Continuity in Disinformation: with Some Examples From the War on Iraq

Y. Inceoğlu - N.Akıner
Abstract
George W. Bush administration itself systematically disseminated lies to promote its war policy on occupation of Iraq. The US government was extremely successful in managing public opinion and engineering consent to their war policies.

The mainstream media helped to mobilize public support for the US war policy. In this paper, the role of the global media -especially TV stations and newspapers- and their transmission, promotion and legitimization US war policy will be analyzed and criticized. Therefore, we shall provide an analysis and critique of how the media presented the disinformation in the war on Iraq. The version of the war presented on TV and the corporate media will be systematically compared with alternative media sources in order to reveal disinformation and outright lies presented in the mainstream media.

Gulf War (1991) was primarily a media propaganda war. The War on Iraq (2003) has same qualifications with Gulf War. Although there are 12 years between these two wars, US administration continued the same disinformation tactics on some specific cases.

The challenge to critical media analysis is to decode the manifest political content behind the masks of disinformation and propaganda.

Keywords: Continuity in disinformation, war, propaganda, lies, Iraq, US.

"CONTINUITY IN DISINFORMATION: WITH SOME EXAMPLES FROM THE WAR ON IRAQ"

I. INTRODUCTION
II. Framing Image of Reality: Media Effects
III. Disinformation and Its Levels
IV. Some Examples of Disinformation Comparing
the War on Iraq with the Gulf War (1991)

A. Heroic Rescue of Private Jessica Lynch and Visible Results of the Story
B. DU and Visible Results of one of the most
Notorious Falsehoods of the War on Iraq C. Anthrax
D. Baby Milk Factory

V. CONCLUSION
VI. REFERENCES

I. INTRODUCTION

"Continuity in Disinformation" would be disinformation that intermittently receives support to maintain its plausibility. The Bush Administration is expert in this area, where the repeated claim that Saddam was involved in 9/11, for example has created an indelible impression in the minds of most Americans that is true, even though Bush himself has rather quietly admitted there was no evidence to support it.

These charges were amplified by the pro-war media, which became the instruments of propaganda. They were repeated by television channels Fox News, CNN and MSNC, by Clear Channel radio network (1225 stations throughout the US) and even prestigious newspapers, such as the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. But it is clear that propaganda in America won't change the "facts on the ground" in Iraq.

II. Framing Image of Reality: Media Effects

"The entire study of mass communication", McQuail (1994) wrote, "is based on the premise that the media have significant effects". This diagnosis, however, must be understood as the temporary result of a scholarly discussion that has been characterized by significant changes in paradigms over the past decades.

According to McQuail, the history of research on media effects can be divided into four stages:

1. From the turn of the 20th century to the late 1930s, first stage was dominated by an experience with strategic propaganda during World War I, which led to a growing fear of the influence of media messages on attitudes.

2. Second stage, which ended in the late 1960s, revised the paradigm of strong media effects. Personal influence on attitude change. Klapper (1960) summed up the findings. Campaigns do not influence people; their major effect is the reinforcement of existing attitudes. Even for those who actually do change their mind, the effects are minimal.

3. The third stage began in the 1970s, It was dominated by the search for new strong media effects(Noelle-Neumann, 1973). The focus of research shifted from attitude change, as found in the Columbia Studies, to more cognitive effects of mass media (Beniger&Gusek, 1995).

4. Present stage started in the early 1980s, is characterized by "Social Constructivism". The description of media and recipients in this stage combines elements of both strong and limited effects of mass media. On the one hand, mass media have strong impact by constructing social reality that is "by framing images of reality... in a predictable and patterned way"(McQuail, 1994, p.331). On the other hand, media effects are limited by an interaction between mass media and recipients.

On the other hand, according to Neuman, Just, and Crigler (1992, p.120) "They give the story a spin", taking into account their organizational and modality constraints, professional judgments about the audience".

At the same time, people's information processing and interpretation are influenced by preexisting meaning structures or schemas. Three dimensions of news processing have been identified (Kosicki&McLeod 1990).

1. Active processing: Active processing refers to an individual seeking out additional sources based on the assumption that mass-mediated information in general is incomplete, slanted, or in other ways colored by the intentions of the communicator.

