Mike Whitney: The Audacity of Ethnic Cleansing: Obama’s Plan for Afghanistan

By Mike Whitney
Information Clearing House

"Today, we Afghans remain trapped between two enemies: the Taliban on one side and US/NATO forces and their warlord hirelings on the other."
Malalai Joya "A Woman Among the Warlords" Scribner Publishing, New York

December 04, 2009 -- The Bush administration never had any intention of liberating Afghanistan or establishing democracy. The real aim was to remove the politically-intractable Taliban and replace them with a puppet regime run by a former-CIA asset. The rest of Afghanistan would be parceled-off to the warlords who assisted in the invasion and who had agreed to do much of the United States dirty-work on the ground. In the eight years of military occupation which followed, that basic strategy has never changed. The U.S. is just as committed now as it was at the war's inception to establish a beachhead in Central Asia to oversee the growth of China, to execute disruptive/covert operations against Russia, to control vital pipeline routes from the Caspian Basin, and to maintain a heavy military presence in the most critical geopolitical area in the world today.

The objectives were briefly stated in a recent counterpunch article by Tariq Ali:

"It’s now obvious to everyone that this is not a ‘good’ war designed to eliminate the opium trade, discrimination against women and everything bad – apart from poverty, of course. So what is Nato doing in Afghanistan? Has this become a war to save Nato as an institution? Or is it more strategic, as was suggested in the spring 2005 issue of Nato Review:

The centre of gravity of power on this planet is moving inexorably eastward … The Asia-Pacific region brings much that is dynamic and positive to this world, but as yet the rapid change therein is neither stable nor embedded in stable institutions. Until this is achieved, it is the strategic responsibility of Europeans and North Americans, and the institutions they have built, to lead the way … security effectiveness in such a world is impossible without both legitimacy and capability." ("Short Cuts in Afghanistan", Tariq Ali, counterpunch)

President Barak Obama's speech at West Point was merely a reiteration of US original commitment to strengthen the loose confederation of warlords--many of who are either in the Afghan Parliament or hold high political office--to pacify nationalist elements, and to expand the war into Pakistan. Obama is just a cog in a much larger imperial wheel which moves forward with or without his impressive oratory skills. So far, he has been much more successful in concealing the real motives behind military escalation than his predecessor George W. Bush. It's doubtful that Obama could stop current operations even if he wanted to, and there is no evidence that he wants to.

The Pentagon has settled on a new counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) which it intends to implement in Afghanistan. The program will integrate psyops, special forces, NGOs, psychologists, media, anthropologists, humanitarian agencies, public relations, reconstruction, and conventional forces to rout the Taliban, assert control over the South and the tribal areas, and to quash any indigenous resistance. Clandestine activity and unmanned drone attacks will increase, while a "civilian surge" will be launched to try to win hearts and minds in the densely populated areas. Militarily, the goal is to pit one ethnicity against the other, to incite civil war, and to split the country in smaller units that can be controlled by warlords working with Washington. Where agricultural specialists, educators, engineers, lawyers, relief agencies and NGOs can be used, they will be. Where results depend on the application of extreme violence; it will also be...unsparingly. This is the plan going forward, a plan designed for conquest, subjugation and resource-stripping. Here is an excerpt from Zoltan Grossman's article in counterpunch "Afghanistan: The Roach Motel of Empires" which details the balkenization strategy:

"We are arming and financing the same vicious men (the Northern Alliance) who brought fundamentalism to Kabul in the first place....Like the Soviets, the Americans do not understand that the insurgency is driven not only by Islamist fundamentalism, but also by ethnic nationalism. In the case of the Taliban, they are representing the grievances of the Pashtuns who have seen the artificial colonial “Durand Line” divide their homeland between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The best way to defuse the Taliban is to recognize the legitimacy of this historical grievance, and incorporate Pashtun civil society into both governments.

But instead of unifying the different ethnic regions of Afghanistan, the NATO occupation seems headed more toward a de facto partition of these regions. The foreign policy team that President Obama has assembled includes some of the same figures who advocated the ethnic-sectarian partition of Yugoslavia and Iraq. Obama’s Special Envoy to Af-Pak, Richard Holbrooke, authored the agreement that partioned Bosnia into Serb and Muslim-Croat republics in 1995, in effect rubberstamping the ethnic cleansing that had forcibly removed populations during a three-year civil war. He also turned a blind eye when Serb civilians were expelled from Croatia the same year, and from Kosovo in 1999.

President Karzai recently instituted a series of laws on women in Shia communities, causing an outcry from women’s rights groups. Hardly unnoticed was his application of different legal standards to different sectarian territories—a sign of de facto (informal) partition. Various “peace” proposals have advocated ceding control of some Pashtun provinces to the Taliban. Far from bringing peace, such an ethnic-sectarian partition would exacerbate the violent “cleansing” of mixed territories to drive out those civilians who are not of the dominant group—the process that brought the “peace of the graveyard” to Bosnia, Kosovo, and much of Iraq." ( Zoltan Grossman, "Afghanistan: The Roach Motel of Empires" counterpunch)

If Grossman is correct, than Obama's professed commitment to Afghan liberation merely masks a vicious counterinsurgency strategy that will ethnically cleanse areas in the south while driving tens of thousands of innocent people from their homes. This is essentially what took place in Baghdad during the so-called "surge"; over a million Sunnis were forced from the city by death squads and Shia militia under the watchful eye of US troops. US counterinsurgency wunderkind Gen Stanley McChrystal played a pivotal role in pacifying Iraq, which is why he was chosen by Obama to oversee military operations in Afghanistan. Here's a clip from an article by Ulrich Rippert "Europe backs Afghanistan strategy aimed at “regionalization”' on the World Socialist Web Site which provides more details on the plan to Balkenize Afghanistan:

"During his inaugural visit to Washington, new German defense secretary, Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg said it was necessary to put aside “the romantic idea of democratization of the whole country along the lines of the western model” and instead “transfer control of individual provinces step by step to the Afghan security forces.”

The new strategy of “regionalization” is aimed at dividing Afghanistan into individual cantons—in a similar manner to what took place in Lebanon and the former Yugoslavia. Up to now the US-NATO occupation supported the government of Hamid Karzai and sold the process to the public as “democratization”. However, occupation forces are moving increasingly to hand over power directly to regional warlords and their militias—on the assumption that such regional forces will follow the orders of their imperial masters. As soon as there is no more danger in a specific province, Guttenberg declared, then the international troops should be withdrawn from that area." (Ulrich Rippert "Europe backs Afghanistan strategy aimed at “regionalization”', World Socialist Web Site)

Obama's escalation is not aimed at strengthening democracy, liberating women or bringing an end to the brutal, misogynist rule of religious fanatics. It is pure, unalloyed imperial politics, the rearranging of the map and its people to serve Washington's interests. As journalist Alex Lantier notes on the World Socialist Web Site, the plan does not end with Afghanistan, but stretches across the globe. The hard-right policymakers behind Obama, still have not abandoned their dream of global rule. Here's an excerpt:

"As Obama indicated elsewhere in his speech, this escalation is one step in plans for even broader wars. “The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly,” he said, “and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Mentioning Somalia and Yemen as potential targets, he added, “our effort will involve disorderly regions and diffuse enemies.”

The inclusion of this passage made clear that Obama was basing his Afghan policy on a report issued last month by Anthony Cordesman of the influential Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Cordesman wrote: “The President must be frank about the fact that any form of victory in Afghanistan and Pakistan will be part of a much wider and longer struggle. He must make it clear that the ideological, demographic, governance, economic, and other pressures that divide the Islamic world mean the world will face threats in many other nations that will endure indefinitely into the future. He should mention the risks in Yemen and Somalia, make it clear that the Iraq war is not over, and warn that we will still face both a domestic threat and a combination of insurgency and terrorism that will continue to extend from Morocco to the Philippines, and from Central Asia deep into Africa, regardless of how well we do in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

He added: “…the present level of US, allied, Afghan and Pakistani casualties will almost certainly double and probably more than triple before something approaching victory is won.” (Alex Lantier "Obama’s speech on Afghanistan: A compendium of lies" World Socialist web Site)

In the years ahead, we can expect to see relief and reconstruction efforts stepped up to provide security in the heavily-populated areas while the war in the south is expanded and intensified. Tajiks and Uzbeks, in the Afghan military will be enlisted to fight or expel their Pashtun countrymen, while warlords, druglords and human rights abusers are handed over large swathes of the countryside. 30,000 more troops is not enough to lock-down all of Afghanistan, but it may be enough to force hundreds of thousands of people into regional bantustans where they can be controlled by bloodthirsty chieftains, the very same men who leveled Kabul on April 28, 1992, killing 80,000 Afghan civilians. This is Obama's plan for Afghanistan, a carbon-copy of George Bush's.

Background to the Afghan War

From Michel Chossudovsky, America’s “War on Terrorism” (Quebec, Global Research, 2005):

Chapter VI
The Trans-Afghan Pipeline

Washington’s Silk Road Strategy consists in not only excluding Russia from the westbound oil and gas pipeline routes out of the Caspian Sea basin, but also in securing Anglo-American control over strategic southbound and eastbound routes.

This strategy consists in isolating and eventually “encircling” the former Soviet republics by simultaneously taking control of both westbound and east/southbound corridors. In this regard, Washington’s strategy in support of the oil giants is also to prevent the former republics from entering into pipeline ventures (or military cooperation agreements) with Iran and China.

According to the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, a conservative public policy organization, the American diplomatic dance with the Taliban was partly an attempt to prevent the construction of a pipeline through Iran and to reduce Russian leverage over Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. [1]

Backed by the Clinton administration, Unocal, the California based oil giant, developed a plan in 1995 to build an oil and gas pipeline route from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and

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Pakistan, to the Arabian Sea. Unocal is also involved in the westbound Baku-Ceyan pipeline project out of Azerbaijan across Turkey and Georgia, together with BP, which has a majority stake in the consortium.

The CentGas Consortium

By transiting through Afghanistan, Unocal’s CentGas pipeline project was meant to bypass the more direct southbound route across Iran. Unocal’s design was to develop a dual pipeline system that would also transport Kazakhstan’s huge oil reserves in the Tenghiz Northern Caspian region to the Arabian Sea.

