War, propaganda and smears: An interview with Professor Piers Robinson
Parts one, two, and three in one page. This is a TGP enhanced version of the original
By Julie Hyland, wsws.org
His 2002 book, The CNN Effect: The Myth of News Media, Foreign Policy and Intervention, examined news reporting in a series of “humanitarian” interventions in Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda. He was the lead author of Pockets of Resistance: British News Media, War and Theory in the 2003 Invasion of Iraq (2010), an ambitious and meticulous analysis of television and press coverage during the invasion. The Routledge Handbook of Media, Conflict and Security(2016), which Robinson authored with Philip Seib and Romy Frohlich, links the growing body of media and conflict research with the field of security studies. As a member of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM), founded in 2017, Robinson and fellow academics such as Professor Tim Hayward (environmental political theory, University of Edinburgh) have questioned the official narrative in relation to the Skripal poisoning and the role of the White Helmets in Syria that is being promoted by the media and the US and British governments. For this, they have been the subject of a witch hunt initiated by the Guardian and taken up last month by the Times, smearing them as “Assad’s Apologists.” Earlier this month, Labour-run Leeds City Council announced it was cancelling a Media on Trial event at which Robinson and Hayward were due to speak. The event has been relocated. Professor Robinson spoke to Julie Hyland for the World Socialist Web Site in a wide-ranging interview on war, lies and censorship, beginning with the Times smear.
Piers Robinson: My personal experience over the last two years, and especially the last eight or nine months, is that the attack is not spontaneous. It didn’t start with the Times. I was attacked by Padraig Reidy of Little Atoms two years ago after I wrote an article for the Guardian on Russian and Western propaganda and how people need to think for themselves.
I was attacked by Oliver Kamm [a Times lead columnist] over Twitter a long time before the Times articles. Tim Hayward had a lot of run-ins with [Guardianjournalist] George Monbiot over Twitter.
[Investigative journalists] Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett have been attacked and derided as “conspiracy theorists” and pro-Assad “apologists” for a long time.
We were aware as we started doing the Media on Trial events, which were very successful, that more attention was coming to us. In December 2017, the Guardian ran a hit piece on Vanessa and Eva. Two days later, George Monbiot tweeted that myself and Tim Hayward had “disgraced” ourselves over Syria.
We wrote an open letter which the Guardian wouldn’t publish. We spoke to journalists, but they refused to publish it. Once we put that out we got more attacks over Twitter.
We set up the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media and that’s when Brian Whitaker (formerly of the Guardian) started attacking us. Then the Times focussed in on the Working Group.
There was a lot of chatter going on, and it wasn’t low-grade chatter. You are suddenly aware of more and more attacks, and it was getting more intense. The more organised we were, the more intense the attacks became.
I think it’s naive to think all this is happening spontaneously. It feels as if it is being driven. That’s the only way I can logically explain the scale of the attack. Four articles in the Times all on one day. Why does that happen?
Throughout all this time I always tried to return to “What questions are we asking?” We are asking questions about propaganda and the war on Syria. For me as an academic, the obvious explanation is that we are hitting an area that some people don’t want us to touch. That’s the bottom line. Some people don’t want us to talk about or research the [Syrian] White Helmets. They certainly don’t want us to research or talk about what has been happening in Syria with respect to chemical weapons attacks.
Julie Hyland: You said Britain is far more involved in Syria than many would realise. Can you expand on this?
PR: The last set of air strikes after the Douma chemical weapon event, Tony Blair said something along the lines that “Doing nothing is not an option.”
We know that is not true. We have not been doing nothing! That’s such a profound misunderstanding of the reality of where we are now in Syria. We’ve been intervening for a long time. It’s public record. It’s not disputed.
As Professor Jeffrey Sachs (Columbia University) told MSNBC on April 12, “We need to understand how we got to where we are today. We are the cause of half a million dead.”
He said, and I’m paraphrasing, that this was the result of a covert operation called Timber Sycamore between the CIA and Saudi Arabia to overthrow the Syrian government. He said it has been covert, not approved by Congress, against international law and it has led to the destruction of that country.
