Keith Laidler: Ensuring Acquiescence

From Keith Laidler, Surveillance Unlimited (Icon Books Ltd, 2008) pp.171-194

Chapter 11
Ensuring Acquiescence: The Carrot and The Stick

The Carrot

We hear much about the ‘Orwellian’ dynamic in our society, but in truth the changes we are witnessing owe more to Huxley’s Brave New World than anything found in Nineteen Eighty-four. Instead of repressive tyrants and omnipresent intrusive technology we are in the midst of a process of mass pacification. Computers and technology have been designed to be user-friendly - all the hard-to-understand jargon, all the sharp edges have been smoothed away. Technology is our friend, non-judgmental and ever-present and eventually ... invisible. The danger of a ubiquitous technological environment was seen as long ago as 1991, when Mark Weiser, chief technologist of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), pointed out that ‘the most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.’

This ubiquitous computing (or ubicomp), known in Europe as ambient intelligence (AmI), is already well advanced, with plans for ultra-convenient RFID personal biometric monitors woven into clothing to act as a cue for lighting and heating within the home, altering our personal environment continuously and without our conscious awareness. Refrigerators that monitor (via RFID again) our food stocks and automatically order replacements from the supermarket when we run low form another frequently mentioned example of the ubicomp environment.

We are developing a childlike dependence on technology: it informs us, entertains us, cooks our food, even gives us directions when driving. Our mobile phones keep us connected to friends and family, credit cards transfer funds for goods and services in a fraction of a second. We know our laptop like an intimate friend, one to whom we are happy to confide our hidden interests and passions. But beyond the slick technology is a darker reality. Our computer is less a friend than a gossip, its console less a TV screen than a one-way mirror. We see only the reflections of our own commands appearing on the screen - we do not observe the myriad individuals and organisations who are collecting our every keystroke and using it to record, analyse and sell on to others everything we buy, our sexual preferences, what our political affiliations are, and a host of other private transactions.

Intimacy and ‘bonding’ with the machine lowers our resistance, salves our suspicion and lulls us into a sense of false security. Each day we unwittingly divulge more and more about ourselves to our electronic friend, forgetting that we are no longer playing with individual gadgets - we are dealing with an overarching technological umbrella, and the complex mass of information we allow to be placed under this umbrella ‘will be passed on endlessly, to be configured and reconfigured, sold, resold, and redirected in a thousand ingenious ways.’

But note: there is no coercion here. We are all so cosy with technology that, with no thought, we routinely hand over enormous amounts of personal info, or subscribe to a road toll system that may cut a minute or two off our daily travel time, but will at the same time ensure that, 24/7 and year-round, no confidential data we possess, no journey we make, will escape technology’s all-seeing eye. If we choose to accept the benefits of these technologies without considering their attendant risks, then we are assuming that the possibility of creeping government repression - leading ultimately to the establishment of a controlled society - is non-existent. This flies in the face of all historical precedent; given human nature and the desire of individuals and groups for dominance, such an assumption is a reckless betrayal of all our society’s freedoms. And for what? More convenient shopping and a shorter delay at the toll booth?

On the rare occasions that mass protest does erupt, the wise government espouses compromise, making minor changes, or even ostentatiously shelving a large part of the programme (intending to introduce it in stages, by stealth, later). This normally has the effect of neutralising opposition. In a liberal democracy people feel uncomfortable holding ‘extreme’ views, even on such topics as basic freedoms, and if the other side offers ‘concessions,’ they feel duty-bound to reciprocate. A sham compromise effectively disarms resistance and allows repressive legislation to creep, stage by stage, over our liberties.

The stick

When cosmetic changes and compromise are insufficient, the authorities promote a climate of fear and loathing; ID cards have been in turn a cure for benefit scroungers, illegal immigrants, and terrorists. This latter grouping has been the most useful as, although we may loathe benefit scroungers, we actively fear terrorists, a shadowy grouping who have the power to take away our health and life without warning. The fight against this nemesis has been given an elevated status: the ‘war on terror.’ Today the term is a little out of fashion, and while President George W. Bush still mentions the WoT, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has apparently forbidden the phrase. But then again, it has served its purpose.

If we step back and view the broad canvas of events over the past decade, it is obvious that 11 September 2001 was the tipping point for all matters of a surveillance nature. There had, of course, been surveillance before this date: CCTV had been in operation for some 25 years, and wire-tapping and mail intercepts were not unknown. But post-9/11 it is obvious that an absolute deluge of legislation and surveillance has been unleashed on the nations of Western Europe and the United States. An editorial in Surveillance & Society succinctly describes events:

Suddenly, during 2001, the steady increase in surveillance received a boost from a world event. September 11 prompted widespread international concern for security in the face of global terrorism ... Already existing surveillance was reinforced at crucial points, with the promise of more to come. Many countries rapidly passed laws permitting unprecedented levels of policing and intelligence surveillance, which in turn draws upon other sources such as consumer records.

The attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre is the causa causans, the fount and origin of the term ‘war on terror,’ and the fundamental justification for those who claim we face so grave a situation that we must be prepared to give up many of our basic freedoms in order to live in reasonable security. It behoves us, therefore, to look very closely at the events of 9/11 and to decide if we really are in such great danger as some would have us believe, or if the threat has been exaggerated in order to serve another agenda.

In chapter 5 we looked at the idea of defining the ‘topography of the argument’ so as to steal a march on rival arguments: progressive teaching, wind farms and the like. Now we have the ‘war on terror.’ It is instructive to ask whether the draconian measures implemented since 9/11 would have received such an easy passage had the president announced a ‘campaign against terror,’ or an ‘anti-terror initiative.’ The word ‘war’ successfully defines the topography of the argument in favour of the hawks and those advocating extreme measures, because a war demands extreme measures.

The immediate parallels with the threat of Islamic extremism, at least for the United Kingdom, must lie with the IRA action of the last half of the 20th century. Note that this conflict was never graced with the title ‘war’; on the contrary, because successive UK governments did not wish to emphasise the level and consequences of sectarian dissension in the province, the conflict was ‘the Troubles’ - a phrase that, even now, serves to defuse the impact of the murders, bombings and religious violence that Northern Ireland suffered for more than 25 years.

IRA activity led to innumerable deaths and mutilations. According to the book Lost Lives, up to 2004 the IRA were responsible for 1,781 deaths, while around 20,000 were injured (6,000 of them British Army, UDR or RUC personnel and up to 14,000 civilians). The paramilitaries killed Lord Mountbatten, a cousin of the Queen, the Conservative MP Airey Neave, and they attempted to kill the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher and most of her Cabinet in the Brighton bombing of 12 October 1984. Against this, in the UK the jihadists have managed the 7/7 tube and bus bombing with a death toll of 52, and a failed bombing fourteen days later. And yet the IRA attacks were ‘Troubles’ which did not even lead to the introduction of additional passport restrictions on citizens of the Irish Republic, and whose impact on the freedoms of the British people (internment in Northern Ireland excepted) was minimal. In contrast, a single successful bombing has led to Britain acting as a willing ally to the ‘war on terror’s’ main protagonist, the USA. What lies behind this perceptual dichotomy that we are invited - or rather, instructed - to accept?

It is not that the threat of Islamic extremism is non-existent; it is the disproportionate response, the asymmetrical manner in which we are asked to perceive the threat, and the blatant overreaction in terms of legislation and deployment of surveillance technology, that gives cause for concern. In terms of actual damage and deaths, the jihadists have not demonstrated one hundredth of the destructive potential of the IRA. Why, then, should a terrorist threat of low intensity result in an exponential rise in draconian legislation and intrusive surveillance powers? Is this merely a political panic attack, or are we looking at an orchestrated dismantling of our freedoms?

The politicians, of course, insist it is neither of these alternatives. The justification lies not in terrorist activity seen to date in the UK, but in the catastrophic fact of the attack on the World Trade Centre. If the jihadists are able and willing to mount attacks on this scale, resulting in the collapse of enormous structures with huge loss of life, then - so the argument goes - we are dealing with a threat level well outside of that posed by the IRA, UDA, ETA, or any of the many extremist groups that currently populate our planet. And in the face of such a challenge, all the many recent restrictions and intrusions on our freedom are, they argue, necessary for our own good.

Time and again, then, we come back to 9/11 as the pivotal moment, the raison d’être, for the exponential growth in the most repressive aspects of the surveillance society. ID cards, centralised data bases, RFID tagging, electronic surveillance and the rest, all are presently necessary to protect us against the jihadists, and the reason the jihadists are to be feared is 9/11. If this is so, we should certainly look very closely at the circumstances of this iconic attack on Western civilisation.

World Trade Centre 7 and the ‘prophetic’ BBC

There are already a huge number of books, articles and TV programmes concerning the attack on the Twin Towers, and it is not the purpose of this work to enumerate a minute-by-minute account of the disaster. Nor to apportion blame. Indeed, looking too closely at the minutiae of such events is sometimes counter-productive; we have had, for example, numerous ‘human interest’ TV programmes on 9/11, the plight of individuals, the dangers facing fire crews etc, but too few on the accusations and counter-accusations that have made the attack so problematical. There is, however, one part of 9/11 that must give any thinking person pause: not the destruction of the twin towers (World Trade Centre 1 and 2), but the little-reported collapse of World Trade Centre 7, more than seven hours after the first of the Twin Towers came down. And the BBC’s ability to cover its destruction 26 minutes before it actually occurred.

A new Pearl Harbor?

For more than 50 years controversy has raged around the Japanese attack on the US naval base of Pearl Harbor in 1941 - was it, as Franklin D. Roosevelt said, a ‘day of infamy’ when Japanese planes appeared out of a clear blue sky and brought death and destruction to an unsuspecting American Pacific Fleet? Or did the American government have advance warning of the planned attack, and choose to allow an outrage to occur in order to awaken an isolationist American public to the dangers of fascist Germany and a Japan with grandiose imperial pretensions?

