David Miller is the editor of "Tell Me Lies, Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq," interview on the book, the Hutton investigation, the controversy at BBC, and suggests a tribunal like the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Vietnam, for Iraq. This is Dori Smith with Regime Change Radio, a half hour program on the importance of voting to bring about regime change in America. SMITH INTRO: David Miller joins us today to talk about a new book he has edited, "TELL ME LIES: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq." Speaking to Danny Schechter of mediachannel.org earlier this month, David Miller said quote: "We can expect more disinformation and misinformation next year with renewed efforts by the U.S. government to leapfrog over any semblance of critical media with news feeds that bypass the news networks and are fed directly to local stations. Media control will intensify as perceived "bad news" threatens to disturb the domestic tranquility that the administration is hell-bent on preserving. This is part of the privatization of and a synergization with a strategy adapted by the U.S military called "information dominance." SMITH: According to AP reporter Jason Keyser writing from Tikrit, Iraq, the High Tech US Battle Gear Aimed At Insurgents, in Iraq includes computer screens on Humvees that carry information from military commanders directly to the field. His story appearing in the Hartford Courant, January 2nd 2004, states that the new computer technology allows commanders to give orders to their soldiers in the field through screens in their Humvees, and with assistance from aerial drones and global positioning satellites. It is a new kind of high tech war, but to David Miller, it is also further evidence of the new ability governments have to control information both into and out of war zones. MILLER: "One of the key things in terms of the use of technology in relation to questions of propaganda is the concept of interoperability, which means that there is a concern with making sure all information systems across the military operate together, talk to each other, whether that be computer systems used by say the Marine forces, the Air Force, or whether that be the kind of technology you are talking about that is being used in Iraq just now where there are computer links between soldiers on the ground and their commanding officers and they use their superiority, their dominance of information control to be able to keep populations under surveillance and to target populations including engaging people in armed action whether they be civilians or the resistance. And that kind of technology is a key part of what they call information dominance. And I think one of the interesting things, and little known things about it, which is what I have been trying to point out, is that concept of information dominance doesn't just refer to interoperability between computer systems. It refers to interoperability between different sorts of information, both internal to the military but also external in the sense of media relations and in the sense of propaganda and in the sense of psychological operations. Basically the militaries, I see no difference between the kinds of things that they are doing on the ground with downloading technology and the manipulation of the media and actually the attacking of independent journalists." SMITH: David Miller is the author of a January 8, 2004 piece in the Guardian, "Information Dominance," he is joining us to talk about his book, "Tell Me Lies, Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq." Welcome to Regime Change Radio. MILLER: "Thanks for having me." SMITH: I understand that in the UK there is an awful lot going on about this so-called surreal war that you describe, the war that was going on in the upper echelons of power versus the war on the ground that our UK and US soldiers saw in places like Iraq. Tell us a little bit about where you feel the public is in all of this discussion, in both the UK and the US, as we hear now that we were lied to, and it's not a question anymore, it's a fact. MILLER: "Well public opinion is an interesting question. I think it's fairly clear that all around the world with the exception of Israel and the US the majority of the population were opposed to the war back in February 2003. You know in very large majorities even in countries like the UK and sizable minorities in countries like the US against the war, public opinion did kind of change as the war started. Media coverage in the UK, for example, stopped featuring any dissent. It had monitored and marginalized dissent before the war started but after the shock and awe campaign started dissent was more or less removed from television especially. And that meant that many, some people in the UK for example, were forced to go along with the war and thought well once it's started we need to try and get it over with as soon as possible. But in the period after what was called the liberation of Baghdad people have become more and more skeptical again of the war and have sort of to the entext that today, for example that we have polls in the British press this morning suggesting that large majority of the population of the population think that the inquiry we just had into the death of a weapons inspector was a white wash, that the government has lied about it's prospectus for war, and the government is much less trusted by the population then for example the BBC is: Only 10 percent of the population are