In his controversial new book, Nick Davies argues that shadowy intelligence agencies are pumping out black propaganda to manipulate public opinion – and that the media simply swallow it wholesale
Onthe morning of 9 February 2004, The New York Times carried an exclusive and alarming story. The paper's Baghdad correspondent, Dexter Filkins, reported that US officials had obtained a 17-page letter, believed to have been written by the notorious terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi to the "inner circle" of al-Qa'ida's leadership, urging them to accept that the best way to beat US forces in Iraq was effectively to start a civil war.
The story went on to news agency wires and,
within 24 hours, it was running around the world.
There is very good reason to believe that that letter was a fake – and a
significant one because there is equally good reason to believe that it was
one product among many from a new machinery of propaganda which has been
created by the United States and its allies since the terrorist attacks of
September 2001.
For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to
manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its
compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it.
The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects
a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our
news. I've spent the last two years researching a book about falsehood,
distortion and propaganda in the global media.
The "Zarqawi letter" which made it on to the front page of The New
York Times in February 2004 was one of a sequence of highly suspect
documents which were said to have been written either by or to Zarqawi and
which were fed into news media.
This material is being generated, in part, by intelligence agencies who
continue to work without effective oversight; and also by a new and
essentially benign structure of "strategic communications" which
was originally designed by doves in the Pentagon and Nato who wanted to use
subtle and non-violent tactics to deal with Islamist terrorism but whose
efforts are poorly regulated and badly supervised with the result that some
of its practitioners are breaking loose and engaging in the black arts of
propaganda.
Like the new propaganda machine as a whole, the Zarqawi story was born in the
high tension after the attacks of September 2001. At that time, he was a
painful thorn in the side of the Jordanian authorities, an Islamist radical
who was determined to overthrow the royal family. But he was nothing to do
with al-Q'aida. Indeed, he had specifically rejected attempts by Bin Laden
to recruit him, because he was not interested in targeting the West.
Madonna To Oppose Anti-Gay Russian Law During Concert
Christian Bale, Chinese guards clash over activist
India should stop using Mumbai attacks for propaganda: FO
Robert Fisk: Please spare me the word 'terrorist'
