PROPAGANDA WATCH

Antiwar: The 'Prop-Agenda' at War

In their widely quoted book Weapons of Mass Deception, Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber argued in 2003 that the U.S. government
used the shock of the 9/11 attacks to justify an invasion of Iraq.
Bush counter-terrorism coordinator Richard Clarke further denounces
President George Bush for using the attacks as a pretext for the
war in his book Against All Enemies published last March. For
propaganda expert Nancy Snow ... 'if war is the paint, then
propaganda is the paint primer that makes possible the total
devotion of the public to the just cause of the state in wartime.'

When on April 9, 2003 the statue of Saddam was finally brought down
in Baghdad's Firdos Square, U.S. media commentators rushed to assign
iconic connotations to the toppling, ranking it alongside the fall of
the Berlin Wall or the protesters opposing tanks at Tiananmen Square.

"Jubilant Iraqis Swarm the Streets of Capital," Rampton and Stauber quoted
The New York Times as saying. The main papers and television channels in
the U.S. showed the same scene and proffered similar comments.

But a BBC photo sequence of the statue's fall displayed a sparse crowd of
approximately 200 people, they observe; a Reuters long-shot photo of
Firdos Square showed that it was nearly empty, sealed off by U.S. tanks.