Information Warfare: Pro-U.S.
information must prevail
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Information Warfare: Pro-U.S.
information must prevail
'The U.S. military must be able to perform the following three fundamental information warfare missions:1. Protect its own information systems,
2. Attack and influence the information systems of its adversaries, and
3. Leverage U.S. information to 'gain decisive advantage'.From: The Unintended Consequences of Information Age Technologies
"All war is based on deception." -- Sun Tzu, The Art of War
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/lieofthecentury.html
There is nothing new in a government lying to their people to start a war. Indeed because most people prefer living in peace to bloody and horrific death in war, any government that desires to initiate a war usually lies to their people to create the illusion that support for the war is the only possible choice they can make.
President McKinley told the American people that the USS Maine had been sunk in Havana Harbor by a Spanish mine. The American people, outraged by this apparent unprovoked attack, supported the Spanish American War. The Captain of the USS Maine had insisted the ship was sunk by a coal bin explosion, investigations after the war proved that such had indeed been the case. There had been no mine.
Hitler used this principle of lying to his own people to initiate an invasion. He told the people of Germany that Poland had attacked first. The Germans, convinced they were being threatened, followed Hitler into Poland and into World War 2.
FDR claimed Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack. It wasn't. The United States saw war with Japan as the means to get into war with Germany, which Americans opposed. So Roosevelt needed Japan to appear to strike first. Following an 8-step plan devised by the Office of Naval Intelligence, Roosevelt intentionally provoked Japan into the attack. Contrary to the official story, the fleet did not maintain radio silence, but sent messages intercepted and decoded by US intercept stations. Tricked by the lie of a surprise attack, Americans marched off to war.
President Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin to send Americans off to fight in Vietnam. There were no torpedoes in the water in the Gulf. LBJ took advantage of an inexperienced sonar man's report to goad Congress into escalating the Vietnam
It is inescapable historical reality that leaders of nations will lie to their people to trick them into wars they otherwise would have refused. It is not "conspiracy theory" to suggest that leaders of nations lie to trick their people into wars. It is undeniable fact.
This brings us to the present case. Did the government of the United States lie to the American people, more to the point, did President Bush and his Neocon associates lie to Congress, to initiate a war of conquest in Iraq?
This question has been given currency by a memo leaked from inside the British Government which clearly indicates a decision to go to war followed by the "fixing" of information around that policy. This is, as they say, a smoking gun.
But the fact is that long before this memo surfaced, it had become obvious that the US Government, aided by that of Great Britain, was lying to create the public support for a war in Iraq.
First off is Tony Blair's "Dodgy Dossier", a document released by the Prime Minister that made many of the claims used to support the push for war. The dossier soon collapsed when it was revealed that much of it had been plagiarized from a 12-year old student thesis paper!
The contents of the dossier, however much they seemed to create a good case for invasion, were obsolete and outdated. This use of material that could not possibly be relevant at the time is clear proof of a deliberate attempt to deceive.
Then there was the claim about the "Mobile biological weapons laboratories". Proffered in the absence of any real laboratories in the wake of the invasion, photos of these trailers were shown on all the US Mainstream Media, with the claim they while seeming to lack anything suggesting biological processing, these were part of a much larger assembly of multiple trailers that churned out biological weapons of mass destruction.
This claim fell apart when it was revealed that these trailers were nothing more than hydrogen gas generators used to inflate weather balloons. This fact was already known to both the US and UK, as a British company manufactured the units and sold them to Iraq.
Our third piece of evidence consists of documents which President Bush referenced as in his 2003 State of the Union Speech. According to Bush, these documents proved that Iraq was buying tons of uranium oxide, called "Yellow Cake" from Niger. Since Israel had bombed Iraq's nuclear power plant years before, it was claimed that the only reason Saddam would have for buying uranium oxide was to build bombs.
This hoax fell apart fast when it was pointed out that Iraq has a great deal of uranium ore inside their own borders and no need to import any from Niger or anywhere else. The I.A.E.A. then blew the cover off the fraud by announcing that the documents Bush had used were not only forgeries, but too obvious to believe that anyone in the Bush administration did not know they were forgeries!
Along with forged "Yellow Cake" documents and balloon inflators posing as bioweapons labs, the US was shown a steady barrage of spy photos taken from high flying aircraft and spacecraft. On the photos were circles and arrows and labels pointing to various fuzzy white blobs and identifying them as laboratories and storage areas for Saddam's massive weapons of mass destruction program. Nothing in the photos actually suggested what the blobby shapes were and inspections which followed the invasion, all of them turned out to be rather benign. One purported biological weapons lab turned out to be a bakery, and a claimed nuclear facility turned out to be a commercial mushroom farm. Not a single one of the photographed targets proved to be what the labels claimed that they were.
In the end, the real proof that we were lied to about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is that no weapons of mass destruction were ever found. That means that every single piece of paper that purported to prove that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was by default a fraud, a hoax, and a lie. There could be no evidence that supported the theory that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. In a way, the existance of any faked documents about Iraq's WMDs is actually an admission of guilt. If one is taking the time to create fake documents, the implication is that the faker is already aware that there are no genuine documents.
What the US Government had, ALL that they had, were copied student papers, forged "Yellow Cake" documents, balloon inflators posing as bioweapons labs, and photos with misleading labels on them. And somewhere along the line, someone decided to put those misleading labels on those photos, to pretend that balloon inflators are portable bioweapons labs, and to pass off 12-year old stolen student papers as contemporary analysis. And THAT shows an intention to deceive.
Lawyers call this "Mens Rea", which means "Guilty Mind". TV lawyer shows call it "Malice of forethought". This means that not only did the Bush Administration lie to the people and to the US Congress, but knew they were doing something illegal at the time that they did it.
All the talk about "Intelligence failure" is just another lie. There was no failure. Indeed the Army agents who erroneously claimed that missile tubes were parts for a uranium centrifuge received bonuses, while the Pentagon smeared Hans Blix, and John Bolton orchestrated the firing of Jose Bustani, the director of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, because Bustani was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad.
The President of the United States and his Neocon associates lied to the people of the United States to send them off on a war of conquest.
Defenders of the government will point to the cases listed at the top of the page as proof that lying to the people is a normal part of the leader's job and we should all get used to it. And because "Everybody does it" that we should not single out the present administration. But this is madness. We do not catch all the murderers, yet when we catch a murderer, we deal with them as harshly as possible, in order to deter more murderers.
Right now, we have the criminals at hand. and, while other leaders in history have lied to start wars, for the first time in history, the lie stands exposed while the war started with the lies still rages on, to the death and detriment of our young men and women in uniform. We cannot in good moral conscience ignore this lie, this crime, lest we encourage future leaders to continue to lie to use to send our kids off to pointless wars. Lying to start a war is more than an impeachable offence; it the highest possible crime a government can commit against their own people. Lying to start a war is not only missapropriation of the nation's military and the nation's money under false pretenses, but it is outright murder committed on a massive scale. Lying to start a war is a betrayal of the trust each and every person who serves in the military places in their civilian leadership. By lying to start a war, the Bsuh administration has told the military fatalities and their families that they have no right to know why they were sent to their deaths. It's none of their business.
Our nation is founded on the principle of rule with the consent of the governed. Because We The People do not consent to be lied to, a government that lies rules without the consent of the governed, and ruling without the consent of the governed is slavery.
You should be more than angry. You should be in a rage. You should be in a rage no less than that of the families of those young men and women who have been killed and maimed in this war started with a lie.You need to be in a rage and you need to act on that rage because even as I type these words, the same government that lied about Iraq's nuclear weapons is telling the exact same lies about Iran's nuclear capabilities. The writing is on the wall; having gotten away with lying to start the war in Iraq, the US Government will lie to start a war in Iran, and after that another, and after that another, and another and another and another because as long as you remain silent, and as long as you remain inactive, the liars have no reason to stop.
As long as you remain inactive, the liars have no reason to stop. None.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" - Edmund Burke
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security - "The Declaration of Independence"
New Scientist - 8th May 2004
http://www.frankfuredi.com/pdf/NewScientist1.pdf
"Local people can be highly effective during emergencies and are often the first to respond"
CAUGHT up in a large-scale tragedy such as a terrorist attack or earthquake, most people lose their heads and panic. Disorder reigns and social responsibility breaks down. That, at least, is the view of many governments and emergency planners, who prepare for disasters presuming that people will throw rationality to the wind.
Both the UK's draft Civil Contingencies Bill, which aims to increase the government's powers to deal with major catastrophes, and the Homeland Security Act in the US, with its "command and control" model of dealing with terrorist attacks, discount any helpful contribution from the public. Instead, they rely on top-down approaches run by technocrats who are often far removed from the scene. The unspoken assumption is that when disaster strikes, ordinary people cannot be trusted.
They have got it very wrong. There is a large body of research, dating back to the second world war, which shows that far from panicking, people in the throes of a catastrophe behave quite rationally and with greater social responsibility than usual. Some of this work was reviewed last week at a conference at the University of Delaware to mark the 40th anniversary of its Disaster Research Center. DRC researchers have long questioned what they describe as the "disaster mythology". Now they fear this mythology is undermining how nations cope with emergencies.