2. Reflective integrators: They ponder or think about information they gather from mass media, or they talk to others about what they have learned from mass media to understand fully what they have learned.

3. Selective scanners: They use mass media only to seek information relevant to them. They skim over or ignore irrelevant or uninteresting content.

We see that, according to a constructivist media effects model, audiences rely on "a version of reality built from personal experience, interaction with peers, and interpreted selections from mass media"(Neuman et al., 1992, p.120).

III. Disinformation and Its Levels

Disinformation involves the dissemination of incomplete, inaccurate, or otherwise misleading information with the objective, goal, or aim of deceiving others about the truth. Sometimes the source is accurately acknowledged (this might be called "overt" disinformation), but sometimes it is concealed by providing no identification or by providing misleading identification (call this "covert"). The quantity and quality of disinformation may be difficult to judge, but it should be viewed more or less on a par with acts of lying, but where the motives that usually bring about lying (to preserve a relationship, to conceal an affair, to secure a loan, and such) are displaced by other, often political, motives, aims, or goals.

As Professor James H. Fetzer, have speculated that there must be at least five different types, levels or degrees of disinformation, from the highest (fifth) to the lowest (first).

Fifth Type: The fifth level of disinformation appears to occur when a source presents information that has been deliberately selected to misrepresent, distort or abuse sources with the intention to mislead. Citing only evidence that is favorable to one side as if no contrary evidence exists is known as Special Pleading. The key aspect of fifth degree efforts is creating-usually by writing-entire new works (books and article), because of which it has the character of Fabricating Evidence.

Fourth Type: The fourth level of disinformation appears to occur, not when a work (a book or an article) is being written from scratch, but in creating a highly biased impression of a study by simply "Ignoring" its most significant, important, or relevant features to mislead others, about the contents of the work, which is another form of Special Pleading.

Third Type: The third level of disinformation occurs by abusing the man in attacking the author or the editor of a work on irrelevant or misleading grounds that have little or nothing to do with the position the author or editor represents.

Second Type: The second level of disinformation occurs when relevant available evidence that ought to make a difference to a conclusion, hypothesis or conjecture under examination is simply dismissed or ignored.

First Type: The first level of disinformation might equally well be characterized as apparent incompetence by someone who assumes the task of offering criticism but for which he is not well-positioned to provide. This may be due to any number of factors, including lack of mental acumen, specific misunderstandings, or lack of familiarity with relevant evidence (simple ignorance) (Fetzer, 2003).

IV. Some Examples of Disinformation from the War on Iraq Comparing with Gulf War (1991)

A. Heroic Rescue of Private Jessica Lynch and Visible Results of the Story

Private Jessica Lynch was one of the first American POW shown on Iraqi TV and since she was young, female, and attractive her fate became a topic of intense interest. Due to the story she was shot and stabbed and was tortured by Iraqis who were holding her in captivity. It is one of good example for Bush administration's disinformation. Spectacle nature of the event and the ways that the Pentagon constructed myths were replicated by the TV Networks like Fox, NBC, and CNN.

What's wrong with the story?

A story which was headlined "She was fighting to her death" was published in Washington Post April 3. The story based on unnamed military sources claimed that Lynch "continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds". And she was also stabbed by Iraqis who captured her. In fact, Lynch's vehicle took a wrong turn, overturned, and she was hurt in the accident but not fighting Iraqis.

Eight days after her capture, the U.S. media broadcasted her dramatic rescue, obviously staged like a reality TV spectacle. Soldiers stormed the hospital, found Lynch and claimed a dramatic, heroic rescue under fire from Iraqis.

The "rescue" was filmed on a night-vision camera by a former assistant of director Ridley Scott, who had worked on the film "Black Hawk Down (2001)"(Los Angeles Times, 20 May 2003).

The big reality is that several media institutions interviewed the doctors in the hospital who claimed that Iraqi troops had left the hospital two days before and hospital staff had tried to take Jessica to the Americans but they fired on them. On the other hand in the "rescue" the U.S. troops shot through the doors, terrorized doctors and patients, and created a dangerous scene that could have resulted in deaths, simply to get some dramatic rescue footage for TV audiences ("The Real Saving Pte. Lynch" Toronto Star May 5 by Mitch Potter). This real story was confirmed by BBC on May 15, CBS News on May 29 and also by the Associated Press.