willing to say that they trust the government more than the BBC." SMITH: Now your book was officially launched last night at a big too do and I understand things went very very well for you. It looks like your book is going to be quite a success. Yet, it's coming out, now today is January 30th, we're looking at stories about "BBC apologies" and I'm questioning now, this is a Glen Frankel item from the Washington Post, that in London, members of the BBC are humbled and apologizing to Tony Blair. How do you understand that? How do you put that in context to your theories about the media? MILLER: "Well we've had this inquiry from the judge, Lord Hutton, and I should tell your listeners a couple of facts about Lord Hutton. Lord Hutton cut his legal teeth as it were defending the British Army in the Widgery Tribunal in Derry in Northern Ireland in 1972, where 14 innocent civilians were gunned down by the army and he, that inquiry went down in British Legal history as one of the biggest whitewashes in the post 1945 period. I think it's become very clear here now in the last day or so since this report came out that he learned an awful lot from Widgery and this is an attempt to do, as we say over here, to do a Widgery on the facts around the death of Dr. David Kelly. So it's become very very apparent to the bulk of the population here that this is a white wash from a judge who is extremely conservative and by no means independent. But having said that, the white wash is so thorough going and so condemnatory of BBC and excuses almost everything that the government has done that it is causing a backlash amongst the public and amongst the BBC and that's some kind of context for what's happening with the BBC. The BBC governors, that's the ruling body of the BBC, have apologized, have groveled before the government, have even apologized for things which were reported by the BBC which were true, and that's lead to a great rift within the BBC, so that the director general has gone and yesterday we saw across the UK in 17 separate BBC offices of staff walked out in protest about this. So there is real concern inside the BBC that this is about the government really trying to remove the political independence of the BBC. And I should emphasize that their political independence is already fairly limited And historically it's been fairly limited over the last 20 years as broadcasting has become commercialized and is becoming more limited. But this really is a crucial moment for the BBC for the existence of free media in the UK, and we'll see over the next few days how the issue develops but it could go very very badly wrong for freedom of speech and free media here. On the other hand the more positive note of this the staff are clearly very very angry and there will be demonstrations across the UK tomorrow in support of media freedom outside BBC offices up and down the country. So I think that we need to see the apology in that kind of context that there is deep division within the BBC now over this and that there is an emerging unity which would have been thought unthinkable during the war, an emerging unity between the anti-war movement here, which is very big and active, and many of the mainstream journalists in the BBC because we're now on the same side." SMITH: We're talking with David Miller, he is the editor of a book, "Tell Me Lies," it's just out, "Propaganda and media distortion in the attack on Iraq." That book is available from Pluto Press, you can log on to www.plutobooks.com to pick it up, and you will find in it contributors John Pilger, David Crouch, Des Freedman, name some others and tell me about this book and how it came together for you. MILLER: "Well it's also got chapters by Noam Chomsky, by Edward Herman, Norman Soloman, by the folks from PR watch in the US, together with Yvonne Ridley, the journalist who was captured by the Taliban back in 2001, and lots of other key reporters such as Robert Fisk. How did it come about? It came about, I was saying last night at the launch, at a meeting in the National Union of Journalist's headquarters in London on the ninth of April 2003, which was at the very moment that the statue of Saddam Hussein was being pulled down in Firdos square in Baghdad. We were meeting together to discuss how we could combat the torrent of lies which were being told about what was happening in Iraq. Not just in relation to the run up to the war and the false prospectus, but the notion that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that the Iraqi government posed any threat, that there was a link between Iraq and Al-Queda, which again, was false. But also in relation to the coverage of the war where any, it seemed, that any amount of propaganda from the US and the UK would be repeated unchallenged by the mainstream broadcast networks. Just to run through it quickly, the stories from the first week of the attack, the fall of Um Qasr nine times, the fall of Basra, several times, the discovery of chemical weapons factories, which didn't exist, the surrender of whole companies of the Iraqi military which hadn't happened, etc. etc. So it came out as a real concern that propaganda was going unchecked and that many mainstream media outlets in the UK as well as the US were not properly discussing and criticizing the information which was turning out to be false. So it came out of that, it came out of trying to correct, the record and set the record straight. And so what was done in the book is that we have sections on the propaganda apparatus