Sam
Gardiner has taught strategy and military operations at the National
War College, Air War College and Naval War College. He was recently
a visiting scholar at the Swedish Defence College. During Gulf
II he was a regular on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer as well as
on BBC radio and television, and National Public Radio. He authored
“The Enemy is Us” an article describing how the Bush
Administration used disinformation and psychological warfare –
weapons usually used against the 'enemy' – against the American
public in order to support the war in Iraq. He has done an extensive
analysis of the media coverage before the war, during the war
and during the occupation as well as of the statements of Administration
officials. His conclusions are startling and of great concern.
He has put his findings in a report entitled: “Truth
from These Podia.”
Zeese:
Describe your professional background and expertise.
Gardiner:
Sure, Kevin. I'm a retired colonel of the US Air Force. When I
retired, I was teaching strategy at the National War College in
Washington, DC. Since I've been retired, I have continued to teach
military strategy. I've taught for the Naval War College. I've
taught at the Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama. I also spent
a period as a visiting scholar at the Swedish Defense College
in Stockholm.
In addition, I have been doing war games. You may have seen descriptions
of some of the games I've done. I did one on Iran that was covered
in the December 2004 Atlantic Monthly. More recently, I conducted
a game addressing North Korea. It was covered in the July/August
Atlantic Monthly.
Zeese:
What is: "Truth from These Podia"? How did you conduct
this media analysis?
Gardiner:
It is a paper I published on the web that reflected four months
of heavy research.
I
had followed press reports of the war closely as it unfolded because
of a job I had. During the first couple months of Gulf II, I was
under contract with the Newshour with Jim Lehrer. With another
retired colonel, we did an almost daily on-air analysis of how
the war was going.
As
the war unfolded, I became increasingly uneasy about what was
being reported out of the White House, Pentagon and Central Command.
I was hearing things that just did not make sense with what I
knew and what my intuition was telling me. I began tracking some
of the stories. It was just a matter of going over what we were
told and connecting that with the truth as it emerged later.
One of the first items that made me uneasy was when I heard we
were encountering “terrorist death squads.” I was
very familiar with the Iraq military forces. There were no terrorist
death squads. It became obvious the Pentagon wanted us to connect
Iraq with 9/11. Terrorists did 9/11. There are terrorists in Iraq.
Iraq must have been behind 9/11.
Zeese:
Regarding the management of information about Iraq, I'd like to
focus on the build up to the Iraq War initially. There has been
growing indications from a series of memoranda and meeting minutes
from Great Britain that U.S. intelligence was “fixed”
to support the war. In your analysis of media management before
the war do you see any indication that the United States Congress
and public was manipulated into supporting the invasion of Iraq
by misinformation?
Gardiner:
Kevin, I find it amazing that there is now a growing interest
in the marketing the war. There is absolutely no question that
the White House and the Pentagon participated in an effort to
market the military option. The truth did not make any difference
to that campaign. To call it fixing is to miss the more profound
point. It was a campaign to influence. It involved creating false
stories; it involved exaggerating; it involved manipulating the
numbers of stories that were released; it involved a major campaign
to attack those who disagreed with the military option. It included
all the techniques those who ran the marketing effort had learned
in political campaigns.
Zeese:
Can you give some examples of false or exaggerated stories put
out by the Bush administration in the build-up to the war?
Gardiner:
In the summer of 2003, we know from the Downing Street Memo that
the Administration was talking about justifying a war by arguing
that Iraq was the nexus of terrorism and WMD.
The
terrorism argument was what propaganda literature would refer
to as the big lie. The Administration’s objective was to
make enough arguments connecting Iraq to terrorism and Bin Laden
that the American people would believe Iraq was behind the 9/11
attacks. They used a technique called the excluded middle. Iraq
supports terrorists. The attacks were by terrorists. Iraq must
been behind the 9/11 attacks.
We
the WMD story fairly well. We know the story of the uranium from
Niger. We know about the aluminum tubes that were not for uranium
enrichment. We know the biological labs Powell showed to the UN
did not exist.
Beyond
these there are many exaggerations that have gotten very little
notice. Let me mention just a few.
A
New York Times reporter was told by the Administration that Iraq
was buying excess quantities of atropine to get ready for chemical
warfare. It turns out the quantities were consistent with the
Iraq use of the substance for routing medical purposes.
The
President told us in a speech in Ohio that Iraq had drone aircraft
that could possible deliver chemical weapons into the United States.
When that facility was found, the officers reported that it looked
more like a school project than a serious military program.
The
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told the Council on
Foreign Relations that Iraq had the capability to attack US computers.
They did not.
We
were lead to believe a Navy pilot shot down during the first Gulf
War was alive and being held in Baghdad. He was not.
We
were told on the State Department web sit that Iraq was forming
units of children to fight the United States. Iraq did not do
that.
We
were told the French were supplying air defense missiles to Iraq.
That was not ture
There
were many more.
Zeese:
How about information during the war? Did the embedded journalists
help give the U.S. a more accurate or less accurate perspective?
How did the Pentagon control information?
Gardiner:
A number of democratic institutions failed us during the war.
Certainly, the press was among those. I attended a conference
in London in July 2003 at which one of the PR firms that advised
the Pentagon talked about lessons learned from the effort. They
were pleased that they were able to dominate the story. That was
their objective. The embedded notion had been tested in Afghanistan,
and it proved to be effective. The product was lots of coverage
with personal stories of soldiers. That was the Pentagon objective.