In Infamy: Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Toland revealed compelling evidence that President Roosevelt had foreknowledge of the event, yet chose to do nothing. Robert Stinnett, in his book Day Of Deceit, presents massive evidence that Roosevelt intended to goad the Japanese into an overt attack. Indeed, in the Vacant Seas order, Roosevelt had cleared both civilian and naval shipping away from the Japanese fleet’s attack route, in order to aid the enemy’s undetected approach to within striking distance of Pearl Harbor. The release of former secret files from the US Navy has shown that the US had broken the Japanese Navy’s codes and knew exactly where and when the attack would take place. The more valuable US ships such as aircraft carriers were ordered out of Pearl to other locations. Tellingly, 69 of the 74 Navy intelligence summaries delivered to President Roosevelt in the two weeks prior to the attack have been ‘lost.’

In sum, the Pearl Harbor ‘let it happen’ scenario is at least plausible, and given the undoubted isolationist feeling among the US public, a good argument can be made that it was, despite the underhand way in which it was carried out, absolutely essential to the final victory over fascism.

The parallels between the situation facing President Roosevelt in 1940 and that confronting the Bush administration at the beginning of the 21st century are compelling. The Taliban and their terrorist training camps had been identified as a clear threat to United States interests, just as Nazi Germany and an imperially-minded Japan had been over 50 years earlier. And despite what was seen, by the respective US administrations at least, as a pressing need to destroy their enemy before they gained in strength, in both cases the American public were steadfastly against foreign military adventures. Roosevelt’s answer, as we know from recently declassified correspondence, was to provoke Japan into making the first overt act of aggression, so justifying a military response and letting the president off the hook of his electoral promise not to send American boys to fight abroad unless the US were attacked. The breaking of the Japanese codes, the failure to warn Pearl Harbor, the movement of strategically important vessels, the Vacant Seas policy, all make it highly likely that the president of the United States took the decision to sacrifice the men and women at Pearl Harbor in order to prevent an even greater catastrophic loss of life and geopolitical influence in the future. Captain Joseph J. Rochefort was head of the Navy’s Mid-Pacific Radio Intelligence Network before and during the Pearl Harbor attack. In his oral history for the US Naval Institute, he put the case for allowing the attack to go ahead with characteristic succinctness: ‘It was’ he said, ‘a pretty cheap price to pay for unifying the country.’

And by a strange coincidence, exactly twelve months before the 9/11 attacks a major American ‘neo-con’ think tank cited ‘another Pearl Harbor’ as the quickest means of bringing about the transformation of American military and geopolitical strength. The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) was founded in 1996 to promote an agenda for strengthening America’s position and influence in the world. In September 2000 it published Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, in which it claimed that ‘ ... the process of transformation [in American strategy and forces], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor.’

This comment does not, as some have insisted, reveal a plot to launch 9/11. But it does show that the value of a ‘new Pearl Harbor’ in bringing about transformational change was acknowledged by PNAC. Of interest, too, is the fact that a significant number of PNAC’s founders and signers are working for, or have worked for, the Bush administration, including Dick Cheney, Richard Armitage, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld.

This is far from proving that the Bush administration instigated a ‘new Pearl Harbor’ in order to allow major changes in US foreign and domestic policy. And yet the idea is not perhaps as incredible as it might at first appear - the US government has certainly considered similar ideas at least once before. A fifteen-page US government Top Secret document dated 13 March 1962 and entitled Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba detailed, among other deceptions, a number of ways that attacks on American soil by US operatives could be used to stir up national indignation and act as a pretext for the invasion of communist Cuba. Among the suggestions in what has become known as Operation Northwoods was using drone planes to simulate an attack on an American passenger aeroplane. Below are two extracts from this document:

It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route from the United States ...

We could develop a Communist Cuba terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington ... We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible [Cuban] government.

To sum up, it seems likely that:

1) Pearl Harbor was a ‘managed event’ used as a means of uniting the nation in an acceptance that American foreign policy should change.
2) Not only had similar plans been considered in 1962 (despite the risk of loss of life to American citizens in ‘Homeland America’), but that
3) the value of such a ‘new Pearl Harbor’ to rapidly ‘transforming’ American geopolitical perceptions had been explicitly acknowledged as late as September 2000 by a group (PNAC) which would contribute major players to the Bush administration.

This is emphatically NOT a smoking gun. But it does bring a note of caution to the proceedings; we should take nothing for granted, and should look at the events surrounding the attack on the World Trade Centre with unbiased eyes, refusing to pass over or omit awkward facts.

A possible scenario would see the US intelligence services aware of the impending jihadist attack, allowing it to go ahead and, knowing the targets involved well ahead of the event, using this lead time to enhance the destructiveness of the attack, making it a visual spectacle that would burn itself into the nation’s psyche and conjure up an unstoppable demand for retribution. And indeed, there are many anomalies in the World Trade Centre/Pentagon attacks, deeply unsettling questions that remain unanswered while the mass media continue to uncritically regurgitate the official version.

Of all the many anomalies, none is so strange and compelling as the collapse of 7 World Trade Centre. Rather than get bogged down in a detailed overview of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, this discussion will concentrate solely on 7 WTC. There are many advantages to this, not least of which is the bewildering complexity of the full story. By focussing on 7 WTC, we can look at a manageable event and come to some valid conclusions that should be applicable to the attack as a whole. 7 WTC is interesting for two main facts which no one disputes:

1) 7 WTC collapsed without any active terrorist involvement, six hours after the main attack on 1 and 2 WTC (the Twin Towers).
2) The BBC announced the collapse of this building 26 minutes before it fell.