Another dimension of Private Jessica's story is the role of PR consultant who was responsible for spreading one of the most notorious falsehoods of Gulf War (1991). In spite of that there are twelve years between Gulf War (1991) and the War on Iraq (2003), heroes who are responsible for construction of disinformation have not yet changed. Hence, we can tell about continuity in disinformation. Lauri Fitz-Pegado, a former U.S. official, is helping to publicize a newly published book (Because Each Life is Precious: Why an Iraqi Man Risked Everything for Private Jessica Lynch)-by Mohamed Odeh al-Rehaief, an Iraqi lawyer who provided information to U.S. forces searching for POW Jessica Lynch.

Mr. Rehaief explains how he risked his life to give news of the captured 19 years old soldier lying injured in a hospital bed in the Iraqi city Nasiriyah, to U.S. troops: ?I can not say how I had pictured this American POW but I never imagined her so small or so young... In that moment I felt compelled to help that person in the hospital bed. I had no idea of what I could do, but I knew that I had to do something". Mr. Rehaief's actions leaded to U.S. forces that carried out a dramatic night-time "rescue? in The City Saddam Hospital.

The Pentagon was quick to seize on the mission and leaked many details about the photogenic Pte. Lynch, her efforts to avoid capture and the resistance the Special Forces Soldiers met-details that subsequently proved to be false.

Mr. Rehaief, aged 33, has been well-rewarded for his actions. He was paid 300.000 dollars in advance by HarperCollins. In addition, the lawyer and his wife were granted asylum in the US. He has also been hired by one of Washington's biggest lobbying firms, the Livingston Group and as a consultant for a TV film about Pte. Lynch.

The Profile of Lauri Fitz-Pegado

Lauri Fitz-Pegado was handling press relations for Mr. Rehaief in his capacity as an employee of Livingston. Ms Fitz-Pegado was a senior executive (with the PR firm Hill&Knowlton) in 1990-following the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein's forces. Hill&Knowlton was paid almost 12 million dollars by Kuwaiti royal family for running a campaign to pressurize the U.S. government for acting against Iraq.

One of key the elements of the campaign focused on allegations that Iraqi soldiers had thrown Kuwaiti babies out of their incubators and taken the machines back to Baghdad. Most powerful evidence was the testimony of a 15 year old Kuwaiti girl "Nayirah", who testified in a congressional hearing: "I was a volunteer at Al-Addan Hospital. (While I was there) I saw the Iraqi soldiers coming into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, stole the incubators and left the babies on the cold floor to die".

It later emerged that the allegations were entirely false. In fact, Nayirah was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. and had been coached on what to say by Ms Fitz-Pegado. She later told the author of a book about Media Censorship and the Gulf War: "Come on ... Who gives a shit whether there were six babies or two? I believe her."

B. DU and Visible Results of one of the most Notorious Falsehoods of the War on Iraq

During Gulf War, coalition forces used armor-piercing ammunition made from depleted uranium, which is ideal for the purpose because of its great density. According to the report (Apparatus of Lies) which was released by White House in January 2003, in recent years, the Iraqi regime has made substantial efforts to promote the false claim that the depleted uranium rounds fired by coalition forces have caused cancers and birth defects in Iraq. Iraq has distributed horrifying pictures of children with birth defects and linked them to the depleted uranium.

The campaign had two major propaganda assets:

1. Uranium is a name that has frightening associations in the mind of the average person, which makes the lie relatively easy to sell; and
2. Iraq could take advantage of an established international network of antinuclear activists who had already launched their own campaign against depleted uranium.

According to the White House report, scientists working for the World Health Organization, the UN Environmental Program, and the European Union could find no health effects linked to exposure to depleted uranium.

What's wrong with the story?

"If you can't clean it up, don't use it." Doug Rokke The Invisible War: Depleted Uranium and the Politics of Radiation 2000

What is Depleted Uranium?

Depleted uranium (U-238) is made from uranium hexafluoride, which is the non-fissionable by-product of the uranium enrichment process completed at facilities in Tennessee, Ohio, and Kentucky. The process removes fissionable U-234 and U-235 to make nuclear bombs and reactor fuel. The remaining uranium, which is 99.8% uranium 238, is called depleted uranium. The term depleted implies the fact that it isn?t only dangerous, but also it is deadly. This waste product is disposed of by producing weapons, armor, and concrete (www.savewarchildren.org/whatIsDU.html).

Ever since the first Gulf War the U.S. military and NATO forces have increasingly used radioactive Depleted Uranium (DU) munitions. Against Iraq in 1991 they proved very effective at penetrating enemy tanks and bunkers. More recently in the Afghan campaign they were used extensively for destroying underground facilities and caves. (All these weapons are being heavily used during The War on Iraq. DU burns intensely and is very hard. DU is also much cheaper than the substitute metal, tungsten. In effect, the U.S. military is trading off lower costs for increased health hazards. The health dangers of using DU-munitions have now been widely recognized (www.cursor.org/stories/uranium.htm).

The Department of Defense got the bright idea of using depleted uranium in weapons because: it is very dense, which gives it greater penetrating power to destroy tanks, etc.; it is "pyrophoric," which means that upon impact, it explodes into fire and smoke, creating submicroscopic radioactive particles which travel great distances and can remain suspended until it is "rained out" of the atmosphere; it is cheap, and passes the responsibility for disposal from DOE on to civilians (that means us) and the environment.

Since depleted uranium is so radioactive, it will continue acting internally on living things long after the battlefield has been cleared - with delayed effects, which impact soldiers and civilians for the rest of their lives. The half life of uranium is 4.5 billion years - in ten half-lives radioactivity becomes an insignificant amount. In 45 billion years it will no longer be a danger. In other words, it's "fun" for the DOD, its "cheap" for the arms manufacturers (who reap good profits by making it), and "good riddance" says DOE (with 480,000 tons on hand).

The Navy first tested depleted uranium munitions in 1977 at Hunters Point. From the USS Bigelow, the Phalanx Weapons System fired 3,000 rounds of depleted uranium penetrates per minute. The tests exceeded expectations and production started in 1978 to fill orders for 23 U.S. Navy and 14 foreign military systems.

The Army A-10 Thunderbolt II nicknamed "the Warthog," fired most of the depleted uranium munitions in the Gulf War, between 300 to 800 tons. The Abrams Tank, the Marines M-60, the U.S. F-16 and U.S. Apache helicopters have been fitted to fire DU munitions. Many cruise missiles contain DU balance weights (Moret, 2001).

Impact of DU on Iraq

The White House Report, misleadingly states scientist working for the World Health Organization, the UN Environmental Program and the European Union could find no health effects linked to exposure to depleted uranium. In fact, scientists from these organizations never looked for health effects linked to exposure to DU in any post-combat environment; the World Health Organization and European Union produced literature reviews and analysis and the UN environment program looked only at environmental contamination from use of DU munitions (Apparatus of Lies, 2003).

During the War on Iraq (2003), United States and United Kingdom armed forces shot ammunition made from depleted uranium (DU) at a wide variety of targets. Although there is little known about actual quantities of DU released or the locations of contamination, it appears approximately 100 or 200 metric tons was shot at tanks, trucks, buildings and the people in largely populated areas. It was 5 times more than the ammunition made from depleted uranium that was released in Gulf War (1991).

Anti-DU activists developed and promoted fantastic tales about DU in the months before the war. Some claims, such as comparing the release of DU to the Chernobyl disaster.

* The use of DU munitions in Iraqis is an act of genocide.
* The US military uses of DU munitions to intentionally "destroy the genetic future of the Iraqi people".
* The US military is using new, secret weapons that release large quantities of natural uranium into the environment.