The public perception is that Syria is an almost incomprehensible Middle East conflict and that we’re sitting on the sidelines. If it is possible for Tony Blair to say “non-intervention is not an option” that shows straight away that people have a deeply flawed understanding of what is going on, because we have been intervening and for a long time.
The Stop the War Coalition seem to have even been doing that as well, demanding that “We shouldn’t intervene.” I was a member and I gave a talk in Sheffield. I think that Stop the War should not talk about “non-intervention” in the way they sometimes do because there is an intervention already underway. I thought there was a problem in the way they are presenting this, because my impression was that they were not really getting to the root of what was going on.
Millions have been poured into supporting militant groups, some of whom are extremists and linked to Al Qaeda. These are the groups that have been major factors in propelling the war.
That’s the major gap in public awareness and political awareness. I think that gap is reducing now. When I say on TV that we have been supporting militant groups and pouring money in, I don’t seem to have anyone disagreeing with me. We now know more about information operations and the White Helmets, and there is increasing public awareness of the latter. Overall, I think there is a large propaganda operation in relation to Syria and there’s a lot of money going into that. It’s very organised.
In 2016 there was a Guardian scoop in which Ian Cobain identified the company, InCoStrat in Turkey, set up to do PR for militant groups. You have a lot of British involvement, whether it’s the so-called White Helmets or InCoStrat. That is all now in the public domain.
In terms of what I am involved in with a PhD researcher, Jake Mason, and also with Professor David Miller (Bath), Britain seems to be quite involved in so-called “information operations” regarding Syria. So, we are looking into how Britain has been involved in shaping understanding of the conflict, including the issue of who has been carrying out chemical attacks and whether there has been an attempt to exaggerate Syrian government crimes and downplay those of militant groups.
People have been talking for a number of years about the Ghouta chemical attack [2013]. Is it the Syrian government or militant groups? This is one of the questions that some of us are looking at.
With Douma more recently, there have been a lot of questions. Russian Foreign Secretary Sergei Lavrov said it was Jaysh al-Islam [a coalition of Islamic extremists] that was responsible and even intimated that the order came from the British: Maybe Lavrov is lying, maybe he is not. Major-General Jonathan Shaw, [formerly senior commander in the British Army] was on Sky News and he appeared to be raising questions as to why the Assad government would do it just at the point when it was negotiating the last transfer of Jaysh al-Islam to Idlib.
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon is a source for journalists. He is ex-British military [and former commander of NATO’s Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion] and set up a company, SecureBio, in 2011 [now dissolved]. He is regularly talking to the media and he seems to be never very far from the government line on this issue.
If Britain is involved in the presentation regarding these attacks, it means we are very involved. We are very important in helping to shape the perceptions of the war and the question is how much might those perceptions have been distorted or manipulated? How accurate are they?
Published on Sep 16, 2017
Part Two
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War, propaganda and smears: An interview with Professor Piers Robinson
Part two
By Julie Hyland
25 May 2018
The following is the second part of a three-part interview with Professor Piers Robinson, an academic at the University of Sheffield and a member of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media. Part one was posted on May 24.
Julie Hyland: You have been studying media propaganda in connection to Middle East wars for years. Can you explain how this has developed?
Piers Robinson: I was very interested in international politics and the media. My PhD was on looking at US foreign policy and intervention decisions in Somalia and looking at the CNN effect. That was a big debate in the 1990s. With the end of the Cold War, there was what appeared to be for some people a development in “norms,” so that we would breach sovereignty and intervene to protect human rights.
It really got underway following the first Gulf War [August 2, 1990, to February 28, 1991] when you had the Kurdish crisis in the mountains and on the border with Turkey. A decision was made to create “safe areas.” That really got the ball rolling. Then there was the intervention in Somalia a couple of years later—Restore Hope—and it fed through to the war in Bosnia, and then culminated with Operation Allied Force in Kosovo.