Although the Russian oil giant Gazprom was part of the CentGas consortium, its participation was insignificant. [2] The hidden agenda was also to weaken Gazprom, which controls the Northbound gas pipeline routes out of Turkmenistan, and undermine the agreement between Russia and Turkmenistan, which handled the export of Turkmen gas through the network of Russian pipelines.

After Unocal had completed a first round of negotiations with Turkmenistan’s President Niyazov, it opened talks with the Taliban. [3] In turn, the Clinton administration decided to back the installation of a Taliban government in Kabul in 1996, as opposed to the Northern Alliance, which was backed by Moscow:

Impressed by the ruthlessness and willingness of the then-emerging Taliban to cut a pipeline deal, the State Department and Pakistan’s ISI agreed to funnel arms and funding to the Taliban in their war against the ethnically Tajik Northern Alliance. As recently as 1999, US taxpayers paid the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official. [4]

Meanwhile, the Russians were providing logistical support and military supplies to General Massoud’s Northern Alliance out of military bases in Tajikistan. When Kabul finally fell to the Taliban with the military backing of America’s ally Pakistan, in September 1996, State Department spokesman Glyn Davies said the US found “nothing objectionable” in the steps taken by the Taliban to impose

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Islamic law. Senator Hank Brown, a supporter of the Unocal project, said “the good part of what has happened is that one of the factions at least seems capable of developing a government in Kabul.” Unocal’s Vice-President, Martin Miller, called the Taliban’s success a “positive development”. [5]

When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, Washington said nothing. Why? Because Taliban leaders were soon on their way to Houston, Texas, to be entertained by executives of the oil company, Unocal…. A US diplomat said, “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did.” He explained that Afghanistan would become an American oil colony, there would be huge profits for the West, no democracy and the legal persecution of women. “We can live with
that”, he said. [6]

Washington’s endorsement of the Taliban regime instead of the Northern Alliance was part of the “Big Game” and the added rivalry between Russian and US conglomerates for control over oil and gas reserves, as well as pipeline routes out of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. In early 1997, Taliban officials met at Unocal’s Texas office:

[Unocal’s Barry] Lane says he wasn’t involved in the Texas meetings and doesn’t know whether then-Governor George W. Bush, an ex-oil man, ever had any involvement. Unocal’s Texas spokesperson for Central Asia operations, Teresa Covington, said the consortium delivered three basic messages to the Afghan groups. “We gave them the details on the proposed pipelines. We also talked to them about the projects’ benefits, such as the transit fees that would be paid,” she says. “And we reinforced our position the project could not move forward until they stabilized their country and obtained political recognition from the US and the international community.” Covington says the Taliban were not surprised by that demand …. In December 1997, Unocal arranged a high-level meeting in Washington, DC, for the Taliban with Clinton’s undersecretary of state for South Asia, Karl Inderforth. The Taliban delegation included Acting Minister for Mines and Industry Ahmad Jan, Acting Minister for Culture and Information, Amir Muttaqi, Acting Minister for Planning, Din Muhammad and Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, their permanent UN delegate. [7]

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Two months following these negotiations, in February 1998, Unocal Vice President for International Relations, John Maresca, in a statement to the House Committee on International Relations, called for “the need for multiple pipeline routes for Central Asian oil and gas resources”. Implied in his statement, US foreign policy in the region was to be geared towards destabilizing the north, west and southbound pipeline routes controlled by Russia, as well as competing pipelines through Iran:

[A] chief technical obstacle [or more likely political obstacle] which we in the industry face in transporting oil is the region’s existing pipeline infrastructure. Because the region’s pipelines were constructed during the Moscow-centred Soviet period, they tend to head north and west toward Russia. There are no connections to the south and east …

The key question then, is how the energy resources of Central Asia can be made available to nearby Asian markets … One obvious route south would cross Iran, but this is foreclosed for American companies because of US sanctions legislation. The only other possible route is across Afghanistan, which has of course its own unique challenges. The country has been involved in bitter warfare for almost two decades, and is still divided by civil war. From the outset, we have made it clear that construction of the pipeline we have proposed across Afghanistan could not begin until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of governments, lenders, and our company.

Unocal foresees a pipeline which would become part of a regional system that would gather oil from existing pipeline infrastructure in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia. The 1,040-mile long oil pipeline would extend south through Afghanistan to an export terminal that would be constructed on the Pakistan coast. This 42-inch diameter pipeline would have a shipping capacity of one million barrels of oil per day. The estimated cost of the project, which is similar in scope to the trans-Alaska pipeline, is about $2.5 billion.

Without peaceful settlement of the conflicts in the region, cross-border oil and gas pipelines are not likely to be built. We urge the Administration and the Congress to give strong support to the UN-

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led peace process in Afghanistan. The US Government should use its influence to help find solutions to all of the region’s conflicts. [8]

The Unocal-Bridas Feud

There was something else behind the Unocal pipeline project, which mainstream reports failed to mention. The Taliban had also been negotiating with an Argentinean oil group, Bridas Energy Corporation, and were “playing one company against the other”. [9] Bridas belonged to the wealthy and powerful Bhulgeroni family. Carlos Bhulgeroni is a close friend of former Argentine President Carlos Menem, whose government was instrumental in implementing in 1990 - under advice from the World Bank - a comprehensive deregulation of Argentina’s oil and gas industry. This deregulation contributed to the enrichment of the Bhulgeroni family.

In 1992 - several years prior to Unocal’s involvement - Bridas Energy Corporation had obtained gas exploration rights in Eastern Turkmenistan, and the following year it was awarded the Keimir oil and gas block in Western Turkmenistan. Washington considered this an encroachment. It responded to Bridas’ inroads into Central Asia by sending former Secretary of State Alexander Haig to lobby for “increased US investments” in Turkmenistan. [10] A few months later, Bridas was prevented from exporting oil from the Keimir block.

Unocal and Bridas were clashing in their attempts to gain political control. While Bridas had a head start in its negotiations with Turkmen officials, Unocal had the direct support of the US Government, which was acting both overtly (through diplomatic channels) as well as covertly to undermine Bridas Energy Corp.

In August 1995, at the height of the Afghan civil war, Bridas representatives met up with Taliban officials to discuss the pipeline project. Meanwhile, Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyasov had been invited to New York (October 1995) to sign an agreement with Unocal and its CentGas consortium partner, Delta Oil Corporation of Saudi Arabia. The agreement was signed by President Niyazov of Turkmenistan and John F. Imle, Jr., President of Unocal, and witnessed by Badr M. Al-Aiban, CEO of Delta Oil Corporation.


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Bridas and the Taliban

In February 1996, Bridas Energy Corporation of Argentina and the Taliban provisional government signed a preliminary agreement. Washington responded through its embassy in Islamabad, urging Pakistan’s Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to dump Bridas and grant exclusive rights to Unocal. [11] Meanwhile, the Clinton administration had funnelled, through Pakistan’s ISI, military aid to advancing Taliban forces. This support was a crucial factor in the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul in September 1996. Following the installation of a hard-line Islamic government, Unocal confirmed that “it will give aid to Afghan warlords once they agree to form a council to supervise the project”. [12]

Back in Texas, Bridas Energy Corporation filed a $15 billion lawsuit against Unocal, accusing it of dirty tricks and interference in:

… secretly contacting the Turkmen deputy prime minister for oil and gas [in 1996] about its own pipeline plan. According to a Bridas source, the Turkmen government then made an overnight decision to cut off the export of oil from Bridas’ Keimir field on the Caspian Sea. The company also alleges that the deputy prime minister demanded that Bridas, with its cash flow strangled, renegotiate its concession. “We found written evidence that Unocal was behind the
curtains,” the Bridas source said. [13]

BP-Amoco Enter the Pipeline Saga

Facing pending financial difficulties, 60 per cent of Bridas shares were sold in August 1997 to the American Oil Company (Amoco), leading to the formation of the Pan American Energy Corporation. The bidders in the Bridas merger were Amoco and Union Texas Petroleum of the United States, France’s Total, Royal Dutch Shell, Spain’s Endesa and a consortium including Spain’s Repsol and US Mobil.

For Amoco, which later merged with BP in 1998, Bridas was a prize acquisition, which was facilitated by Chase Manhattan and Morgan Stanley. Former National Security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was a consultant to Amoco. Arthur Andersen - the

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accounting firm implicated in the 2002 Enron scandal - was put in charge of “post-merger integration”. [14]

BP-Amoco is the main player in the Westbound pipeline routes out of the Caspian Sea basin including the controversial Baku-Ceyan pipeline project through Georgia and Turkey. By acquiring Bridas, the BP-led consortium gained a direct stake in the east and southbound pipeline negotiations.

Unocal is both a “rival” as well as a consortium “partner” of BP. In other words, BP controls the westbound pipeline consortium in which Unocal has a significant stake. With Bridas in the hands of BPAmoco, however, it is unlikely that a future trans-Afghan pipeline will proceed without the consent and/or participation of BP:

Recognizing the significance of the merger, a Pakistani oil company executive hinted, “If these [Central Asian] countries want a big US company involved, Amoco is far bigger than Unocal.” [15]

Following the takeover of Bridas by Amoco, Bridas’ successor company, Pan American Energy Corporation, continued to actively negotiate with the Taliban. But the dynamics of these negotiations had been fundamentally modified. Pan American Energy was negotiating on behalf of its Chicago-based parent company Amoco. Moreover, the Clinton administration had abandoned its dirty tricks and was now backing Amoco’s subsidiary.

Meanwhile, in August 1998, Amoco and BP announced their decision to unite their global operations leading to the formation (together with Atlantic Ritchfield) of the world’s largest oil company.

The Bridas-Unocal rivalry had evolved towards “a fall-out” between two major US corporations (Unocal and BP-Amoco), which were also “partners” in the westbound pipeline projects. Both Unocal and BP-Amoco have extensive links to seats of political power, not only in the White House and Congress, but also with the military and intelligence establishment in charge of covert operations in Central Asia. Both companies contributed generously to the Bush presidential campaign.

