The Happy Creator of Pure Propaganda: remember the '45 minute' claim? That was me.

The particular allegation of ‘post-truth’ originates in the slow demise of the ‘mainstream media’, the liberal press outlets that used to dominate the discourse of news and politics, partly because it was all newspapers and TV and radio in those days, and a few had the power to filter information for everyone else. In other words, the decline of certain media outlets that claimed (and still claim) to present ‘the truth’. Places like the BBC, New York Times, NPR, New Yorker in the US etc. etc.. News programmes like BBC’s ‘Today’ broadcast on radio 4 saw themselves - still do - as ‘agenda setting’ i.e. what they choose to broadcast is ‘the news’ that matters that day. Politicians compete to appear on the show; others listen, keen to pick up what’s ‘going on’ that day. It’s a self-reinforcing world. A few newspapers, of ever smaller circulation, perform the same dismal ‘service’ to ever less popular politicians and an ever more disillusioned public.

Of course, the claim that any news outlet presents ‘the truth’ is of course a lie. It cannot be otherwise because all representation, including that by ‘mainstream media’, is a selection of facts, described with particular words in particular frames, a triad of fundamentally political choices all of which reduce reality into something else, something chosen, a story.

The Right go further, and claim that the ‘legacy’ media, as they call them, deliberately misrepresent what matters and ignore much of what really matters - in their view issues like race (sometimes coded ‘DEI’ in the US and, increasingly, in the UK, where the acronym hitherto did not exist, nor do many know what it means), immigration (of course), and ‘culture war’ issues like trans rights, the alleged abuse of national symbols like flags etc. and so on. At the fringes, this ‘discourse’ embraces fairly wack ‘news’ like conspiracy theories, Pizzagate in the US etc etc..

This critique has lain behind an explosion of podcasts, influencers and other ‘content creators’ (and I am one!) which focus on these supposedly-ignored issues and often (but not always) exaggerate in order to make their point, and often ignore actual on-the-ground reporting entirely, let alone fact-checking their reporting. Instead, it’s all opinion. Facts are sometimes created to suit an argument and then repeated ad nauseam, often embellished along on the way, becoming kind of ‘factoids’ of the media landscape, at least parts of it, simply believed because they are believed. Hence, the accusation of ‘post-truth’.

As I’ve pointed out, all news that pretends to be ‘the news’ is in fact already ‘post-truth’. The fact that it’s dressed up as authoritative reportage doesn’t change that reality. Instead of confessing this, the ‘liberal media’ complains about the undoubted exaggeration and deliberate lying of the Right, thereby reinforcing the Right’s claim that the ‘liberal’ media are indeed deliberately distorting the ‘truth’ - otherwise, why would they be so defensive?

Unfortunately for the ‘liberal’ media, they have always lived in a post-truth world and it’s pretty silly to pretend otherwise. Oxbridge-educated editors at the BBC have since the BBC’s foundation decided what they think merits inclusion in ‘the news’ - usually the sort of things that matter to them. On the BBC ‘Today’ programme recently, news presenters - who themselves claim an image as objective and interrogative - have described starvation in Gaza without once naming who is responsible for that starvation. I’m not complaining about that particular distortion (OK, I am), just pointing out that it happens - all the time. The possibility of new taxes or interest rate rises is given prominence, the brutal realities of life at the bottom of the cruel heap that is capitalism barely gets a mention. The fact that the poor live significantly shorter - and less pleasant - lives is also ignored. The ‘growth’ imperative of neo-liberalism is literally never questioned. There are many, many more examples.

Of course, the media works in cahoots with government. Now that we have a far-right government in Washington, it’s more obvious than usual: the far-right media are given the most attention in terms of interviews, access to press conferences etc., for of course they reflect and amplify what the government wants to say. But this phenomenon of course also happens in supposedly more centrist or ‘liberal’ democracies, or pre-Trump America. Here, the mutually-beneficial relationship is more covert and, to the people who comprise it, not only inadmissable but also invisible: they often don’t even know they’re doing it, because they believe that they are objectively dealing in ‘truth’. How do we know this?