These events really elevated the idea of humanitarian intervention, with the media understood to be an important part of pushing these interventions. It seemed to suggest that the media was more independent following the end of the Cold War, more powerful in setting the agenda. So the story went. The idea was that this was a positive development. That you would intervene to help people was seen to be a good thing, at least to some extent.
The PhD work was started in 1996, and it was turned into the book about intervention during humanitarian crises which was published in 2002. By the time that book was going out, the Iraq war of 2003 was really upon us.
We did a very standard thing then. I was with people in Liverpool University who had done large-scale content analysis of media coverage of elections. And they said, why don’t we take this methodology and look at media coverage of the Iraq invasion? We can look at it in terms of media bias, autonomy from the government.
That was two to three years, and it was 2010 before it was published, which is quite normal because it takes a long time to do detailed research of media coverage.
I was very aware throughout that with 9/11 we were now into the “War on Terror,” as it was presented at that time. I argued then that [humanitarian intervention] was off the agenda and we were back to more traditional kinds of war. But I soon became very aware that the humanitarian discourse carried on. We were supposedly taking out Saddam Hussein because of his “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” but also because he had committed human rights abuses. So the humanitarian narrative never really went away.
I was very focussed on the Iraq study. There was a key moment at that point because I was fully aware of what happened after the Iraq war with the Gilligan BBC report, Dr. David Kelly and that extraordinary battle between the British government and the BBC ending in Kelly’s death.
[Then-BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan reported on the Today programme May 29, 2003, that the government had ordered that an intelligence dossier on Iraq’s WMD be “sexed up.” Dr. David Kelly was later outed as Gilligan’s source. He was found dead—recorded as suicide—on July 17, 2004—ed.]
PR: That’s when I really became interested in the notion of propaganda. How much of the information is being shaped even before it gets to the media? How deep-rooted are the propaganda operations?
A lot of information had come into the public domain through the Hutton Inquiry, also the Butler Inquiry, and then, at that point, the ongoing Chilcot Inquiry [three separate public inquiries into aspects of the Iraq War]. You were able to start building up a very clear picture of what was going on and how they shaped the claims about Iraqi WMD. This ended up with me spending a few years working on a paper with Professor Eric Herring (University of Bristol) which became Report X Marks the Spot: The British Government’s Deceptive Dossier on Iraq and WMD.
The claims of the British government, or Tony Blair, were always that “I just passed on the intelligence they gave us.” And there were other people saying they’d lied, and others saying it was a question of deception through manipulation and distortion. We spent a long time unpacking and detailing what happened with the dossier—establishing and confirming that it was a case of intentional deception.
It was slightly intimidating doing that because you are in the territory where you are making the case that your government has been involved in a deception.
We finally got that study published, and it carefully detailed the deception that had occurred in the case of Iraq. But what I learnt from that was how organised it was. I learnt, for example, that the first idea for the dossier was at least a year before the actual invasion. There were months of preparation, working with John Scarlett, head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, with [Blair’s former adviser] Alastair Campbell, in order to build as strong a picture as they could of Iraqi WMD.
At that point I realised that unless we start to understand propaganda, also known as “strategic communications,” we don’t really have a good idea of why the media does what it does and why the public thinks the way it does.
We need to look at these mechanisms of information manipulation. And my research interest in propaganda has carried on since then, to this point with Mark Crispin Miller, David Miller, Chris Simpson and myself setting up the Organisation for Propaganda Studies. Its primary aim is to encourage research and writing into questions of propaganda and manipulation and how that can undermine democracy. But we also want to encourage film makers and artists to talk about these things and to engage the public.
The Syria work has just emerged because I have people around me researching it. I had my head down looking at the September dossier for four years, and I popped my head up when I had finished and it was, “Oh, Syria has undergone a terrible war for many years. What’s been going on there?”
I think it was a Seamus Milne article in the Guardian in 2015 where he said very clearly that the West is backing militant groups in Syria. That got my mind ticking over. How much of this war is connected to other regime-change operations such as Iraq?