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The merger between BP and Amoco (leading to the integration of British and American oil interests) had no doubt also contributed to the development of closer political ties between the British and US Governments. Responding to the merger of American and British interests in oil, banking and the military-industrial complex, Britain’s new Labour government, under Prime Minister Tony Blair, has become America’s unconditional ally.

The US Embassy Bombings

In the course of 1998, talks between Taliban and Unocal officials had stalled. The honeymoon was over. Then came the East African US Embassy bombings, allegedly by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, and the launching of cruise missiles against targets in Afghanistan.

The official suspension of negotiations with the Taliban was announced by Unocal in August 1998 in the immediate wake of the punitive actions against Afghanistan and Sudan, ordered by President Clinton. Whether the 1997 takeover of Bridas by Amoco and the subsequent merger of BP-Amoco (also in August 1998) had a bearing on Unocal’s decision remains unclear. Nonetheless, “the Big Game” had evolved: Unocal was now competing against the world’s largest oil company, BP-Amoco.

The Texas Court Case: BP-Amoco (Bridas) versus Unocal

Two months later in this evolving saga, in October 1998, a Texas court dismissed the (formerly Argentinean-owned) Bridas’ US$15 billion lawsuit against Unocal “for preventing them developing gas fields in Turkmenistan”. [16] It turned out that the court ruling was in fact against Bridas’ parent company, BP-Amoco, which had, a year earlier, acquired a controlling stake in Bridas.

In all likelihood, there was a mutual understanding between Unocal and BP-Amoco, which are consortium partners in the Caspian Sea basin. Moreover, while Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former National Security Adviser (in a Democratic administration), was acting as a consultant for Amoco, Henry Kissinger, a former Secretary of State (in a Republican administration), was advising Unocal Corporation.

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The acquisition of Bridas by BP-Amoco suggests that BP will, in all likelihood, be a major player in future pipeline negotiations, most probably in an agreement with Unocal.

Unocal Withdraws But Only Temporarily

While Unocal had formally withdrawn from the CentGas consortium in the wake of the cruise missile attacks on Afghanistan and the Sudan, BP-Amoco’s subsidiary, Pan American Energy, (the successor company to Bridas), continued to actively negotiate with Afghan, Russian, Turkmen and Kazakh officials regarding the trans-Afghan pipeline project.

Meanwhile, a turnaround had occurred in US foreign policy under the Clinton administration towards Bridas: No more dirty tricks against a company which is now owned by one of America’s largest oil conglomerates! Visibly, in the last two years of the Clinton administration, Unocal’s rival in the pipeline negotiations, BPAmoco, had the upper hand.

Despite Unocal’s temporary withdrawal, the CentGas consortium was not disbanded. Unocal’s partner, Delta Oil Corporation of Saudi Arabia, in CentGas continued to negotiate with the Taliban.

George W. Bush Enters the White House

The evolving pipeline saga gained a new momentum upon George W. Bush’s accession to the White House in January 2001.

At the very outset of the Bush administration, Unocal (which had withdrawn in 1998 from pipeline negotiations under the Clinton administration) reintegrated the CentGas Consortium and resumed its talks with the Taliban (in January 2001), with the firm backing, this time, of senior officials of the Bush administration, including Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage. Dick Armitage had previously been a lobbyist for Unocal in the Burma/Myanmar Forum, which is a Washington-based group funded by Unocal. [17]

These negotiations with the Taliban occurred only a few months before the September 11 attacks:

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Laila Helms [daughter of Senator Jesse Helms], who was hired as the public relations agent for the Taliban government, brought Rahmatullah Hashimi, an advisor to Mullah Omar, to Washington as recently as March 2001. Helms was uniquely positioned for the job through her association with her uncle Richard Helms, former chief of the CIA and former Ambassador to Iran. One of the negotiating meetings was held just one month before September 11, on August 2, when Christina Rocca, in charge of Asian Affairs at the State Department, met Taliban Ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salem Zaef, in Islamabad.

Rocca has had extensive connections with Afghanistan, including supervising the delivery of Stinger missiles to the Mujahideen in the 1980s. At the CIA, she had been in charge of contacts with Islamist fundamentalist guerrilla groups. [18]

Unocal ‘Appoints’ Interim Government in Kabul

In the wake of the bombing of Afghanistan, the Bush administration designated Hamid Karzai as head of the interim government in Kabul. While highlighting Karzai’s patriotic struggle against the Taliban, what the media failed to mention is that Karzai had collaborated with the Taliban government. He had also been on Unocal’s payroll.

In fact, since the mid-1990s, Hamid Karzai, who later became President, had acted as a consultant and lobbyist for Unocal in negotiations with the Taliban. His appointment - visibly on behalf of the US oil giants - had been casually rubber-stamped by the “international community” at the November 2001 Bonn conference, held under UN auspices.

According to the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan:

Karzai has been a Central Intelligence Agency covert operator since the 1980s. He collaborated with the CIA in funneling US aid to the Taliban as of 1994 “when the Americans had - secretly and through the Pakistanis [specifically the ISI] - supported the Taliban’s assumption of power.” [19]

“Coincidentally, President Bush’s Special Envoy to Kabul, Zalmay Khalizad, had also worked for Unocal. He had drawn up the risk

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analysis for the pipeline in 1997, lobbied for the Taliban and took part in negotiations with them.” [20] Khalizad had occupied the position of Special Advisor to the State Department during the Reagan administration, “lobbying successfully for accelerated US military aid to the Mujahideen”.

He later became Undersecretary of Defense in the Bush Senior Cabinet. [21] When George W. was inaugurated in January 2001, Khalizad was appointed to the National Security Council. While Clinton’s foreign policy had provided support to US oil interests in Central Asia, under the Republicans oil company officials were brought into the inner sphere of political decision-making.

The ‘Reconstruction’ of Afghanistan

Washington had set the stage. According to a World Bank representative in Kabul, “reconstruction in Afghanistan [was] going to open up a whole range of opportunities.” [22]

Two days after the bombing of Afghanistan commenced, on October 9, the US Ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlain, met with Pakistani officials regarding the trans-Afghan pipeline. The pipeline, according to the report, was slated to “open up new avenues of multi-dimensional regional cooperation, particularly in light of recent geopolitical developments [bombing of Afghanistan] in the region”. [23]

With Afghanistan under US military occupation, the role of Hamid Karzai as the country’s President is to “broker” the pipeline deal on behalf of the Anglo-American oil giants with the firm backing of the Bush administration.

In the immediate wake of the October 2001 bombing raids, the media reported that “two small companies”, Chase Energy and Caspian Energy Consulting (acting on behalf of major oil interests), had contacts with the governments of Turkmenistan and Pakistan to revive the pipeline deal. While the identity of the oil companies behind these “small firms” was not mentioned, it just so happens that the President of Caspian Sea Consulting, S. Rob Sobhani, had been a consultant to BP-Amoco in Central Asia. Sobhani also sits on the Council of Foreign Relations’ “Caspian Sea

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Discourse”, together with representatives of major oil companies, the George Soros Open Society Institute, the CIA and the Heritage Foundation (a Republican party think tank).

According to S. Rob Sobhani:

It is absolutely essential that the US make the pipeline the centerpiece of rebuilding Afghanistan …. The State Department thinks it’s a great idea, too. Routing the gas through Iran would be avoided, and the Central Asian republics wouldn’t have to ship through Russian pipelines. [24]

According to Joseph Noemi, CEO of Chase Energy, September 11, and the “War on Terrorism” are a blessing in disguise for Afghanistan:

If the United States’ presence continues in the region, [September 11] is probably the best thing that could have happened here for the Central Asian republics … This region, in terms of oil economics, is the frontier for this century and Afghanistan is part and parcel of this. [25]

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Notes

1. Knight Ridder News, 31 October 2001.
2. Jim Crogan, “The Oil War”, LA Weekly, 30 November 2001.
3. Ibid.
4. Ted Rall, “It’s About Oil”, San Francisco Chronicle, 2 November 2001, p. A25.
5. Ishtiaq Ahmad, “How America Courted Taliban”, Pakistan Observer, 20 October 2001.
6. John Pilger, “This War is a Fraud”, Daily Mirror, 29 October 2001.
7. Jim Crogan, “Pipeline Payoff to Afghanistan War”, California CrimeTimes, November 2001, http://www.californiacrimetimes.com/. See also Jim Crogan, “The Oil War: Unocal’s once-grand plan for Afghan pipelines”, LA Weekly, 30 November-6 December 2001.
8. US Congress, Hearing on US Interests in the Central Asian Republics, House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Committee on International Relations, Washington, DC,
http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/intlrel/hfa48119.000/hfa48119_0f.htm.
9. See Karen Talbot, “US Energy Giant Unocal Appoints Interim Government in Kabul”, Global Outlook, No. 1, Spring 2002, p. 70.
10. “Timeline of Competition Between Unocal and Bridas”, World Press Review, December 2001, www.worldpress.org.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Alexander Gas and Oil Connections, http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/company/cnc75005.htm, 12 August 1997
14. Larry Chin, “Unocal and the Afghanistan Pipeline”, Online Journal, 6 March 2002, Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHI203A.html, 6 March 2002.
15. Ibid.
16. Timeline, op. cit.
17. Larry Chin, op. cit.
18. See Karen Talbot,“US Energy Giant Unocal Appoints Interim Government in Kabul”, Global Outlook, No. 1, Spring 2002. p. 70.
19. Karen Talbot, op. cit. and BBC Monitoring Service, 15 December 2001.
20. Karen Talbot, op. cit.
21. Patrick Martin, “Unocal Advisor Named Representative to Afghanistan”, World Socialist Web Site, 3 January 2002.
22. Statement of William Byrd, World Bank Acting Country Manager for Afghanistan, 27 November 2001.
23. Quoted in Larry Chin, “The Bush administration’s Afghan Carpet”, Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHI203B.html, 13 March 2002.
24. Daniel Fisher, “Kabuled Together”, Forbes Online, 4 February 2002, http://www.forbes.com.
25. Knight Ridder News, 30 October 2001.

