Weapons of Mass Deception by Sheldon Rampton & John Stauber (Tarcher/Putnam, 2003, 215 pp.)

A number of opinion surveys have recently reported that for the first time since the beginning of the war in Iraq a solid majority of Americans believe the Bush administration either stretched the truth about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or told outright lies. The publication of Weapons of Mass Deception by investigative reporters Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber should swell that majority as well as critically inform a curious public about the aggressive public relations campaign used to take the nation to war with Iraq. 

For starters, Rampton and Stauber remind readers about the PR campaign masterminded by Hill & Knowlton for the first war in the Gulf. With a budget in excess of $10 million, Hill & Knowlton had ample funds to gather, select, and broadcast a vast quantity of information. This process also included the fabrication of front groups designed to hide the identity of private sponsors as well as scripting theatrical stories that were then presented as news. One particular event that is now recognized as the most decisive ploy used to manufacture American consent for the first Gulf war involved the testimony of Kuwaiti citizens at a hearing designed to resemble an official congressional proceeding (the so-called Congressional Human Rights Caucus). The most moving “eye witness” testimony, given by a young Kuwaiti girl, identified only by her first name, described how Iraqi soldiers had taken hundreds of babies out of incubators in a hospital in Kuwaiti City and left “the babies on the cold floor to die.” In fact, the girl was the 15-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. and Hill & Knowlton had scripted her lines for their client, the Kuwaiti Royal family. Needless to say, Dr. Fayeza Youssef, who ran the obstetrics unit at the hospital, said the girl’s claim was false; no one had seen Iraqi troops yanking babies from incuba- tors. Furthermore, there were only a handful of incubators in all of Kuwait. 

After the media repeatedly broadcast this hoax, the tide of American sentiment became hawkish enough to launch the war to “reclaim Kuwait.” The U.S. troops then rolled into Kuwait City for their first victorious curtain call. Another PR firm—whose clients included the Pentagon and the CIA—had set the stage for TV crews by distributing small American flags to hundreds of Kuwaitis posed along the route. 

Though the babies-torn-from–incubators story has become infamous within the PR community, few Americans understand how (much less why) their perceptions were managed at that time and how their perceptions about various Islamic states and leaders have been managed ever since. As recently as January 2003, for example, in an opinion poll conducted by Knight-Ridder newspapers, half of the people surveyed still believed that one or more of the September 11 terrorist hijackers were Iraqi citizens. In fact, none were from Iraq and most were from our “client state” Saudi Arabia. 

What Rampton and Stauber would like Americans to know is that the freedom of speech that is seen to be the essence of democracy also grants the freedom to lie. Thus, a necessary skill for those who aspire to a better, livable world is to be able to discriminate between fact and fabrication. Weapons of Mass Deception also makes it clear that it is important to know who is footing the bill for the vast amount of misinformation that is broadcast—be it the Pentagon, the CIA, a client state, multinational corporation, or other entity. In the same way the general public has become savvy about industries creating desire and consumption, Americans need to understand how so much of what passes for news has been tailored in the interests of ruling elites as acutely as any marketing campaign. 

Weapons of Mass Deception offers an analysis of how this works. Its timeliness is self-evident; it is an excellent book, written with the conviction that American people are not coarse and feckless but individuals capable of intelligent discrimination and concern when the truth isn’t sanitized out of existence.