Randal Marlin

by Propaganda

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  problem in the evidence. The date of the incident supposedly witnessed in 1990 by Nayirah when she visited Al-Adan Hospital is given only as “one day in late August.”

  In other words, Kroll considered the reported incubator baby deaths at Al-Adan as

  among the seven for which, conservatively judged, solid evidence existed, although

  the report is unspecific as to the date. In response to a fax in which I sought more

  detail, Alice McGillion, Managing Director of Kroll Associates, replied in a letter

  dated July 8, 1993 that the nurses quoted in the report could say only that the incident

  occurred sometime during the week of August 26, 1990. I was puzzled that hospi-

  tal records could not identify the date more precisely, since it is standard practice

  to maintain regularly updated charts on patients. In answer to my query, McGillion

  wrote on August 23, 1993, “As to your request for clarification of chart information,

  please remember that due to the emergency and resulting chaos of the situation, daily

  records on patient care and progress were not being kept with their usual care.”55Now,

  one can make allowances for panic and the non-maintenance of charts at the time of

  the alleged incident, but, however sloppy the maintenance of charts might have been,

  they would at least be expected to note eventually the time when data ceased to be

  recorded by virtue of the disappearance of the baby.

  If the evidence of incubator baby killing in the Al-Adan Hospital is solidly based,

  according to Kroll, how reliable are the cases where even Kroll is not willing to give

  its own “conservative” credence? Nayirah’s testimony, widely televised, was: “I saw

  the Iraqi soldiers coming into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where 15

  babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incuba-

  tors, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.”56 Kroll says that Nayirah’s experience

  “amounted to a glance or ‘snapshot’ impression that included chaotic commotion and

  the sight of one infant on the floor and the presumption that other infants, not seen,

  had also been removed from incubators.”57 They say she witnessed the scene for no

  more than seconds, hurrying out of the hospital in fear (given her identity) for her

  safety. It seems remarkable that between the nurses, Nayirah, and a friend who was

  with her, the date of this incident cannot be narrowed to within less than a week.

  What is certain is that disproof of the alleged sighting is made more difficult when

  the time frame is so extended.

  Taking into consideration the deception involving the identity of their client

  and witnesses and their obstinacy in clinging to a number of baby deaths that sub-

  sequent reports proved to be false, it seems inescapable to conclude that Hill and

  Knowlton was not interested in the whole truth of the matter but only in elements

  that would promote the interests of their real client and, therefore, of themselves.

  Is this news? Should there be concern? Of course a business looks out for its own

  interests. So what? Suppose the following were true: the United States, for defensible

  policy reasons, felt it necessary to go to war against Saddam Hussein. To do this, it

  required the support of the American people, a support that did not exist to the

  required extent. With the help of Hill and Knowlton, hired by Citizens for a Free

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  Kuwait (which in turn was funded by the government of Kuwait), public opinion was altered sufficiently to implement the policy. Hill and Knowlton either invented

  or embellished the incubator babies story or told its client what the Kuwaiti gov-

  ernment needed to do to support it. Even if the details of the story were false, the

  Iraqis were certainly guilty of some well-documented atrocities. Middle East Watch

  does not mince its words: “Our own research on the occupation of Kuwait docu-

  mented hundreds of gross abuses committed by Iraqi forces.”58 Why quibble about

  the details?

  Supposing the truth of these statements, it is certainly arguable that deception

  may have been justified on the basis of the huge policy matters at stake. Many people

  felt that the US involvement in the Gulf War was vital to world peace. From that per-

  spective, the usual “dirty hands” arguments can be invoked to support the deception.

  There are few absolutists who would say that deception is never justified no matter

  how vital the stakes.

  One answer to the “so what?” question is that democracy is a sham if those with

  government power feel it is acceptable to gain support for their policies through such

  deception. This answer does not settle the matter, for two reasons. First, not every-

  one wants genuine democracy. Second, a substantial number of people seem to accept

  deception, so long as it is for benign purposes. Here we should distinguish between

  “benign,” chauvinistically interpreted to mean whatever increases one’s own coun-

  try’s political and economic power in the globe at whatever cost to people of other

  nations, and “benign” interpreted as reckoning in the costs and benefits to the people

  of other nations as well. It is an unfortunate fact of US involvement in the wars of Iraq,

  Afghanistan, and now (2013) the threat of war with Syria or Iran that a reckoning of

  the second type was not done or done with any care and presented in such terms to the

  people of the United States. It was for many a convenient assumption, perhaps conso-

  nant with “American exceptionalism,” that the second kind of reckoning would not be

  necessary, since it was felt that the expansion of US military power and influence would

  guarantee a better world for everyone over time. The experience of the last 10 years has

  done a lot to discredit that assumption. The possibility has come more clearly into sight

  that ignoring the second kind of reckoning is not “merely” immoral but also geopoliti-

  cally a huge mistake that leads to the diminishing of that very power and influence that

  the wars and deceptions were supposed to achieve.

