FW: British Propaganda

[Owen Jones <owen_jones@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 A fascinating look at the imperialist propaganda machine by the Guardian,
usually at the frontline of the liberal bomb-bomb-bomb supporters.

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Perfecting the art of evasion

Russians aren't the only ones who have been telling lies

Richard Norton-Taylor and Seumas Milne
Wednesday August 23, 2000
The Guardian

Before the current crowing over Moscow's untruths and public relations
blunders about the Kursk submarine disaster strays into a hubristic
never-never land, a little sober reflection on Britain's own record of
official lying is necessary.

Twelve days of deceit and cack-handed public relations from the Russian
authorities have certainly fuelled popular anger about the Murmansk tragedy,
while western commentators have blamed the legacy of Soviet secrecy.

But it was only last week that British claims about the scale of Serb
killings in Kosovo were shown to be false. The death toll was likely to be
less than
3,000, war crimes investigators revealed, rather than the 10,000-plus
insisted on by the Foreign Office at the time. That followed the leaked
internal
Ministry of Defence report that most British bombs dropped on Yugoslavia
missed their targets, contrary to earlier boasts of devastating accuracy.
And
last month Lord Gilbert, defence minister during the Kosovo war, told the
House of Commons that the Rambouillet terms offered to Serb leaders had been
"absolutely intolerable" and designed to provoke war, a proposition
ridiculed by the British government last year.

Throughout the past decade, official Anglo-American lies about Iraq have
been two-a-penny. During the Gulf war it was said that the al-Amiriya bomb
shelter in Baghdad, where hundreds of civilians were incinerated, had been a
military command centre; that the pulverised Biladi baby-milk factory was
really a biological weapons plant; and that Iraqi soliders in Kuwait had
ejected babies from hospital incubators. All these tales were later accepted
as
untrue. More recently, there was Robin Cook's fictitious story, repeatedly
used to shore up Labour support for the Desert Fox bombing campaign against
Iraq 18 months ago, that a 16-year-old Iraqi boy had been incarcerated since
the age of five for throwing stones at a portrait of Saddam Hussein.

In general, however, British officialdom prefer to avoid what they call
"direct lies" wherever possible. Their speciality is the partial disclosure
designed
to disguise or obscure a larger truth. "Half the picture can be true," Robin
Butler, the then cabinet secretary, told the Scott arms-to-Iraq inquiry.
Whitehall's attitude was immortalised by Robert Armstrong, Butler's
predecessor, as being "economical with the truth".

A textbook case was the presentation of Margaret Thatcher's decision to sink
the Belgrano during the 1982 Falklands war when the Argentine cruiser was
outside Britain's exclusion zone and sailing away from the islands. It took
two years to force Thatcher to admit the damaging truth about when the
Belgrano
was first sighted.

Nuclear accidents are a prime target for mendacity and cover-ups - as
highlighted by the case of the British nuclear submarine, HMS Tireless,
damaged
earlier this year and now moored off Gibraltar. The Gibraltar government
says that it was initially given the impression by the Ministry of Defence
that
there was "no risk at all" in repairing it in the Rock's harbour. It was
later told the risk was "modest". The MoD says it cannot disclose its full
safety
report for security reasons.

Tony Benn, former energy secretary, said in parliament recently that he had
never been told the truth by the nuclear industry - and only found out about
the 1957 fire and fallout at Windscale (now Sellafield) years later on a
visit to Japan. The scale of the Windscale incident was not officially
acknowledged
until 1986, the year Chernobyl took over the dubious accolade of the world's
worst nuclear accident.

For nearly 40 years, the MoD maintained the fiction that there had never
been a nuclear weapons accident in Britain. It was only in 1996 that the
government admitted that it had lied. There had been been an accident at RAF
Wittering in 1959 involving "serious damage" to a 2,000lb nuclear bomb
which fell out of an aircraft and a serious fire on a loaded nuclear bomber
at the US Air Force base at Greenham Common in 1957.

It has also taken bitterly resisted public inquiries to expose the truth
about Britain's secret supply of arms-related equipment to Saddam Hussein in
the
80s and - although the full truth has yet to emerge - the shooting of 14
unarmed demonstrators by British soldiers on Bloody Sunday in Derry in
January
1972.

Such cases emphasise the effectiveness and sophistication of British
official deceit: born of centuries of diplomatic evasion and a need-to-know
culture of
secrecy. For all the relative success of its political propaganda, the
Soviet Union relied where possible on silence to deal with Kursk-style
disasters. In
ramshackle post-communist Russia, that is no longer possible, but the
Kremlin still lacks the more practised evasions perfected in the west. Is
the
problem really not that the Russians have lied, but that they haven't yet
learned to lie well?

                                              © Copyright Guardian Media
Group plc. 2000