One of the first people to look at how people behave in an emergency was Enrico Quarantelli, co-founder of the DRC. In a 1954 review of data he observed that the frequency with which people panicked in such situations had been exaggerated and that panic was "relatively uncommon". This is consistent with experience during the second world war.
Take the bombing of Hamburg by the Royal Air Force in July 1943. The raids killed between 30,000 and 45,000 people and left more than 900,000 homeless. Yet reports by the Hamburg local authorities at the time stated that people responded in a remarkably orderly manner and quickly found shelter after the bombing, or offered it to others. Within five months the city's industrial production was back to 80 per cent of the level before the attack. The residents of Hiroshima were similarly cooperative and resilient after the US dropped the atomic bomb. Despite the fact that 75,000 people were killed out of a population of 245,000, within a few days essential services were restored and after a week economic life was back in full swing.
There are plenty more recent examples of how calm reigns over chaos. When the Chernobyl nuclear power station caught fire and released deadly radiation in 1986, the maintenance and emergency operatives at the plant did not panic and flee. Instead, many of them risked almost certain death to contain the damage and search for victims. When the first Scudmissiles fell on Israel during the Gulf war of 1990-91, people suffered greater anxiety and used the healthcare services more than usual, but within a few days the levels of anxiety subsided as the public adapted.
Among the most analysed incidents ever in terms of crowd behaviour are the Al-Qaida terrorist attacks on the US on 11 September 2001. All the research indicates that people behaved in an orderly and socially responsible manner. A review by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology of 726 published eyewitness statements on the behaviour of the evacuees reveals that every injured or disabled person who was interviewed reported being helped to safety by a colleague.
The tragedy of the "disaster mythology" is that it tends to lead to government emergency programmes cutting ordinary people out of the picture on the assumption that they may be incapacitated by fear. Yet local people can be highly effective during emergencies and are often the first to respond. Certainly during floods, earthquakes and other natural disasters, they are generally at the forefront of search and rescue operations. This spontaneous provision of assistance can make all the difference; it can save lives and help restore essential services.
Emergency planners on both sides of the Atlantic appear to have overlooked this. The UK draft Civil Contingencies Bill totally ignores the role that local communities might play if disaster strikes. In the same way, the US Homeland Security Act puts the onus for survival on technocrats. Concerned by the prospect that citizens will respond irrationally, officials withhold from them "disturbing" information that could help them, and governments attempt to manage a disaster and its aftermath through bureaucracy and superior technology.
It is time they realised that community resilience is a hugely important factor in limiting the damage caused by a terrorist attack or other catastrophe. Recognising this will do more to protect society than billions of dollars spent on new technologies.
Frank Furedi is professor of sociology at the University of Kent, UK. His book Therapy Culture: Cultivating vulnerability in an uncertain age was published this year by Routledge
http://www.guardian.co.uk/analysis/story/0,3604,1118096,00.html
Since the beginning of the war in Iraq, the US has sought not just to influence but to control all information, from both friend and foe
David Miller
Thursday January 8, 2004
The Guardian
"Information dominance" came of age during the conflict in Iraq. It is a little discussed but highly significant part of the US government strategy of "full spectrum dominance", integrating propaganda and news media into the military command structure more fundamentally than ever before.
In the past, propaganda involved managing the media. Information dominance, by contrast, sees little distinction between command and control systems, propaganda and journalism. They are all types of "weaponized information" to be deployed. As strategic expert Colonel Kenneth Allard noted, the 2003 attack on Iraq "will be remembered as a conflict in which information fully took its place as a weapon of war".
Nor is information dominance something dreamt up by the Bush White House. It is a mainstream US military doctrine that is also embraced in the UK. According to US army intelligence there are already 15 information dominance centres in the US, Kuwait and Baghdad.
Both the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in this country have staff assigned to "information operations". In future conflicts, according to the MoD, "maintaining morale as well as information dominance will rank as important as physical protection".
Achieving information dominance according to American military experts, involves two components: first, "building up and protecting friendly information; and degrading information received by your adversary". Seen in this context, embedding journalists in Iraq was a clear means of building up "friendly" information. An MoD-commissioned commercial analysis of the print output produced by embeds shows that 90% of their reporting was either "positive or neutral".
The second component is "the ability to deny, degrade, destroy and/or effectively blind enemy capabilities". "Unfriendly" information must be targeted. This is perhaps best illustrated by the attack on al-Jazeera's office in Kabul in 2001, which the Pentagon justified by claiming al-Qaida activity in the al-Jazeera office. As it turned out, this referred to broadcast interviews with Taliban officials. The various attacks on al-Jazeera in Kabul, Basra and Baghdad should also be seen in this context.
The evidence is that targeting of independent media and critics of the US is widening. The Pentagon is reportedly coordinating an "information operations road map", drafted by the Information Operations Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to Captain Gerald Mauer, the road map notes that information operations would be directed against an "adversary".
But when the paper got to the office of the undersecretary of defence for policy, it was changed to say that information operations would attempt to "disrupt, corrupt or usurp" adversarial decision-making. "In other words," notes retired US army colonel Sam Gardiner, "we will even go after friends if they are against what we are doing or want to do."
In the UK, according to Major Nigel Smith of the 15 Psychological Operations Group, staffing is to be expanded and strategic information operations "will take on a new importance" as a result of Iraq. Targeting unfriendly information is central to the post-conflict phase of reconstruction too. The collapse of distinctions between independent news media and psychological operations is striking.
The new TV service for Iraq was paid for by the Pentagon. In keeping with the philosophy of information dominance it was supplied, not by an independent news organisation, but by a defence contractor, Scientific Applications International Corporation (Saic). Its expertise in the area - according to its website - is in "information operations" and "information dominance".
The Saic effort ran into trouble. The Iraqi exile journalists it employed for the Iraq Media Network (at a cost $20m over three months) were too independent for the Coalition Provisional Authority. Within weeks, occupying authority chief Paul Bremer introduced controls on the IMN. He also closed down some Iraqi-run newspapers and radio and TV stations. According to Index on Censorship, IMN managers were told to drop the readings from the Koran, the vox-pops (usually critical of the US invasion) and even to run their content past the wife of a US- friendly Iraqi Kurdish leader for a pre-broadcast check. The station rejected the demands.
But this did not stop Bremer, and further incidents culminated in a nine-point list of "prohibited activity" issued in June 2003. Bremer would reserve the power to advise the IMN on any aspect of its performance, including matters of content and the power to hire and fire staff. Thus, as Index on Censorship notes: "The man in absolute authority over the country's largest, richest and best-equipped media network is also his own regulator and regulator of his rivals, with recourse to the US Army to enforce his rulings."
Attacks on al-Jazeera continue. In September 2003 the Iraq governing council voted to ban reports from al-Jazeera and al- Arabiya on the grounds that they incite violence. As evidence of this, one member of the Iraqi National Congress who voted for the ban, noted that the TV stations describe the opposition to the occupation as the resistance. "They're not the resistance, they are thugs and criminals," he said.
But the Iraqi people appear not to share this view of al-Jazeera. Those with satellite access to al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya are more likely to trust them over IMN. As the experience of IMN shows, achieving dominance is not always a straightforward matter. This is precisely why the strategy for "unfriendly information" is to "deny, degrade and destroy".
· David Miller is editor of Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq
staff.stir.ac.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/analysis/story/0,3604,1118096,00.html
By Jim Wagner <jwagner@jupitermedia.com>
January 16, 2004
http://www.internetnews.com/infra/article.php/3300731
While our grandparents and parents had to deal with world wars fought on land, sea and air, future generations are going to have to worry about the threat of attack on a new level: cyberspace.
A study released Tuesday by Gartner Research predicts voice over IP and other converging network technologies make the possibility of a national-level cyberwar possible by 2009.
In the next couple years, the U.S. and other countries will likely have the capability to wage cyberwar, the Gartner report states, while "brute force," or distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, on VoIP systems could become commonplace by 2007.
The research points to the telecommunications industry's movement away from a circuit-switched telephone network to the more efficient packet-switching The migration opens critical communication services to Internet-like attacks.
VoIP is the most vulnerable, the report indicates, as the inherent latency found in the communication medium makes it an easy target for an enemy to launch a DDoS attack.
"Just like standard IP networking equipment, VoIP-specific equipment is susceptible to traditional IP threats such as worms, viruses and unauthorized system access," the report stated.
Signaling System 7 the circuit-switched technology used to route telephone calls today, is pulling double duty on many of today's telephone networks. Not only is it handling the day-to-day copper-wire telephone traffic but also being tapped more often by IP networks passing off data information between telephone providers.
Technologies like SS7, LAN/WAN telephony and the data switches used by the telephone companies will find itself the target of many of these communications-based attacks.
First a fad, VoIP as a viable communications alternative is gaining serious clout in the U.S. Telephone carriers AT&T, Qwest, SBC, Chart and Verizon, Chart have rollouts planned for this year, to stay in reach of startup Vonage's network.
Government oversight in the technology is minimal, with FCC Chairman Michael Powell taking a hands-off approach and putting discussion of the technology in working groups. A bill introduced Tuesday by U.S.
Sen. John Sununu looks to keep VoIP out of federal and state regulations altogether.
