"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."
-George W. Bush
"Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise."
-Adolph Hitler
When you are a dictator of a country that restricts civil liberties; profiles people based on race, religion and beliefs; worships the military; and invades countries without provocation, you need to make sure that what the public sees is not what is actually happening. Hitler knew it. Bush knows it. For all those people who still doubted that the Bushies employed propaganda even after Armstrong Williams, the recent staged conversation between King George and his knights should send one message to you: we told you so.
September 11, 2001
It all started on September 11, 2001. In the morning, hijacked airplanes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; by early afternoon, Saddam Hussein was already in the crosshairs of Donald Rumsfeld.
![](http://www.fantompowa.net/Flame/rumsfeld_saddam.jpg)
CBS:
With the intelligence all pointing toward bin Laden, Rumsfeld ordered the military to begin working on strike plans. And at 2:40 p.m., the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying he wanted "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H." - meaning Saddam Hussein - "at same time. Not only UBL" - the initials used to identify Osama bin Laden.
...
"Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
The gears were already turning even before the smoke of 9/11 cleared. Now all the White House had to do was find some way to market an invasion of Iraq to the general public.
January 29, 2002
![](http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/01/29/bush.speech.txt/story.bush.speech.jpg)
President Bush took a huge leap down the path of propaganda with his 2002 State of the Union Address in front of Congress. He sought, subtly at first, to connect 9/11 with an "Axis of Evil" - especially Iraq.
CNN:
Our second goal is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction.
Some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since September 11...
...
Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade. ... This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.
States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.
I have to hand it to Bush, bullshitting people is one of his strong suits. Of course, any reasonable person would notice that Bush had linked Saddam with WMD and terrorism without citing evidence of such activity. But rational people were hard to find in the post-9/11 "patriotic" fervor. The White House had succeeded in implanting some sort of connection between Iraq and 9/11 in the minds of the American public while instilling fear in Saddam Hussein.
October 7, 2002
![](http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/images/20021007-8_ohio-1-250h.jpg)
Bush stopped in Cincinatti to give a speech to the nation regarding Iraq. He referenced September 11 five times and terrorism 35 times without providing actual evidence of a link between Saddam and 9/11.
Video of the speech.
From a White House Press Release:
Eleven years ago, as a condition for ending the Persian Gulf War, the Iraqi regime was required to destroy its weapons of mass destruction, to cease all development of such weapons, and to stop all support for terrorist groups. The Iraqi regime has violated all of those obligations. It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. It has given shelter and support to terrorism...
...
And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America.
...
We've experienced the horror of September the 11th. We have seen that those who hate America are willing to crash airplanes into buildings full of innocent people. Our enemies would be no less willing, in fact, they would be eager, to use biological or chemical, or a nuclear weapon.
Once again, Bush says that Iraq has sponsored terrorism and has something to do with 9/11. The evidence Bush offers: Saddam Hussein "gleefully celebrated" 9/11. Yet, the media buys the story.
January 29, 2003
![](http://ap.grolier.com/images/cache/024/news0177.jpg)
One year after Bush had mentioned Iraq in a State of the Union address, the subject dominates 2003's speech.
CNN:
[Saddam Hussein] pursued chemical, biological and nuclear weapons even while inspectors were in his country.
...
Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. In such quantities, these chemical agents could also kill untold thousands. He's not accounted for these materials. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them.
...
From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them.
...
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
Bush went into a lot more detail in this speech, using falsified intelligence reports to back up many of his claims. He scared the public even more by describing tons upon tons of deadly weapons - none of which were actually in Hussein's possession.
February 5, 2003
![](http://www.state.gov/cms_images/030205_UNSC_2.jpg)
Colin Powell addressed the UN Security Council (video) regarding the WMD threats posed by Iraq. He used a college student's paper to back up his claims.
From Mediastudy.com:
One embarrassing revelation about Powell's speech was that a key part of his evidence against Iraq was cut and pasted from a California graduate student's outdated academic paper, ripped directly from the internet. In academia, we call this plagiarism. Stealing something straight off of a website, an act easily detected by feeding a string of words into a Google search, is plagiarism in its cheesiest form. Students who do it fail classes - this is non negotiable. In Powell's case, he's not the plagiarizer. He properly cited a British intelligence service report, four pages of which were ripped off without citation, complete with spelling and grammatical errors, from a paper that appeared five months ago in an obscure academic journal.
The Brits, for their part, changed a few words here and there, inflated numbers, and added the term "terrorist" to make the Iraqis appear more ominous than the student-author intended. He told the British newspaper, The Mirror, that the misuse of his doctored work represented "wholesale deception." Ominous or not, however, 97% of the citations in the student paper were three to fifteen years old, rendering the whole package useless in a speech challenging Iraq's compliance to the current inspection regimen. The American Secretary of State, with this trash in his hand, addressed the United Nations Security Council, calling for the commencement of a war that might never end.
There you have it: that is a timeline of the propaganda that Bush used to start the Iraq War. Is that all? You wish...
Armstrong Williams and the DoE Propaganda
![](http://images.usatoday.com/news/_photos/2005/01/07/armstrong-inside.jpg)
Bush paid Armstrong Williams, a journalist/commentator and a member of the 2% of African-Americans that approve of the President, $240,000 of taxpayer money to promote the No Child Left Behind program.
USA Today:
Seeking to build support among black families for its education reform law, the Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same.
...
Williams' contract was part of a $1 million deal with Ketchum that produced "video news releases" designed to look like news reports. The Bush administration used similar releases last year to promote its Medicare prescription drug plan, prompting a scolding from the Government Accountability Office, which called them an illegal use of taxpayers' dollars.
The Bush administration tried to trick the public by making his NCLB program advertisements look like actual news broadcasts. He would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids.
Staged Conversation with U.S. Soldiers in Iraq
![](http://www.timesreporter.com/photos/October2005/1014bushspeechnet.jpg)
One of the biggest stories around dKos and even the MSM lately has been the staged conversation between Bush and soldiers in Iraq. The event was planned so that the soldiers would make Iraq seem like a democratic paradise in which tremendous progress was being made.
ABC News confirms that the teleconference was staged:
It was billed as a conversation with U.S. troops, but the questions President Bush asked on a teleconference call Thursday were choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and Saturday's vote on a new Iraqi constitution.
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As she spoke in Washington, a live shot of 10 soldiers from the Army's 42nd Infantry Division and one Iraqi soldier was beamed into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building from Tikrit the birthplace of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
"I'm going to ask somebody to grab those two water bottles against the wall and move them out of the camera shot for me," Barber said.
A brief rehearsal ensued.
"OK, so let's just walk through this," Barber said. "Captain Kennedy, you answer the first question and you hand the mike to whom?"
"Captain Smith," Kennedy said.
"Captain. Smith? You take the mike and you hand it to whom?" she asked.
"Captain Kennedy," the soldier replied.
And so it went.
This is, in my opinion, the worst piece of propaganda that Bush has ever put out (and it comes at a time when he is more desperate than ever). If people say that the soldiers are puppets, they stand the risk of being labeled as people who don't support the troops.
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What does Bush think about the propaganda war?
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED