Professor Snow is our Toto... like Dorothy's little dog in THE WIZARD OF OZ, she goes behind the curtain to expose the awful little man projecting that big fake image on the giant screen.  Snow rips back the curtain on the agencies, programs and methods of our nation's official propagandists, both the ones you've heard of, like the USIA, and the ones you haven't, like "Office of Strategic Influence."  If the name of that little pustule on our government's organization chart doesn't give you the willies, Snow's portrait of it and the propaganda czar, Undersecretary of State Charlotte Beers, certainly will.  Ms. Beers, whom George W. Bush put in charge of convincing the world's religion-and-resentment-stuffed billions NOT TO KILL US, comes to the post fresh from running ad campaigns for Uncle Ben's Rice.  Lord help us. 

It's just such combinations of pin-headed arrogance and boobery which characterize this Administration's intellectual weaponry for the War on Terror.  That's what Snow tells us in revealing detail; and as a former apparatchik in America's ministry of propaganda, the USIA, she can speak from her experience in the belly of clown.

A couple of years ago, a mischievous US State Department consul convinced USAID to send me to Brazil. I followed city to city in the footsteps of Mack McLarty, Henry Kissinger's business partner, formerly Bill Clinton's chief of staff.  McLarty was prancing about, trying to sell Brazil on the wonders of selling off their water and power systems (preferably cheaply, to his clients).  Weirdly, the US government paid me a packet to explain that, in America, we tend to run such snake oil salesmen out of town.   McLarty failed to mention that, in the USA, privatization and deregulation are on the run.  In America, almost all water systems are publicly owned, the result of a huge public uprising of the Populist movement 90 years ago against the water and power barons.  It surprised my audiences to learn that well-organized anti-corporate mass movements have made the USA the only nation outside of Canada and Guyana with open forums (public service commissions, the nuclear regulatory commission and more) that democratically control the investments and even prices of private corporations.   

This story of America the Democratic was a winning advertisement for our nation -– but one which conflicted with the mission of our official propagandists: to justify the projection of US military and commercial power, to glove the claws of Kissinger-McLarty Associates.  What so many in Washington DON'T want is the propagation of seditious ideas – freedom of speech, of press, of religion, freedom from want – which America's best propagandists (Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, Franklin Roosevelt) deployed to inspire the planet.

Now, instead of Rushmore-worthy giants like Jefferson, we have the sales force from Lilliput: America's world image is left to Uncle Ben's jingle-writer who said that the "brand" she is selling is "George W. Bush."  (Update: Charlotte Beers resigned her post in March 2003, soon to be replaced by Margaret Tutwiler, a Bush I alumna and former ambassador to Morocco.)  

Think about it: our minister of propaganda is supposed to be explaining to the Arab street why American citizens shouldn't be bombed; and what do we dangle in front of their faces?  Brand "W" – which flopped even in the USA (after all, Americans voted against that guy by a substantial margin). And if they don't warm to Dubya, we beam them images of war profiteer Dick Cheney skulking in his hideaway, Shoot'm First Don "Mad Dog" Rumsfeld, the offensive Defense Secretary, and John Poindexter who was convicted of aiding terrorists in the 1980s, now in charge of Bush's new office of "Total Information Awareness."  Even Henry the K was unlocked from his political crypt by our president to join the team.  Our plea to the world is spoken by armed and dangerous corporate board refugees shrieking, "You're with us or you're against us."

I'm afraid.  And after you read the details of it all in this book, you may be too.  To her credit, our Professor Toto has hope for change.

Greg Palast

American journalist Palast, who reports for BBC Television's Newsnight, is author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: An Investigative Reporter Reveals the Truth About Globalization, Corporate Cons and High-Finance Fraudsters (Penguin Plume 2003).