"VoIP providers should be free from state regulation, free from the complexity of FCC regulations, free to develop new solutions to address social needs, and free to amaze consumers," Sununu said recently.
While certain segments of the U.S. government are seeking unfettered VoIP deployments, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has been looking at the vulnerabilities the technology brings to critical communications services.
The National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) published "Risk Management: An Essential Guide To Protecting Critical Assets," in November, 2002, mainly as a guideline for land-based threats to communications facilities in the U.S. However, it included the Internet as a source of critical information services.
"Any organization that connects critical networks to the Internet must be aware of events in the larger environment," the report stated. "When short-term periods of intense politically-motivated protests take place, the infrastructure community can expect that it may be attacked, physically or via cyber means, regardless of the individual organization's involvement in the event being protested."
The NIPC reports private sector companies should focus on risk management, not just risk avoidance. It suggests fives steps every company should take: asset, threat, vulnerability and risk assessments as well as identification of countermeasure options.
The Gartner report stated preparation for a cyberwarfare attack should be proportional to the perceived risk. The tools are out there, the report said, to protect the network.
"Most security technology, when used in conjunction with 'best practices,' is appropriate to the proportional risk presented by the threat of cyberwarfare.
http://www.internetnews.com/infra/article.php/3300731
By JAY PRICE
Raleigh News & Observer http://newsobserver.com/
http://www.naplesnews.com/03/07/neapolitan/d948485a.htm
July 02, 2003
FORT BRAGG, N.C. - Except for the woodland-camouflage dress code and a discreet lack of windows, the new building - with its state-of-the-art digital television and radio production rooms, studios and printing presses - could easily belong to a sophisticated marketing firm.
In a way it does. But the "firm" is the U.S. Army's 4th Psychological Operations Group, and its "products" are whatever messages the Defense Department wants to sell.
The group held an open house Monday to show off its new $8.1 million Special Operations Forces Media Operations Complex. It was a rare look inside the Pentagon's central production facility for "psyops" products such as fliers, posters and television and radio segments aimed at the hearts and minds of, well, those the military wants to persuade.
Since 9/11, those have included civilians and enemy troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. More than 150 million fliers, all of them produced at Fort Bragg and many of them printed there, have been spread over those countries, said Col. James Treadwell, the 4th POG's commander. About 16,000 hours of radio messages produced by the group were transmitted to Afghan listeners and another 4,000 hours to Iraqis, he said.
The psychological-operations campaign in Iraq reportedly cost tens of millions of dollars and has been called the biggest in history. It centered on Arabic-language leaflets and radio and television scripts designed by the 4th POG to encourage mass surrenders and erode support for Saddam Hussein.
Psyops troops are still in Iraq, but their efforts have shifted to calming and winning over civilians.
Like a marketing company, psyops soldiers often perform marketing studies before designing products. They also conduct detailed analyses of results. Army officials say it still may be a few months before the official report on the Iraq effort is complete. Civilian experts say the campaign probably had mixed results, but still likely saved thousands of lives on both sides by taking some of the fight out of the Iraqis.
Psyops has been busy lately, and not just in Iraq and Afghanistan: The staff of the media complex is supporting nearly 900 psyops troops spread across 13 countries, Treadwell said.
Until now, the psyops troops had to make do with facilities scattered around the base in several buildings, many of them predating the Vietnam War. The Pentagon's willingness to invest in the new media complex is a sign of its growing confidence in the value of psyops, he said.
"This facility marks past success and emphasizes our potential for future contributions," Treadwell said.
Lots of future contributions: The four new presses can churn out 1 million leaflets in a single day. The new, fully digital presses and audio and video equipment could cut the amount of time it takes to produce a given product by 20 percent or more.
http://www.naplesnews.com/03/07/neapolitan/d948485a.htm
http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles249.htm
Paul Bremer has ordered his legal department in Baghdad to draw up rules for press censorship. A joke, I concluded, when one of the newly styled Coalition Provisional Authority officials tipped me off last week. But no, it really is true. Two months after "liberating" Iraq, the Anglo- American authorities and their boss Paul Bremer - whose habit of wearing combat boots with a black suit continues to amaze his colleagues - have decided to control the new and free Iraqi press.
Newspapers that publish "wild stories", material deemed provocative or capable of inciting ethnic violence, will be threatened or shut down. It's for the good of the Iraqi people, you understand. A controlled press is a responsible press - which is exactly what Saddam Hussein used to say about the trashy newspapers his regime produced. It must seem all too familiar to the people of Baghdad.
Now let's be fair. Many stories in the emerging newspapers of Baghdad are untrue. There is no tradition of checking reports, of giving opponents the opportunity to be heard. There are constant articles about the behaviour of American troops. One paper has claimed that US soldiers distributed postcards of naked women to schoolgirls - they even published the pictures, with Japanese script on the cards. Even the most cynical Westerner can see how this kind of lie can stir up sentiment against Iraq's new foreign occupiers.
"The people of Iraq have fallen," Waleed Rabia, a 19-year-old student, wrote in the new paper Al- Mujaha. "Invaders are in our country. The wild animals of this jungle called a world are trying to rip us apart. We've been through hard times under the old regime, but we were better then than we are now ... Look at those girls who are having sex with the Americans in their tanks, or in the bathrooms of the Palestine Hotel ... What about those Muslim girls marrying Christian foreigners? No one can accept this as a true Muslim or true Iraqi."
It isn't difficult to understand the fury that this kind of article might arouse - and the idea that the Anglo-American presence is as awful as Saddam's torturers betrays a truly eccentric mind - though it would help if certain Iraqi police officers were not admitting that they were arranging "dates" for US troops.
What the Iraqis need, of course, is journalistic help rather than censorship, courses in reporting - by experienced journalists from real democracies (rather than the version Mr Bremer seems set on creating) - rather than a colonial-style suppression of free speech.
But we're now hearing that imams in the mosques may be censored if they provoke unrest - this would obviously include the imam of the Rashid Street mosque in Baghdad, outside of which I heard him preaching last week. The Americans must leave, he said. Immediately. Subversive stuff. Definitely likely to provoke violence. So goodbye in due course, I suppose to the Rashid Street imam. And of course, we all know how the first pro-American Iraqi government of "New Iraq" will treat the laws. It will enthusiastically adopt the Western censorship law, just as former colonies almost always take over the repressive legislation of their former imperial masters.
I can obviously see the kind of stories that must be, at the least, discouraged. Take last week's extraordinary UN announcement - mercifully ignored in most of the Western press - that Afghanistan is once more the world's Number One producer of opium. The hateful Taliban banned all poppy production under their vicious rule, cutting off the Northern Alliance warlords from their narcotics production. But since America's "success" in routing the Taliban, the drug barons - the very same Northern Alliance lads who were US allies in the "war on terror" - have gone back into business.
Not one American official dares to comment on this shameful fact. Quite a memorial to the thousands who died in the international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001. As for the Iraqis, what lessons are they to draw? If the Americans can let the narco-terrorists rule again in Afghanistan, why should they be more moral in Baghdad where drugs are reappearing for sale on the streets, courtesy - you guessed it - of the Afghan drugs trade. So censor the story.
Then we have the German UN arms inspector Peter Franck telling Der Spiegel magazine that Colin Powell's evidence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, which he presented to the UN Security Council in February, was merely "a big bluff". The former UN inspector Scott Ritter - who all along told audiences before the war that Saddam had no WMD - appears to have been telling the truth. Saddam, he says, "couldn't have destroyed weapons of mass destruction without leaving traces". So much for Donald Rumsfeld's cheerful suggestion that the Iraqi dictator had got rid of his nasties just before the Americans and British staged their illegal invasion. "Britain and the United States should admit they lied," Ritter now suggests. Censor the story.
Out at Baghdad airport, the Americans are now holding 3,000 prisoners without any intention of putting them on trial or charging them with offences. Where is Tariq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister? The Americans say they have him. But we don't know where. What's he being asked? About Saddam's weapons of mass destruction? Or - my own guess - how much he knows about America's close relations with Saddam after 1978? In fact, Aziz knows far too much about that shameful alliance; after all, he met Donald Rumsfeld several times. One thing's for sure. There'll be no trial for Tariq Aziz. Keeping him silent will be the first priority. But that's not something the Iraqis should learn about. Censor the story.
While we're still on the subject of Baghdad airport, it's important to note that American forces at the facility are now coming under attack every night - I repeat, every night - from small arms fire. So are American military planes flying into the airbase. Some US aircrews have now adopted the old Vietnam tactic of corkscrewing tightly down on to the runways instead of risking sniper fire during a conventional final approach. The source is impeccable (it's within the Third Infantry Division, if the int. boys want to know). But what will that tell the Iraqis? That the Americans cannot keep order? That a resistance movement is well under way? Censor the story.
And what to print? Well, there's the charnel house of mass graves being discovered every day, the visits to the Saddamite torture rooms, the continued and uproarious memoirs of the man who claims to have been Saddam's double - anything, in fact, which will remind the people of how awful Saddam truly was and take their mind off what is really being done to their country. Bremer is trying to quick-fix his new "consultative" council of wise Iraqis prior to the famous democratic election which has been briefly postponed. And meanwhile he's fired a quarter of a million Iraqi soldiers from their jobs - ready, no doubt, to join the nascent resistance movement. Yes, it truly is time for press censorship in Iraq.
