The eerie, blurred video images of the hostage Kenneth Bigley, pleading for his life with the odds so stacked against him, are working hard demoralising us in every living room in the land. The poor man may well suspect that he’s an unwitting pawn in someone else’s publicity stunt, but he probably won’t see the…
Go back a few weeks. The polls said the nation suspected the Prime Minister of having deceived its representatives in the House of Commons. The polls said we believed he had deliberately misled us over Iraqi munitions to get some urgency into ‘our’ support for George W. Bush’s Middle Eastern expedition, and get the sacking…
It was a last ditch PR ploy, but Rumsfeld’s testimony may not save his job. The man squirmed on the spot as he faced difficult questions from the press corps. Gone was the swagger that framed his briefings at the height of ‘Shock and Awe’. Now called Torture-gate, the credibility of the US is below…
I picked this up yesterday, it�s a report that suggests that the images of graphic brutality to Iraqi captives were produced by a porn site The conspiracy theorists are being fuelled I suggest by some shadow department in the Pentagon�s spin machine who may be trying to deflect some heat. The published report says the…
When crisis looms, go on the attack. This is exactly what the PR aides did to counter the publication of the shocking pictures printed in the Daily Mirror of British troops apparently urinating on Iraqi prisoners in custody. The Army’s heaviest hitter, Chief of the General Staff General Sir Michael Jackson, was quickly wheeled out…
For decades Saddam Hussein’s infamous Abu Ghraib dungeon was the scene of terrible cruelty against innocent Iraqi captives. Now the US forces are in charge and it’s business as usual as the torture continues. Images of cruelty against the detainees surfaced last night and were broadcast on ABC’s ‘60 minutes’ programme. The shots showing Iraqis…
http://www.drudgereport.com for updates (c)DRUDGE REPORT 2004 Since the end of the Vietnam War successive American presidents have worried that their military actions would lose support once the public glimpsed the remains of U.S. soldiers arriving back at air bases in flag-draped caskets. To this problem, the Bush administration has found a simple solution: it has…
Its always worth a trip to Spin watch for interesting stuff like this “Impartial information is increasingly hard to come by in Iraq,” reports Fiona O’Brien. “As fighting has intensified on the ground, U.S. authorities have stepped up a separate battle for public opinion, tightly controlling the flow of information to journalists whose ability to…
In Iraq, John Simpson was informed that his mum was on the satphone. He walked across to answer it. She wished him a happy birthday, and they chatted for a while. As they talked, the place where he had been standing before he went to pick up the call was hit by a bomb. Isn’t…
War – for the public and people in the firing line – is about death, destruction, terror and violence. For certain sectors of the PR community, it’s a business opportunity. Ask those US PRs who were paid in oil for the counsel they gave Sadaam over the years; or those who constructed the “babies ripped…