But Snyder had a job to do: producing the video that his superiors wanted. "The perception we wanted to convey was that the Soviet Union had cold-bloodedly carried out a barbaric act," Snyder noted. "The objective, quite simply, was to heap as much abuse on the Soviet Union as possible."
In a boastful but frank assessment of the successful disinformation campaign, Snyder noted that "the American media swallowed the U.S. government line without reservation. Said the venerable Ted Koppel on the ABC News 'Nightline' program: 'This has been one of those occasions when there is very little difference between what is churned out by the U.S. government propaganda organs and by the commercial broadcasting networks.'"
Propaganda Gold
George W. Bush's administration struck similar propaganda gold with Powell's speech to the UN Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003. The few skeptical voices in the mainstream U.S. news media were silenced after Powell laid it on thick.
One of Powell's techniques was to play excerpts of intercepted Iraqi telephone conversations in which the precise topic was unclear, but Powell applied the worst possible interpretation. In one such conversation, an Iraqi official said, "we evacuated everything. We don't have anything left."
Powell added, "Note what he says: 'We evacuated everything.' We didn't destroy it. We didn't line it up for inspection. We didn't turn it into the inspectors. We evacuated it to make sure it was not around when the inspectors showed up.'" But Powell was speculating that the "everything" referred to WMDs.
In another excerpt, Powell embellished an original State Department translation to cast more suspicion on the Iraqis. To prove that Iraqis were removing illegal weapons before a U.N. inspection team arrived, Powell read from one supposed transcript of an Iraqi official giving orders: "We sent you a message yesterday to clean out all of the areas, the scrap areas, the abandoned areas. Make sure there is nothing there."
What the original State Department transcript said, however, was: "We sent you a message to inspect the scrap areas and the abandoned areas." There was no order to "clean out all of the areas" and there was no instruction to "make sure there is nothing there." Powell's gamesmanship with the intercept was later reported by Gilbert Cranberg, a former editor of the Des Moines Register's editorial pages, when he compared Powell's testimony to the original State Department translation.
Powell used the needled transcript to draw a powerful conclusion. "This is all part of a system of hiding things and moving things out of the way and making sure they have left nothing behind," he said. "They were trying to clean up the area to leave no evidence behind of the presence of weapons of mass destruction. And they can claim that nothing was there. And the inspectors can look all they want, and they will find nothing."
However, as deceptive as Powell and the Bush administration were regarding Iraq, they at least provided details that could be checked out independently. A careful journalist or an attentive citizen could do what Gilbert Cranberg did, overlay the official story on top of the raw data to see if they matched.
With the Obama administration's white paper on Syria, not even that is possible. The claims are so lacking in detail that they amount to an insistence that the American people and the world's public simply trust the U.S. government not to mislead them -- again.
Below is the three-page white paper released by the White House.
U.S. Government Assessment of the Syrian Government's Use of Chemical Weapons on August 21, 2013The United States Government assesses with high confidence that the Syrian government carried out a chemical weapons attack in the Damascus suburbs on August 21, 2013. We further assess that the regime used a nerve agent in the attack. These all-source assessments are based on human, signals, and geospatial intelligence as well as a significant body of open source reporting.
Our classified assessments have been shared with the U.S. Congress and key international partners. To protect sources and methods, we cannot publicly release all available intelligence -- but what follows is an unclassified summary of the U.S. Intelligence Community's analysis of what took place.
Syrian Government Use of Chemical Weapons on August 21
A large body of independent sources indicates that a chemical weapons attack took place in the Damascus suburbs on August 21. In addition to U.S. intelligence information, there are accounts from international and Syrian medical personnel; videos; witness accounts; thousands of social media reports from at least 12 different locations in the Damascus area; journalist accounts; and reports from highly credible nongovernmental organizations.
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