(Robert Fisk, The Independant, 11 June 2003)
http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles249.htm
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_28-4-2003_pg4_6 http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=400409
By Robert Fisk
Samia, a brave and honest woman, was almost destroyed as a human being by that American tank crew 26 April 2003
What is a journalist’s life worth? I ask this question for a number of reasons, some of them – frankly – quite revolting. Two days ago, I went to visit one of my colleagues wounded in the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Samia Nakhoul is a Reuters correspondent, a young woman reporter who is married to another colleague, the Financial Times correspondent in Beirut. Part of an American tank shell was embedded in her brain – a millimetre difference in entry point and she would have been half paralysed – after an M1A1 Abrams tank fired a round at the Reuters office in Baghdad, in the Palestine Hotel, last week.
Samia, a brave and honourable lady who has reported the cruelty of the Lebanese civil war at first hand for many years, was almost destroyed as a human being by that tank crew.
At the time, General Buford Blount of the 3rd Infantry Division, told a lie: he said that sniper fire had been directed at the tank – on the Joumhouriyah Bridge over the Tigris river – and that the fire had ended “after the tank had fired” at the Palestine Hotel. I was between the tank and the hotel when the shell was fired. There was no sniper fire – nor any rocket-propelled grenade fire, as the American officer claimed – at the time. French television footage of the tank, running for minutes before the attack, shows the same thing. The soundtrack – until the blinding, repulsive golden flash from the tank barrel – is silent.
Samia Nakhoul wasn’t the only one to be hit. Her Ukrainian cameraman, father of a small child, was killed. So was a Spanish cameraman on the floor above. And then yesterday I had to read, in the New York Times, that Colin Powell had justified the murder – yes, murder – of these two journalists. This former four-star general – I’m talking about Mr Powell, not the liar who runs the 3rd Infantry Division – actually said, and I quote: “According to a US military review of the incident, our forces responded to hostile fire appearing to come from a location later identified as the Palestine Hotel... Our review of the April 8th incident indicates that the use of force was justified.”
But it gets worse. A few hours before I visited Samia, I was in Beirut with Mohamed Jassem al-Ali, the managing director of the Qatar-based Arab al-Jazeera channel. On that same day – 8 April – that the American tank fired at the Reuters office in Baghdad, an American aircraft fired a missile at the al-Jazeera office in Baghdad. Mr al-Ali has given me a copy of his letter to Victoria Clarke, the US Assistant Secretary of State of Defence for Public Affairs in Washington, sent on 24 February this year. In the letter, he gives the address and the map coordinates of the station’s office in Baghdad – Lat: 33.19/29.08, Lon 44.24/03.63 – adding that civilian journalists would be working in the building.
The Americans were outraged at al-Jazeera’s coverage of the civilian victims of US bombing raids. And on 8 April, less than three hours before the Reuters office was attacked, an American aircraft fired a single missile at the al-Jazeera office — at those precise map coordinates Mr al-Ali had sent to Ms Clarke – and killed the station’s reporter Tareq Ayoub. “We find these events,” Mr al-Ali wrote in his slightly inaccurate English, “unjustifiable, unacceptable, arousing all forms of anger and rejection and most of all need an explanation.”
And what did he get? Victoria Clarke wrote a letter that was as inappropriate as it was “economical with the truth”. She offered her “condolences” to the family and colleagues of Mr Ayoub and then went on to write a preachy note to al-Jazeera. “Being close to the action means being close to danger,” she wrote. “...we have gone to extraordinary [sic] lengths in Iraq to avoid civilian casualties. Unfortunately, even our best efforts will not prevent some innocents from getting caught in the crossfire [sic]... Sometimes this results in tragedy. War by its very nature is tragic and sad...”
Pardon me? Al-Jazeera asks why its office was targeted and Ms Clarke tells the dead man’s employer that war is “sad”? I don’t believe this. General Blount lied about his tank crew on the Tigris river. “General” Powell went along with this lie. And now Ms Clarke – who clearly was told to write what she wrote since her letter is so trite – does not even attempt to explain why an American jet killed Al Jazeera’s reporter (just like an American missile was fired at Al Jazeera’s office in Kabul in 2001).
A Ukrainian, a Spaniard, an Arab. They all died within hours of each other. I suspect they were killed because the US – someone in the Pentagon though not, I’m sure, Ms Clarke – decided to try to “close down” the press. Of course, American journalists are not investigating this. They should – because they will be next.
As for Mohamed al-Ali, he has the painful experience of knowing that he gave the Pentagon the map coordinates to kill his own reporter. Who was the pilot of the American jet that fired that missile at al-Jazeera? Why did he fire? What were the coordinates? Who was the American tank officer who blasted a piece of metal into Samia’s brain? A day after he fired, I climbed on his tank and asked the soldier on top if he was responsible. “I don’t know anything about that, sir,” he replied. And I believe him. Like I believe in Father Christmas and fairies at the bottom of my garden. —Independent
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_28-4-2003_pg4_6 http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=400409
http://www.news24.com/News24/Entertainment/Abroad/0,,2-1225-1243_1347906,00.html
Apr 15 2003 12:34:57:700PM
The producer of a US TV series about Hitler has been fired for comparing the climate of fear that led to the rise of Nazism to the current situation in the United States.
Los Angeles - The producer of an American television series about Hitler has been fired for comparing the climate of fear that led to the rise of Nazism to the current situation in the United States.
According to Monday's Los Angeles Times, Ed Gernon, the executive producer of Hitler: The Rise of Evil, was fired by a Canadian production company at the behest of the CBS network after his controversial comments appeared in TV Guide magazine last week.
Scheduled to air next month, the drama stars Robert Carlyle as Hitler and examines the conditions that led to the rise of the notorious dictator.
Gernon stated his belief that fear fuelled both the Bush administration's adoption of a pre-emptive-strike policy and the public's acceptance of it.
"It basically boils down to an entire nation gripped by fear who ultimately chose to give up their civil rights and plunged the whole nation into war," Gernon told TV Guide.
"I can't think of a better time to examine this history than now. When an entire country becomes afraid for their sovereignty, for their safety, they will embrace ideas and strategies and positions that they might not embrace otherwise."
Fearing controversy over the project, which is the first American docu-drama to try to explain the rise of Hitler, CBS issued a strong condemnation of Gernon's comments.
His "personal opinions are not shared by CBS and misrepresent the network's motivation for broadcasting this film", the network said.
"It is very important that viewers understand that these views are not reflected in the tone or the content of the miniseries, which recounts the rise of Hitler to power and portrays him as the ruthless, maniacal force he was." - Sapa-DPA
http://www.news24.com/News24/Entertainment/Abroad/0,,2-1225-1243_1347906,00.html
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=395412
09 April 2003 - Independent
First the Americans killed the correspondent of al-Jazeera yesterday and wounded his cameraman. Then, within four hours, they attacked the Reuters television bureau in Baghdad, killing one of its cameramen and a cameraman for Spain's Tele 5 channel and wounding four other members of the Reuters staff.
Was it possible to believe this was an accident? Or was it possible that the right word for these killings – the first with a jet aircraft, the second with an M1A1 Abrams tank – was murder? These were not, of course, the first journalists to die in the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Terry Lloyd of ITV was shot dead by American troops in southern Iraq, who apparently mistook his car for an Iraqi vehicle. His crew are still missing. Michael Kelly of The Washington Post tragically drowned in a canal. Two journalists have died in Kurdistan. Two journalists – a German and a Spaniard – were killed on Monday night at a US base in Baghdad, with two Americans, when an Iraqi missile exploded amid them.
And we should not forget the Iraqi civilians who are being killed and maimed by the hundred and who – unlike their journalist guests – cannot leave the war and fly home. So the facts of yesterday should speak for themselves. Unfortunately for the Americans, they make it look very like murder.
The US jet turned to rocket al-Jazeera's office on the banks of the Tigris at 7.45am local time yesterday. The television station's chief correspondent in Baghdad, Tariq Ayoub, a Jordanian-Palestinian, was on the roof with his second cameraman, an Iraqi called Zuheir, reporting a pitched battle near the bureau between American and Iraqi troops. Mr Ayoub's colleague Maher Abdullah recalled afterwards that both men saw the plane fire the rocket as it swooped toward their building, which is close to the Jumhuriya Bridge upon which two American tanks had just appeared.
"On the screen, there was this battle and we could see bullets flying and then we heard the aircraft," Mr Abdullah said.
"The plane was flying so low that those of us downstairs thought it would land on the roof – that's how close it was. We actually heard the rocket being launched. It was a direct hit – the missile actually exploded against our electrical generator. Tariq died almost at once. Zuheir was injured."
Now for America's problems in explaining this little saga. Back in 2001, the United States fired a cruise missile at al-Jazeera's office in Kabul – from which tapes of Osama bin Laden had been broadcast around the world. No explanation was ever given for this extraordinary attack on the night before the city's "liberation"; the Kabul correspondent, Taiseer Alouni, was unhurt. By the strange coincidence of journalism, Mr Alouni was in the Baghdad office yesterday to endure the USAF's second attack on al-Jazeera.
