NP? Pentagon Propaganda Plan Is Undemocratic, Possibly Illegal

Doug Millison millison at online-journalist.com
Tue Feb 19 19:16:42 CST 2002 

>                                 FAIR-L
>                    Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
>               Media analysis, critiques and activism
>
>MEDIA ADVISORY:
>Pentagon Propaganda Plan Is Undemocratic, Possibly Illegal
>
>February 19, 2002
>
>The New York Times reported today that the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic
>Influence is “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 OSI was created shortly after September 11 to publicize the U.S.
>government’s perspective in Islamic countries and to generate support for
>the U.S.’s “war on terror.” This latest announcement raises grave concerns
>that far from being an honest effort to explain U.S. policy, the OSI may
>be a profoundly undemocratic program devoted to spreading disinformation
>and misleading the public, both at home and abroad. At the same time,
>involving reporters in disinformation campaigns puts the lives of working
>journalists at risk.
>
>Despite the OSI’s multi-million-dollar budget and its mandate to
>propagandize throughout the Middle East, Asia and Western Europe, “even
>many senior Pentagon officials and Congressional military aides say they
>know almost nothing about its purpose and plans,” according to the Times.
>The Times reported that the OSI’s latest announcement has generated
>opposition within the Pentagon among those who fear that it will undermine
>the Defense Department’s credibility.
>
>Tarnished credibility may be the least of the problems created by the
>OSI’s new plan to manipulate media-- the plan may compromise the free flow
>of information that democracy relies on. The government is barred by law
>from propagandizing within the U.S., but the OSI’s new plan will likely
>lead to disinformation planted in a foreign news report being picked up by
>U.S. news outlets. The war in Afghanistan has shown that the 24-hour news
>cycle, combined with cuts in the foreign news budgets across the U.S.,
>make overseas outlets like Al-Jazeera and Reuters key resources for U.S.
>reporters.
>
>Any “accidental” propaganda fallout from the OSI’s efforts is troubling
>enough, but given the U.S. government’s track record on domestic
>propaganda, U.S. media should be pushing especially hard for more
>information about the operation’s other, intentional policies.
>
>According to the New York Times, “one of the military units assigned to
>carry out the policies of the Office of Strategic Influence” is the U.S.
>Army’s Psychological Operations Command (PSYOPS). The Times doesn’t
>mention, however, that PSYOPS has been accused of operating domestically
>as recently as the Kosovo war.
>
>In February 2000, reports in Dutch and French newspapers revealed that
>several officers from the 4th PSYOPS Group had worked in the news division
>at CNN's Atlanta headquarters as part of an “internship” program starting
>in the final days of the Kosovo War. Coverage of this disturbing story was
>scarce (see http://www.fair.org/activism/cnn-psyops.html), but after FAIR
>issued an Action Alert on the story, CNN stated that it had already
>terminated the program and acknowledged that it was “inappropriate.”
>
>Even if the PSYOPS officers working in the newsroom did not directly
>influence news reporting, the question remains of whether CNN may have
>allowed the military to conduct an intelligence-gathering mission against
>the network itself. The idea isn’t far-fetched-- according to Intelligence
>Newsletter (2/17/00), a rear admiral from the Special Operations Command
>told 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. One of CNN’s PSYOPS “interns” worked in the network’s
>satellite division. (During the Afghanistan war the Pentagon found a very
>direct way to “gain control”—it simply bought up all commercial satellite
>images of Afghanistan, in order to prevent media from accessing them.)
>
>It’s worth noting that the 4th PSYOPS group is the same group that staffed
>the National Security Council's now notorious Office of Public Diplomacy
>(OPD), which planted stories in the U.S. media supporting the Reagan
>Administration's Central America policies during the 1980s. Described by a
>senior U.S. official as a "vast psychological warfare operation of the
>kind the military conducts to influence a population in enemy territory"
>(Miami Herald, 7/19/87), the OPD was shut down after the Iran-Contra
>investigations, but not before influencing coverage in major outlets
>including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post
>(Extra!, 9-10/01).
>
>The OPD may be gone, but the Bush administration’s recent recess
>appointment of former OPD head Otto Reich as assistant secretary of state
>for Western Hemisphere affairs is not reassuring. It suggests, at best, a
>troubling indifference to Reich’s role in orchestrating the OPD’s
>deception of the American people.
>
>Indeed, as the Federation of American Scientists points out, “the Bush
>Administration’s insistent efforts to expand the scope of official secrecy
>have now been widely noted as a defining characteristic of the Bush
>presidency” (Secrecy News, 2/18/02). The administration’s refusal to
>disclose Enron-related information to the General Accounting Office is
>perhaps the most publicized of these efforts; another is Attorney General
>John Ashcroft’s October 12 memo urging federal agencies to resist Freedom
>Of Information Act requests.
>
>In addition, the Pentagon’s restrictive press policies throughout the war
>in Afghanistan have been an ongoing problem. Most recently, Washington
>Post reporter Doug Struck claims that U.S. soldiers threatened to shoot
>him if he proceeded with an attempt to investigate a site where civilians
>had been killed; Struck has stated that for him, the central question
>raised by the incident is whether the Pentagon is trying to “cover up” its
>actions and why it won’t “allow access by reporters to determine what
>they're doing here in Afghanistan” (CBS, “The Early Show,” 2/13/02).
>
>Taken together, these incidents and policies should raise alarm bells for
>media throughout the country. Democracy doesn’t work if the public does
>not have access to full and accurate information about its government.
>
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