Two months after the Nuremberg hangings, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 59(I), declaring:
"Freedom of information requires as an indispensable element the willingness and capacity to employ its privileges without abuse. It requires as a basic discipline the moral obligation to seek the facts without prejudice and to spread knowledge without malicious intent."
The next year another General Assembly Resolution was adopted: Res. 110 which "condemns all forms of propaganda, in whatsoever country conducted, which is either designed or likely to provoke or encourage any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression."
Although UN General Assembly Resolutions are not legally binding, Resolutions 59 and 110 carry considerable moral weight. This is because, like the United Nations itself, they are an expression of the catastrophic brutality and suffering of two world wars and the universal desire to avoid future slaughter.
Propaganda Crimes
Most jurisdictions have yet to recognize propaganda for war as a crime. However several journalists have recently been convicted of incitement to genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
Because there is stiff resistance, especially from the United States, the effort to criminalize war propaganda faces an uphill battle.
However in legal terms it seems relatively straightforward: if incitement to genocide is a crime, then incitement to aggression, another Nuremberg crime, could and should be as well.
After all, aggression -- starting an
unprovoked war -- is "the supreme international crime differing only
from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated
evil of the whole," in the words of the judgment at Nuremberg.
Criminal or not, much of the world now sees incitement to war as morally indefensible.
In this light and in light of Goering's three-part recipe for war (weapons, economic war and propaganda) it is instructive to look at the role which American journalists and war propagandists have recently played in bringing about and sustaining war.
The Bush administration began to sell the invasion of Iraq to the American public soon after 9/11.
In order to coordinate this effort President Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, established the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) in the summer of 2002 expressly for the purpose of marketing the invasion of Iraq.
Among the members of WHIG were media figures/propagandists Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin.
WHIG was remarkable not only for its
recklessness with the truth but for the candor with which it
acknowledged it was running an advertising campaign. A Sept. 7, 2002,
New York Times article entitled TRACES OF TERROR: THE STRATEGY; Bush Aides Set Strategy to Sell Policy on Iraq reported:
"White House officials said today that the administration was following
a meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress
and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein".