Far more disturbing, however, is the fact that the al-Jazeera network – the freest Arab television station, which has incurred the fury of both the Americans and the Iraqi authorities for its live coverage of the war – gave the Pentagon the co-ordinates of its Baghdad office two months ago and received assurances that the bureau would not be attacked.
Then on Monday, the US State Department's spokesman in Doha, an Arab-American called Nabil Khouri, visited al-Jazeera's offices in the city and, according to a source within the Qatari satellite channel, repeated the Pentagon's assurances. Within 24 hours, the Americans had fired their missile into the Baghdad office.
The next assault, on Reuters, came just before midday when an Abrams tank on the Jamhuriya Bridge suddenly pointed its gun barrel towards the Palestine Hotel where more than 200 foreign journalists are staying to cover the war from the Iraqi side. Sky Television's David Chater noticed the barrel moving. The French television channel France 3 had a crew in a neighbouring room and videotaped the tank on the bridge. The tape shows a bubble of fire emerging from the barrel, the sound of a detonation and then pieces of paintwork falling past the camera as it vibrates with the impact.
In the Reuters bureau on the 15th floor, the shell exploded amid the staff. It mortally wounded a Ukrainian cameraman, Taras Protsyuk, who was also filming the tanks, and seriously wounded another member of the staff, Paul Pasquale from Britain, and two other journalists, including Reuters' Lebanese-Palestinian reporter Samia Nakhoul. On the next floor, Tele 5's cameraman Jose Couso was badly hurt. Mr Protsyuk died shortly afterwards. His camera and its tripod were left in the office, which was swamped with the crew's blood. Mr Couso had a leg amputated but he died half an hour after the operation.
The Americans responded with what all the evidence proves to be a straightforward lie. General Buford Blount of the US 3rd Infantry Division – whose tanks were on the bridge – announced that his vehicles had come under rocket and rifle fire from snipers in the Palestine Hotel, that his tank had fired a single round at the hotel and that the gunfire had then ceased. The general's statement, however, was untrue.
I was driving on a road between the tanks and the hotel at the moment the shell was fired – and heard no shooting. The French videotape of the attack runs for more than four minutes and records absolute silence before the tank's armament is fired. And there were no snipers in the building. Indeed, the dozens of journalists and crews living there – myself included – have watched like hawks to make sure that no armed men should ever use the hotel as an assault point.
This is, one should add, the same General Blount who boasted just over a month ago that his crews would be using depleted uranium munitions – the kind many believe to be responsible for an explosion of cancers after the 1991 Gulf War – in their tanks. For General Blount to suggest, as he clearly does, that the Reuters camera crew was in some way involved in shooting at Americans merely turns a meretricious statement into a libellous one.
Again, we should remember that three dead and five wounded journalists do not constitute a massacre – let alone the equivalence of the hundreds of civilians being maimed by the invasion force. And it is a truth that needs to be remembered that the Iraqi regime has killed a few journalists of its own over the years, with tens of thousands of its own people. But something very dangerous appeared to be getting loose yesterday. General Blount's explanation was the kind employed by the Israelis after they have killed the innocent. Is there therefore some message that we reporters are supposed to learn from all this? Is there some element in the American military that has come to hate the press and wants to take out journalists based in Baghdad, to hurt those whom our Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has maliciously claimed to be working "behind enemy lines". Could it be that this claim – that international correspondents are in effect collaborating with Mr Blunkett's enemy (most Britons having never supported this war in the first place) – is turning into some kind of a death sentence?
I knew Mr Ayoub. I have broadcast during the war from the rooftop on which he died. I told him then how easy a target his Baghdad office would make if the Americans wanted to destroy its coverage – seen across the Arab world – of civilian victims of the bombing. Mr Protsyuk of Reuters often shared the Palestine Hotel's elevator with me. Samia Nakhoul, who is 42, has been a friend and colleague since the 1975-90 Lebanese civil war. She is married to the Financial Times correspondent David Gardner.
Yesterday afternoon, she lay covered in blood in a Baghdad hospital. And General Blount dared to imply that this innocent woman and her brave colleagues were snipers. What, I wonder, does this tell us about the war in Iraq?
'The American forces knew exactly what this hotel is'
The Sky News correspondent David Chater was in the Palestine Hotel when the hotel was hit by American tank fire. This is his account of what happened.
"I was about to go out on to the balcony when there was a huge explosion, then shouts and screams from people along our corridor. They were shouting, 'Somebody's been hit. Can somebody find a doctor?' They were saying they could see blood and bone.
"There were a lot of French journalists screaming, 'Get a doctor, get a doctor'. There was a great sense of panic because these walls are very thin. "We saw the tanks up on the bridge. They started firing across the bank. The shells were landing either side of us at what we thought were military targets. Then we were hit. We are in the middle of a tank battle.
"I don't understand why they were doing that. There was no fire coming out of this hotel – everyone knows it's full of journalists.
"Everybody is putting on flak jackets. Everybody is running for cover. We now feel extremely vulnerable and we are now going to say goodbye to you." The line was cut but minutes later Chater resumed his report, saying journalists had been watching American forces from their balconies and the troops had surely been aware of their presence.
"They knew exactly what this hotel is. They know the press corps is here. I don't know why they are trying to target journalists. There are awful scenes around me. There's a Reuters tent just a few yards away from me where people are in tears. It makes you realise how vulnerable you are. What are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to carry on if American shells are targeting Western journalists?"
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=395412
27 Mar 2003
The Pentagon has threatened to fire on the satellite uplink positions of independent journalists in Iraq, according to veteran BBC war correspondent Kate Adie.
"I was told by a senior officer in the Pentagon," she said, "that if uplinks - that is the television signals out of... Bhagdad, for example - were detected by any planes ... above Bhagdad... they'd be fired down on. Even if they were journalists," she told The Sunday Show on Irish public radio network RTE. She said the source responded to her concern with "Who cares... They've been warned."
Recall for context that when the Al-Jazeera studio in Kabul was bombed it was suggested that the weapons had simply homed in on radio signals without caring who was transmitting. More follows as soon as we have it...
http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=3241§ionID=15
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=387592
All across the Middle East, they are deploying by the thousand. In the deserts of Kuwait, in Amman, in northern Iraq, in Turkey, in Israel and in Baghdad itself. There must be 7,000 journalists and crews "in theatre", as the more jingoistic of them like to say. In Qatar, a massive press centre has been erected for journalists who will not see the war. How many times General Tommy Franks will spin his story to the press at the nine o'clock follies, no one knows. He doesn't even like talking to journalists.
But the journalistic resources being laid down in the region are enormous. The BBC alone has 35 reporters in the Middle East, 17 of them "embedded" – along with hundreds of reporters from the American networks and other channels – in military units. Once the invasion starts, they will lose their freedom to write what they want. There will be censorship. And, I'll hazard a guess right now, we shall see many of the British and American journalists back to their old trick of playing toy soldiers, dressing themselves up in military costumes for their nightly theatrical performances on television. Incredibly, several of the American networks have set up shop in the Kurdish north of Iraq with orders not to file a single story until war begins – in case this provokes the Iraqis to expel their network reporters from Baghdad.
The orchestration will be everything, the pictures often posed, the angles chosen by "minders", much as the Iraqis will try to do the same thing in Baghdad. Take yesterday's front-page pictures of massed British troops in Kuwait, complete with arranged tanks and perfectly formatted helicopters. This was the perfectly planned photo-op. Of course, it won't last.
Here's a few guesses about our coverage of the war to come. American and British forces use thousands of depleted uranium (DU) shells – widely regarded by 1991 veterans as the cause of Gulf War syndrome as well as thousands of child cancers in present day Iraq – to batter their way across the Kuwaiti-Iraqi frontier. Within hours, they will enter the city of Basra, to be greeted by its Shia Muslim inhabitants as liberators. US and British troops will be given roses and pelted with rice – a traditional Arab greeting – as they drive "victoriously" through the streets. The first news pictures of the war will warm the hearts of Messrs Bush and Blair. There will be virtually no mention by reporters of the use of DU munitions.
But in Baghdad, reporters will be covering the bombing raids that are killing civilians by the score and then by the hundred. These journalists, as usual, will be accused of giving "comfort to the enemy while British troops are fighting for their lives". By now, in Basra and other "liberated" cities south of the capital, Iraqis are taking their fearful revenge on Saddam Hussein's Baath party officials. Men are hanged from lamp-posts. Much television footage of these scenes will have to be cut to sanitise the extent of the violence.
Far better for the US and British governments will be the macabre discovery of torture chambers and "rape-rooms" and prisoners with personal accounts of the most terrible suffering at the hands of Saddam's secret police. This will "prove" how right "we" are to liberate these poor people. Then the US will have to find the "weapons of mass destruction" that supposedly provoked this bloody war. In the journalistic hunt for these weapons, any old rocket will do for the moment.
Bunkers allegedly containing chemical weapons will be cordoned off – too dangerous for any journalist to approach, of course. Perhaps they actually do contain VX or anthrax. But for the moment, the all-important thing for Washington and London is to convince the world that the casus belli was true – and reporters, in or out of military costume, will be on hand to say just that.