It’s really getting a sense that what we’re looking at here is a semi-coherent strategy that has been pursued especially since 9/11. General Wesley Clark in 2007 said they were talking about knocking out seven countries in a matter of years [“starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”]
Our inability to look at these things is partly because of propaganda. People who did quote Wesley Clark or said there is a connection here—there is Afghanistan, Iraq and then Libya—straight away they were called “conspiracy theorists.” People are scared. They don’t want to be called that.
Academics are subject to the same pressures as journalists, and it shapes what you do and what you talk about. The mountain you have to climb intellectually to get yourself out of that situation where “I don’t want to ask those questions, I think it’s stupid to ask those questions” is tremendous.
But when you get out of that, you’re able to think for yourself and also have the confidence to ask the really important questions. That’s another interesting thing if you think about terms such as “conspiracy theorist” or “apologist” or “denialist.” These are ways of bracketing you as an irrational or immoral person, even a lunatic.
They are very effective at doing that and of dissuading you from asking tough questions. You have to get a really good knowledge of what is going on to get to the point where you have the confidence to challenge power.
Becoming aware of my own ideological blindness and blinkers and to the extent I had been propagandised, that awareness comes very quickly when you start to understand propaganda. You start to see the mechanisms and how they work. I was at that point after the September dossier. I thought there is obviously deception going on here.
JH: Your 2017 study, “Learning from the Chilcot report: Propaganda, deception and the ‘War on Terror’,” details the “close-knit propaganda campaign” that laid the groundwork for the invasion of Iraq. How did this influence your subsequent research?
PR: The Chilcot report [into the Iraq war] had an important influence on my current work. Chilcot’s report looked at the establishing phase of the “war on terror,” and there you had Tony Blair and George Bush talking about hitting Iraq, Iran and Syria, which one to do first, and I thought, well, Wesley Clark was very likely telling the truth!
Since then, I’ve been very committed to understanding better how we are propagandised in the West, especially in relation to the “war on terror,” and there is a lot of evidence available now.
In tandem we were looking at Syria carefully. Not just in terms of PR campaigns, but also with respect to the facilitation of grassroots movements.
When you start piecing evidence together, you realise that we are mired in a very belligerent phase of Western foreign policy. The problem really does lie very much at home and with the issue of how propaganda is being used to systematically shape how people are thinking, and to enable the wars we have seen since 9/11.
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Part Three and conclusion of this interview
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War, propaganda and smears: An interview with Professor Piers Robinson
Part three
By Julie Hyland
26 May 2018
The following is the third part of a three-part interview with Professor Piers Robinson, an academic at the University of Sheffield and a member of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media. Parts one and twoappeared on May 24 and May 25.
Julie Hyland: What is your estimation of the alleged poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal by Russia, and how do they relate to the war in Syria?
PR: We initially issued two briefing notes on Skripal. That was partly because some of the people in the Working Group who had been looking at chemical/biological events in Syria had relevant knowledge and were aware that what the British government was saying straight off was inaccurate, i.e., the idea that the nerve agent used was Russian and only the Russians could have produced it, etc.
I did feel, because at the time the Syrian government was retaking large portions of territory, that the representation of Skripal might be being exploited as part of a broader propaganda drive against Russia (which was providing military support to Syria).
If there was going to be an escalation in Syria, beyond the bombing that occurred, that would take us up against the Russians. There was a good possibility that the Skripal event was going to be exploited as part of a broader anti-Russian propaganda drive.
It’s not something you can pinpoint for sure at this stage because you don’t have access to the information. I don’t think we will know the full truth of exactly what is happening for some time. But you can make an informed judgement call.
"Talk to Vanessa Beeley or Eva Bartlett—they go to Syria and, for example, talk to mothers who have lost their sons. This is very real. So there’s a basic moral issue for us as Western academics.."
What we do know is that the claims being made at the time were not tenable. So when [Foreign Secretary] Boris Johnson pretty much said it was the Russians who must have poisoned the Skripals, that appeared to be a statement of certainty that was not warranted. And, of course, the recent history of Iraq and UK government claims regarding alleged WMD stockpiles was an important reminder that governments can be strongly motivated to distort and manipulate their claims, especially when intelligence is involved.
