person:louis allday

Extrait de The Threat to Reason, Dan Hind, 2007, à propos des « perception managers » de la CIA, chargés de trouver les thèmes qui séduisent tel ou tel groupe de l’opinion (« hot buttons »), et la promotion de thèmes irrationnels mais testés selon les méthodes du marketing :

[…] Robert Party explained how the US government ignored US law and used the CIA’s expertise in psychological warfare to secure domestic support for a terrorist campaign against the leftist government in Nicaragua in the early 1980s. This wasn’t a matter of countering foreign disinformation and providing information to assist rational decision-mahing. This was about pressing buttons: ‘The documentation is... clear that the idea was to find our “hot buttons” and to see what – how they could rum, twist, spin certain infonnation to appeal to various special groups. They’d reached the point, and this was really being directed by the CIA, of breaking down the American people into subgroups.’ Themes were developed to appeal to particular subgroups. Journalists were likely to be concerned about the freedom of the press, so they were targeted with stories about Sandinista harassment of La Prensa, a Nicaraguan newspaper opposed to the government; Jewish Americans were told that the Sandinistas were anti-Semitic. Eventually, the CIA’s ‘perceptaon managers’ came up with something that played on popular xenophobia and worked particularly well in states on the border with Mexico:

[They’d] found out that most of the themes about the communist menace in Central America left people cold. They didn’t really take it that seriously - it just didn’t hit the hot buttons right. But they found that one hot button that really… they could really use was this idea of the Hispanic immigrants flooding into the United States. So they developed what they called the ‘feet people’ argument, which was that unless we stopped the communists in Nicaragua and San Salvador, 10 per cent – they came up with that figure somewhere – 10 per cent of all the people in Central America and Mexico will flood the United States.

In the ran-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, themes were developed for particular audiences in a manner strikingly reminiscent of the perception management campaign that secured public support for Reagan’s policies in Central America. Human rights abuses, Saddam Hussein’s alleged assassination attempt on the President’s father, links between Iraq and al Qaeda, fundamentalist fears that ‘Babylon’ stalked the ‘Holy Land’, all found their way into the mix. The emphasis increasingly fell on weapons of mass destruction, ‘the one issue everyone could agree on’. In a formula hardly conducive to rational decision-making by the American public, the then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice insisted that they couldn’t delay invasion until they had proof that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons: ‘We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud’. President Bush repeated the message: ‘we cannot wait for the final proof – the smoking gun – that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud’. The promotion of market-tested irrationality at the highest levels of the US administration calls to mind H. L. Mencken’s cynical comment that ‘the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.’

(Scanné d’après le post de Louis Allday sur Twitter.)

Lire absolument: Louis Allday, “Controlling the Narrative on Syria”
▻http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2016/allday131216.html

One of the many fallacies that predominate in this prevailing narrative is that the West has not intervened in the conflict in Syria. For instance, Amnesty International has recently described the UK as “sit[ting] on the sidelines” of the conflict. This fundamentally false position ignores several years of the West and its regional allies (primarily Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar) arming, funding and training rebel groups, the crippling economic sanctions imposed against the Syrian Government, ongoing airstrikes, special forces operations, and a host of other diplomatic, military and economic measures that have been taken. Not only has the West (primarily the US) intervened, it has done so on a very large scale. For instance, in June 2015, it was revealed that the CIA’s involvement in Syria had become “one of the agency’s largest covert operations” in which it was spending roughly $1bn a year (about $1 for every $15 in the CIA’s announced budget). At that time, this operation based out of Jordan had already “trained and equipped nearly 10,000 fighters sent into Syria over the past several years”. As Patrick Higgins has remarked, “[i]n other words, the United States launched a full-scale war against Syria, and few Americans actually noticed”. It is vital to place this aggression in the context of long-standing US animosity to the Syrian Government. As diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks have revealed, since at least 2006, the US has consistently sought to undermine it “by any available means”, utilising a variety of techniques including an effort — in co-ordination with Saudi Arabia — to encourage Islamic fundamentalism and sectarianism in the country by playing on fears of Iranian influence. Indeed, although it is rarely mentioned, a senior US intelligence official is on record in a televised interview with Mehdi Hasan confirming that facilitating the rise of ISIS and other Islamic extremist groups in Syria and Iraq was a “wilful decision” on behalf of the Obama administration. The BBC has recently reported that ISIS use ammunition bought legally in Eastern Europe by the US and Saudi Governments that is then transported via Turkey into Syria and Iraq, “sometimes only two months from leaving the factory”.

When US intervention in Syria is acknowledged, it is regularly portrayed as having been small-scale and insufficient. Professor Gilbert Achcar of SOAS has remarked that “Washington’s support to the opposition is more the stuff of jokes than anything serious”. Given that Achcar made this observation six months after the revelations concerning the enormous scale of the CIA’s Syria operation, it is hard to imagine exactly what level of military support would be required in order to be considered more than a ’joke’. This misleading narrative of non-existent or inadequate US intervention, coupled with a propensity to defend it with insults, is extremely common, including among commentators who write for ostensibly left-leaning publications. Some pundits such as Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept have recently even gone so far as to claim that the US is in fact intervening in Syria, but “in favor of Assad”, an absurd argument that Glenn Greenwald has also expressed.