Baghdad is surrounded and its defenders ordered to surrender. There will be fighting between Shias and Sunnis around the slums of the city, the beginning of a ferocious civil conflict for which the invading armies are totally unprepared. US forces will sweep past Baghdad to his home city of Tikrit in their hunt for Saddam Hussein. Bush and Blair will appear on television to speak of their great "victories". But as they are boasting, the real story will begin to be told: the break-up of Iraqi society, the return of thousands of Basra refugees from Iran, many of them with guns, all refusing to live under western occupation.
In the north, Kurdish guerrillas will try to enter Kirkuk, where they will kill or "ethnically cleanse" many of the city's Arab inhabitants. Across Iraq, the invading armies will witness terrible scenes of revenge which can no longer be kept off television screens. The collapse of the Iraqi nation is now under way ...
Of course, the Americans and British just might get into Baghdad in three days for their roses and rice water. That's what the British did in 1917. And from there, it was all downhill.
'Inevitable revenge' – for the executions of Saddam's Baath party officials which no one actually said were inevitable.
'Stubborn' or 'suicidal' – to be used when Iraqi forces fight rather than retreat.
'Allegedly' – for all carnage caused by Western forces.
'At last, the damning evidence' – used when reporters enter old torture chambers.
'Officials here are not giving us much access' – a clear sign that reporters in Baghdad are confined to their hotels.
'Life goes on' – for any pictures of Iraq's poor making tea.
'Remnants' – allegedly 'diehard' Iraqi troops still shooting at the Americans but actually the first signs of a resistance movement dedicated to the 'liberation' of Iraq from its new western occupiers.
'Newly liberated' – for territory and cities newly occupied by the Americans or British.
'What went wrong?' – to accompany pictures illustrating the growing anarchy in Iraq as if it were not predicted.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=387592
By John Lettice Posted: 13/03/2003 at 17:10 GMT
Should war in the Gulf commence, the Pentagon proposes to take radical new steps in media relations - 'unauthorised' journalists will be shot at. Speaking on The Sunday Show on Ireland's RTE1 last Sunday veteran war reporter Kate Adie said she had been warned by a senior Pentagon official that uplinks, i.e. TV broadcasts or satellite phones, that are detected by US aircraft are likely to be fired on.
Bush pere's Iraq war featured tight control of the media, but the current administration intends to go rather further. According to Adie (who, overseas readers should be aware, is effectively a saint in the UK), the Pentagon is vetting journalists who propose to cover the war, and is taking control of their comms equipment. This presumably will ease the logistics of managing the hacks quite considerably, because if the US has control of all the gear, then any gear it doesn't know about that starts broadcasting is presumably a target.
According to Adie the official told her: "There is a 'no' list... they have been warned." We presume that US forces will not be specifically trying to kill journalists - that escalation sounds more like the next war to us. But by warning of the dangers, the US is providing further discouragement for the few journalists who'll attempt to report from behind Iraqi lines, or to 'freelance' outside the control of the US authorities. And should they get one or two while taking out unidentified communications systems, well, they've covered themselves. They should however bear in mind that should Saint Adie be in the slightest bit damaged, no force on earth will be strong enough to save Tony Blair from the British public.
Adie's remarks came as part of a discussion of war reporting and media freedom which also involved author Phillip Knightley, New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges and former Irish Times editor Connor Brady. The whole discussion is well worth listening to, and we particularly liked Hedges' put-down of CNN: "CNN survives from war to war; as soon as the war starts they become part of the problem."
By CONNIE CASS Associated Press Writer
March 10, 2003, 2:52 PM EST
WASHINGTON -- A Cold War-era office with a shadowy name and a colorful history of exposing Soviet deceptions is back in business, this time watching Iraq.
The Counter-Disinformation/Misinformation Team's moniker is more impressive than its budget. It's a crew of two toiling in anonymity at the State Department, writing reports they are prohibited by law from disseminating to the U.S. public.
The operation has challenged some fantastic claims over the years -- a U.S. military lab invented AIDS, rich Americans kidnapped foreign babies for their organs, the CIA plotted to kill Pope John Paul II.
Since the office reopened in October, it's been responding to Iraqi claims about America, which tend to be more plausible and sometimes remain in dispute.
In coordination with the CIA, FBI and others, the team helps U.S. embassies identify and rebut other nations' disinformation, most often fabrications about the United States planted in foreign newspapers or television shows and, these days, on the Internet.
It's part of a broader Bush administration project to shore up America's reputation when sentiment against a possible war with Iraq is running high overseas.
It's not the stuff of James Bond movies, but disinformation has long been a tool of the world's secret operatives, including America's.
Reports that a new Office of Strategic Influence might dabble in disinformation caused such an uproar this year that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered it closed, insisting the Pentagon doesn't spread lies.
Even so, in Afghanistan last year, the U.S. military dropped leaflets with a doctored photograph showing Osama bin Laden beardless in a Western-style suit. And some of the administration's claims about links between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida have been stretched.
In these days of war preparation, the pressure to peddle the U.S. version of events is enormous, and civil libertarians question how far the government should go.
"When you're fighting an enemy not constrained by social norms or morals, do you get down in the gutter or do you stick to certain rules of behavior?" asked Christopher Preble, director of foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. "It's important to question where do we draw the line."
Tucker Eskew, White House global communications chief, says the administration can't concern itself with shooting down every lie about America.
"Yet we do have to more aggressively promote the truth about our foreign policy and about our society in the face of distortion," he said.
Eskew said the team helped write a report issued by the White House in January, "Apparatus of Lies: Saddam's Disinformation and Propaganda."
"The regime uses a combination of on-the-record lies, covert placements of false news accounts, self-inflicted damage and fake interviews," the report says.
The report recalls that, during the Persian Gulf War, Iraqis showed reporters a bombed-out factory with a hand-lettered sign that read "Baby Milk Plant" in English and Arabic. The White House says the factory had been converted to a biological weapons laboratory. Disagreement lingers to this day.
Dennis Kux, who coordinated counterdisinformation for the Reagan administration, said ignoring false stories is risky.
"It's like drops of water falling over a stone," Kux said. "In one year, five years, 10 years, you've worn a hole in the stone -- in this case, the U.S. reputation."
A decade after the Soviet Union's collapse, the KGB is remembered as a disinformation virtuoso, especially creative in faking documents.
"We saw forgeries signed Ronald Reagan, Jerry Ford, Jimmy Carter," said Herbert Romerstein, who ran the original counterdisinformation office during most of the 1980s. Once, a phony memo appeared under Romerstein's own letterhead.
The KGB even faked letters from the Ku Klux Klan, threatening to kill African and Asian athletes at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, Romerstein said. The Soviets were boycotting, in retaliation for America's boycott of the Moscow games, and hoped to scare other nations away.
In 1992, former Russian spymaster Yevgeny Primakov admitted the KGB made up the AIDS story. The "baby parts" tale was an urban legend exploited and spread by the Soviets, Romerstein said.
"One of the more bizarre stories the Soviets developed was called the `ethnic weapon,'" he recalled. "Supposedly the Americans were developing a bomb that would kill blacks and keep whites alive."
In 1996, State laid off the last man in the counterdisinformation office, Todd Leventhal. He was rehired in October; now he has a researcher and a part-time writer, too.
On the Net: White House "Apparatus of Lies": http://www.whitehouse.gov/ogc/apparatus/printer.html
State Department: http://www.state.gov
http://www.poptel.org.uk/morning-star/features/articles/ben070303.htm
7th March 2003 - Morning Star
AS THE war moves closer, it is becoming harder and harder to believe a word of what we are told by the president, the Prime Minister or the media.
Perhaps the most obvious example is that, even at this late stage in the build-up of military forces, we are still assured by those who are actually planning the invasion of Iraq that "war is not inevitable" when the war has already begun as US and British bombers step up the bombing of Iraq's no-fly zones as part of military operations which they have long planned.
Bush and Blair have, in that sense, already answered the question that everyone asks - "Would you go to war without a UN resolution?" - by going to war without such a resolution, since those bombing missions have never been authorised by the United Nations.
Those who argue for peace in our dealings with Iraq are denounced as favouring appeasement, whereas, in Northern Ireland and in Palestine, Blair and Bush claim to be working for peace - even though Trimble, for the Ulster Unionists warns about appeasing the republicans and Sharon in Israel refuses to talk to Arafat on the grounds that it would involve appeasing Palestinian terrorists.
Or, to take further examples, Osama bin Laden, the world's most wanted man, was actually sent to Afghanistan by the United States as a terrorist to get the Soviet Union out and Nelson Mandela, one of the world's greatest freedom fighters, was once denounced as a terrorist by Margaret Thatcher.
President Bush promises democracy in Iraq when he has conquered it, speaking from the same White House which has backed every tinpot dictator in the world, including Marcos in the Philippines, Pinochet, who killed Chile's elected President Allende, Papa Doc in Haiti and Suharto in Indonesia, who was responsible for the slaughter of millions and for the invasion of East Timor.
We are also told that the war is to defend American values of justice and human rights, while, in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, which the US occupies against the wishes of the Cuban government, hundreds of people, including some British citizens, have been held in prison and, for all we know, actually tortured by the US for over a year, without being tried, charged or even allowed to see lawyers.