New round-up: Afghanistan

From yesterday’s news:

At his annual Mansion House foreign affairs address Gordon Brown says that a ‘clear timetable’ for the handover of security to Afghan forces could be agreed as early as January 2010. ‘The international community will meet to agree plans for the support we will provide to Afghanistan during this next phase.’

In a speech to the NATO parliamentary assembly David Miliband says the military commitment in Afghanistan is ‘not a war without end’ but that NATO’s priority was not to risk leaving a ‘vacuum’ for a resurgent Taliban.

Transparency International reports that Iraq and Afghanistan are among the most corrupt states on the planet. ‘When essential institutions are weak or non-existent, corruption spirals out of control.” And who made ’em weak to non-existent in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Now some quotes from Aram Roston’s article in The Nation last week, ‘How the US Funds the Taliban’:

On October 29, 2001, while the Taliban’s rule over Afghanistan was under assault, the regime’s ambassador in Islamabad gave a chaotic press conference in front of several dozen reporters sitting on the grass. On the Taliban diplomat’s right sat his interpreter, Ahmad Rateb Popal, a man with an imposing presence. Like the ambassador, Popal wore a black turban, and he had a huge bushy beard. He had a black patch over his right eye socket, a prosthetic left arm and a deformed right hand, the result of injuries from an explosives mishap during an old operation against the Soviets in Kabul.

But Popal was more than just a former mujahedeen. In 1988, a year before the Soviets fled Afghanistan, Popal had been charged in the United States with conspiring to import more than a kilo of heroin. Court records show he was released from prison in 1997.

Flash forward to 2009, and Afghanistan is ruled by Popal’s cousin President Hamid Karzai. Popal has cut his huge beard down to a neatly trimmed one and has become an immensely wealthy businessman, along with his brother Rashid Popal, who in a separate case pleaded guilty to a heroin charge in 1996 in Brooklyn. The Popal brothers control the huge Watan Group in Afghanistan, a consortium engaged in telecommunications, logistics and, most important, security. Watan Risk Management, the Popals’ private military arm, is one of the few dozen private security companies in Afghanistan. One of Watan's enterprises, key to the war effort, is protecting convoys of Afghan trucks heading from Kabul to Kandahar, carrying American supplies.

Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA officials and ex-military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahedeen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort.
…

Whereas in Iraq the private security industry has been dominated by US and global firms like Blackwater, operating as de facto arms of the US government, in Afghanistan there are lots of local players as well. As a result, the industry in Kabul is far more dog-eat-dog. “Every warlord has his security company,” is the way one executive explained it to me.

In theory, private security companies in Kabul are heavily regulated, although the reality is different. Thirty-nine companies had licenses until September, when another dozen were granted licenses. Many licensed companies are politically connected: just as NCL is owned by the son of the defense minister and Watan Risk Management is run by President Karzai’s cousins, the Asia Security Group is controlled by Hashmat Karzai, another relative of the president. The company has blocked off an entire street in the expensive Sherpur District. Another security firm is controlled by the parliamentary speaker’s son, sources say. And so on.
…

“Most escorting is done by the Taliban,” an Afghan private security official told me. He’s a Pashto and former mujahedeen commander who has his finger on the pulse of the military situation and the security industry. And he works with one of the trucking companies carrying US supplies. “Now the government is so weak,” he added, “everyone is paying the Taliban.”

Taliban, Mr Miliband? Taliban Schmaliban!

The last eight years begin to look like a speeded-up version of so many old-model colonisation-decolonisations. Invade and destroy the old regime; secure the resources; divide and rule the population; identify and cultivate the most corruptible local elites; install them in power; officially pull out, … but in reality control of the economy remains in our hands. I say ‘our hands’ but mean the bloody hooks of the bankers and contractors. As in Egypt, so in Afghanistan, we, the real we, merely provided the initial tax base and soldiery (this is Combat Barbie’s ‘service.’).

The system of transferring nominal authority without threatening the bankers’ actual control was developed and perfected by Sir Andrew Cohen at the Foreign office in the late 1940s. See Ronald Robinson, ‘Imperial Theory and the Question of Imperialism after Empire,’ and the same author’s contribution to Morris-Jones and Fischer (Eds), Decolonization and After: The British and French Experience (Cass, 1980), ‘Andrew Cohen and the Transfer of Political Power in Tropical Africa, 1940-1951.’ In the first of these Robinson asks whether decolonisation and the recognition of nationalist claims was not simply the ‘continuation of imperialism by other and more efficient means?’ Aye, and still is.

Corsi’s EU timeline

In the introduction to his excellent book ‘Late Great U.S.A.’ Jerome R. Corsi provides a useful potted history of the evolution of the European Union as well as a warning to his American readers:

On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln strode forward onto the field of Gettysburg, some four months after the great battle. The short speech he delivered that day is one of the most enduring statements of American freedom ever uttered.

In that speech, Lincoln observed that the Civil War was a test of how long a nation ‘conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal’ could endure.

In these few words, Lincoln captured the historic significance of America. The United States was the first nation ever brought forth to preserve the God-given rights endowed to all people. He also recognized the preciousness of any human institution designed to preserve those rights, especially one created ‘under God’ to be a government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’ Before, governments had been created of the elite, by the elite, and for the elite.

That day, Lincoln prayed that the United States of America, so created and so dedicated, should ‘not perish from the earth.’

Today, we again face the possibility that the United States of America may not long endure. Our national sovereignty is in danger of being compromised in favor of an emerging regional government, designed of the elite, by the elite, and for the elite, who are working to achieve global ambitions in the pursuit of wealth and power for themselves.

There are movements afoot in Mexico, Canada, and the United States, similar to those in Europe that led to the formation of the European Union that, if left unchecked, will erode U.S. sovereignty and lead to a North American Union.


But how exactly did the Europe of World Wars I and II—a Europe that was fiercely nationalistic—become the Europe of today? In order to understand the significance of contemporary developments in the United States, it is imperative to compare them to those that occurred in Europe over half a century ago.

The Formation of the European Union

The European Union was formed by people determined to destroy the nation-states that had dominated European politics for centuries. Many European intellectuals, especially in Germany, blamed the two world wars on the rise of nationalism. Those planning to undercut national sovereignty in Europe knew they would succeed only if they kept their true intentions concealed. Any direct proposal to eliminate nation-states - most with proud histories extending across centuries - would have been overwhelmingly rejected by citizens loath to see their national identities absorbed into a ‘European’ consciousness.

Despite these odds, the backers of a European Union succeeded, due in large part to the efforts of Jean Monnet, widely regarded as the father of the European Union. Monnet was born on November 9, 1888, to a French cognac merchant. Discharged from the military for health reasons, Monnet spent much of World War I forging an international alliance between the French and British-led effort to defeat Germany. Monnet emerged from this experience a true globalist who believed that nation-states were ultimately destructive. Monnet believed more European wars were inevitable as long as Europeans saw themselves first as British, French, Italian, or German, and only secondarily as European.[1]

On August 5, 1943, as a member of the National Liberation Committee of the free French Government in Algiers, Monnet addressed the committee, stating:

There will be no peace in Europe if the States rebuild themselves on the basis of national sovereignty, with its implications of prestige politics and economic protection...The countries of Europe are not strong enough to be able to guarantee prosperity and social development for their peoples. The States of Europe must therefore form a federation or a European entity that would make them into a common economic unit.[2]

Monnet was instrumental in forging this federation, and he did so by prioritizing economic unity over political unity.

On May 9, 1950, French Foreign Minister Robert Shuman, in a speech inspired by Monnet, announced what became known as ‘The Shuman Declaration,’ a plan to pool French and German coal and steel production.[3] Shuman argued that this solidarity would make war between France and Germany ‘not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.’[4] On December 18, 1951, ‘the Six’ - a group of European nations consisting of Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands - signed the Treaty of Paris, formally establishing the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC).[5] Then, on March 25, 1957, the Six signed the Treaty of Rome establishing the European Economic Community (EEC), commonly referred to in the United Kingdom as the European Common Market.[6]

From here, a series of incremental steps can be traced that moved a European common market into a European regional government. Once Europe started taking steps toward economic unity, political unity followed.

On March 25, 1957, the European Atomic Energy Commission was created by a second treaty of Rome, signed the same day that the more famous Treaty of Rome created the EEC. On October 17, 1957, a European Court of Justice was established in order to settle regional trade disputes. In 1960, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK set up the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). In 1965, the three already-established European communities - the European Economic Community, the European Coal and Steel Community, and the European Atomic Energy Community - merged under the European Economic Community (EEC) moniker. In 1968, in a move toward abolishing duties at internal borders and establishing a uniform system for taxing imports among EEC countries, the European Customs Union was formed.

Brussels and Luxembourg were selected as the executive sites of the EEC almost by accident. In 1951, Luxembourg’s foreign minister had insisted that the European Coal and Steel Community set up headquarters in Luxembourg, but refused to accept any more ‘Eurocrats.’ When the Treaty of Rome established the EEC in 1957, Brussels became a ‘provisional site’ that eventually grew into a permanent fixture. In Luxembourg, ECSC committees were established, just as EEC committees were established in Brussels. Over time, these committees evolved into the bureaucratic ‘working groups’ that even today run the executive functions of the European Union.[7]

In 1978, the European Council met in Brussels and established a European monetary system based on a European currency unit (ECU) and an exchange rate mechanism (ERM). Initially the ECU was just used for travelers’ checks and interbank deposits. However, the agreement set the stage for the emergence of a common European currency. In 1986, the Single European Act modified the Treaty of Rome and set up a framework for a completely unified European market. Gradually, what began as a limited coal and steel agreement transformed into a common market and a European customs union, with the underpinnings for a European currency.