  Every so often, people glimpse the wrongdoing that lack of accountability encour-

  ages, and there is renewed demand for truthfulness and openness in government.

  Notable examples of this are Watergate, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the false alle-

  gations about Iraq, including weapons of mass destruction used to gain support for

  the US-led war in Iraq in 2003. Recurring deceptions of the people have been used

  to impress on the public the need for more military expenditures. A problem with

  such deception is that it provokes a like response from the enemy. Perhaps the mili-

  tary gains from such a race, but not the general public. In 1973, I.F. Stone noted the

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  attempt to suppress information from a Coast and Geodetic Survey, which indicated that, contrary to the official position, underground nuclear explosions were detectable thousands of miles away.59 The suppression was important for heading off calls

  for nuclear test bans and thus continuing the arms race. The New York
Times revealed military deceptions on the cost and need for weapons in the 1980s.60 In Canada, the

  government at first sold the public on the sole-sourced (i.e., uncompetitive) purchase

  of 65 F-35 aircraft on the basis of a cost estimate of $9 billion. When an official audit

  estimated the full cost, including maintenance, of the purchase to be $45 billion, the

  government backed off.61

  The argument against this kind of deception is that it can easily become rampant

  throughout the administration. If that happens, eventually cynicism and a sense of

  futility develop regarding the democratic process. This is good neither for the holders

  of power nor for those subject to their decisions.

  The argument as stated is consistent with deception being otherwise justified on

  a single-instance analysis, that is, not taking account of habit-forming repercussions.

  What if the actual decision, quite apart from the process used to enable it to be put

  into effect, is wrong? The outrage against the supposed 312 incubator baby deaths

  needs to be compared with the estimated 46,900 children under age five who died

  in Iraq between January and August 1991 as an indirect effect of US-led bombing,

  civilian uprisings, and a UN economic embargo.62 Use of deception, we have seen, pre-

  empts the judgment of the people. It prevents such judgment from being made effec-

  tive through choice of congressional representatives by cutting it off from a grounding

  in proper fact, as distinct from grounding in selected information and misinformation

  disseminated by the power-holders.

  Ivy Lee felt very strongly that it was wrong not to reveal to an audience the source

  of a PR message. This principle in the incubator babies case was violated with regard

  to the American people and to all but a few of the congressional caucus. The argument

  that concealment of Nayirah’s identity was necessary to protect relatives in Kuwait

  sufficed to ward off critical scrutiny, but, considering the enormous stakes involved

  and the many lives lost during the war and as a consequence of it, the marginal increase

  in risk to such of her relatives who may have remained in occupied Kuwait hardly pro-

  vides a convincing justification.

  Had Lee’s principle of being upfront with the sources of information been fol-

  lowed, it seems unlikely that the incubator babies story would have been so easily

  believed. But on the evidence reviewed here, there is still reason to be more concerned

  than he was about one-sided accounts. The one-sided account Hill and Knowlton gave

  of the incubator babies story contributed to burying the truth. According to their

  account, Hill and Knowlton were not at fault for the misleading information; they

  simply went with what they were told, taking the veracity of their sources for granted.

  On the contrary, since the story is shaky in its entirety, Hill and Knowlton did not

  serve the truth by pretending otherwise. The evasions and hyperbole, the “one-sided

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  presentation” Lee referred to, continued to mask truths that the “other side” (in this case, MacArthur and Middle East Watch) painstakingly brought to public attention.63

  ConCLUSIon

  It is sometimes argued that truth by itself is morally indifferent and that the value of a

  truth lies in its context, depending on the pragmatic implications of believing or acting

  upon it. What good does it do, it might be asked from this perspective, to chase after

  and expose deceptions that no longer have a role to play? The war is over, Kuwait was

  liberated, and exposure of deceptions will not undo any of the war’s damage. Maybe

  those involved in the deception should be commended for helping to bring about such

  good as came of the war.