The official version of 7 WTC’s destruction is that debris from the fall of 1 and 2 WTC weakened the building, and ignited fires which led to its eventual collapse. The map [below] shows the relative positions of the seven separate World Trade Centre buildings that were dispersed across World Trade Centre Plaza. As is obvious, of all the buildings, 7 WTC lies furthest from the Twin Towers (1 and 2 WTC) whose eventual downfall generated so much controversy. It might therefore reasonably be expected to receive far less damage than those buildings closer to the collapse. And while this protection-by-distance might well be mitigated by the fact that 7 WTC is the tallest of the remaining buildings, and therefore perhaps more vulnerable in its higher storeys to damage from the destruction of 1 and 2 WTC, the nature of the collapse (for all practical purposes, the Twin Towers fell within their own footprint) would mean that the majority of any debris ejected would originate from the base of the collapsed buildings. If this is so, then, looking at the map below, it is obvious that 6 and 5 WTC would act as shields for 7 WTC. And in fact 5 and 6 WTC did suffer extensive damage, but did not collapse. By contrast, 7 WTC sustained far less damage, implying that the ‘shield effect’ hypothesis is substantially correct. And yet it, alone of all the other WTC buildings, did collapse.

It is valid to ask why this particular building went down, and there are no easy answers. This conflicts with an eyewitness interview conducted by Jason Bermas with Barry Jennings, the deputy director of the Emergency Services Department of the New York City Housing Authority. According to Jennings, not long after 1 WTC had been hit by an aircraft, but before the attack on 2 WTC, he escorted Mr Hess, one of Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s highest-ranking appointed officials, to the Office of Emergency Management (OEM) on 7 WTC’s 23rd floor. This office was the command bunker where any emergency in the WTC area was to be handled, and was staffed by US security personnel. What he found astounded him: the entire emergency headquarters had been abandoned. This is his story:

Upon arriving into the OEM EOC we noticed that everybody had gone. I saw coffee that was on the desk, still - smoke was still coming off the coffee, I saw - I saw uh, half eaten sandwiches. And I called several individuals, one individual told me that, that um, ‘to leave, and leave right away’ ... We subsequently went to the stairwell and we were going down the stairs. When we reached the 8th uh, the 6th floor, the landing that we were standing on gave way. There was an explosion and the landing gave way. And I was left there hanging. I had to walk back up to the 8th floor. After getting to the 8th floor everything was dark.

I’m just confused about one thing, and one thing only. Why WTC 7 went down in the first place? I’m very confused about that. I know what I heard. I heard explosions. The explanation I got was that it was the fuel oil tank. I’m an old boiler guy. If it was a fuel oil tank it would have been one side of the building. When I got to that lobby, the lobby was totally destroyed. It looked like King Kong had came through it and stepped on it. And I - it was so destroyed I didn’t know where I was. It was so destroyed they had to take me out through a hole in the wall, a makeshift hole that I believe the fire depot made to get me out.

Let us be clear about this. A well-respected, credible witness is stating that he was in the 7 WTC building and that there was a devastating explosion before the second of the Twin Towers was even hit by an aircraft, and long before either 1 or 2 WTC came down (this latter event being the supposed cause of the fires and damage that made 7 WTC fall). Just as worryingly, the explosion seems to have been planned, as all the OEM staff had vacated the building and Mr Jennings was told by an unnamed source to flee WTC, ‘to leave, and leave right away.’ And this was no small explosion: it wiped out the entire lobby and (contrary to official claims) caused many deaths too. Equally concerning, if this event was planned - and taking Barry Jennings’ testimony at face value it is very difficult to see how it was not - it could not have been put into effect in the few minutes that had elapsed since the first aeroplane struck the first tower. Such a plan called for prior knowledge of the attack hours, even days, before the event.

The BBC announcement - clairvoyance, chance or something else?

From the time of the first attack on 11 September, the BBC newsreaders, like most of the world’s media, had been providing a constant stream of updates on the unprecedented situation in New York.

At 21.54 London time on 11 September 2001, a BBC newsreader made the sombre announcement that the Salomon Brothers building (another name for 7 WTC) had collapsed:

Now more on the latest building collapse in New York. You might have heard a few moments ago we were talking about the Salomon Brothers building collapsing, and indeed it has. Apparently that was only a few hundred yards away from where the World Trade Centre towers were. And it seems this was not the result of a new attack, it was because the building has been weakened during this morning’s attack.

There was just one problem with this news: it was wrong. Or rather, it was a little ahead of time. 7 WTC was still standing when the broadcast was made - it did not collapse until 26 minutes later, at 22.20 London time.