The Treaty of the European Union, signed in Maastricht, the Netherlands, on February 7, 1992, formed a full-fledged regional government.[8] The flag of twelve yellow stars in a circle against a blue background, first seen as the EEC flag in 1985, became the official flag of the European Union - just as the EU passport supplemented and then supplanted national passports from the various European nations participating in the union. Over a period of fifty years, the internal borders between EU countries were largely erased so European Union citizens could live and work in the EU country of their choice. Over this same period of time, a professional bureaucracy sprouted and grew in Brussels and Luxembourg. On January 1, 2002, the euro was introduced and the traditional national currencies of the participating EU countries were phased out.[9]

Today, some 70 to 80 percent of the laws passed in Europe involve nothing more than rubber stamping regulations already written by nameless ‘working group’ bureaucrats in Brussels or Luxembourg. Virtually gone is the ability of European countries to set their own policy direction and the ultimate arbiter of justice is the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, not the highest national court in each country.

In short, Monnet’s vision of a future where the nations of Europe would gradually surrender their sovereignty to participate in a regional government had been largely achieved.

The Incremental Approach and the Stealth Plan

The European Union succeeded because its supporters took an incremental approach. While advancing step by step toward a united Europe, they studiously avoided suggesting their goal was to create a ‘supra-government.’ What began as a coal and steel agreement advanced to a common market and ended as a regional government - exactly as Jean Monnet had always wanted as expressed in the closing words of his Memoirs:

The sovereign nations of the past could no longer solve the problems of the present; they cannot ensure their own progress or control their own future. And the Community itself is only a stage on the way to the organized world of tomorrow.[10]

In The Great Deception, perhaps the most comprehensive examination of the emergence of the EU yet written, authors Christopher Booker and Richard North conclude:

Even though he had long since been honored as ‘the Father of Europe,’ Jean Monnet had always preferred to work behind the scenes, away from the limelight. He knew that, only by operating in the shadows, behind a cloak of obscurity, could he one day realize his dream. What he pulled off ... was to amount to a slow-motion coup d’etat: the most spectacular coup d’etat in history.[11]

Although he died in 1979 before seeing his plan for establishing an EU fully realized, Monnet lived to see many events unfold as he had recommended. The original nation-states, including the governments, courts, and parliaments of France, England, and Germany remained, but ‘only so they could gradually become subordinated to a new supranational government which was above them all.’[12]


From this brief history of the European Union, several defining characteristics emerge from which parallels can be drawn to the movement to merge the United States, Mexico, and Canada:

• A highly motivated and passionate organizer
• Economic union as a means to economic growth, which was later followed by political union;
• A desire to foster security and eradicate war;
• A desire to establish a collective consciousness that superseded national consciousness;
• A de facto political union that resulted from economic treaties followed by formal ratification;
• The blurring of borders and the transfer of passports from the countries to the ‘supra-government’;
• A reticence to acknowledge the real goals of the movement;
• The creation of a common currency.

Had Germany, France, or Italy realized in 1957 that the Treaty of Rome would lead to a loss of self-government, the European Union movement would have been dead before it started. By 2002, however, most European states made the decision to abandon their national currencies in favor of the euro with little hesitation, despite the loss of national sovereignty entailed in the decision.

Will the same be said of the United States twenty or thirty years from today? If we don’t heed the handwriting on the wall, it might very well be.

The Late, Great USA

Abraham Lincoln understood that liberty is precious, so he stood on the field of Gettysburg and reminded people that it was their duty to continue ‘the great task remaining before us ... that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.’ Eternal vigilance, it has been said, is the price of freedom, and just as it was the duty of Americans in Lincoln’s day to fight to preserve that freedom, so it is the duty of Americans in our day.

The government established by our forefathers, a government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people,’ was not established quietly. Unlike Jean Monnet, the Founding Fathers were upfront about their goals for the new government they formed. The democratic process and the liberty it brings depend upon such openness. Elites are as susceptible to corruption as ordinary citizens. In a constitutional republic, the power of correction rests with all the people; but the people can only correct that of which they are aware. As the EU experience shows us, secrecy is the great friend of tyranny.

Unfortunately, steps similar to those that resulted in the European Union are being taken in America, Mexico, and Canada. If we do not wish to follow the EU into regional government, it’s the duty of each of us to hold our leaders accountable for placing our country’s sovereignty in danger. While it would be presumptuous to claim that a North American Union is inevitable, it is equally presumptuous to insist that it is impossible. This book will demonstrate that disturbing parallels exist between the stealth process that resulted in the EU, and the incremental actions being taken by the governments of the United States, Mexico, and Canada to unite our nations into an emerging regional configuration. Preserving U.S. sovereignty is up to those of us who still care about freedom and the nation our forefathers bestowed upon us.

Notes


1. Christopher Booker and Richard North, The Great Deception: The Secret History of the European Union (New York: Continuum Books, 2003), 5.
2. Quoted in ‘Jean Monnet: 1888-1979,’ in ‘The history of the European Union: The European citizenship,’ at http://www.historiasiglo20.org/europe/rnonnet.htm .
3. Europa, ‘Gateway to the European Union,’ the official Internet portal to the European Union, in a year-by-year timeline entitled ‘The History of the European Union,’ at: http://europa.eu/abc/history/1950/index_%20en.htm . Referred to hereafter as ‘Europa Timeline.’
4. Documented in ‘A Timeline of the EU,’ BBC News, October 29, 2004, at: http://news.bbc.co.Uk/l/hi/world/europe/3583801.stm. Referred to hereafter as ‘BBC News Timeline.’
5. Europa Timeline at: http://europa.eu/abc/history/1951/index_en.htm.
6. Europa Timeline at: http://europa.eu/abc/history/1957/index_en.htm.
7. Great Deception, 86-87.
8. Europa Timeline at: http://europa.eu/abc/history/1992/index_en.htm.
9. BBC News Timeline, at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3583801.stm.
10. Closing words of Jean Monnet’s memoirs, quoted by Booker and North, op. cit. 1,1.
11. Great Deception, 3.
12. Ibid., 1.

The BBC: Its real origins and purpose

Discussion over at DPF:

Paul Rigby:

Not quite your conventional take on the origins of the BBC:

“…the BBC was started in the early 1920s as a means of quietly raising revenue for British radio manufacturers, in order to develop radio signalling equipment for the British secret service…”

Tom McArthur & Peter Waddell. Vision Warrior: The Hidden Achievement of John Logie Baird (Orkney Press Ltd, 1990), p.277

The big prize was, initially at least, radar: TV was the cover-story. The implications, however, go much further:

“...Appeasement was a fake. Appeasement implied not knowing Hitler's next move. In fact, it now appears that the future Allies were aware of most of these plans, allowing him to make increasingly reckless moves”

(Ibid., p.309) Guido Giacomo Preparata, take a bow.

****

Thanks Paul. A previous post rung a bell and I searched 'Guido Giacomo Preparata' on Amazon.The reviews of 'Conjuring Hitler' are informative and very much accord with my own developing knowledge and intuition on the whole 20th century historical record, as 'imprimatured' and carefully nurtured by the Anglo American Establishment. I've ordered it.

****

Peter, Buy both – or order Vision Warrior from the library (paperback ISBN 0907618049) – and read them as, well, companion volumes. For, as unlikely as it may seem on cursory inspection, the degree of correspondence is staggering. What do I mean by this? The authors of Vision Warrior prove that conventional accounts of Logie Baird's career, not least those offered publicly by the man himself (“…it is difficult to date many incidents because Baird post-dated them to fit the official version…,” p.142), are essentially deep state fictions – pre-eminently, though by no means exclusively, SIS fabrications - designed to hide Baird’s real activities; and that those activities, essentially radar and secret signalling, were geared, from the early 1920s at the latest, to war. McArthur & Waddell even touch upon a central theme of Preparata’ thesis, to wit, the degree to which the British establishment undertook a sophisticated, and utterly bogus, “bifurcation” designed to create the illusion of division, and weakness.

“The possibility remains that some of these members may have been placed in ‘The Link’ as double agents, to encourage Hitler to believe that the wealthy in Britain were pro-Nazi and anti-communist.”

Preparata or McArthur & Waddell? The latter (p.277). Here’s Preparata on the same subject (pbk, p.xviii):

“England put on a mesmerizing show by feigning before the world that her ruling class was divided between pro-Nazis and anti-Nazis, and that such a scission accounted for the apparent lack of commitment to fight Hitler on the Western Front…”

The resonances are not merely historical:

“…in the 1926 Christmas edition of the Illustrated London News he [Baird] presented a breathtakingly early vision of what was in store. An artist’s impression had hostile tribesmen on the North-West frontier of India observed and tracked in the dark by solar-topeed troops who watched their movements on a screen,” (p.224).

CIA drones, anyone?

****

Back to the original theme of the thread for a moment. In seeking to understand why a wealthy & sophisticated news-gathering entity like the BBC parrots obsessively the American establishment line on the latter’s successive world-historical covert ops, we might usefully start at the beginning. And in the beginning was, as we have seen, deception in the service of the Russophobic geopolitical lunatics running Britain’s avowardly imperial military industrial complex. But there was another factor at work, too:

“A look at the early structuring of the BBC provides some fascinating facts. Originally the British Broadcasting Company, created in late 1922, consisted of six of the biggest radio-producing companies in the country. Their make-up reveals intriguing links…about the strength of American representation. The companies were Metropolitan Vickers, originally British Westinghouse, a branch of the American Westinghouse Company, and subsequently owned by General Electric USA; British Thompson Houston, also bought by GE of America; British GEC, 60 per cent of whose shares…were owned by GE USA; The Radio Communications Company, specialising in naval radio, which had information and patent swaps with Metropolitan Vickers; Marconi Britain whose American firm was forced in 1919 by US Government order to join with GE to form RCA; and Western Electric, also American-owned, part of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company who were linked by patent swaps and trade agreements with GE USA in the 1930s…With the BBC linked to such associates, it is hardly surprising that…*”

…it regurgitates any old nonsense the US MIC cares to foist on it and us: The BBC was its mouthpiece from the off. PS Didn't General Electric fund Hitler? Or have I misremembered my Anthony Sutton?

* Tom McArthur & Peter Waddell. Vision Warrior: The Hidden Achievement of John Logie Baird (Orkney Press Ltd, 1990), pp. 301-302.

****

Rest assured that your memory is intact:

Chapter Three of Sutton “Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler”

David Miller: The Propaganda Machine

This essay appeared in the book Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq edited by the author.

