Operation Mass Appeal

In the late 1990s, Britain's Secret Intelligence Service carried out Operation Mass Appeal aimed at gaining support for sanctions and war against Iraq. Stories were planted in the foreign media “with the intention that they would then feed back into Britain and the US,” British historian Mark Curtis explained in ...

In early 2003 it was claimed that Iraq was a threat to other countries. Despite ten years of crushing economic sanctions plus intrusive inspections, supposedly Iraq had acquired enough “weapons of mass destruction” to threaten the West. It was ridiculous on its face but few people in power said so.

Propaganda is described as “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view.” Black propaganda is “false information and material that purports to be from a source on one side of a conflict, but is actually from the opposing side, typically used to ...

In the case of British intelligence, you can see this combination of reckless propaganda and failure of oversight at work in the case of Operation Mass Appeal. This was exposed by the former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter, who describes in his book, Iraq Confidential, how, in London in June 1998, he was ...

'Anonymous' sources feature heavily in these stories, which like MI6's 'Operation Mass Appeal' are often planted by the security services. Meanwhile, people's emotions are shamelessly played upon by the 'something must be done' brigade of 'liberal' laptop bombardiers, the same crowd, note well, who ...

Last week, seven years after the Iraq Inquiry was set up, Sir John Chilcot finally delivered his long-awaited report. Although it stopped short of declaring the Iraq war illegal, and although it failed to examine the real motives for war, the report was not quite the whitewash that had been feared by peace ...

Britain's Chilcot report recalled the Iraq War lies that justified an aggressive war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, but this international crime has largely been sloughed off with almost no accountability, as Eric S. Margolis noted. By Eric S. Margolis. Last week's Chilcot report on Britain's role in the ...

We now know that the BBC and other British media were used by the British secret intelligence service MI-6. In what they called Operation Mass Appeal, MI-6 agents planted stories about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, such as weapons hidden in his palaces and in secret underground bunkers.

In the case of British intelligence, you can see this combination of reckless propaganda and failure of oversight at work in the case of Operation Mass Appeal. This was exposed by the former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter, who describes in his book, Iraq Confidential, how, in London in June 1998, he was ...

He told reporters in the House of Commons that he was involved personally with Operation Mass Appeal between the summer of 1997 until August 1998 when he resigned from the UN. Mr Ritter said the MI6 operation was designed to "shake up public opinion" by passing dubious intelligence on Iraq to the ...