As if to compound the error, the London anchorman then handed over to his New York colleague Jane Standley, who carried on the report of the collapse apparently unaware that the 7 WTC building could still be seen on the right of the screen, behind her left shoulder. This point needs to be emphasised: the visual evidence here is absolutely irrefutable. As the BBC reporter confirms the destruction of 7 WTC it stands as large as life on the screen behind her. And, enhancing the Alice in Wonderland nature of the report, as Ms Standley continues to comment on this new ‘collapse.’ a strap line appears across the lower half of the screen confirming the news: ‘The 47-storey Salomon Brothers building close to the World Trade Centre has also collapsed.’

But there is more. At around 22.15, as Jane Standley continues to hold forth on the non-existent collapse (with 7 WTC still standing proudly behind her), a very strange thing happens. Had this broadcast conversation continued for a further five minutes (and there was no sign of it winding down), we would have been treated to the spectacle of 7 WTC collapsing for real, on air, behind Ms Standley. But, mirabile dictu, at this crucial moment, just five minutes before the actual collapse, the image of Jane Standley begins to break up and the BBC loses the feed and the picture from New York.

BBC News 24 also broadcast the news that 7 WTC had collapsed, with a corroborative time stamp on their broadcast to confirm, without fear of contradiction, that the BBC was somehow aware of the destruction of 7 WTC around half an hour before it went down.

Richard Porter, the head of news at BBC World, offered this explanation for these astonishing events:

1) We’re not part of a conspiracy. Nobody told us what to say or do on September 11th. We didn’t get told in advance that buildings were going to fall down. We didn’t receive press releases or scripts in advance of events happening.

2) In the chaos and confusion of the day, I’m quite sure we said things which turned out to be untrue or inaccurate - but at the time were based on the best information we had. We did what we always did - sourced our reports, used qualifying words like ‘apparently’ or ‘it’s reported’ or ‘we’re hearing’ and constantly tried to check and double check the information we were receiving.

3) Our reporter Jane Standley was in New York on the day of the attacks, and like everyone who was there, has the events seared on her mind. I’ve spoken to her today and unsurprisingly, she doesn’t remember minute-by-minute what she said or did - like everybody else that day she was trying to make sense of what she was seeing; what she was being told; and what was being told to her by colleagues in London who were monitoring feeds and wire services.

4) We no longer have the original tapes of our 9/11 coverage (for reasons of cock-up, not conspiracy). So if someone has got a recording of our output, I’d love to get hold of it. We do have the tapes for our sister channel News 24, but they don’t help clear up the issue one way or another.

5) If we reported the building had collapsed before it had done so, it would have been an error - no more than that.

This is, with the greatest respect, simply not good enough. Much of Mr Porter’s carefully worded comments contradict one another; others are plainly untrue:

1) We didn't get told in advance that buildings were going to fall down. No one is accusing the BBC of this. But it is obvious that the BBC was told in advance that a building had fallen down. This is a crucial point. Someone told the BBC that 7 WTC had collapsed. Who had foreknowledge of this event? The BBC doesn’t say.

2) Elsewhere in the statement Mr Porter admits that their news output (in line with other news services) was based on incoming information from a variety of sources. He states that BBC colleagues in London were monitoring feeds and wires services and that we did what we always did - sourced our reports and constantly tried to check and double check the information we were receiving. If that is the case, then why did they not pick up on the fact that the story was blatantly untrue? More importantly, there should be a record at the BBC of the source of the ‘7 WTC collapse’ story. Who made this claim? Which agency fed this information through to BBC News - was it Reuters? Voice of America? Associated Press? Knowing the source of the information would allow us to move one step back along the chain of responsibility, and perhaps come to a clearer judgement on the motivation behind the story.

3) [We] used qualifying words like ‘apparently’ or ‘it’s reported’ or ‘we’re hearing.’ This is simply not true. As one commentator noted:

In the most important final 7 minutes and 15 seconds of the said segment the words ‘apparently,’ ‘it’s reported’ or ‘we’re hearing’ are not used in the context of building 7, viz.: ‘Now more on the latest building collapse in New York ... the Salomon Brothers Building collapse ... and indeed it has.’ ‘What can you tell us about the Salomon Building and its collapse?’ ‘When it collapsed.’ [Ticker] - ‘The 47-storey Salomon Brothers building close to the World Trade Centre has also collapsed.’

This same commentator also asks: ‘Who is responsible for the newsroom in-desk and floor prompters being used by the news presenter? Who is responsible for the news report on the bottom screen news ticker? Who is responsible as the newsroom floor source for giving these people information? What is the complete list of editors and journalists responsible for this program on said day?’ None of this information has been vouchsafed by the BBC.

4) We no longer have the original tapes of our 9/11 coverage. This statement beggars belief, and brings to mind other convenient document misplacements, like the Belgrano incident’s missing submarine logs. Such a loss appears even less likely in the face of BBC policy which states:

[Ref No. Policy Area/Policy Statement 01 Components to be Retained 01-01] : The following components to be retained: Two broadcast standard copies of all transmitted/ published TV, radio and BBCi output - one to be stored on a separate site as a master; One browse-quality version for research purposes, to protect the broadcast material.

