[Peace-discuss] Pentagon: Say It With Lies!

[Barbara Dyskant]

It doesn't cease to amaze me that The People are putting up with this!
This is an excellent article to give people who still misguidedly believe
in the "integrity" on the U.S. military-industrial-political system.  I'm
sending a pair of articles this morning-- the other one, on domestic
"economic justice", to follow.

This article from NYTimes.

Pentagon Readies Efforts to Sway Sentiment Abroad

February 19, 2002 

By JAMES DAO and ERIC SCHMITT
 

WASHINGTON, Feb. 18 - The Pentagon is developing plans to
provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign
media organizations as part of a new effort to influence
public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and
unfriendly countries, military officials said. 

The plans, which have not received final approval from the
Bush administration, have stirred opposition among some
Pentagon officials who say they might undermine the
credibility of information that is openly distributed by
the Defense Department's public affairs officers. 

The military has long engaged in information warfare
against hostile nations - for instance, by dropping
leaflets and broadcasting messages into Afghanistan when it
was still under Taliban rule. 

But it recently created the Office of Strategic Influence,
which is proposing to broaden that mission into allied
nations in the Middle East, Asia and even Western Europe.
The office would assume a role traditionally led by
civilian agencies, mainly the State Department. 

The small but well-financed Pentagon office, which was
established shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,
was a response to concerns in the administration that the
United States was losing public support overseas for its
war on terrorism, particularly in Islamic countries. 

As part of the effort to counter the pronouncements of the
Taliban, Osama bin Laden and their supporters, the State
Department has already hired a former advertising executive
to run its public diplomacy office, and the White House has
created a public information "war room" to coordinate the
administration's daily message domestically and abroad. 

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, while broadly
supportive of the new office, has not approved its specific
proposals and has asked the Pentagon's top lawyer, William
J. Haynes, to review them, senior Pentagon officials said. 

Little information is available about the Office of
Strategic Influence, and even many senior Pentagon
officials and Congressional military aides say they know
almost nothing about its purpose and plans. Its
multimillion dollar budget, drawn from a $10 billion
emergency supplement to the Pentagon budget authorized by
Congress in October, has not been disclosed. 

Headed by Brig. Gen. Simon P. Worden of the Air Force, the
new office has begun circulating classified proposals
calling for aggressive campaigns that use not only the
foreign media and the Internet, but also covert operations.


The new office "rolls up all the instruments within D.O.D.
to influence foreign audiences," its assistant for
operations, Thomas A. Timmes, a former Army colonel and
psychological operations officer, said at a recent
conference, referring to the Department of Defense. "D.O.D.
has not traditionally done these things." 

One of the office's proposals calls for planting news items
with foreign media organizations through outside concerns
that might not have obvious ties to the Pentagon, officials
familiar with the proposal said. 

General Worden envisions a broad mission ranging from
"black" campaigns that use disinformation and other covert
activities to "white" public affairs that rely on truthful
news releases, Pentagon officials said. 

"It goes from the blackest of black programs to the whitest
of white," a senior Pentagon official said. 

Another proposal involves sending journalists, civic
leaders and foreign leaders e-mail messages that promote
American views or attack unfriendly governments, officials
said. 

Asked if such e-mail would be identified as coming from the
American military, a senior Pentagon official said that
"the return address will probably be a dot-com, not a dot-
mil," a reference to the military's Internet designation. 

To help the new office, the Pentagon has hired the Rendon
Group, a Washington-based international consulting firm run
by John W. Rendon Jr., a former campaign aide to President
Jimmy Carter. The firm, which is being paid about $100,000
a month, has done extensive work for the Central
Intelligence Agency, the Kuwaiti royal family and the Iraqi
National Congress, the opposition group seeking to oust
President Saddam Hussein. 

Officials at the Rendon Group say terms of their contract
forbid them to talk about their Pentagon work. But the firm
is well known for running propaganda campaigns in Arab
countries, including one denouncing atrocities by Iraq
during its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. 