According to Professor Doug Rokke, ex-director of the Pentagon's Depleted-Uranium Project, "numerous US Department of Defense reports have stated that the consequences of DU were unknown. That is a lie. They were told. They were warned." Furthermore, Rokke's assessment of the consequences of DU, consequences that are part of the astronomical increase in varieties of cancers among Iraqi children, provides chilling evidence of the lethal impact of depleted uranium: "DU is the stuff of nightmares. It is toxic, radioactive and pollutes for 4500 million years. It causes lymphoma, neuro-psychotic disorders and short-term memory damage. In semen, it causes birth defects and trashes the immune system." (Shor, 2002)

One of the eyewitnesses of the impact of DU on Iraqis, is Robert Fisk. He explained what he saw in Iraq with these words: "Tens of thousands of 1991 Gulf War veterans suffering unexplained and potentially terminal illnesses and with thousands of Iraqi civilians, including children unborn when the war ended, now suffering from unexplained cancers. Something terrible happened at the end of the Gulf War about which we have still not been told the truth. As former acting Sergeant Tony Duff of the Gulf War Veterans put it to me yesterday, "a lot of things we are now calling victories about the Gulf War will be seen one day as atrocities - I wonder whether this is why the powers that be don't want this DU thing to come out?"

And what exactly is this awful secret which we are not allowed to know? Is it, as Professor Malcolm Hooper, professor of medicinal chemistry at Sunderland University remarks, the result of the US-British bombing of Saddam Hussein's Sarin and Tabun poison gas factories (around 900 facilities were bombed, it now turns out). Or is it the secret DU factor?

I don't know whether this can be classed as a war crime. But anyone who thinks there's no connection between our use of depleted uranium ammunition in the 1991 Gulf War and the tide of sickness that has followed in its wake must also believe in Father Christmas (Fisk, 1998).

Impact of DU on US

The use of DU is not being covered up, but the health hazards have been. Gulf War Syndrome not only killed, maimed, and made soldiers sick, they brought it home. In a study of 251 Gulf War veterans' families in Mississippi, 67 percent of their children were born without eyes, ears or a brain, had fused fingers, blood infections, respiratory problems or thyroid and other organ malformations. The depleted uranium that has contaminated the Gulf States since the Gulf War can be detected on gamma meters in Greece and Bulgaria on windy days. It's the weapon that "keeps giving"... and keeps killing (Moret, 2001).

We recommend;
* The US and UK governments to test automatically Iraq war veterans with known or suspected DU exposures,
* The World Health Organization should undertake rapid assessment of the health status of the population of Iraq and work with the US administration ruling Iraq, United Nations Environment Program and International Atomic Energy Agency to protect the Iraqi population from environmental health hazards.

C. Anthrax

The person(s) who caused the outbreak probably mailed seven letters containing anthrax spores and similar written messages from Trenton, New Jersey. Five of the letters were sent on September 18 (2001), one going to American Media in Boca Raton, Florida; a second to the New York Post; a third to Tom Brokaw of NBC News ; a fourth to ABC News; and a fifth to Dan Rather of CBS News. On October 9, two more letters were sent from Trenton, N.J. via Brentwood mail processing facility, one to Senator Tom Daschle and the other to Senator Patrick Leahy. Letters cross-contaminated with the Daschle and Leahy letters were sent from Trenton, N.J. to Wallingford, CT, with at least one letter probably going to Oxford, CT. The final anthrax case in the outbreak remains a mystery, but possibly arose from contact with the September 18 letters or cross-contamination with the October 9 Leahy letter in Trenton, New Jersey. To do so, spores from the Leahy letter would need to have adhered to an envelope of another letter destined for the Bronx, New York City (Exposure Letters).

Office of Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said that "It is highly concentrated. It is pure and the spores are smaller. Therefore they're more dangerous, because they can be more easily absorbed in a person's respiratory system." By contrast, the contents of the New York Post letter were clumpy, he said. On the other hand The Washington Post reported a government official with direct knowledge of the investigation has said that the totality of the evidence so far suggests it is unlikely the spores were originally produced in the former Soviet Union or Iraq (Washington Post, October 26, 2001).

What's anthrax?

Anthrax is what's called a "gram positive" bacterium. This means it has the type of cell walls which are harmless, unlike the cell walls of "gram negative" bacteria, which attack tissue. Therefore, anthrax can only attack tissue by producing a special toxin which it excretes. One cell or spore does not produce enough toxins to start an infection. Studies have apparently determined that, typically, ten thousand anthrax spores must be inhaled to start an infection. Anthrax normally attacks the lungs, because it must lodge in vulnerable tissue. It can invade through other routes such as cuts or undercooked meat, but it only does so under third world conditions and those routes are not relevant to biowarfare. Livestock eat from the ground, so they have their faces in the ground where the spores are, and they can inhale ten thousand spores. How does anyone get ten thousand spores into his lungs? (Novak, 2002).