5) In the chaos and confusion of the day, I’m quite sure we said things which turned out to be untrue or inaccurate - but at the time were based on the best information we had. This is exactly the point: in the chaos and confusion the BBC omits all qualifiers such as ‘apparently’ or ‘we’ve unconfirmed reports that ...’ and gives the correct name of the building, the precise number of floors in that building (47), the explanation of the collapse (that 7 WTC was weakened by damage from the collapse of 1 and 2 WTC), and the Corporation even knows that the building was apparently empty. This is no throwaway remark or rumour that somehow took on the robe of truth; this is detailed, accurate data. Where did this information originate? It is all very unsettling. As one commentator notes, this is ‘some pretty precise reporting for a day of chaos when everyone was “trying to make sense of what they were seeing ...” ’

6) If we reported the building had collapsed before it had done so, it would have been an error - no more than that. But it is much more than that - it was an error that turned out to be true. It was prescient. The likelihood that the BBC, or anyone else, would suddenly decide, de novo, that another building would collapse - no, more, that it had collapsed - when the only buildings that had fallen so far were those struck by large passenger jets, has to be vanishingly small. And yet someone does make up this incredible tale, the BBC reports it as fact, and 26 minutes later, the incredible occurs. To call it an ‘error’ does not even come close. We need to know the originator of this story, the man or woman who can foretell the future with such impressive accuracy. The BBC must have the name of this person or organisation - the Corporation has a moral obligation to bring this information into the public domain.

The BBC’s disingenuous approach to what must be regarded as a highly suspicious series of events has satisfied no one. A posting on the net encapsulates the feelings of anger and frustration felt by many:

You lose footage of one of the most important days in modern history … (Good job! That way no one can ‘prove’ anything that day …) Out of all the surrounding buildings that suffered massive damage - WTC 3, 4, 5, 6 - and assorted others that suffered minor damage (among them, WTC 7 - Salomon Brothers Building), the BBC - by merely a mistake and in confusion - picked exactly the right one that was going to fall - (Good job!) Hey, the BBC is incompetent - they lose tapes AND they claim buildings fall that haven’t - but what LUCK! They hit the lottery! What a ‘lucky guess,’ huh? BBC should go to Vegas, with those odds - you’d be rich. BBC is not part of the conspiracy - but you are just a bunch of pathetic dupes. You capture the biggest smoking gun in history ... and your response is ... to call yourselves incompetent and go play ‘blind/deaf/dumb monkey’ on your public. Good job, Guys!!

Despite the obvious parallels between Pearl Harbor and 9/11, one huge disparity remains. While Pearl Harbor resulted in military action abroad, very little change occurred within mainland America itself. With the exception of the arguably unconstitutional internment of US citizens of Japanese origin, the freedoms and rights of the American people were left largely unscathed by World War II. Nor were the rights of other nations materially affected by the Japanese aggression against the United States. Not so with the ‘war on terror’ which, we have been told with breathtaking arrogance, ‘is different from any other war in history.’ The attack on the World Trade Centre which precipitated the ‘war on terror’ has led not only to the invasion of two sovereign states, Afghanistan and Iraq, but to a raft of controlling and repressive legislation (most of it issued in the form of secondary legislation) in both the USA and the United Kingdom, and latterly in many of the EU nations as well, and to intrusive and unnecessary surveillance on an unprecedented scale.

Inevitable war

There is an added danger. While the idea of ‘pre-emptive strike’ is derided as cowardly and base when it is delivered by the Japanese on America, the Bush administration (and its UK ally New Labour) appear to have embraced the concept with both hands - if America and friends are doing the striking. Iraq is the example par excellence of this, with ‘coalition troops’ deployed pre-emptively to prevent the development or use of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and to sever links between Al Qaeda and Iraq - both of which motives turned out to be illusory.

But this disastrous symbol of American neo-con philosophy has done nothing to dampen that country’s enthusiasm for firststrike action. Iraq is simply the most prominent example of a worrying malaise that is creeping by stealth into the Western democracies - pre-emptive politics and theories of inevitability. Several academics have pointed out that recent statements by politicians have continually stressed the inevitability of disaster; we are told on a regular basis that terrorist attacks are not merely possible, but unstoppable. In May 2002, FBI Director Robert Mueller announced that more suicide bombings in the USA were ‘inevitable ... We will not be able to stop it. It’s something we all live with.’ Vice President Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld both repeatedly used the phrase ‘Not a question of if, but when’ during several television interviews, as did Tom Ridge, the first Homeland Security Director. Note that very little detail is given, even such obvious parameters as the timescale of these inevitable happenings. Few would argue that a terrorist attack will probably occur sometime in the next ten years, but the rhetorical nature of the repeated emphasis on ‘inevitable attack,’ especially when screened repeatedly via non-critical media, gives the population an impression of predetermined, imminent, repeated attacks about which ‘something must be done.’ Moreover, much of the evidence upon which these sloganeering statements are made is veiled beneath classified documents that are, by definition, completely unavailable to public scrutiny.
What remains is a faith-based form of politics in which a political elite claims to be in possession of facts denied the ordinary citizen, who must accept whatever pre-emptive action that elite deems necessary, purely on the basis of trust. What is worrying, as academics Greg Elmer and Andy Opel have pointed out, is that although rarely-read government policy documents offer less strident analyses of these events, ‘public statements by a host of public officials, broadcast repeatedly as sound bites, describe a stark, inevitable future of unending terror threats. The contradictions between the written documents and the public statements suggest a wilful attempt to harness the immediacy (and uniformity) of ... news outlets to distribute and maintain an atmosphere of fear and emotion.’ And, it might be added, to encourage acquiescence to both foreign pre-emptive strikes and national legislation further restricting personal freedoms.