We’ve already seen how the mainstream media reflect and present as normal the neo-liberal economic system that we today endure, contributing to the illusory world of ‘capitalist realism’ diagnosed by Mark Fisher. Other evidence is not difficult to find: it is right under our noses. Ever noticed who gets to interview the Prime Minister or Foreign Secretary? When I was in the News Department of the Foreign Office, we would pick and choose interviewers according to whether we thought they were ‘sympathetic’ or not. When selecting journalists to accompany the Foreign Secretary on a foreign trip, a much-desired perk, those whom we regarded as ‘unhelpful’ (i.e. those who were too critical of the government line) were simply not invited onto the ‘plane. I doubt that this practice has changed at all. Would a journalist working for the investigative news site ‘Declassified’, which has exposed much of the material complicity of the Labour government in the genocide in Gaza, get an interview with the Foreign Secretary? In this case, it is the guerrilla, marginal media (this time of the Left) that tells ‘the truth’ (at least as I, and indeed many others, see it), the BBC and the like who languish in the ‘post-truth’ bog, refusing to use the words that don’t suit them.

During what the west calls the first ‘Gulf War’ (to people in the region, there had already been a ‘Gulf War’, namely the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980’s), when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, I worked in an underground bunker underneath the Foreign Office, the so-called ‘Emergency Unit’. I worked in the ‘pol/mil’ section - political-military affairs, responsible for political liaison with the military side of the house (itself quite an interesting coupling, but that’s for another time). The Unit worked 24 hours a day, so one often had to do nights. Usually, however, we didn’t have much to do except watch CNN on the telly and move little flags and symbols around a big wall map according to what that outlet reported. One night, the ‘allied’ (i.e. US/UK + a smattering of others) campaign began to remove Iraq from Kuwait. We had been briefed on what to do to prepare the government for war. A call was to come from a senior official; he would say the codeword ‘Mikado’. Then, we were to ring up all the cabinet to inform them that the attack was about to start. Come the moment, I put on my gravest voice to call various of the high-up politicians, ‘Hostilities have begun’ I pompously announced. One politely replied, ‘I know, I’m already watching it on telly’.

Anyway, I digress. One of my jobs in the ‘pol/mil’ unit was to prepare ‘lines-to-take’ for my ministers about the ‘Gulf War’. These were sometimes ‘defensive’ lines-to-take. For instance, there were news reports that allied bombs had struck the Shi’a ‘holy sites’ of Najjaf and Kerbala which, we knew, went down pretty badly with the ‘Muslim world’ whose support for our ‘Gulf War’ we cherished. I duly prepared a ‘line-to-take’ for my ministers i.e. what they should say if this issue was raised with them. My advice was to say, ‘Allied pilots take the greatest possible care to avoid sites of religious or cultural significance in Iraq, just as they do to avoid civilian casualties’. Had I asked those pilots? Had I even questioned the Ministry of Defence which sat a few yards across Whitehall from our cosy bunker? Of course not. I was gratified when ‘my’ line-to-take was indeed deployed by ‘my’ foreign minister in a news interview (or was it Parliament, that cradle of truth, I don’t remember). How important I felt! Needless to say, the press to whom this lie was fed never questioned it (maybe it was the truth, who the hell knows?). Busy with deadlines and copy-creation, they simply repeated it. The circle was completed, consent duly ‘manufactured’, as Chomsky put it.

Another night, this time before the war started but after Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait, I was tasked with ‘proving’ that Iraq had the ‘fourth largest’ army in the world. While arguing the case for Britain’s involvement in the war, one of my ministers had thoughtlessly uttered this claim and now we had to justify it, in case he was asked to do so himself (he never was of course). In those pre-internet days, I turned to the encyclopedia, ‘Jane’s Armies of the World’ which was lying around our subterranean burrow. Unfortunately for me, this book clearly stated that Iraq did not in fact have the fourth largest army (if I remember correctly, China’s, India’s, the US’s and Russia’s were larger, in fact quite a lot larger). I was not deterred. By leaving out the reserve forces of the bigger armies, but by including Iraq’s - very large -reserves, I managed to tot up the troop numbers to ‘prove’ that indeed Iraq’s army was the world’s ‘fourth largest’.

