face our wrath.
When the corporate elites trample on other peoples and
states to advance their own selfish interests, such as
in the invasion of Iraq to control its resources, our
dominant media cannot allow its reporting to frame the
events honestly. The continuing assumption in liberal
commentary about the US attack on Iraq, for example, is
that, once no WMD were found, the Bush administration
remained to pursue a misguided effort to root out the
terrorists, restore law and order, and spread democracy.
For the western media, our leaders make mistakes, they are
naïve or even stupid, but they are never bad or evil. Our
media do not call for Bush or Blair to be tried at the
Hague as war criminals.
This, of course, does not mean that the western media is
Pravda, the propaganda mouthpiece of the old Soviet empire.
There are differences. Dissent is possible, though it
must remain within the relatively narrow confines of
"reasonable" debate, a spectrum of possible thought that
accepts unreservedly the presumption that we are better,
more moral, than them.
Similarly, journalists are rarely told -- at least, not
directly -- what to write. The media have developed care-
ful selection processes and hierarchies among their
editorial staff -- termed "filters" by media critics Ed
Herman and Noam Chomsky -- to ensure that dissenting or
truly independent journalists do not reach positions of
real influence.
There is, in other words, no simple party line. There are
competing elites and corporations, and their voices are
reflected in the narrow range of what we term commentary
and opinion. Rather than being dictated to by party
officials, as happened under the Soviet system, our
journalists scramble for access, to be admitted into the
ante-chambers of power. These privileges make careers but
they come at a huge cost to the reporters' independence.
Nonetheless, the range of what is permissible is slowly
expanding -- over the opposition of the elites and our
mainstream TV and press. The reason is to be found in
the new media, which is gradually eroding the monopoly
long enjoyed by the corporate media to control the spread
of information and popular ideas. Wikileaks is so far the
most obvious, and impressive, outcome of that trend.
The consequences are already tangible across the Middle
East, which has suffered disproportionately under the
oppressive rule of empire. The upheavals as Arab publics
struggle to shake off their tyrants are also stripping
bare some of the illusions the western media have peddled
to us. Empire, we have been told, wants democracy and
freedom around the globe. And yet it is caught mute and
impassive as the henchmen of empire unleash US-made
weapons against their peoples who are demanding western-
style freedoms.
An important question is: how will our media respond to
this exposure, not just of our politicians' hypocrisy but
also of their own? They are already trying to co-opt the
new media, including Wikileaks, but without real success.
They are also starting to allow a wider range of debate,
though still heavily constrained, than had been possible
before.
The West's version of glasnost is particularly obvious in
the coverage of the problem closest to our hearts here in
Palestine. What Israel terms a delegitimisation campaign
is really the opening up -- slightly -- of the media land-
scape, to allow a little light where until recently dark-
ness reigned.
This is an opportunity and one that we must nurture. We
must demand of the corporate media more honesty; we must
shame them by being better-informed than the hacks who
recycle official press releases and clamour for access;
and we must desert them, as is already happening, for
better sources of information.
We have a window. And we must force it open before the
elites of empire try to slam it shut.
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