What's wrong with the story?

Anthrax cannot be weaponized by the terrorists, and it could probably never be used successfully as a military weapon. It has to be converted to spores suspended in the air, which is technically very difficult. A scenario which is often mentioned is that someone might use a plane to dust a large city with anthrax during the night. It's unrealistic. First, no one in buildings without external ventilation would be harmed by anthrax. The few spores that entered such buildings would settle on surfaces, and few would enter the air, and even fewer would be inhaled. At most, someone might inhale a few dozen spores per hour. That's not the ten thousand that are needed.
Secondly, anthrax spores would not diffuse uniformly through the air like a gas. They will either drop too fast or blow away. A few dozen persons might be killed, but that's not the terror that is being hyped in the media. Moreover, nobody is producing the spores in powder form except the U.S. and Russia (Novak, 2002).

The Riegle Report details the findings of senate hearings chaired by Senator Donald Riegle in 1994. The report confirms that when US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was a member of the President's General Advisory Committee on Arms Control in the 1980's, biological materials were being exported to Iraq under license from the US Department of Commerce. These included botulinum toxin and anthrax, later identified as major components in the Iraqi biological warfare program (The Riegle Report, 1994).

Journalists seem to assume that an anthrax cell anywhere will kill someone someplace. Putting words alongside each other on a page is not the same thing as getting cells into humans on the ground. There are millions of square miles of space on the ground, which do not show up with the words. Out in the open, tons would be required, not grams. Journalists keep mentioning how many anthrax spores can be gotten onto the head of a pin. It's not a question of how many can be gotten onto the head of a pin but how many can be gotten into someone's lungs.

It is said that Iraq uses anthrax in liquid form and puts it in missiles in liquid form. You would have to drink liquid anthrax for it to do any harm. It would be more effective to attack a city with used motor oil than with liquid anthrax. Therefore, Iraq poses no anthrax threat (Novak, 2002).

In fact, military and UN inspectors only found two Iraqi warheads with anthrax in them (in liquid form). If Iraq had anthrax in an effective form, it would have had it in hundreds of warheads, as they did with nerve gas. So Iraq knew its anthrax was useless. For about a billion dollars, Iraq could probably get enough experts together to develop anthrax as a weapon. But the reason why it doesn't is that researchers already know that anthrax would be next to worthless after it was developed. Anthrax is almost impossible to use effectively (Novak, 2002).

The terrorists may have succeeded in creating a lot of fear, but for casualties, guns would have been more effective.

D. Baby Milk Factory

"The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations. The parties to the conflict shall not direct the movement of the civilian population or individual civilians in order to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield military operations."
Protocol to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, Article 51

During Gulf War and The War on Iraq, the U.S. Military and the Bush Administration never admitted making mistakes and consistently lied to hide the fact that they were regularly hitting civilian targets.

In January 2003, the White House released a report on the Iraqi government's "Apparatus of Lies", which noted that the regime of the Saddam Hussein made many claims that civilian targets had been hit by coalition air forces, with loss of innocent civilian lives. According to the report, during Gulf War, coalition bombers hit what the Iraqis claimed was a "baby milk factory" in Baghdad. The United States insisted that Iraq was using it as a biological-weapons development site. It appears the facility had briefly functioned as a "baby milk factory" in 1979 and 1980. Then again in the spring and summer of 1990, before the Iraqi regime began to use it as a biological weapons site. As U.S. officials pointed out at that after the Gulf War, UNSCOM inspectors discovered that three scientists from the Iraqi regime's main biological weapons facility had been assigned to the "baby milk factory".

What's wrong with the story?

As it turned out, this was an example for continuity in disinformation campaign. During the Gulf War (1991), Iraqis claimed that, on the seventh day of the bombing, the multinational coalition was targeting not only strategic and military targets, but also civilian installations. "Baby milk factory" was one of the civilian installations that was bombed.