The Propaganda Machine

David Miller

Since 11 September 2001 both the US and UK governments have comprehensively overhauled their internal and external propaganda apparatus. These have been globally co-ordinated as never before to justify the “war on terror” including the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq and the assault on civil liberties at home. To win the war on Iraq the US and UK governments evidently believed that they could not rely on the media to report consistently in conformity with the official line. Consequently there has been serious investment in an extensive machinery of propaganda.

There is very little public debate on the propaganda apparatus and very few people know of the extensive machinery which has been built up in the past two years. The UK Foreign Office public diplomacy operation alone costs £340 million annually for operations taking place in London and not including work done in embassies around the world.[1] In the US the Pentagon has its own machinery and the State Department has the Office of Public Diplomacy. The latter tries to win hearts and minds in the Arab world and operates with a budget in excess of $1 billion.[2] The overall cost of the propaganda campaigns to justify the “war on terror” and the attack on Afghanistan and Iraq is a secret, but it must run into billions of dollars in the US and hundreds of millions of pounds in the UK.

The machinery has a number of parallel elements in the US and UK and the efforts are also co-ordinated globally between the US and UK. In the US the White House has the Office of Global Communications (OGC) which sits at the top of the global pyramid. The OGC was set up by the Bush White House based on the experience of the Coalition Information Centers (CIC) operated during the Kosovo and Afghanistan adventures. These drew on the propaganda expertise of the British government and are reported to have been the idea of Alastair Campbell, the former No.10 Press Secretary.[3] The CIC was set up in October 2001 for the Afghanistan campaign with offices in Washington, London and Islamabad to co-ordinate across time zones. According to reports it was this initiative which sparked information sharing to ensure that the US and UK (and other governments) “sang from the same hymn sheet”.[4] The CIC was made permanent under the auspices of the White House with the creation of the OGC in July 2002. It was the OGC which fed out the lies about the threat posed by the Hussein regime including the faked and spun intelligence information supplied by the UK and by the secret Pentagon intelligence operation, the Office of Special Plans. This was set up by Rumsfeld to bypass the CIA, which was reluctant to go along with some of the lies.[5]

According to Suzy DeFrancis, deputy assistant to President Bush for communications, the aim during the attack on Iraq was to ensure information dominance by constant feeding of the official line:

When Americans wake up in the morning, they will first hear from the [Persian Gulf] region, maybe from General Tommy Franks … Then later in the day, they’ll hear from the Pentagon, then the State Department, then later on the White House will brief.

The day’s message was set “with an early-morning conference call to British counterpart Alastair Campbell, White House communications director Dan Bartlett, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, Pentagon spokesperson Torie Clarke, and White House Office of Global Communication (OGC) director Tucker Eskew – a routine that mirrors procedure during the conflict in Afghanistan”.[6] The OGC produces each day’s “talking points”. “[C]ivilian and military personnel, for example are told to refer to the invasion of Iraq as a ‘war of liberation’. Iraqi paramilitary forces are to be called ‘death squads’.”[7]

From the White House the message is cascaded down to the rest of the propaganda apparatus. In the US, the State Department Office of Public Diplomacy is responsible for overseas propaganda. It also underwent a reorganisation and appointed a new director after 11 September. According to the new director Charlotte Beers, a former ad agency executive (and who lasted only until March 2003), the Office’s 800 staff in the US link into some 16,000 embassy staff globally. “We reach them through web, through e-mail, through cable, and our own American Embassy television channel. They can take our products and activate them locally in ways that we in Washington cannot.”[8] Every night the Office sends an email bulletin known as the “Global Messenger” “containing talking points and ready-to-use quotes”.[9]

In the UK there is a parallel apparatus. The Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office have the biggest propaganda operations of any UK government departments and their efforts are co-ordinated with Downing Street. The co-ordination was accomplished by means of a cross-departmental committee known as the Communication and Information Centre, later changed back to the Coalition Information Centre as it had been in the Afghan campaign. It is administratively based in the Foreign Office Information Directorate, yet, was chaired by Alastair Campbell and run from Downing Street.[10] Campbell also chaired a further cross-departmental committee at No.10 – the Iraq Communication Group.[11] It was from here that the campaign to mislead the media about the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was directed. In particular it oversaw the September dossier on WMD and the second “dodgy” dossier of February 2003 which was quickly exposed as plagiarised and spun. In another parallel with the US, Downing Street has “exasperated” the Foreign Office by setting up an alternative diplomatic policy centre in No.10 which is linked straight in to the centres of power in Washington, particularly via Sir David Manning, the most senior diplomat in No.10, who regularly speaks on the phone with his “friend” Condoleezza Rice. In the Foreign Office the parallel machinery is known as the “cosa nostra”.[12]

The propaganda apparatus below this had four main elements. First was the external system of propaganda run by the Foreign Office and co-ordinated by the Public Diplomacy Policy Department. Second was internal propaganda focused on the alleged “terrorist threat” co-ordinated out of the Cabinet Office by the newly established Civil Contingencies Secretariat. Third and very much subordinate to the command and control propaganda systems in Washington and London was the operation “in theatre” – the stage for the crushing of Iraq. This was Centcom in Doha, Qatar, the Forward Press Information Centre in Kuwait and the embedded reporters with their military minders. Lastly, there were the US and UK military psychological operations teams undertaking overt and covert operations inside Iraq which are said only to target enemy opinion to break resistance. All of these operations have their own contribution to make to the attack on Iraq although most public debate has focused on the Centcom/embed system and latterly (in the UK) on the Downing Street operation overseen by Campbell.

CHANGING PERCEPTIONS: THE FOREIGN OFFICE

The Foreign Office has undergone a major review of all its propaganda work “using”, as an internal report puts it, “the events of 11 September as a peg”. Following the US example the Foreign Office “re-branded” its propaganda work as “public diplomacy” in the late 1990s. The review of public diplomacy has brought together all Foreign Office activity in this area including the BBC World Service and the cultural propaganda outfit the British Council. The review concluded that the government needed an “overarching public diplomacy strategy”[13] which would shape the “core messages that we wish to put across to our target audiences”.[14] To oversee this propaganda effort a strategy board was appointed.

Mark Leonard of the Foreign Policy Centre, a think-tank set up by Blair and then Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, has written extensively on public diplomacy. His view on honesty and openness in communication is that neither should be an obstacle to government propaganda: “If a message will engender distrust simply because it is coming from a foreign government then the government should hide that fact as much as possible.”[15] One can guess how much this reflects official thinking by the fact that Leonard is now one of the members of the Public Diplomacy Strategy Board which oversees Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) propaganda.

The Foreign Office has a long history of covert and semi-covert propaganda operations via the secret Information Research Department, closed down in 1978, and its successor the Information Department which continued the tradition of “grey” propaganda in the production of briefings, news stories, radio and TV items which were planted in news outlets around the world. The Foreign Office was historically rather coy about the fact that these were produced by the British government.[16] Today the tradition continues. Four “grey” propaganda operations run by the FCO are the London Press Service, the London Radio Service, the London Television Service and the relatively new British Satellite News. These provide pro-British news and information free of charge and copyright to news organisations across the world. There is little indication in the material itself that it is produced by the British government and it is then published in international media as if it was genuine news.[17] The response to 11 September has been to step up such material and reshape the entire information apparatus with renewed emphasis on managing perceptions overseas.

A favoured tactic is to conduct trips for journalists. The Foreign Office departmental report brags about the success of one to Afghanistan in 2002. According to FCO propaganda official, David Dearnley, the journalists from Islamic media were shown “what Britain and the British-led forces were doing to help rebuild Afghanistan”. The journalists were also taken “through some of the most devastated parts of [Kabul] to a recently refurbished school where many girls and young women were eagerly taking the opportunity to catch up on their education”. Little is shown of the truth of the situation in Afghanistan which by July 2003 was described as follows: “More than 18 months after the collapse of the Taliban regime, there is a remarkable consensus among aid workers, NGOs and UN officials that the situation is deteriorating. There is a further point of consensus: that the deterioration is a direct consequence of ‘coalition’ policy.”[18] Instead, as the Foreign Office blushingly tells us: “The journalists subsequently published many articles giving positive coverage of Britain’s work in Afghanistan.”[19]

The attack on Afghanistan in 2001 also occasioned the creation of a unit within the Foreign Office tasked specifically with dealing with the Islamic media such as Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV. It was made permanent in 2002. As the attack on Iraq loomed, the rare UK media mentions of the unit painted it as a traditional example of plucky yet genteel British propaganda. The head of the unit, Gerard Russell, is described as “Britain’s lone crusader” or as “almost single-handedly responsible” for putting the British case in the Arab world.[20] This picture fails to take account of the fact that the Islamic Media Unit, which Russell heads, has eight staff [21] and is tapped into the rest of the extensive apparatus of public diplomacy, including work with the London Correspondents Unit which arranges visits to Britain for journalists from the Arab world, and British Satellite News which beams slanted news coverage into the Middle East with both English and Arabic scripts. Russell says “a lot of my job is demolishing myths” and countering the “emotive enunciations of extreme views on Arab television”.[22] Among the myths are the notion that US and UK imperialism are alive and well today. According to Russell: “I have to be very careful when I talk about democracy that they understand this means power of the people, and not imposing western ways of life or undermining Arab identity.”[23]

The strategy of the FCO is to fundamentally misrepresent the British role as consisting of benevolence and a respect for human rights. UK “public diplomacy” campaigns are not propaganda but the truth. The public diplomacy strategy of the government is available on the web, but has caused no major headlines in the media. The “core narrative” of the strategy includes maintaining that the UK is

principled and professional as shown in our: …
– reliability, straight dealing and trustworthiness in business and international affairs.
– Commitment to justice, human rights, the rule of law and international security.[24]

This statement was written and posted on the internet in May 2003 just after the attack on Iraq – in breach of international law and after the systematic deception about the threat from Iraq had started to unravel in the media. A clear illustration of the parallel universe inhabited by the UK government’s propagandists.

