This is the age of the fake. We live in an era where the gap between how the world is and how powerful interests try to portray it has grown dramatically wider. Virtually nothing in public debate these days is free of the virus of fakery. Remember the Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq? Said by all and sundry in the US and UK governments to exist, their message was amplified in the mainstream media. Iraq has provided the most vivid illustration of the age of the fake. But it is only the best known. All over the world the manipulation of imagery and reporting occurs.

But it is not only photographs which are susceptible to fake treatment. While governments have a long and invidious record, the cutting edge of innovation is in the corporate sector, particularly in the PR industry. Monsanto and other GM interests have been to the forefront of creating fake demonstrations, fake scientific institutes, fake pressure groups with all the paraphernalia of fake leaflets, tee shirts, websites and the rest. GM interests were behind the creation of two apparently independent organisations in the UK, the Agricultural Biotechnology Council and CropGen. Both are run out of the office of a central London PR company called Lexington Communications and pretend to be independent and authoritative. Corporations are also currently spending huge sums on fake front groups designed to give ‘third party support’ to their sectional interests. This has become so significant that even conservative figures such as the UK government's chief Scientific adviser Dr David King recently complained about the 'group of lobbyists, some of whom are chasing me around the planet'. One such group based in central London is the International Policy Network which attempts to mislead journalists into thinking that climate change is either a myth or that nothing can be done about it. Unsurprisingly the IPN is funded by the corporations whose interests are most threatened by climate action, such as the oil giant ExxonMobil.

The fake has also infiltrated the mainstream media as the running scandal in Washington about 'fake' journalists has shown. A journalist known as Jeff Gannon was recently revealed as writing under a false name for a Republican front organisation. But this story goes back a year, when it was revealed that the Bush administration had paid actors to produce fake news promoting their policies on Medicare. Then it was revealed that they had done the same with fake news promoting their drugs policy and that they had paid several journalists to promote their education policies. The key problem with the fake news was that it was broadcast without any indication that it was paid for by the government. The use fo propaganda by the US government within its own borders is at least illegal. In the UK government propaganda is perfectly legal.

The export of US political marketing skills has intensified in recent years and this puts the democratic credentials of elections under strain. The US democratic system is in poor shape. One leading academic Robert Entman, has referred to it as ‘the system formerly known as American democracy’. The people who made it that bad are also intent on exporting their system of ‘fake democracy’ overseas. It is well known that New Labour in the UK learned much form the US. This involves a close relationship with the right wing of the Democrat party, most recently in the run up to the May2005 election, with a young spin doctor called Andrei Cherny. The new import is referred to by Alan Milburn the Labour election campaign co-ordinator "new wave Democratic thinker influencing New Labour". This process of US involvement in overseas elections has become quite significant. In the past cruder methods such as bribery and corruption were used, or, if necessary, US supported coups could be arranged as in Chile in 1973. Today, the introdution of debased electioneering using techniques derived from marketing and advertising is a useful means of attempting to impose candidates favoured by the US. This process could be seen in the election in the Ukraine at the end of last year and in the Iraqi elections in January this year. In all of the cases described above the objective is the same: to influence the course of real events by the production of fake events.

In recent years the fakes have become more sophisticated, so that the distinction between fake and real is less easy to discern. Peeling back the layers of deception quite often makes the question of what is a 'fake' or 'staged' photo, more complex than would have been the case in the past. Take the example of the photos of abuse at Abu Graibh. These are said by most of the media and by the US military to be trophy photos taken by low level US military personnel. Some sections of the media paint a picture of Abu Graibh (and other US interrogation centres) as out of control. It is pretty clear that elements of this portrait are accurate and that the torture trail is much more extensive than just one prison in Baghdad.  Last month it was reported that the US military had destroyed photos showing hooded and bound prisoners in 'mock executions' in Afghanistan. But if we peel back this layer we find a different story about the significance of the photos emerging.

This suggests that the photos are not 'really' trophy pictures and nor are they 'really' pictures of torture in the normal sense of the word. Certainly they capture images of the degradation of prisoners. But the question is what were the photos produced for? The answer it seems is that they were part of a psychological warfare strategy. Seymour Hersh revealed that this ran by the name of 'copper green'. Hersh writes: 'The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything–including spying on their associates–to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant said, "I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population." The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action... If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency continued to grow.'  Jon Ronson has traced more of this story in his book The Men Who Stare at Goats. He quotes an interview with Lyndie England, who was in the photos:

England : I was instructed by persons in higher rank to "stand there, hold this leash and look at the camera". And they took a picture for PsyOps and that's all I know ... I was told to stand there, give the thumbs-up, smile, stand behind all of the naked Iraqis in the pyramid [have my picture taken].

Q: Who told you to do that?

England : Persons in my higher chain of command ... They were for PsyOps reasons and the reasons worked. So to us, we were doing our job, which  meant we were doing what we were told, and the outcome was what they wanted. They'd come back and they'd look at the pictures and they'd state, "Oh, that's a good tactic, keep it up. That's working. This is working. Keep doing it, it's getting what we need."

So the question is, what would it mean to say that the Abu Ghraib photos were 'genuine'? They do show abuse and humiliation and perhaps torture, but they are not just a record of torture, but an active part in the process of torture. In other words the age of the fake is no longer about distorting our view of the world but about removing the distinctions which sanity requires us to hold on to - the difference between truth and lies and the difference between civilisation and barbarism. Which is why it is necessary to focus explicitly on the techniques of fakery and to carefully follow the development of new techniques for managing the public mind. This is what Spinwatch was set up to do.

https://www.spinwatch.org