Keep their story on television. Keep people talking about Meals
Ready to Eat, and they won't criticize the war.
As
I mentioned, I had done analysis during the major offensive operations.
One of the things that the head of this PR firm said at that conference
was that in the next war the Pentagon wanted to control context
more and not let it be done by retired military people.
Zeese:
You spend a lot of time in your article on the story regarding
the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch. Why is that important?
Gardiner:
Kevin, the Jessica Lynch story touched me personally, and it became
representative of the whole effort to manipulate the truth.
From
beginning to end, the Lynch story was a press event. It started
with the description that the unit was “ambushed.”
The unit was not ambushed. It got lost and drove into Iraqi lines,
and then it retraced its path back through Iraqi lines.
The
Pentagon was in such a hurry to get out the story of an individual
who had fought off the Iraqi they did so with incomplete information.
All of the heroic stuff was really about a soldier in the unit
who was killed, not about Lynch.
The
Secretary of Defense allowed the story to stay around for days
despite knowing the truth and despite the family insisting that
the information was not about their daughter.
My
father was wounded and captured by the Germans during WW II. He
did some heroic things during the period of his capture. The manipulation
of the Lynch story was an insult to his heroism.
Zeese:
And in the occupation phase? What kind of media control occurred
as that phase began? Is it continuing today?
Gardiner:
There have been major media strategies during the occupation.
For the first year, the same pattern continued. We heard exaggeration
and deflection from the press conferences from Baghdad. After
the first year, the White House strategy shifted.
The
idea what that it wanted the American people to forget about the
war. They quit having press conferences in Baghdad. Central Command
quit having press conferences. The military spokesperson from
Iraq became junior officers and enlisted people. The Brigadier
Generals disappeared.
The
current strategic communications strategy is to make it seem as
if there is progress, keep the number of stories down and certainly
to continue to hide casualties. You may know that the United States
is the only coalition country that did not honor its returning
dead.
Zeese:
Is the media being fooled by the Administration or is it complicit
in this effort to misinform the public?
Gardiner:
The media have been fooled. They have been lazy. They have lost
sight of the historic calling of journalism. Journalists have
been replaced on television by cheerleaders.
Zeese:
Was any of this illegal?
Gardiner: Some of it may have been illegal. A case was brought
against the Secretary of Defense in a Chicago court by Judicial
Watch for violating the law that limits defense money being used
for propaganda inside the United States.
There
was another illegal dimension. Most people don't know but the
military is the only profession where it is illegal to lie. It
is a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for an
officer to tell a lie. There were some officers who violated the
Uniform Code of Military Justice as they marketed for the Administration.
Zeese:
You say in “Truth from these Podia:” “In the
most basic sense, Washington and London did not trust the peoples
of their democracies to come to right decisions. Truth became
a casualty.
When
truth is a casualty, democracy receives collateral damage.”
Does this mean that if the people of Washington and the United
States were told the truth they would not have supported the invasion
of Iraq and therefore had to be misled by the Bush administration?
Gardiner:
One irony of the whole mess is that the American people (and the
British people) would most likely have supported strong actions
against Iraq had they been told the truth.
The
other irony is that if truth had been valued inside the Administration,
we probably would not have gone to war. In very early 2003 I had
done an extensive analysis of the likely humanitarian consequences
of an invasion of Iraq. I was able to get quite a few mid-level
people to review my briefing. I even briefed my results of the
National Security Council Staff. The bottom line of my presentation
was that the United States was not ready to deal with what was
coming. That was clearly not a piece of information anyone wanted.
My
efforts and those of others are described in a January 2004 article
in the Atlantic Monthly by Jim Fallows, “Blind into Baghdad.”
Zeese:
How much did this campaign of misinformation cost?
Gardiner:
Tough question, Kevin. I don't think it possible to get a total
handle on the effort. I have read one estimate that put the marketing
at $200 million. That cost is trivial, however, to the collateral
damage that has been done to democracy.
Zeese:
What do we do to prevent this from occurring in the future?
Gardiner:
Wow, I wish I had an answer to this question. Based upon the initial
work done after the offensive phase by those involved in strategic
communications, I have to tell you, as I said in my paper, if
you think this was bad, wait until the next war. They will be
even better at manipulating the story.
Zeese:
You conclude “Truth in these Podia” with the “Last
Chart” and suggest that we need an investigation to determine
the extent of information management and legislation to prevent
the people of the United States from being victimized by war propaganda
in the future. What type of investigation? What type of legislation?
Gardiner:
We need a commission. This one would not be about intelligence.
This would be focused on strategic communications. I have been
able to uncover some of the manipulation that went on before and
during the war, but I think I have only scratched the surface.
Some is still classified or buried. For example, who within the
US Government told the press that the French gave Saddam Hussein
a passport so he could sneak out of Iraq? Who told the press Saddam
Hussein was hiding in the Russian embassy?
The
United States needs a robust public diplomacy effort, but I believe
we cannot allow government officials to insert non-truth into
media that will be seen by Americans. We can’t allow officials
to damage democracy in the name of extending democracy.
Kevin
Zeese is Director of Democracy Rising. You can see more
interviews and columns written by Zeese on www.DemocracyRising.US.