of the UK and the US, the global propaganda apparatus, then there are sections on the mainstream media reporting, and then towards the end sections on what can be done about it, about alternatives, and how mainstream media can be changed and democratized." SMITH: It's an election season in the US. We've heard an awful lot about the Iraq war but it seems the focus is shifting or being shifted now away from the war in Iraq and it's made to seem that the American public is more interested in the economy and other aspects, health care. These are vitally important issues to Americans, however, they don't undo the fact that we have soldiers abroad as do people in the UK that are in harms way every day, and the thousands of Iraqi deaths going on and the numbers there growing to exceed perhaps even 50,000 we don't know yet. So, in sum, we have a situation that no one could say is not an international emergency. And yet, in America during an election year we are being deflected away from it. Is this something that you could see from where you are as information dominance? MILLER: "I think to some extent. I think information dominance is perhaps a wider concept than just being able to divert attention onto other issues. I mean obviously the election is going to take a lot of attention and the extent to which the democratic candidates will continue to raise the war, continue to raise the war, will be something we see as the weeks go on. But I think information dominance is a much more worrying concept than just being able to manipulate the media successfully. It requires that all information is friendly information, that it suits the purposes of the US and it's foreign policy and military planners. And if it doesn't suit their purposes and if it¹s regarded as unfriendly. If it is sufficient to make a difference to US foreign policy then the solution is, and I'm quoting Pentagon documents here, "to deny, degrade or destroy, unfriendly information." So I think that the whole question about diverting attention is a valid question, but really, a much smaller question than the kind of global ambitions of the US, of US foreign policy. But in a way I think that there is an interesting point here about the US about the movement in the US against the war, which is that yes they will try and divert attention, yes they will try and put it behind them like Blair is doing here, like Condoleezza Rice is doing in the States at the moment, but the most interesting thing about information dominance and the campaign to try and put Iraq behind them, to draw a line under it, is the way in which they are finding it difficult. They have to have concepts like information dominance and they have to spend millions of dollars. In the case of the US, the office of public diplomacy has a budget in excess of one billion dollars every year for propaganda operations; they have to spend this amount of money because there is so much opposition and because the opposition is becoming more successful. And that's the other side of the rather frightening propaganda apparatus. They fear us. They fear the movement against war and the movement against inequality. And that's a message of hope I think. So, I think while we can criticize their moving away from concerns about the war and talk about it in terms of diverting attention, we must also remember that they are scared of the movement against the war and actually the movement against inequality in terms of domestic policy. Whether it's to do with prisons or with health care or with transport or anything else." SMITH: In America the questions about the media have gotten pretty intense with Michael Powell, Colin Powell's son, involved with the FCC. And one of the questions people have had is how far is this going to go to the break point where Americans finally get to say something about the media and the control of the media by the Pentagon, the White House, etceteras. How far will things have to go before we find a way to address this both legally and also in terms of our Constitution here and then in the case of the UK you are up against the House of Lords, the government, and a whole information apparatus there too? MILLER: "Well, I don¹t think it¹s a question of how far it will have to go. I mean it could go very very far. I mean Noam Chomsky puts it, as usual very well in his new book, that it's about "a choice between resistance to American power or barbarism." And, it could go very far. It could become very very nasty. We could move, you know, towards something similar to fascism, and the alternative is, the only alternative to that is resistance. So it's a question of the history being unwritten, and while that is always the case, the history, that the future is unwritten, the current period is a period where there is more hope now, I think, for change than there has been for 30 odd years. And I think we can see that with the emergence of not just the anti-war movement globally but the anti-globalization movement as well. So I think it could go a lot further and it could get a lot worse, and that's what we have to be wary of." SMITH: In one of your pieces "Big and Little Lies on Iraq," you say for the sake of clarity, let us say a few words about lies to combat the accusation of erecting a mirror image, propaganda from the margins. "Lies are falsehoods," you say, "the status of which the liar is aware." This is becoming a campaign question now in America not just did the CIA give the White House bad information on Iraq, but did George Bush know it was false information? MILLER: "Yes. And this is the key question. This is the question, which Blair and Campbell in the UK are desperately trying to rule out. They are saying, you can have serious debates about whether we should have gone to war and about whether the information on Iraq is correct or not, but you cannot and should not question our integrity. And they are trying to stop broadcasters and the media, in general, from questioning their integrity. But of course, it's the only key, it's the only question left about weapons of mass destruction. It's not a question of whether they exist or not it's a question of whether they knew that they didn't exist before they went into the war. And I would say a couple of things about that: Both in the US and the UK, it's clear that elements of the security and intelligence services, in the CIA, and MI6, were very worried about this charade, and tried to stop it happening, and so there were divisions in both of the intelligence agencies, which resulted in leaks to the press in both the US and the UK. So one should be careful of saying that oh it was just the intelligence services. And the second thing was of course that the Bush White House created the office of special plans specifically so they could find evidence, which they could put before the public to justify the war in Iraq. And the third thing one would say is that if you look at the evidence which they have put out, in Colin Powell's address to the UN, and the famous dossier in the UK, the plagiarized one which was stolen from somebody's thesis and the other one with the 45 minute claim in it, it's not a question of them getting the information wrong unwittingly. I mean none of that because of the evidence, which is actually in the dossier. The dossier itself says that the Iraqis could launch within 45 minutes some chemical and biological agents using ballistic missiles, and they used the term "ballistic missiles" in the dossier. And that claim includes 3 separate falsehoods: That there were chemical and biological agents left. According to the UN reports they were largely sludge by 1994. "Useless sludge," as Scott Ritter puts it. There were no ballistic missiles of that range left in Iraq as the UN has confirmed. And the 45-minute claim applied only, as we found out in the Hutton inquiry here, the 45-minute claim applied only to battlefield munitions that could fire a few hundred yards. So it required the melding together of three separate falsehoods to get to the 45-minute claim that Iraq was a threat--Now how do we know that Downing Street knew that those were false? Well we know because the evidence they give in the dossier for there being any weapons of mass destruction, of chemical and biological agents, the evidence they quote is, are the UN reports from the weapons inspectors. When one examines the weapons inspector's reports one finds that they say precisely the opposite of what the government has said that they have said. So we know that they lied because their own evidence contradicts the case that they are making. Now unless they are arguing that they mistakenly left out the word, "not" in a monumental feat of incompetence, which I suppose isn't beyond the realm of possibility then we have them on the construction of a lie which involved three separate deceptions at least, and this is only the tip of the iceberg in relation to the deceptions of that particular dossier. It's been found that there are 36 separate falsehoods in that particular dossier. So, I mean it is important to be clear that lies are falsehoods which are known to be false by the people who put them out when they put them out, and it's clear that what happened in relation to the case for war was known to be false by them when they put it out at the time because they had the evidence which showed that." SMITH: You know in Reuters again today, January 29th, is a story about Condoleezza Rice, and this hot political issue created now by former Chief Weapons Inspector David Kay who has resigned and what's happening here is that this is a concise piece by Adam Entous, he talks about the fact that the White House acknowledged that it had been a mistake to accuse Iraq of the African Uranium purchase attempt. He also quotes Condoleezza Rice, and I want to ask you about this quote as a journalist. Rice says, quote, "I think that what we have is evidence that there are differences between what we knew and what we found on the ground." Tell me about your response to that as a reporter. Is that enough to say that she is admitting that the intelligence and the statements she made and the White House made were wrong? MILLER: "Of course she's not admitting it. She's saying, "we knew it," and "now we don't know it." It's like the famous Donald Rumsfeld quote isn't it about "known knowns and unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns," and that kind of thing. I mean they play with words all the way through. If you look back to 2001 before 9/11 there's footage of Condoleezza Rice saying that Iraq poses no threat, we've closed down all the weapons, we've isolated them, his army is broken and he is no threat, and you know that clip is simply never played in the mainstream media. So they believed, including Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, who again there's a clip of him saying the same thing. They believed in 2001 that there was no possibility of going into Iraq and they were saying that there was no threat. And it's quite clear that what 9/11 gave them was the excuse