You will still hear this claim often repeated today, more than thirty years later. It’s become one of those factoids, useful in all sorts of contexts, helpful in reinforcing a range of ‘narratives’ - just as long as no one checks it. Isn’t this the job that truth-telling ‘mainstream media’? They didn’t even check it at the time. It would have taken about the hour with Jane’s Encyclopedia that it took me, then a 24-year old desk officer in Whitehall.

Which brings me to the ‘45 minutes’. For non-British readers, this was one of the most infamous claims made by the Blair government - and Blair himself - to persuade the Labour Party and, less importantly, the general public, that Iraq was a ‘threat’ to the UK before the 2003 invasion, and thus justify Britain’s military involvement. Blair and his spin-doctors alleged that Iraq could ‘threaten’ Britain in just 45 minutes, the time it took to launch a Scud medium-range missile tipped, they claimed, with a chemical warhead.

Twelve years earlier, ensconced in the neon-lit confines of the ‘Emergency Unit’ one night, I was idly reading one of the many ‘intelligence’ reports that crossed my desk. (Usually, by the way, these were total nonsense.). I noticed a particular fact, that apparently it took 45 minutes to park a Scud launch vehicle (a TEL, to the technocracy) and ‘wind it up’ ready to fire. I told the head of the unit this ‘fact’. Being the kind of man he was, he then told his boss, implying that he himself had unearthed this little nugget. And soon it emerged from the mouths of our ministers. I have no idea whether it was true. But who cares, clearly not the press and journalists who helpfully repeated the line.

And, hey presto, the ‘45 minutes’ resurfaced in 2003, this time to suggest that this was the timespan required - very short! - for Iraq to threaten the UK. You don’t have to be a missile expert to know that this claim should not survive the shallowest of scrutiny. A Scud missile has a maximum range of approximately 500 miles (most variants a lot less). The UK is over 2500 miles from Iraq. These facts are available with a couple of clicks on the internet, which I believe did exist in 2003. Moreover, in the years leading up to the war, the UK had never claimed that there was evidence that Iraq had ever mounted anything on a Scud other than conventional explosives, when in 2003 the government began to claim Scuds could carry chemical warheads (before 2003, in fact before 9/11 to be precise ‘we’ wanted everyone to believe that our policy of ‘containing’ Iraq was working, so we downplayed any ‘threat’).

In other words, in reality, a Scud missile posed a similar threat to a World War Two-era German V-2 rocket, though occupied Europe was of course just a little closer to British soil than Iraq and, unlike with Iraq, these missiles were actually being launched. But did these troubling details prevent the press from repeating the ‘45 minute’ chemical Scud claim? They did not.

 

When I first heard the ‘45 minute’ claim, I had been Britain’s expert at the UN on Iraq’s WMD and sanctions for over four years, so I knew a thing or two about Scud missiles and knew that this claim was total nonsense (as well as the fact that we didn’t assess that Iraq possessed more than about six missiles in total). But I also wondered, can they have seriously dug up my little factoid nugget from 1990? Can this be true? Yes, they had! My own bit of propaganda history, of which I am less than proud.

Later, my friend and colleague the weapons scientist David Kelly cited the 45 minute factoid to a journalist to demonstrate that the government’s claim of a ‘threat’ from Iraq had been ‘sexed up’ i.e. exaggerated. This authoritative refutation of outright lies was to lead to his death. But that’s another story. More prosaically, that instance of the ‘45 minutes’ is one reason I left the government in disgust at the mendacity and the impunity of government and those who perpetrate its lies; it is one reason that today I am an anarchist.

