We just finished reading a book called "Weapons of Mass Deception" by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. It details how public relations firms and their tactics have been, and are still being, used to sell us the war in Iraq.

This is no literary masterpiece in the sense that the quality of the writing could be improved. Mostly, a bunch of stuff from the internet has been pasted together to form a book but it is very well documented with nearly five hundred end notes. Also, much of what is in this book we have read in this forum. But, when it is all concentrated into two hundred pages, the information is astounding.

Although some outright lies have been told, most of the propoganda is in the form of partial truths where what is said is factual but what is not said completely changes the implications of what is said.

To cite one example, an article in the Los Angeles Times this year said that "Air Force General Richard B. Myers,chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters on April 25 that 1,500 cluster bombs had been used during the war but that only 26 had fallen in civilian areas and that there was only one case of death or injury to a noncombatant. However, Myers's statistic referred only to cluster bombs dropped from airplanes and did not include weapons fired from land-based artillery." The same article said, "Human Rights Watch and other organizations, as well as doctors in Baghdad, have reported hundreds of casualties from cluster bombs or similar devices."

Read this book. It's worse than you think it is.

Bev and Jerry