The firm has been hired as the Bush administration appears
to have united around the goal of ousting Mr. Hussein.
"Saddam Hussein has a charm offensive going on, and we
haven't done anything to counteract it," a senior military
official said. 

Proponents say the new Pentagon office will bring
much-needed coordination to the military's efforts to
influence views of the United States overseas, particularly
as Washington broadens the war on terrorism beyond
Afghanistan. 

But the new office has also stirred a sharp debate in the
Pentagon, where several senior officials have questioned
whether its mission is too broad and possibly even illegal.


Those critics say they are disturbed that a single office
might be authorized to use not only covert operations like
computer network attacks, psychological activities and
deception, but also the instruments and staff of the
military's globe- spanning public affairs apparatus. 

Mingling the more surreptitious activities with the work of
traditional public affairs would undermine the Pentagon's
credibility with the media, the public and governments
around the world, critics argue. 

"This breaks down the boundaries almost completely," a
senior Pentagon official said. 

Moreover, critics say, disinformation planted in foreign
media organizations, like Reuters or Agence France-Presse,
could end up being published or broadcast by American news
organizations. 

The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency are barred
by law from propaganda activities in the United States. In
the mid-1970's, it was disclosed that some C.I.A. programs
to plant false information in the foreign press had
resulted in articles published by American news
organizations. 

Critics of the new Pentagon office also argue that
governments allied with the United States are likely to
object strongly to any attempts by the American military to
influence media within their borders. 

"Everybody understands using information operations to go
after nonfriendlies," another senior Pentagon official
said. "When people get uncomfortable is when people use the
same tools and tactics on friendlies." 

Victoria Clarke, the assistant secretary of defense for
public information, declined to discuss details of the new
office. But she acknowledged that its mission was being
carefully reviewed by the Pentagon. 

"Clearly the U.S. needs to be as effective as possible in
all our communications," she said. "What we're trying to do
now is make clear the distinction and appropriateness of
who does what." 

General Worden, an astrophysicist who has specialized in
space operations in his 27-year Air Force career, did not
respond to several requests for an interview. 

General Worden has close ties to his new boss, Douglas J.
Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, that date
back to the Reagan administration, military officials said.
The general's staff of about 15 people reports to the
office of the assistant secretary of defense for special
operations and low-intensity conflict, which is under Mr.
Feith. 

The Office for Strategic Influence also coordinates its
work with the White House's new counterterrorism office,
run by Wayne A. Downing, a retired general who was head of
the Special Operations command, which oversees the
military's covert information operations. 

Many administration officials worried that the United
States was losing support in the Islamic world after
American warplanes began bombing Afghanistan in October.
Those concerns spurred the creation of the Office of
Strategic Influence. 

In an interview in November, Gen. Richard B. Myers,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained the
Pentagon's desire to broaden its efforts to influence
foreign audiences, saying: 

"Perhaps the most challenging piece of this is putting
together what we call a strategic influence campaign
quickly and with the right emphasis. That's everything from
psychological operations to the public affairs piece to
coordinating partners in this effort with us." 

One of the military units assigned to carry out the
policies of the Office of Strategic Influence is the Army's
Psychological Operations Command. The command was involved
in dropping millions of fliers and broadcasting scores of
radio programs into Afghanistan encouraging Taliban and Al
Qaeda soldiers to surrender. 

In the 1980's, Army "psyop" units, as they are known,
broadcast radio and television programs into Nicaragua
intended to undermine the Sandinista government. In the
1990's, they tried to encourage public support for American
peacekeeping missions in the Balkans. 

The Office of Strategic Influence will also oversee private
companies that will be hired to help develop information
programs and evaluate their effectiveness using the same
techniques as American political campaigns, including
scientific polling and focus groups, officials said. 

"O.S.I. still thinks the way to go is start a Defense
Department Voice of America," a senior military official
said. "When I get their briefings, it's scary."