The UN, which was set up to represent the peoples of the world, has now apparently been replaced by a new entity, "the international community," which consists only of Bush and Blair or "a coalition of the willing" if you include small states which may be bribed with billions of dollars into voting for the war.
And, if by any chance, a security council resolution calling for war is vetoed by a France, China or Russia, as provided for in the UN charter, the Prime Minister says that he would disregard it as "unreasonable," although the US has used the veto 70 times to protect Israel.
It makes you wonder whether, if the Prime Minister actually lost a vote of No confidence in Parliament, he might be inclined to disregard it on the grounds that it was unreasonable.
But the corruption of language by political leaders goes way back and involves replacing words that may not be popular with other words that are thought to be more acceptable to the public.
For example, we used to have a War Office, but now we have a Ministry of Defence, nuclear bombs are now described as deterrents, innocent civilians killed in war are now described as collateral damage and military incompetence leading to US bombers killing British soldiers is cosily described as friendly fire.
Those who are in favour of peace are described as mavericks and troublemakers, whereas the real militants are those who want the war.
It is certainly arguable that President Bush is a maverick president of a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction which the US has used to bomb 19 countries since 1945, costing many, many hundreds of thousands - possibly millions - of lives.
Such actions are justified on the grounds that they were peacekeeping operations.
When Israel sent troops into the Lebanon, it was described as an incursion, whereas, when Iraq sent troops to Kuwait, it was an invasion.
Next week, when Bush launches his quarter-million strong army into Iraq, it will be presented as the first step in building a new world order and those who oppose it, including the Pope, may well be criticised by Mr Blair for having "blood on their hands."
The president and the Prime Minister tell us every day that the time is running out for Saddam and that he has his last chance to disarm, but, when he actually begins to destroy his missiles, this important act of disarmament is dismissed as another cunning trick to mislead us and divide us.
When Labour MPs vote for peace, they are described as rebels who are defying their leader, but, if the Prime Minister goes to war without the authority of the UN or Parliament, the media will welcome it as providing proof that he cannot be swayed by the emotional response of the British people, as if war and the killing it involves is not a suitable subject for emotion.
People are beginning to realise that, every day, we are being systematically told blatant lies to keep us quiet so that the killing can begin - and our worldwide anti-war movement is not only for peace but also for truth, without which peace is not possible.
This is the moment when we all must stand up and be counted.
http://www.poptel.org.uk/morning-star/features/articles/ben070303.htm
CBS
http://wcco.com/topstories/topstories_story_025091634.html
Jan 25, 2003 8:14 am US/Central
You cannot hear the explosions, but as CBS News Correspondent Wyatt Andrews reports, the United States has been bombing Iraq for months.
In a warehouse at Ft. Bragg, Col. David Baker and his psychological operations team have already printed, stuffed and dropped more than 3 million leaflets aimed at the minds of Iraqis.
One tells workers not to repair air defense systems and warns of the suffering to expect if they do.
They say the U.S. can hit a specific neighborhood from 50,000 feet.
"We can calculate exactly where the leaflets need to be dropped to fall and land on that target," says Baker.
Psy Op is the Iraq campaign being waged with no U.N. debate. The major theme is that Saddam is a tyrant. Artist Brett Karpowitz, who draws Saddam for the leaflets was ordered to portray him just right.
Flipping through some of his sketches of the Iraqi leader, Karpowitz showed us one depiction that was rejected.
"I drew him kind of chunky, and uh, he seemed too powerful," he says.
More than half of the leaflets dropped on Iraq so far are advertisements for a radio broadcast: Tune into these frequencies at night and the U.S Army presents, Radio Iraq.
The broadcasts, which are also made at Ft Bragg combine music with pointed political commentary.
Saddam, one broadcast says, "spends on himself in one day what it takes to feed your family for a year."
Former CIA officer Michael Vickers says the U.S. strategy is focused on Baghdad: 5 million people, including Army and civilian.
Vickers says the PsyOP campaign seeks, "To take away that last stand for Saddam - for soldiers to stay in their barracks, refuse orders, for civilians to stay in their apartments."
On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced a new program.
"Starting today the department of defense will be broadcasting the Pentagon weekly press briefing to the Iraqi people," Rumsfeld announced Tuesday.
Success in psychological war is measured by the shots not fired. Just as in the Gulf War, when Iraqis got airdropped instructions for how to surrender.
The intent once again is to save lives - both Iraqi and American.
http://wcco.com/topstories/topstories_story_025091634.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,861126,00.html
Last week brought yet another terrifying headline from an American newspaper: "US suspects al-Qaida got nerve agent from Iraqis".
The 1,800-word story in the Washington Post last Thursday got off to a reasonably promising start by saying: "The Bush administration has received a credible report that Islamic extremists affiliated with al-Qaida took possession of a chemical weapon in Iraq last month or late in October, according to two officials with firsthand knowledge of the report and its source."
Less promisingly, the second paragraph begins: "If the report proves true ... " The remaining 28 paragraphs offer little to suggest that it actually is true, and several reasons for thinking it may not be. Paragraph six tells us: "Like most intelligence, the reported chemical weapon transfer is not backed by definitive evidence."
Paragraph eight says: "Even authorised spokesmen, with one exception, addressed the report on the condition of anonymity. They said the principal source on the chemical transfer was uncorroborated, and that indications it involved a nerve agent were open to interpretation."
In paragraph 12, we are told that the report may be connected to a warning message circulated to American forces overseas and an unnamed official is cited as saying that the message resulted only from an analyst's hypothetical concern.
As one would expect from the Washington Post, the story is carefully written and meticulously researched. But it's basically worthless.
The reporter had clearly spoken to a lot of different people but he failed - not for want of effort - to substantiate the claim that Iraq provided al-Qaida with nerve gas. Although some officials were happy to describe the claim as "credible", none appeared willing to stand up and say that they, personally, believed it.
The sensible course of action at that stage would have been to abandon the story, or at least file it away in the hope of more evidence coming to light. That might have happened with any other story, but in the case of Iraq at present the temptation to publish is hard to resist.
This particular story was more tempting than many because it carried, as the American military would say, a multiple warhead. It not only suggested that Iraq - contrary to its recent declaration - does possess chemical weapons but, additionally, that it has close links with al-Qaida.
The effect, if not the intention, of publishing the story was to give currency to both these ideas. Stories in the Washington Post are instantly regurgitated by other news organisations around the world, usually at much shorter length and without all the cautionary nuances of the original.
Iraq itself helped the story along by issuing a denial which - since it could produce no evidence by way of rebuttal - simply sounded unconvincing.
The Post's story is also discussed on the BBC website. Under the headline "Wanted: an Iraqi link to al-Qaida ", Paul Reynolds, the website's world affairs correspondent, views it as part of a long and unsuccessful effort to link Iraq with al-Qaida.
"One of the most intriguing questions in the 'war on terrorism'," he writes, "is whether there are contacts between Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaida network. Intelligence agencies are constantly looking for the 'missing link'."
The quotation marks around "missing link" distance the BBC from the idea that such a link exists, though the definite article preceding it suggests otherwise. Why are intelligence agencies looking for "the" missing link and not "a" missing link?
Journalistically, it's more interesting to talk about a "missing" link than a "possible" link but even when the tone of discussion is sceptical - as it was in the BBC's case - there's still a drip effect. The more we mention missing links, the more people will assume they are out there somewhere, waiting to be found.
The risk of giving currency to false or questionable claims is now a daily problem for those of us who try to write about Iraq without turning into other people's weapons of mass deception.
Even a simple reference to Iraq's weaponry can be problematic. Some readers object that "weapons of mass destruction" is a tendentious phrase. "Chemical, biological and nuclear" is accurately descriptive, though it becomes too much of a mouthful when used repeatedly in a story. Reuters news agency and others increasingly - and rather emotively - talk about "doomsday weapons". In practice, "doomsday" is beginning to mean anything nasty possessed by Iraq, though not by the United States.
Last Wednesday, for example, a Reuters report stated: "The United States threatened possible nuclear retaliation against Iraq if its forces or allies were attacked with doomsday weapons." Let's see how that looks the other way round: "The United States threatened retaliation with doomsday weapons against Iraq if its forces or allies were attacked with chemicals."
In terms of mass death, it takes 28 Halabjas to make one Hiroshima.
Meanwhile, to the delight of pharmaceutical companies, the United States is pressing ahead with its smallpox vaccination programme - though the recent New York Times "scoop" about an Iraqi smallpox threat looks increasingly shaky. On December 3, Judith Miller, the paper's "bioterrorism expert" reported an unverified claim that a Russian scientist, who once had access to the Soviet Union's entire collection of 120 strains of smallpox, may have visited Iraq in 1990 and may have provided the Iraqis with a version of the virus that could be resistant to vaccines and could be more easily transmitted as a biological weapon. (See "Poisoning the Air", World Dispatch, December 9.)
Since the article was published, colleagues of the now-dead scientist, Nelja Maltseva, have said that she last visited Iraq in 1971-72 (as part of a global smallpox eradication effort) and last travelled abroad (to Finland) in 1982.
