Richard
08-24-2011, 09:15
In a culture where the norm is an exaggerated version of the truth, the idea that disinformation and confusion reign should not be a surprise to anyone. ;)
And so it goes...
Richard :munchin
Waves of Disinformation and Confusion Swamp the Truth in Libya
NYT, 23 aUG 2011
Truth was first a casualty in Libya well before this war began, and the war has not improved matters at all, on any side.
Libya has long been a republic of lies or, in the words of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, “the only democracy in the world.” Colonel Qaddafi was the absolute dictator who claimed years ago to have stepped down from all public posts. He said he was more of a sage, or guide, to Libya’s six million citizens.
In Libya, as with authoritarian governments generally, leaders are accustomed to dictating how people should think; no matter how outrageous the lie or how obviously bizarre (as was often the case in Libya), it is often received as reality by a public numbed by isolation and oppression. So it may not be surprising that the rebels now challenging Colonel Qaddafi sometimes sound like him, because he is the only leader they ever knew. Many of the rebels’ leaders were in Colonel Qaddafi’s top echelons, helping defend and promote his vision, and version, of reality.
A case in point was the rebels’ claim on Sunday that they had arrested Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, the leader’s son who is often talked of as the heir apparent. The claim was issued with such authority, even setting off a debate among rebels over what to do with the younger Mr. Qaddafi, that the International Criminal Court said he should be transported to The Hague.
By the wee hours of Tuesday morning, however, Mr. Qaddafi was squiring journalists around neighborhoods filled with Qaddafi sympathizers, saying the rebels who had rolled into the city had fallen into a trap.
Information, or rather truthful information, is often difficult to come by in any war zone. Disinformation is a powerful tool that can be used to mislead the enemy, hide tactics, instigate fear or win public support. There is also the fog of war, the confusion in communications and the chaos of the battlefield that can obscure any objective understanding.
But in Libya, with so many competing factions and overlapping agendas — Qaddafi loyalists, competing tribes, western guerrillas, eastern rebels, NATO allies — all of that is true, to an exceptional degree.
By sunrise, it seemed that the younger Qaddafi’s claim of having sprung an elaborate trap was just another lie, as rebels poured into Colonel Qaddafi’s Bab al-Aziziya compound.
“It’s a timely reminder that Twitter, 24-hour rolling news channels and satphones are still useless against the fog of war,” Rob Crilly of The Daily Telegraph of London wrote on Tuesday.
During the six months of fighting, both the rebels and Colonel Qaddafi’s forces repeatedly overstated or misrepresented their battlefield abilities and accomplishments. The rebels said they had seized cities, only to be pushed back hours or days later; on Tuesday, Colonel Qaddafi’s forces insisted that they controlled Tripoli. In the early days of the NATO intervention, optimistic claims about the rebels’ capacities and battlefield gains seemed intended to reassure queasy domestic audiences that a quick victory was possible.
One day before rebels invaded Colonel Qaddafi’s compound, a NATO spokesman, Col. Roland Lavoie, was asked where the Libyan leader might be hiding.
“I don’t have a clue,” he said at a news conference in Italy, offering an answer with the ring of truth.
Then he added, perhaps less convincingly, “I’m not sure it really does matter.”
The examples of spin from all sides provide one of many echoes in Libya of the war in Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussein. For months after Mr. Hussein slipped into hiding, the American military had insisted that his capture was unimportant — until, of course, they captured him and promptly distributed images of him having lice picked from his hair. Officials were jubilant.
When the Americans rolled into Baghdad, they did so with what turned out to be a false justification — that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction.” That claim was so deeply accepted by the troops that they packed gas masks and spent much of the critical first weeks looking for unconventional weapons, rather than controlling looters, which was one of the Iraqi grievances that later fed an insurgency.
Sometimes it is hard to tell if the people spreading the information believe it themselves. “There are no American infidels in Baghdad — never,” Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, Mr. Hussein’s prevaricating minister of information, said long after American troops had entered the city.
Was this disinformation? Self-deception?
When it was no longer possible to deny their presence, after American troops had reached the center of the city, Mr. Sahhaf had a ready reply. “They’re coming to surrender or be burned in their tanks,” he said.
Those Iraqi troops who took him seriously — and there were some — died.
Unlike Iraq, the misinformation in Libya has sometimes taken on the feel of a comic opera.
When the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi began, he blamed Al Qaeda and youths “fueled by milk and Nescafé spiked with hallucinogenic drugs.” When that did not get enough traction, he said of the rebels: “They feel trigger happy, and they shoot especially when they are stoned on drugs.”
His maladroit spokesmen at one point showed journalists what they said were 36 million doses of confiscated hallucinogens — which proved to be Tramadol, a common painkiller.
Still, the rebels have offered their own far-fetched claims, like mass rapes by loyalist troops issued tablets of Viagra. Although the rebels have not offered credible proof, that claim is nonetheless the basis of an investigation by the International Criminal Court.
And there is the mantra, with racist overtones, that the Qaddafi government is using African mercenaries, which rebels repeat as fact over and over. There have been no confirmed cases of that; supposedly there are many African prisoners of war being held in Benghazi, but conveniently journalists are not allowed to see them. There are, however, African guest workers, poorly paid migrant labor, many of whom, unarmed, have been labeled mercenaries.
Both sides, of course, pronounce victory as a certainty.
In the case of Mahmoud Jibril, the rebel prime minister, it is just a little late. “The total collapse of the regime could materialize in the next few weeks,” he said during a visit to Washington in May.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/world/africa/24fog.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2
And so it goes...