to start to say we need to go into Iraq. And they manufactured the evidence and simply and only in order to do that. That's what the office of special plans was for, because the CIA wouldn't cooperate. So I think that they are trying to squirm and to get off the hook, and they are doing it I think more effectively in the US where they are admitting that they might have been wrong slightly more openly than they are over here, where Blair still seems to be saying that they were quite correct to say that there were weapons of mass destruction, when everybody knows from David Kay to Hans Blix to Scott Ritter, anybody who has looked at the evidence, that there weren't any weapons there and they knew that at the time." SMITH: Now you said that at your celebration of the launching of this book that there was some discussion about what can be done to stop this process of disinformation from the top down. What are your thoughts on that? MILLER: "Well the movement against war has to be built certainly. But it seems to me that in the UK and possibly also in the US, although I don't have quite such a feel for what's happening precisely now with the Kay stuff and the Condoleezza Rice stuff. But they have done their inquiries and in the case of the UK there's been three separate inquiries all of which have been white washes because they have been done by officials and by appointed judges and by the establishment. And it's strikes me, this is one of the things we were talking about last night at the launch which actually other people in the movement have been talking about in the last few days it turns out. If they won't tell us the truth, then we need to find out the truth ourselves and we can't do that by saying calling on the government to have another independent inquiry, because it won't be independent, because we cannot trust them. Nobody trusts them, the public in the UK or in the US. So it strikes me that the thing to do, and this is a genuine live suggestion. The thing to do is to have an international popular tribunal on the case for war and the intelligence evidence for war, on the lines of the Russell tribunal into Vietnam back in the early 70s. And I think that that's the kind of thing which could bring together all the evidence which now exists in reports which the mainstream media are ignoring, from David Kay's reports to Hans Blix's reports, to say to the retired Brigadier who did a big report on US propaganda, to the report done on the Niger fabrication. The fabrication of evidence that Iraq was trying to buy weapons grade uranium material from the African state of Niger, I think that that is one way in which we can try and hold them to account. If they won't tell us the truth we need to find out the truth ourselves and to publish it as far and wide as we can. All around the world so that they have no hiding place." SMITH: David Miller is the editor of the new book, Tell Me Lies, Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq. He is a member of the Stirling Media Research Institute. The book's published by Pluto Books. You can find it online at www.plutobooks.com David Miller, thanks so much for joining us on Regime Change Radio. MILLER: "It's been a pleasure." For further information on this program write to me Dori Smith, at rcrradio@aol.com see the following urls. http://staff.stir.ac.uk/david.miller/publications/Tellmelies.html ISBN 0-7453-2201-8 PLUTO PRESS http://www.plutobooks.com/whatsnew.shtml Book Launch Pluto Press is delighted to invite you to the launch of the brand new book edited by David Miller. Special guest speakers include Mark Curtis, Abdul Hadi Jiad, David Miller and Phillip Knightley. A question & answer session will follow involving further contributors including John Pilger, David Crouch, and Des Freedman. The meeting will be chaired by Lindsey German of the Stop the War Coalition. Join us for drinks at the NUJ HQ Thursday 29th January 2004, 6.30pm (for 7pm) Headland House, 308 - 312 Gray's Inn Road, London, WC1 Tube: King's Cross Common Dreams News Center, Friday, January 09, 2004, Featured Views 'The Domination Effect' by David Miller http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0108-09.htm http://staugustine.com/stories/010204/ira_2036169.shtml...high-tech digital warfare system are known as Army Battle Command Systems. The technologies, originally designed for battlefield combat involving tanks and helicopters, now are being adapted for hunting rebel leaders and trailing street fighters. Jason Keyser, AP, 1-2-04, "High Tech Battle Gear Aimed At Insurgents" References in this interview include: "Russell Tribunal" on Vietnam see link. "Brigadier" on disinformation campaign is Brig Sam Gardiner see link. And "Widgery" of Hutton see link. Bertrand Russell Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal - Contents Full Text of Bertrand Russell' s Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal Report, held in Sweden and Denmark. Find what really happened. Prevent the Crime of Silence. ... http://911review.org/Wget/www.homeusers.prestel.co.uk/little... http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/violence/sf31398.htm Lord Chief Justice Brian Hutton. This was a telling parallel of the meeting between Ted Heath and Lord Widgery on the eve of the Bloody Sunday inquiry. www.usnews.com/usnews/politics/whispers/documents/truth.pdf Brig Sam Gardiner who was actually a Colonel(!) and his extremely useful report 'Truth from these podia' is at: www.usnews.com/usnews/politics/whispers/documents/truth.pdf