UK RESILIENCE AND THE CIVIL CONTINGENCIES SECRETARIAT

Without attracting front page attention the Blair government has quietly presided over a revolution in internal propaganda systems for dealing with national emergencies. The overhaul was set in train in July 2001 as a result of the foot and mouth crisis and drawing on the experience of the floods of winter 2000 and the fuel protests. The Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CSS) is based in the Cabinet Office and was overseen initially by the most senior propaganda official in the civil service, the head of the Government Information and Communication Service (GICS), Mike Granatt. It works closely with another new body, the Health Protection Agency which encompasses parts of the Department of Health disease surveillance operation and the MoD’s chemical and biological labs at Porton Down. Under the rather chilling website branding of “UK Resilience”, this network of organisations also works closely with the Special Branch and MI5. They tap straight into the CIC, formerly chaired by Alastair Campbell. The aim of the CCS is said to be to improve the UK’s “resilience” to “disruptive challenge”.[25] It has already seen action in the firefighters dispute – an indication of the orientation of the CCS towards state rather than public service agendas. It was centrally involved in circulating information on the alleged “threat” from Islamic “terrorism”.

The CCS houses a 24-hour monitoring spin operation called the News Co-ordination Centre (NCC) which stands ready for use in the event of the next emergency. It has also (in the wake of 11 September) established a wide-ranging review of information handling in an emergency situation undertaken by a working party involving government press officers and senior media executives together with police and local authority crisis planners. The Media Emergency Forum has produced a long report which the CCS claims “reflects a more productive relationship” with the media.[26] The approach taken by the CCS is more sophisticated than previous emergency planning responses which allow the government simply to take over the broadcast media. That system is still in place. According to Mike Granatt, then Director General of the GICS, “we’ve got a system that was put in place for nuclear war. We could press the button and pre-empt every transmitter in this country.” But this would be counter-productive. “Voluntary” agreements with the media are seen as more effective. Granatt says “we need a credible, active, sceptical – rather than cynical – system of news reporting … Anything we do to subvert the process of giving trust in that is wrong … If the BBC or ITN … said we think you should do this because the government says so, we would be lost.”[27] So productive has this been that it has occasioned little attention in the media.

It was the new propaganda apparatus that oversaw the release of the information on the alleged discovery of ricin in January 2003 and which ordered the tanks to Heathrow in late 2002, following an intelligence tip-off, reported as a surface-to-air missile attack on the airport. In the case of Heathrow Granatt has noted:

I will now confess to you. I sat at all the meetings that decided to do that, and I have seen agony cross their face before … Ministers actually considering putting tanks at our biggest economic asset … after what I sat and heard, doing it was absolutely necessary and I can’t tell you more – I’m very sorry about it but that’s the fact. But I can tell you first hand there was no lack of sincerity and nobody does that because it’s going to make some propaganda point for a war that at that point, wasn’t entirely certain anyway.[28]

What Granatt and others sat and heard was the intelligence assessment of the threat. Whether or not the threat was genuine, or just more dodgy “intelligence”, no one was arrested and no surfaceto-air missiles were found. Militarily it is not clear what the effectiveness of light armoured vehicles at Heathrow with a top speed of 30-odd miles an hour would be against a missile attack, launched at some distance from the airport. But according to senior sources involved in the decision: “You don’t catch rockets in an armoured vehicle. That is not the point. Part of the point of these things may be deterrence. So visibility is another part of the game.” Visibility – otherwise known as propaganda.

In the ricin case, the information was released, after deliberation in the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, under the name of the then deputy chief medical officer Dr Pat Troop.[29] She conducted a joint briefing at Scotland Yard with the police. Troop has maintained that the information that ricin had been found was released because “what we didn’t know when we started was whether or not we were then going to find lots more ricin somewhere else and therefore it was felt the public had the legitimate right to know”.[30] According to a senior source involved, “the broadcasters’ response was very positive. They told us afterwards it enabled them to go straight to air … because they were talking to people they believed were trustworthy and experts in their fields.”[31] The CCS released the information in the knowledge that it would potentially prejudice the trial of the people arrested in connection with the find. As Mike Granatt noted, prejudicing a trial comes way down the list of priorities after “public safety”.[32]

The claim that the information was released for public health reasons ushers in a new era or threat warning and assessment where the threat of terrorist attack is whipped up on shaky evidence for our own good – a very New Labour propaganda solution. The “threat” from ricin in the “environment” was clearly very small. The poison has to be ingested, inhaled or injected. Even if we suppose that the warning was genuinely given by civil servants operating in good faith, the information on which the warnings are based depends on the “intelligence” services. Their collective lack of understanding of Islamic activists together with their own overhauled spin apparatus makes it difficult to discern whether the information was based on “genuine” if misinterpreted intelligence or deliberate fabrication, as in the case of the MI5 leak that a planned gas attack on the London Tube had been foiled.[33]

Either way the UK Resilience apparatus appears credible to journalists and ensures effective wall to wall coverage for stories based on dubious sources which played very nicely into the propaganda campaign to take the UK to war and legitimates government assaults on civil liberties.

NO NEWS IS NEWS AT CENTCOM

In the 1991 Gulf War, the pool system has been the main means of control of journalists. In 2003 the Pentagon got more sophisticated and more determined to eliminate the possibility of independent reporting. They pressured journalists to leave Baghdad and by 18 March about half of the 300 there had left, including many of the key UK and US journalists.[34] They also threatened independent journalists and killed an unprecedented number (as discussed elsewhere in this book). The threats are all part of the PR strategy along with which goes the Forward Press Information Centre in Kuwait, the million dollar press room in Doha, Qatar, and the system of “embedding” journalists with military units.

The Doha Centre (Centcom) operated much like in previous wars and there were many complaints about the lack of information which flowed from it and from the Forward Press Information Centre. The grumbling came to a head when Michael Wolff asked the obvious question: “I mean no disrespect, but what is the value proposition of these briefings. Why are we here? Why should we stay? What’s the value of what we’re learning at this million dollar press centre?” As Wolff notes: “It was the question to sour the dinner party. It was also, because I used the words value proposition, a condescending and annoying question – a provocation.”[35]

In response to the question, and the spontaneous round of applause from the assembled reporters,

General Brooks said that I was here of my own volition and, if it wasn’t satisfactory to me, I should go home, this was far from a statement of policy. The last thing the Pentagon wanted was for the media to go home. Indeed, Centcom refused to confirm or deny what everyone could see for themselves: that chairs were being removed from the briefing every day (in one day alone, six chairs were removed) so that, as numbers dwindled, empty seats would not be shown to the world. This was a serious problem. What if you gave a war and the media didn’t come?

The problem for Centcom apart from the instinctive secrecy of the military, was that it lacked the ability to issue information without approval and it was bypassed by the footage supplied by embedded journalists. As one reporter in Doha noted,

At General Tommy Franks’s headquarters, it is easy to work out whether the day’s news is good or bad. When there are positive developments, press officers prowl the corridors of the press centre dispensing upbeat reports from pre-prepared scripts, declaring Iraqi towns have been liberated and that humanitarian aid is about to be delivered. Yet if American and British troops have suffered any sort of battlefield reverse, the spin doctors retreat into their offices at press centre and await instructions from London and Washington.[36]

When the instructions came the important thing was to ensure consistency. When the questions arose about the inability of the US to find Saddam Hussein, US spokespersons “from the White House to the Pentagon to the Central command in Qatar – simultaneously insisted that the war was ‘not about one man’”.[37]

Centcom was certainly not the resounding success that the system of embedding proved. The success of embedding was its co-option of journalists which ensured that the military could trust them – in the words of the BBC’s first director general John Reith – “not to be really impartial”.

EMBED WITH THE MILITARY

Embedded journalists were the greatest PR coup of the war. Dreamt up by the Pentagon and Donald Rumsfeld the “embeds”, as they were now routinely described, were almost completely controlled by the military. Embeds agreed to give up most of their autonomy in exchange for access to the fighting on military terms. Most importantly, embeds were afforded protection from physical harm by the military.

Each embedded reporter had to sign a contract with the military – a significant departure from previous conflicts. They were also governed by a 50-point plan issued by the Pentagon detailing what they could and could not report. The list of what they could report is significantly shorter than the list of what they could not.[38] The rules were presented as voluntary and appeared to some to offer “unprecedented freedom to report the facts”. But on closer inspection, a number of clauses buried in the text indicate the iron fist in the velvet glove. While the rules state that there is “no general review process” of reports, a later section notes that “if media are inadvertently exposed to sensitive information they should be briefed after exposure on what information they should avoid covering”. A security review also becomes compulsory if any sensitive information is released deliberately by the military. In a classic passage attempting to present strict censorship rules as voluntary, the Pentagon notes that “agreement to security review in exchange for this type of access must be strictly voluntary and if the reporter does not agree, the access may not be granted”.[39] In all the debate in seminars after the fall of Baghdad, on both sides of the Atlantic, the contract and the guidelines have barely even been mentioned by the embeds or their editors. In a rare exception to this, ITN reporter Juliet Bremner has disclosed that the British military “wanted the right to vet every piece that we put out before it went on air. If we didn’t sign up to this we couldn’t go. So of course we did [sign up].”[40]

The PR genius of the embed system was that it allowed unprecedented access to the fighting and, also, unprecedented identification by the reporters with the military. British minister of Defence Geoff Hoon has claimed: “I think the coverage … is more graphic, more real, than any other coverage we have ever seen of a conflict in our history. For the first time it is possible with technology for journalists to report in real time on events in the battlefield.”[41] It is certainly true to say that it is new to see footage of war so up-close, but, it is a key part of the propaganda war to claim that this makes it “real”. In fact, the aim of the embedding system is to control what is reported by encouraging journalists to identify with their units. To eat and drink together, to risk danger and to share the same values.