I think the Skripal poisoning might be connected to events in the US. We do know, because Alex Thomson from Channel 4 tweeted on March 12 that the government had put a D-notice restriction on the reporting of [MI6 agent] Pablo Miller. Professor Paul McKeigue (University of Edinburgh) has issued a new briefing talking about this matter.
Pablo Miller was Skripal’s handler. He was connected to [former MI6 officer] Christopher Steele. He was responsible for the dossier alleging Trump’s collusion with Russia. That, as I understand it, was a key part of initiating proceedings and investigations against Trump. It appears that the dossier was linked to the Democratic National Committee in that they apparently commissioned it.
If it is the case that Skripal was in any way connected with that, it forms a possibility that there was a motive for someone other than Russia to have carried out the poisoning.
More broadly, there is the possibility that the whole Russia-gate narrative is being used for bigger political purposes—to influence Trump, to try and shore up action in the Middle East, perhaps on some level to distract Western publics from increasing awareness of how we have been involved in wars in the Middle East.
JH: What do you take from the research that you are involved in?
PR: My personal view is that the truth always comes out eventually. There appears to be a failure for Western military objectives in Syria, at least at this point in time. Arguably, it’s the first failure of the post 9/11 regime-change wars and I know from studying Vietnam that at such a point things can start to unravel, with infighting, politicians arguing and secrets coming out. In Vietnam, of course, you had the Pentagon Papers coming out.
I think we are possibly at that point and I think the truth is coming out, slowly. But even if it doesn’t come out, there’s a very simple issue here. If I say I am not going to look at this issue (Syria and the “War on Terror”) because I’m too scared or because I’m being attacked in the media, I might as well go off and do something else. There is no point in my being an academic who looks at propaganda if I sidestep exploring propaganda in cases such as Syria.
The other point is that this must be understood in the context of major wars that have at the very least been fuelled, if not then instigated, by the West. And these are wars that have been massively destructive. So however stressful my life is because of a bad newspaper article about me, it is nothing compared to the people who are out there. Talk to Vanessa Beeley or Eva Bartlett—they go to Syria and, for example, talk to mothers who have lost their sons. This is very real. So there’s a basic moral issue for us as Western academics.
We need to start having a much fuller public debate about this war and all the wars we’ve been seeing since 9/11. We should be scrutinising our governments because they have been involved in these wars. This is basic democratic politics.
It is definitely my role as an academic, as it is with any professional, to say that “we should at the very least talk about these issues and debate them.”
I come from an international relations academic background and people shouldn’t underestimate the potential dangers we face. There are very high stakes in this. Quite aside from the devastation that has been caused in these wars, we are in a period of major systemic change globally. China is rising and we are seeing a more confident Russia. Major conflicts can occur at these transition points.
So when people ignore or play down the fact that we have US warships in the Mediterranean firing cruise missiles at targets in Syria, which is manned with Russian air defence systems… this is not a situation to be taken lightly.
How far are we from a Cuban missile crisis type event in Syria? This is about the future of the next 20 to 30 years and not stumbling into a dreadful corner where we are engaged in a serious conflict with Russia, another nuclear power, with an inability to control where that ends up.
Someone said that in the run-up to the First World War many people didn’t know what was going on. Before they knew it, they were plunged into a catastrophic war in Europe that decimated a generation of young men.
The current situation has that feeling about it. When you have possibly a very propagandised population, that is a very risky place to be in because the ability for publics to check government action is curtailed.
It’s no good sitting around worrying about Armageddon. It probably won’t come to that, but it could and we all have a responsibility to be informed and to question our governments. We should be looking at what’s happening in the Middle East and be very concerned about the dangers of further military escalation and war. At the moment, people are waiting to see, in particular, what might happen in Iran. It is our responsibility to question our governments and to develop informed opinions with regard to what is going on. Lives are at stake.
Concluded
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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report