Given these developments, historical precedent, and the unanswered questions surrounding the World Trade Centre attack the event which introduced and ostensibly legitimised these unwelcome extensions of state power - we have excellent grounds for suspecting that events may well be being manipulated by groups intent on securing an even firmer grip on power and influence. What laws remain to protect our freedoms, and what can we do to resist further encroachment?

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”

Latest from Sibel Edmonds

A terrific Sibel Edmonds interview at American Conservative magazine:

[Intro...] Sibel Edmonds has a story to tell. She went to work as a Turkish and Farsi translator for the FBI five days after 9/11. Part of her job was to translate and transcribe recordings of conversations between suspected Turkish intelligence agents and their American contacts. She was fired from the FBI in April 2002 after she raised concerns that one of the translators in her section was a member of a Turkish organization that was under investigation for bribing senior government officials and members of Congress, drug trafficking, illegal weapons sales, money laundering, and nuclear proliferation. She appealed her termination, but was more alarmed that no effort was being made to address the corruption that she had been monitoring.

A Department of Justice inspector general’s report called Edmonds’s allegations “credible,” “serious,” and “warrant[ing] a thorough and careful review by the FBI.” Ranking Senate Judiciary Committee members Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) have backed her publicly. “60 Minutes” launched an investigation of her claims and found them believable. No one has ever disproved any of Edmonds’s revelations, which she says can be verified by FBI investigative files.

John Ashcroft’s Justice Department confirmed Edmonds’s veracity in a backhanded way by twice invoking the dubious State Secrets Privilege so she could not tell what she knows. The ACLU has called her “the most gagged person in the history of the United States of America.”

But on Aug. 8, she was finally able to testify under oath in a court case filed in Ohio and agreed to an interview with The American Conservative based on that testimony. What follows is her own account of what some consider the most incredible tale of corruption and influence peddling in recent times. As Sibel herself puts it, “If this were written up as a novel, no one would believe it.”

[continues at link...]

Her interviewer in that article Philip Giraldi discusses Edmonds’s latest revelations at Antiwar radio. And in this (separate) interview of Jim Bovard Scott Horton jokes about the fact that the MSM will probably simply ignore Edmonds’s most sensational claim - a sex and spy scandal involving a bisexual Congresswoman and a honey-trap foreign agent! I guess you have to laugh at media and political corruption sometimes or you’d be permanently irate. Bovard’s interview is interesting as well. I had not heard before that some of the FBI agents investigating 9/11 simply trawled the phone book for people with Arabic sounding names to call in for interview. I don’t find it surprising, and I’m not so concerned about the appearance of racism as I am about the broader implication: this was not really an investigation, it was an exercise in creating the appearance of one. ‘See how thorough we’ve been,’ they could say, ‘interviewing thousands of people with “possible connections” to the terrorists.’ If a proportion of these people had outstayed their visas and could then be classed as ‘terrorist suspects’ under new guidelines, ramping up the numbers of designated ‘terrorist suspects’ and thereby ensuring more funding and fear, all to the good.

Sibel Edmonds is running her own podcast interview series, ‘Boiling Frogs,’ with Peter B. Collins. Show details and download links here.

The ‘One Show’ and ‘The Jungle’

I saw the portion of last night’s One Show covering the closure of ‘the jungle.’ Even for the BBC its naked advocacy for the would-be illegal immigrants was shockingly biased, perhaps unwisely so.

The (Asian) reporter that had visited the camp talked up its residents’ youth as though it implied vulnerability. The men she interviewed looked to me to have about the same average age as the English Defence League, I don’t recall anyone at the Beeb making sympathetic gurgles over them because of their youth. Next, and implying that this was an unfortunate loophole, she stated that asylum regulations would permit the British government to deny the campers asylum since they had not claimed refugee status in the first EU country they passed through. In fact they should have claimed asylum in the very first country which they entered, EU or no, on leaving their own. Guest Matt Lucas gave the standard Jewish line: ancestors who had fled the Nazis and other recent immigrant ancestors … enrichment … melting-pot, all that vomit. Even Adrian Chiles, nominally the average bloke (but happening to be half-Jewish/half-Croatian -- do any Englishmen still work at the BBC?) expressed only sympathy for the economic migrants’ ‘plight’ (they became ‘economic migrants’ when they entered the second country after ‘fleeing’ their own).

All-in-all it was a text book example of one-sided, emotional-plea propaganda. No questions asked of whether these people were truly fleeing some unusually criminal regime; no criticism of them for not seeking asylum in any of the numerous countries they had passed through; no-one - to provide that mythical BBC balance - from Migration Watch or the BNP to offer an alternative to the limitless tolerance of the media dandies (limitless until tolerance of Migration Watch, BNP and the like is required, anyway).