  There are two answers to be given. One is pragmatic. If concern for the truth is

  not shown now, the message to decision-makers is that they have a free hand in pursu-

  ing deceptive means for accomplishing their goals in the future. We have seen reports

  that the figures of Serbian atrocities in Kosovo were greatly exaggerated. Without pur-

  suing matters of truth, we open ourselves to accusations of disinterest in wrongdoing

  and share the responsibility that goes with willful blindness. If we are to have account-

  ability, we need to know the truth about government-fostered deceptions, especially

  those that commit a nation to involvement in war, with all the resultant suffering and

  loss of life. So, the answer is that lack of concern for seemingly superannuated ques-

  tions of truth has pragmatic consequences that cannot be ignored.

  There is a second answer, very much in the spirit of St. Augustine. Without a strong

  precommitment to truth, the process of our reasoning is liable to corruption. Carelessness

  about knowing the truth concerning the effects of our actions affects our attitude towards

  truth generally and ends up making us more likely to err in our calculations. Furthermore,

  exposure of falsehood gives us a sense of protection against the arrival of an Orwellian

  world (or should one say the more complete arrival of an Orwellian world?), just as pun-

  ishment for crimes helps to restore a sense of justice, even though we can expect that

  falsehood and crimes will both continue.

  In the first edition of this book, in August 2002, I wrote, “If a deception on the

  scale and with the impact of the incubator babies story is allowed to fade into remote

  history without a sense of apprehension about the ease with which people can thus be

  manipulated, the message given to future manipulators will surely be one of encour-

  agement.” Unfortunately, these words have proved to be prophetic. August 2002 was

  exactly the time that the administration of US President George W. Bush began circu-

  lating a series of deceptions designed to create fear of an attack by Iraq using weapons

  of mass destruction. These deceptions were developed, refined, and repeated many

  times until Secretary of State Colin Powell made his misleading presentation to the

  UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, complete with charts connecting Saddam

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  Hussein with al-Qaeda and a vial suggestive of anthrax found in and removed from Iraq. This paved the way for the ill-fated war in Iraq. For the most part, the mainstream

  media in the United States received the allegations uncritically, in contrast to the alter-

  nate media. When the allegations were later determined to be unfounded, no serious

  attempt was made to prosecute the perpetrators of the falsehoods. It may be that con-

  trols against deceptive propaganda should be instituted or that treaty provisions such

  as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which holds under Article

  20 that “Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law,” should be enforced. That

  question raises issues of free speech, to which we must now turn.

  notes

  1 J.A.C. Brown, Techniques of Persuasion (London: Penguin, 1963) 170f. See also Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: D. McKay, 1957).

  2 See Jean Kilbourne’s Killing Us Softly: The Image of Women in Advertising (Cambridge Documentary Films, 1979) and Still Kil
ling Us Softly (Cambridge Documentary Films, 1987), a movie and video, respectively, that makes this point forcefully and with some humour.

  3 Pontifical Council for Social Communications, Ethics in Advertising (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana; and Ottawa: Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1997) 27–28.

  4 An urban myth spawned by James M. Vicary claimed that imperceptible (because they were shown for only one three-thousandth of a second) coaxings—“Hungry? Eat popcorn” and “Drink Coca-Cola”—during a showing of the film Picnic in Fort Lee, New Jersey, led to increased sales of those products. Mark Crispin Miller has reported that the “findings” were fabricated (“Hollywood: The Ad,” The Atlantic Monthly, April 1990: 41–54), but the myth is still occasionally passed on as true, even by some students who are assigned the article as compulsory reading. See also Miller 43, 48.

  5 Pontifical Council 20.

  6 A large collection of jingles can be found at .

  7 See the CAB’s statement at .

  8 As of October 2012; see . Quotes from the code in the following text are taken from this source.

  9 ASC 2011–2012 Annual Report, Standards Matter, 2;
  2012AnnualReport.pdf>.

  10 .

  11 ASC, 2010 Ad Complaints Report, Year in Review, 7;
  consumerComplaints/2010AdComplaintsReport.pdf>.

  12 .

  13 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 4th ed. (Boston: Houghton, 1984) Chapter 11.

  14 For a more detailed discussion, see R.L. Arrington, “Advertising and Behavior Control,” Journal of Business Ethics 1, no. 1 (January, 1982): 3–12; and Reese Miller, “Persuasion and the Dependence Effect,” in Business Ethics in Canada, 2nd ed., ed. Deborah C. Poff and Wilfrid J. Waluchow (Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hal , 1991): 479–88.

  15 P.T. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs or Recollections of P.T. Barnum Written by Himself (London: Ward, Lock and Co., 1882).

  16 Commission on Public Relations Education, Public Relations Education for the 21st Century: A Port of Entry, October 1999;