The embed system was hailed as a great success by all sides. From the Falklands via Grenada, Panama and the Gulf in 1991, there has never been such a collective love-in about the reporting of war.[42] Some journalists couldn’t get enough of cheerleading while others worried about being used. The kind of criticism faced in previous conflicts and evident in relation to Centcom was much more muted and marginal. Why? Those most comfortable with the system tended to argue that they had “total freedom” to cover “virtually everything we wanted to cover” in the words of NBC’s Chip Reid.[43] Or in the words of Gavin Hewitt of the BBC: “there was an incredible amount of freedom”. Hewitt was one journalist who evidently came to identify closely with the troops. He describes the evolution of the relationship with the military:

Initially they were cautious and I could tell the captain was having briefings and we were excluded … By the time we got to Baghdad that relationship had changed. We had been in battle with them. I felt my safety was dependent on them, which it was. They felt we had been through a lot together, so the relationship had become much closer.[44]

So close in fact, that Hewitt ended up picking out targets for the military. At a public meeting in London Hewitt recounted how he had spotted a truck through his binoculars. “I had an absolute instinct that not only the unit would come under attack, because I was travelling with it, that I would come under attack,” he said. So:

I shouted across to the Captain “that truck over there – I think these guys are going to attack us.” I thought the Captain would have sent one of the tanks to try and investigate. Within seconds a Bradley fighting vehicle was opening up – tracers were flying across the field… eventually the truck went up – boom – like this. And I was absolutely horrified. I thought for a moment that these could have been innocent civilians. I could have made a mistake and at that moment I thought “are we getting too close to this?” … Then there was a secondary and tertiary explosion and this truck was full of grenades. And of course all the unit were delighted. From then on the bonding grew tighter.[45]

What is so noteworthy is that Hewitt felt able to volunteer the information (at an event on World Press Freedom day no less) and that his only qualm appeared to be that he might have made a “mistake” by identifying civilians. When journalists so identify with their military unit that they pick out targets, they have moved from being reporters, straight through propagandists to become active combatants in war. There have been no calls for Hewitt to be sacked by the BBC. Presumably acting as an accessory to murder (which is what the killing of combatants in an illegal war amounts to) is seen as a less serious offence than Andrew Gilligan’s alleged crime of misreporting a source.

There are two or three examples of critical coverage of the coalition forces resulting from embed reporting. So why were the military so happy with the system? The key to this from the official point of view is precisely that the debate on embedding has been so muted. According to Peter Kovach, a US propagandist in the Office of Public Diplomacy, the beauty of the system was that it prevented journalists complaining about lack of access while securing overwhelmingly positive coverage for the coalition:

I remember that the opaqueness of the US government and its spokespersons became the story [in 1991] … embedding from our point of view was a risk. It carried risks that bad behaviour on our [US military] part might be caught on camera … But I have to say as a consumer of news I think there has been a very high reward … I think the benefits of that have been very great.[46]

The success of the embedding system in other words is that it co-opts journalists so that they become advocates for the system of control.

PSYOPS

Psyops or psychological operations are an important yet hidden element of the information apparatus. On the rare occasions where their work does surface in the mainstream media, the propaganda line that they engage only in “white” operations involving radio broadcasts and leaflet drops which are targeted only at enemy opinion (i.e., Iraqi forces) in order to save lives is scrupulously maintained. As Major Harry Taylor, the head of 42 Commando Royal Marines psyops unit puts it: “The main thing is that we are trying to save these peoples lives.”[47]

In the UK psyops has been renamed “Information Support” a decidedly Orwellian name change. Thousands of British soldiers have passed through the psyops course run by the military at Chicksands, the Defence Intelligence and Security Centre in Bedfordshire. The US psyops teams in Iraq were the largest of any conflict, including eleven companies and almost 1,000 personnel in Iraq or in support roles in the US, according to Lt Col. Glenn Ayers, commander of the 9th Psychological Operations Battalion.[48]

After the war, commanders at the US psyops HQ at Fort Bragg, were so proud of their achievements that they invited the media into their new $8.1 million centre and showed them round the facilities said to be capable of producing 1 million leaflets an hour. More than 150 million leaflets have been produced at Fort Bragg and distributed throughout Afghanistan and Iraq since September 2001. According to the commander of the 4th Psychological Operations Group, Col. James Treadwell, the staff at the complex support the work of nearly 900 psyops troops in 13 countries. Of course no attention was drawn to the hidden part of their work which has remained largely unreported.[49]

It almost goes without saying that the content of the psyops material is mendacious. According to Major Taylor one of the messages in Iraq is that the UK and US will not “plunder the country”. Both the US and UK have run “white” radio operations inside Iraq including “Information Radio” broadcast by the US and Radio Nahran (Two Rivers Radio) run by the British in Basra during the war.[50] According to some reports “grey” operations are continuing in Iraq with one Baghdad weekly printing articles supplied by Fort Bragg, “most of which don’t appear to come from a US or military source”. In exchange the US buys and distributes 70,000 copies.[51] The day after the fall of Baghdad UK and US psyops operatives launched their first television channel. Broadcast on the frequency formerly occupied by Iraqi TV, Towards Freedom featured messages from Bush and Blair. The channel was the idea of a UK government information working group and was commissioned by the FCO, paid for by the British Ministry of Defence and transmitted via the US 4thPsychological Operations Group (airborne) at Fort Bragg for eventual broadcast to Iraq from Kuwait, from the US psyops plane known as Commando Solo and from SOMS-B (Special Operations Media System-B) inside Iraq. The programmes are outsourced to World Television News, the private company which already runs the UK grey propaganda operation known as British Satellite News.[52]

Still, it is clear that psyops does continue to include “black” propaganda operations, including radio stations which disguise their sponsors and media disinformation. But their covert work does leave some traces. For example, one “elaborate disinformation operation” was conducted even before the bombs began to fall on 19 March 2003.[53] The UK Foreign Office confirmed that it was “investigating rumours” that the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq had defected.[54] This prompted Tariq Aziz into making a live media appearance to deny the story. According to reports, Aziz was then “tracked … to a bunker at a presidential palace where they expected him to report to Saddam”, leading to the “decapitation strike” on 20 March.[55] As with much of the “intelligence” surrounding Iraq this turned out to be a botched job and neither Aziz nor Hussein were killed.

Another “black” operation was Radio Tikrit which launched in early February 2003. “It appeared to be just another regime-run station. It mocked the US and … praised ‘Saddam Hussein’s Iraq’.” By late February the tone had changed and according to BBC monitoring it started to call on the Republican Guard to desert their posts “before it is too late”.[56]

This is the kind of approach which psyops and government present as an attempt to save the lives of combatants and it is similar to the messages aimed at the civilian population to keep away from military installations. This version of their work is itself spin since what they are aiming to do is terrorise the population by threatening their lives. As Christopher Simpson, author of an authoritative study of psyops in the US, argues psyops “are premised on violence and they’re premised on terror. That’s why they work, to the extent that they work at all.”[57] As if to underline this statement Major Taylor of the Royal Marines gives this account of the work of British army psyops:

We use tactical and strategic methods. Tactically, on the first stage, we target the military by dropping leaflets stating the inevitability of their defeat, telling them they will not be destroyed if they play our game and exactly how they can surrender. On the second wave we show them pictures of Iraqi officers who complied. On the third wave we show them pictures of those people who did not.[58]

In other words – co-operate or we will try to kill you. This effort is a co-ordinated part of the overall propaganda push. All psyops material is “signed off right at the very top, by General Tommy Franks”, according to Taylor. And the co-ordination is also evident in the wider role which psyops has, but tries to keep under wraps. This is the fact that it also contributes to the battle for hearts and minds internationally and at home as well as targeting “enemy” opinion. As Lt Col. Jerry Broeckert a US Marine Corps public affairs officer acknowledged, the use of the media “blurs the line between public relations and psychological operations”.[59] As the attack on Iraq became bogged down at the end of the first week, a Russian website with links to Russian intelligence reported an intercepted report from the US Psychological Operations Tactical Group for the Special Ground Forces Command. The report was concerned about the development of a “resistance ideology” in Iraq. Its solution: “A more active use of the Iraqi opposition was suggested for propaganda work ... The same opposition members will be used to create video footage of the ‘repented’ Iraqi POWs and footage of the local [Iraqi] population ‘opposing Saddam’.”[60] As the US tanks rolled into Baghdad eleven days later, footage of Iraqis celebrating as the statue of the dictator was toppled outside the Palestine Hotel, where the international media were based, was indeed transmitted around the world. Other sources have suggested that among the celebrants were members of the Iraqi opposition Iraqi National Congress. The toppling of the statue was a propaganda triumph for the US and UK governments. The involvement of psyops in the photo opportunity indicates both the co-ordinated nature of “coalition” propaganda and that psyops operatives spend at least some of their time managing media operations which impact on domestic opinion.

FINALLY

Since 11 September 2001 both the UK and US have systematically overhauled their propaganda operations. This has put in place a very significant operation with global reach which seems to have no precedent (possibly even including the 1939–45 war).

The propaganda operation is entirely outside of democratic control and appears not to be constrained by adhering to any significant standards of truthfulness. It seems instead to operate on the basis that anything goes so long as it is calculated that it can be got away with. The centralisation of propaganda control in the White House, the Pentagon and Downing Street and the unprecedented coordination indicates the determination of the clique around Bush and Blair to pursue their project. Overall the operation shows a great deal of contempt for the process of democracy, since the lies are constructed to misinform and persuade – in part – the electorate of the US and UK as well as world opinion. Some will argue that the apparatus is not successful in its attempts to mould media coverage and popular opinion.

It is certainly true that there is some scope for dissent in the mainstream media although this is without doubt limited. It is also true that in the UK a large majority of the public opinion saw through many of the lies and opposed the war. In the US the picture is less clear and public opinion has – under a media onslaught – been more favourable to war.

But the most important questions to ask here are not whether the public believed the lies. The cabal which runs the US and UK care little for public opinion and belief and they will only take note when their interests and strategies are thwarted. This happens in two ways: first, when the public takes action in demonstrations and other political activity and, second, when parts of the elite political system start to feel the pressure which popular opposition generates. A key reason why the propaganda continues and why the media are seen as important is not because public opinion is important but because elite differences can hamper war making. When the House of Commons and the US Congress ratified war, this was the last obstacle to be surmounted and it was a key target of the propaganda. In the end propaganda succeeds if it allows political elites to carry out their plans. In the case of Iraq it was not an unqualified success – as the fallout over the WMD fabrications shows to some extent – but it was a success nevertheless.

Notes available on request.