In openly seeking to illegally enter another people’s country knowing their entry is opposed by most of that country’s owner-citizens these migrants show themselves to be hostile to basic civilisational norms. That the beeb’s reporters do not seem concerned by this is not surprising - the BBC itself has long been hostile to basic civilisational norms. But ordinarily the beeb’s culture war is far more subtle than last night’s love-fest with criminals who openly conspire to aggress against us as a nation. In brazenly endorsing the law of ‘the jungle,’ the beeb - I hope - will have shocked some of its tame teatime viewers.

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.

Tweedle-dumb

BBC Four is running a three part documentary on the challenges facing Harris’s Tweed industry. Here’s how they describe episode one:

1/3 Trouble Looms:

The islanders take steps to protect their heritage - a beautiful, sustainable and ethnic British cloth, as much part of island culture as the Gaelic language - but are they too late?

Can this be the same BBC whose staff professed to being baffled at the BNP’s claim that alongside those things which are ‘British’ in a legal sense, are also things British in an ethnic sense? It be. Shame on ’em.

MSM perspectives

I do my best to avoid the mainstream media but occasionally check in to see what they’re up to.

In the middle of last night’s Newsnight was an extended feature on a Black African immigrant in Russia running for mayor in the small country town he now lives in. The reporter began by describing the town, ‘conservative, rural, dull’ (and this was said with real venom - do view the link), before introducing the watermelon salesman (I kid you not) who was bringing some much needed vibrancy to this awful place. It was never explained why, if the place is so miserable, this African chose to go and live there in the first place. This became especially puzzling when the remainder of the report was given to describing how much hostility Africans and other immigrants in Russia endure, the would-be mayor even finding it necessary to hire a full-time bodyguard. Predictable comparisons with America and Obama followed, the theme being that as regards race Russia has a long way to go to catch up with its old ‘Cold War’ foe. So a silver lining, then.

Later I caught the last few minutes of a ‘Hardtalk’ interview with filmmaker Tom Hooper discussing a movie he has in the can about Nelson Mandela. Interviewer Stephen Sackur wondered how Hooper had approached the material given that, quote: ‘Mandela is the closest thing we have to a living saint.’ I didn’t hear the answer for laughing.

Maybe the MSM isn’t so bad after all.

Media rejoice as White people lose out to ‘vibrant’ import…

In a post about British Telecom’s anti-White recruitment policies I commented on the familiar ritual of ‘progress’ being measured by the extent to which White people have been removed from power and generally displaced by non-Whites. The rather surprising victory of Rachel Christie in the Miss England beauty contest offered an excuse for media rejoicing about just such White displacement: Christie is Black.

I won Miss England to prove being black is NEVER an excuse for failure
First Black Miss England crowned
Victory for Linford Christie's niece as she becomes first black Miss England
100m star Christie's niece crowned first black Miss England
Linford Christie's niece is first black Miss England

ITN news reported the story like all others with the new Miss England’s race being the primary issue and the factor which made this an especially positive news story. Its reporter claimed that Christie’s non-Whiteness made her a ‘thoroughly modern beauty queen’ - non-Whiteness as contemporary value-in-itself, rarely is it stated so openly. The not-so subtle implication being that the White phenotype is passé and that Whites who would have the beautiful kids of the future should breed out.

[On a side note, the other prominent element in the coverage was Christie’s famous uncle, retired sprinter Linford Christie. Even though the retired sprinter is a disgraced drug cheat the media continue to speak of him respectfully and I take this to be related to race also. So few Blacks prove worthy of role-model status, and their ‘community’ is apparently so in need of the few positive role-models that exist that Christie manages to avoid the negative media treatment a White drugs cheat would deservedly receive.]

****

Update: Hints of political motives behind Miss Christie’s otherwise baffling victory:

Organisers defend Miss England vote
(UKPA)

The organisers of the Miss England contest have defended the competition after it emerged that the winner, the niece of Olympic gold medal-winning sprinter Linford Christie, won with only nine votes from the public.

Angie Beasley, director of Miss England, said the public played only a part in the contest, choosing one of the 15 top finalists with this vote amounting effectively to a seventh judge in the final selection.

She said Rachel Christie, 20, a heptathlete from London, was awarded first place by four of the six judges on the night - including the model Caprice - who assessed candidates on factors such as posture and confidence.

She said: "When it gets to the top 15, they are judged on their confidence and their posture on stage and they are judged on their beauty and their personality. When it gets to the top 15 you cannot have the public vote judging that, it has to be a professional panel."

The vote for Ms Christie comes after Zoiey Smale, Miss Oxfordshire, won the public vote with 2,013 votes. Ms Christie finished 49th out of the 54 original finalists.

Under the rules, eight of the final 15 are winners of categories such as Miss Public Vote - won by Ms Smale - with seven selected by contest judges.

Ms Christie, who hopes to compete in the 2012 Olympics, won the Helen E Cosmetic award to reach the final.

One contestant, quoted anonymously in The Sun newspaper, questioned the "odd" judges' decision. She said: "It seems very odd that the overall winner, chosen by the judges, won so few public votes. The competition is far more than just a beauty contest, but it looks like the judges were totally out of touch with the public."