Although the statement of Bush's administration, they were lying. The French daily newspaper Liberation interviewed Michael Wery, the director of Pierre Guerin, the company which built the plant. He said that the plant had actually produced infant formula and baby food.

"It would have been impossible to transform this into the making of chemical products" he said. The French company began building the plant in 1977, and then it was closed down during the Iran-Iraq War, when French technicians left Iraq (Liberation, February 2, 1991).

After the end of the Iran-Iraq War, technicians from New Zealand installed new equipment in the plant in the spring of 1990 to make cheese, while French technicians were restarting the baby milk production line. Washington Post interviewed two of the New Zealand technicians, Malcolm Seamark and Kevin Lowe. They confirmed that the plant had been a civilian facility with no military value. "There was no way you could make chemical warfare with the plant I saw" Lowe said (Washington Post, February 8, 1991).

In addition, a representative from the Nestle´, corporation claimed: "We know this was a state-built infant formula plant". Company officials said they had regularly observed its construction in the few years "because we like to be aware of the competition" (The Village Voice, Feb. 5, 1991). Yet the mainstream media went along with the White House version, with the exception of CNN, which broadcast reports of the return of Peter Arnett and other reporters to the milk factory; they showed that there was no evidence whatsoever that, biological weapons were produced there, reports that intensified White House Attacks on Arnett and CNN.

However, on a BBC documentary on Operation Desert Storm that was shown on the A&E cable channel, the former director of defense intelligence, Lt. Gen. Leonard Perroots, admitted that "we made a mistake" and that the United States had faulty defense intelligence.

In a USA Today interview after Gulf War(1991), Gen. Merrill Mc Peak, head of the Air Force responded to a question concerning whether the bombing of the infant formula was a mistake; by stating: "Time will tell what kind of factory it was. There is no doubt that we made some mistakes about where we bombed".

On February 8 1991, Iraq asked the United Nations to send a fact-finding mission to determine if the infant formula factory was a biological weapons facility and the UN reported "that no biological capabilities or facilities existed" (Arkin, Durrant and Cherni, 1991, p. 104).

Almost everyday for the rest of the war, the Iraqis asserted civilian damage from U.S. bombing and often confirmed it with graphic pictures of the destruction of nonmilitary sites and the mutilation and murder of innocent civilians; not only during Gulf War(1991), but also during the War on Iraq(2003).

Techno war is clean and precise but it is also brutal and deadly (Kellner, 1992).

UN inspectors and U.S intelligence concluded that the Abu Gharib bombing was in error after Saddam Hussein's son-in law Hussein Kamel Defected in 1995. Kamel said that Iraqi biological-agent research was centered at Al Hakam, 60 miles southwest of Baghdad, and three other facilities not including the baby milk factory (Washington Post, 1998).

Destruction of the baby milk factory caused of the shortage of infant formula in Iraq which had driven price of a single can up to 80 dollars. And the monthly government ration of infant formula was sufficient for only two days.

V. CONCLUSION

Bush and his entourage have deceived Americans and world public opinion. As Professor Paul Krugman says, their lies are "the worst scandal in American political history, worse than Watergate and Iran-Contra (The New York Times, 3 June 2003). It is obvious that the US Administration manipulated intelligence about WMD. The 1400-strong inspection team of the Iraq Survey Group under General Dayton has still no found any evidence (Ramonet, 2003). Additionally, while comparing the War on Iraq with the Gulf War (1991), continuity is seen in disinformation campaigns. These campaigns are related to some specific topics that are Heroic Rescue of Private Jessica Lynch, DU, Anthrax and Baby Milk Factory, respectively.

This paper was presented at the 2nd International Symposium "Communication in the Millenium:A Dialogue Between Turkish and American Scholars",İstanbul University,17.03.2004.

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17. The New York Times, 3 June 2003.
18. The Village Voice, Feb. 5, 1991.
19. Washington Post, October 26, 2001.
20. Washington Post, 1998, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/fogofwar/vignettes/v4.htm .
21. Washington Post, February 8, 1991.
22. www.cursor.org/stories/uranium.htm
23. www.savewarchildren.org/whatIsDU.html

17.03.2004