[Peace-discuss] The Return of PSYOPS

[Lisa Chason]

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                    Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
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http://www.fair.org/press-releases/cnn-psyops-fallujah.html

MEDIA ADVISORY:
The Return of PSYOPS
Military's media manipulation demands more investigation

December 3, 2004

The Los Angeles Times revealed this week (12/1/04) that the U.S.
military lied to CNN in the course of executing psychological warfare
operations, or PSYOPS, in advance of the recent attack on Fallujah.
This incident raises serious questions about government disinformation
and journalistic credibility, but recent discussions of the government's
propaganda plans have excluded some valuable context.

In an October 14 on-air interview, Marine Lt. Lyle Gilbert told CNN
Pentagon reporter Jamie McIntyre that a U.S. military assault on
Fallujah had begun.  In fact, the offensive would not actually begin for
another three weeks.  The goal of the psychological operation, according
to the Times, was to deceive Iraqi insurgents into revealing what they
would do in the event of an actual offensive.

This operation raises obvious questions about the government's use of
media to broadcast disinformation at home and abroad-- not to mention
questions about journalistic gullibility and reluctance to question
official claims.  But the CNN story has received little pick-up so far
from other news outlets-- and when it is covered, it's treated like an
isolated episode, even though recent history shows that U.S. government
plans to deceive journalists and the public are widespread and
systematic, not aberrational.

Shortly before the launch of the "war on terror," an unnamed Pentagon
war planner seemed to warn journalists everywhere when he told
Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz: "This is the most
information-intensive war you can imagine.... We're going to lie about
things." (9/24/01)

In February 2002, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon's Office
of Strategic Influence (OSI) was "developing plans to provide news
items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations" in an
effort "to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly
and unfriendly countries."

The story got widespread attention, and the Pentagon announced that the
office would be eliminated.  But considerably less media attention was
paid when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld later said that, while the
OSI had been closed, its mission would be taken up by other agencies.

As Rumsfeld put it, "I went down that next day and said 'Fine, if you
want to savage this thing, fine-- I'll give you the corpse. There's the
name. You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing
that needs to be done and I have.'" (FAIR Media Advisory, 11/27/02)  So
the revelation that a misinformation campaign bearing a striking
resemblance to the description of the OSI was actually being carried out
ought not to come as a total surprise.

Earlier this year, another Los Angeles Times scoop (6/3/04) revealed
that one of the most enduring images of the war-- the toppling of the
statue of Saddam Hussein in a Baghdad square on April 9, 2003-- was a
U.S. Army psychological warfare operation staged to look like a
spontaneous Iraqi
action:

"As the Iraqi regime was collapsing on April 9, 2003, Marines converged
on Firdos Square in central Baghdad, site of an enormous statue of
Saddam Hussein. It was a Marine colonel-- not joyous Iraqi civilians, as
was widely assumed from the TV images -- who decided to topple the
statue, the Army report said.  And it was a quick-thinking Army
psychological operations team that made it appear to be a spontaneous
Iraqi undertaking."

CNN's history of voluntary cooperation with PSYOPS troops is also worth
considering.  In March 2000, FAIR and international news organizations
revealed that CNN had allowed military propaganda specialists from an
Army PSYOPS unit to work as interns in the news division of its Atlanta
headquarters.

As FAIR reported at the time (3/27/00), some PSYOPS officers were eager
to find ways to use media power to their advantage.  One officer
explained at a PSYOPS conference that the military needed to find ways
to "gain control" over commercial news satellites to help bring down an
"informational cone of silence" over regions where special operations
were taking place.

And a 1996 unofficial strategy paper written by an Army officer and
published by the U.S. Naval War College ("Military Operations in the CNN
World: Using the Media as a Force Multiplier") urged military commanders
to find ways to "leverage the vast resources of the fourth estate" for
the purposes of "communicating the [mission's] objective and endstate,
boosting friendly morale, executing more effective psychological
operations, playing a major role in deception of the enemy, and
enhancing intelligence collection."

Of course, the full extent of these programs is not yet known.  But the
fact that the U.S. government is intentionally lying to journalists, and
by extension to the public, should be big news.  Unfortunately, the L.A.
Times report is generating little mainstream media attention.  CNN's
Aaron Brown reported the story (12/1/04), admitting that "none of us are
particularly comfortable when we're talking about things, about
ourselves if you will."

Brown also made another, even more revealing comment: "There is an
important and explicit bargain between the press and the Pentagon in a
time of war. We don't do anything to endanger the troops or operations.
They don't lie to us. Each is essential in a free society and each is
made more complicated by the information age, but it seems that
sometimes in an effort to mislead the enemy the military has come close,
very close, to crossing the line and misleading you."

Of course, in this case the military did not come "very close" to
misleading the public; they did mislead the public.  And while Brown may
have confidence that such a "bargain" exists between the press and the
military, it would appear that the Pentagon does not agree.  If
journalists were more willing to accept the old adage that "all
governments lie," we might all be better served.

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