After the 2003 invasion, some outlets, this time the BBC, proffered some more ‘forensic’ analysis of the origin and deployment of the ‘45 minute’ claim, which of course they had happily and unquestioningly repeated at the time. Three things to note about this: one, the investigation happened long after the claim was made and, two, the analysis is wrong, because the originator of the claim was in fact yours truly, as I am now publicly confessing. And third, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the BBC ‘investigation’ contains not a word explaining why outlets like the BBC or pretty much every other newspaper in the country did not interrogate the ridiculous claim when it was first made. Perhaps the journalists concerned didn’t want to miss out on that seat on the next jolly with the Foreign Secretary.

This is cast-iron, fact-based truth (as far as any truth is attainable) - proof! - that the press helped the government to perpetrate an outrageous lie, even though journalists now prefer to lay the blame on the government alone (Blair, Campbell etc, not that it’s done either of them much harm). This was a particularly egregious example of what goes on every single day - the government presents alleged ‘facts’ about events, the press repeats them, by and large without question. A ‘narrative’ is created.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say there are no facts, that everything is narrative or mere opinion. There are indeed facts at the bottom of every story. Someone’s tanks are in someone else’s territory. A child was indeed killed by a bomb. It is alleged that it is today more and more difficult to ‘get at’ the facts because of the proliferation of ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’. It wasn’t, in fact, difficult to check the facts before the Iraq invasion (Scud ranges etc). All a journalist had to do was check the government’s claims against what it itself had been saying only a couple of years previously. The press just didn’t bother.

Where does this leave us? Back where we were before, indeed have always been, if only we would realise it. And, some good news: we now have better tools than ever. There are dozens of sites where you can verify the range of a Scud missile or the plausibility of the claim that this type of missile carries a chemical warhead. After watching the rather unsettling Netflix film, The House of Dynamite, I was quickly able to check the film’s story about the reliability of America’s missile defence systems and indeed the ‘Department of War’s’ defence of that reliability: both the film and government were in fact wrong, and there is missile test data, readily available online, to prove it: wow, real facts! (I shall comment on this interesting film soon).

I follow news on Syria closely. I can now read about ten websites that cover news from Syria in English. If the news is in Arabic or Hebrew (or Kurmanji, for that matter), I can AI-translate the webpage in about one second (I recommend the site, app and widget, DeepL, for this). No source - or translation - can be treated as 100% reliable of course - they never could be! - but we are now able to cross check and triangulate between multiple sources. Musk’s ‘X’ aka Twitter carries all kinds of rubbish and lies and it has got a lot worse under the ownership of that awful man. But it still allows me to check more than a hundred (!) feeds that carry news about Syria, often only minutes after an event, written by people actually in Syria, often actual Syrians (the BBC for instance might want to note some of the names of these commentators rather than relying, as it often does now, on retired British ambassadors to offer their superannuated opinions about such places). Soon, the sorts of forensic verification tools - geolocation etc - used by sites such as Bellingcat will become very easily available to all of us - and in the meantime I recommend their investigations, even while noting, as we must, their particular concerns (Russia, Ukraine etc). I follow quite a lot of military blogs, which are often much more revealing of geopolitical facts than the ‘mainstream’ news, such as the deployment of carrier task forces to the Gulf or the Straits of Taiwan (or indeed those strategic missile defences) or the awesome extent of surveillance technology, whose distressing capabilities are brazenly advertised on such sites. This does take time of course but actually not that much when you get used to it. And I am not an analyst, or a journalist, but a lowly ‘content creator’, the breed most tarred with the ‘post-truth’ brush, with two other jobs.

I will shortly be launching a course on my website about how to think critically, how to tear off the layers of misinformation, bias and BS that today camouflage the facts. I don’t claim any great authority in these methods; they’re just what I’ve learned over the years, including from bitter experience, not least as a paid creator of lies for the government. Effective techniques of critical thinking are not brain surgery, nor do they require a PhD in ‘critical theory’ or Foucault. And the necessity of scepticism is not a capitulation to cynicism. It is merely the need, always, to question.

De Omnius Dubitandum, as Christopher Hitchens liked to say, ‘Of Everything be Doubtful’. There are worse dictums, even if he did end up supporting the Iraq invasion…