Richard :munchin
Waves of Disinformation and Confusion Swamp the Truth in Libya
NYT, 23 aUG 2011
Truth was first a casualty in Libya well before this war began, and the war has not improved matters at all, on any side.
Libya has long been a republic of lies or, in the words of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, “the only democracy in the world.” Colonel Qaddafi was the absolute dictator who claimed years ago to have stepped down from all public posts. He said he was more of a sage, or guide, to Libya’s six million citizens.
In Libya, as with authoritarian governments generally, leaders are accustomed to dictating how people should think; no matter how outrageous the lie or how obviously bizarre (as was often the case in Libya), it is often received as reality by a public numbed by isolation and oppression. So it may not be surprising that the rebels now challenging Colonel Qaddafi sometimes sound like him, because he is the only leader they ever knew. Many of the rebels’ leaders were in Colonel Qaddafi’s top echelons, helping defend and promote his vision, and version, of reality.
A case in point was the rebels’ claim on Sunday that they had arrested Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, the leader’s son who is often talked of as the heir apparent. The claim was issued with such authority, even setting off a debate among rebels over what to do with the younger Mr. Qaddafi, that the International Criminal Court said he should be transported to The Hague.
By the wee hours of Tuesday morning, however, Mr. Qaddafi was squiring journalists around neighborhoods filled with Qaddafi sympathizers, saying the rebels who had rolled into the city had fallen into a trap.
Information, or rather truthful information, is often difficult to come by in any war zone. Disinformation is a powerful tool that can be used to mislead the enemy, hide tactics, instigate fear or win public support. There is also the fog of war, the confusion in communications and the chaos of the battlefield that can obscure any objective understanding.
But in Libya, with so many competing factions and overlapping agendas — Qaddafi loyalists, competing tribes, western guerrillas, eastern rebels, NATO allies — all of that is true, to an exceptional degree.
By sunrise, it seemed that the younger Qaddafi’s claim of having sprung an elaborate trap was just another lie, as rebels poured into Colonel Qaddafi’s Bab al-Aziziya compound.
“It’s a timely reminder that Twitter, 24-hour rolling news channels and satphones are still useless against the fog of war,” Rob Crilly of The Daily Telegraph of London wrote on Tuesday.
During the six months of fighting, both the rebels and Colonel Qaddafi’s forces repeatedly overstated or misrepresented their battlefield abilities and accomplishments. The rebels said they had seized cities, only to be pushed back hours or days later; on Tuesday, Colonel Qaddafi’s forces insisted that they controlled Tripoli. In the early days of the NATO intervention, optimistic claims about the rebels’ capacities and battlefield gains seemed intended to reassure queasy domestic audiences that a quick victory was possible.
One day before rebels invaded Colonel Qaddafi’s compound, a NATO spokesman, Col. Roland Lavoie, was asked where the Libyan leader might be hiding.
“I don’t have a clue,” he said at a news conference in Italy, offering an answer with the ring of truth.
Then he added, perhaps less convincingly, “I’m not sure it really does matter.”
The examples of spin from all sides provide one of many echoes in Libya of the war in Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussein. For months after Mr. Hussein slipped into hiding, the American military had insisted that his capture was unimportant — until, of course, they captured him and promptly distributed images of him having lice picked from his hair. Officials were jubilant.
When the Americans rolled into Baghdad, they did so with what turned out to be a false justification — that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction.” That claim was so deeply accepted by the troops that they packed gas masks and spent much of the critical first weeks looking for unconventional weapons, rather than controlling looters, which was one of the Iraqi grievances that later fed an insurgency.
Sometimes it is hard to tell if the people spreading the information believe it themselves. “There are no American infidels in Baghdad — never,” Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, Mr. Hussein’s prevaricating minister of information, said long after American troops had entered the city.
Was this disinformation? Self-deception?
When it was no longer possible to deny their presence, after American troops had reached the center of the city, Mr. Sahhaf had a ready reply. “They’re coming to surrender or be burned in their tanks,” he said.
Those Iraqi troops who took him seriously — and there were some — died.
Unlike Iraq, the misinformation in Libya has sometimes taken on the feel of a comic opera.
When the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi began, he blamed Al Qaeda and youths “fueled by milk and Nescafé spiked with hallucinogenic drugs.” When that did not get enough traction, he said of the rebels: “They feel trigger happy, and they shoot especially when they are stoned on drugs.”
His maladroit spokesmen at one point showed journalists what they said were 36 million doses of confiscated hallucinogens — which proved to be Tramadol, a common painkiller.
Still, the rebels have offered their own far-fetched claims, like mass rapes by loyalist troops issued tablets of Viagra. Although the rebels have not offered credible proof, that claim is nonetheless the basis of an investigation by the International Criminal Court.
And there is the mantra, with racist overtones, that the Qaddafi government is using African mercenaries, which rebels repeat as fact over and over. There have been no confirmed cases of that; supposedly there are many African prisoners of war being held in Benghazi, but conveniently journalists are not allowed to see them. There are, however, African guest workers, poorly paid migrant labor, many of whom, unarmed, have been labeled mercenaries.
Both sides, of course, pronounce victory as a certainty.
In the case of Mahmoud Jibril, the rebel prime minister, it is just a little late. “The total collapse of the regime could materialize in the next few weeks,” he said during a visit to Washington in May.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/world/africa/24fog.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2