Another of Ms Miller's scoops, on November 12, cited "senior Bush administration officials" as saying that Iraq had ordered a million doses of atropine, which is an antidote to nerve gas, but also a routine drug for treating heart patients. This was interpreted as evidence that Iraq not only possesses nerve gas but intends to use it in a conflict with the United States - hence the need to protect its own forces from accidental injury.
The US then threatened to block a continuation of Iraq's oil-for- food programme unless atropine were included in the list of "suspect" items that Iraq cannot import without permission from the United Nations' sanctions committee.
As I pointed out in world dispatch last week, the sudden horror over atropine was very strange, given that the US had previously allowed Iraq to buy large quantities on normal medical grounds, and that UN had lifted all restrictions on Iraqi purchases of the drug only six months earlier.
This highly relevant information, which Ms Miller had failed to mention, eventually found its way into the Washington Post and the wires of Associated Press. The response from the New York Times was to run the Associated Press report without reference to Ms Miller's flawed scoop.
By no means do all the dubious scare stories about Iraq come from shadowy intelligence sources or officials who can't be named.
Last September, Turkish police announced the arrest of two men in a taxi who were apparently smuggling 35lb of weapons- grade uranium to Iraq from somewhere near the Syrian border. But a few days later it emerged that the material was harmless, containing only zinc, iron, zirconium and manganese. Its actual weight was only 5lb but the police, in their excitement, had weighed the lead container as well.
One day, perhaps, one of these scare stories may turn out to be true - but don't hold your breath waiting for it. In the meantime, readers are welcome to send more examples by email, to the address below.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,861126,00.html
http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2001Q4/rendon.html
"I am not a National Security strategist or a military tactician," says John W. Rendon, Jr., whose DC-based PR firm was recently hired by the Pentagon to win over the hearts and minds of Arabs and Muslims worldwide.
"I am a politician," Rendon said in a 1998 speech to the National Security Conference (NSC), "and a person who uses communication to meet public policy or corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior, and a perception manager. This is probably best described in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, when he wrote 'When things turn weird, the weird turn pro.'"
The Rendon Group's contract with the Pentagon was awarded on a no-bid basis, reflecting the government's determination to hire a firm already versed in running overseas propaganda operations. Rendon specializes in "assisting corporations, organizations, and governments achieve their policy objectives." Past clients include the CIA, USAID, the government of Kuwait, Monsanto Chemical Company, and the official trade agencies of countries including Bulgaria, Russia, and Uzbekistan.
"Through its network of international offices and strategic alliances," the Rendon Group website boasts, "the company has provided communications services to clients in more than 78 countries, and maintains contact with government officials, decision-makers, and news media around the globe."
The Pentagon stipulates that the Rendon Group will receive $400,000 for four months of work. Details are confidential, but according to the San Jose Mercury News, Rendon will be monitoring international news media, conducting focus groups, creating a web site about the US campaign against terrorism, and recommending "ways the US military can counter disinformation and improve its own public communications."
In dollar terms, Rendon's Pentagon contract resembles the $100,000 monthly retainer that it received in the early 1990s from the Kuwaiti government as part of a multi-million- dollar PR campaign denouncing Iraq's 1990 invasion and mobilizing public support for Operation Desert Storm.
The Rendon Group's website states that during the Gulf War, it "established a full-scale communications operation for the Government of Kuwait, including the establishment of a production studio in London producing programming material for the exiled Kuwaiti Television." Rendon also provided media support for exiled government leaders and helped Kuwaiti officials after the war by "providing press and site advance to incoming congressional delegations and other visiting US government officials." Several of Rendon's non-governmental clients also have headquarters in Kuwait: Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, Kuwait University, American Housing Consortium, American Business Council of Kuwait, and KPMY/Peat Marwick.
The Rendon Group's work in Kuwait continued after the war itself had ended. "If any of you either participated in the liberation of Kuwait City ... or if you watched it on television, you would have seen hundreds of Kuwaitis waving small American flags," John Rendon said in his speech to the NSC. "Did you ever stop to wonder how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American flags? And for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries? Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs."
Rendon was also a major player in the CIA's effort to encourage the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In May 1991, then-President George Bush, Sr. signed a presidential finding directing the CIA to create the conditions for Hussein's removal. The hope was that members of the Iraqi military would turn on Hussein and stage a military coup. The CIA did not have the mechanisms in place to make that happen, so they hired the Rendon Group to run a covert anti-Saddam propaganda campaign. Rendon's postwar work involved producing videos and radio skits ridiculing Saddam Hussein, a traveling photo exhibit of Iraqi atrocities, and radio scripts calling on Iraqi army officers to defect.
A February 1998 report by Peter Jennings cited records obtained by ABC News which showed that the Rendon Group spent more than $23 million dollars in the first year of its contract with the CIA. It worked closely with the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition coalition of 19 Iraqi and Kurdish organizations whose main tasks were to "gather information, distribute propaganda and recruit dissidents." According to ABC, Rendon came up with the name for the Iraqi National Congress and channeled $12 million of covert CIA funding to it between 1992 and 1996.
ClandestineRadio.com, a website which monitors underground and anti-government radio stations in countries throughout the world, credits the Rendon Group with "designing and supervising" the Iraqi Broadcasting Corporation (IBC) and Radio Hurriah, which began broadcasting Iraqi opposition propaganda in January 1992 from a US government transmitter in Kuwait. According to a September 1996 article in Time magazine, six CIA case officers supervised the IBC's 11 hours of daily programming and Iraqi National Congress activities in the Iraqi Kurdistan city of Arbil. These activities came to an abrupt end on August 31, 1996, when the Iraqi army invaded Arbil and executed all but 12 out of 100 IBC staff workers along with about 100 members of the Iraqi National Congress.
The work of the Rendon Group is only one element of the Bush Administration's PR campaign. The United States has established "instant response" communications offices in Washington, London and Islamabad, and senior administration officials are regularly talking to Arabic news media.
The Wall Street Journal reported on November 8 that the Army's "4th Psychological Operations (Psyops) group" designed leaflets and radio broadcasts inside Afghanistan "to persuade enemy fighters to quit, and to convince civilians that U.S. bombs raining down on their country will result in a better future for their families."
A separate advertising campaign is headed by Charlotte Beers, a former Madison Avenue advertising executive who was recently named the State Department's Undersecretary of State for "public diplomacy" (the official government euphemism for "public relations"). The New York Times reported that Beers is "planning a television and advertising campaign to try to influence Islamic opinion; one segment could feature American celebrities, including sports stars, and a more emotional message."
In an October interview with Advertising Age, Beers said public diplomacy "is a vital new arm in what will combat terrorism over time. All of a sudden, we are in this position of redefining who America is, not only for ourselves under this kind of attack, but also for the outside world." The corporate- funded Advertising Council is reportedly working with Beers on developing the campaign. According to Advertising Age, the Ad Council "has boiled its message down to one strategic idea: freedom."
Hollywood executives have also joined the White House brain trust, conferring with administration officials on ways to help spread the U.S. message at home and abroad. "It's possible the entertainment industry could help the government formulate its message to the rest of the world about who Americans are, and what they believe," said Bryce Zabel, chairman of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Voice of America has dramatically increased its radio broadcasts in Arabic, Dari, Pashto, Farsi, and Urdu, but has had difficult reaching crucial elements of the Arab population in the Middle East. "We have almost no youthful audience under the age of 25 in the Arab world and we are concerned that ... this important segment of the population has enormous distrust of the United States," said Marc Nathanson, a spokesman for the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the entity that oversees international public broadcasting operations for the United States.
Many of the people charged with masterminding the propaganda war seem handicapped by a naïve belief that the US is simply misunderstood abroad. "They hate us out of ignorance," is a common trope. Communications strategies are being developed on the assumption that if "they" just knew how good "we" are and how much we love "freedom," then they will support the war.
"How is it that the country that invented Hollywood and Madison Avenue has such trouble promoting a positive image of itself overseas?" asked Rep. Henry Hyde, chairman of the House International Relations Committee. President Bush has expressed similar bafflement. "I'm amazed that there's such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us," he said. "We've got to do a better job of making our case."
Lee McKnight, director of the Edward R. Murrow Center at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, says this inability to understand the thinking of the Arab world is the single biggest reason that the United States is winning the military battle but losing the propaganda war. "We can't convince anyone we're right if we don't understand their point of view," he said.
The spin doctors and politicians have failed to realize that propaganda cannot hope to change opinions when fundamental US policies remain the same. "No amount of media management will matter if the US is not also seen--and actually working on--ways to resolve some of the intractable conflicts which have served to feed fanaticism and anti-US sentiment throughout many Arabic and Islamic nations," McKnight said.
"The United States lost the public relations war in the Muslim world a long time ago," says Osama Siblani, publisher of the Arab American News. "They could have the prophet Muhammad doing public relations and it wouldn't help."
"The calculus of human suffering is far less clear from the perspective of the Middle East," observes Princeton University history professor Nicholas Guyatt, "and the awful images of Sept. 11 fade quickly when supplanted by Israeli attacks on Bethlehem or even the 'collateral damage' of the U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan." The U.S. cannot hope to win the battle for hearts and minds until its leaders realize the importance of deeds in addition to words and begin to promote real democracy, peace and human rights in the Muslim world.
http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2001Q4/rendon.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,851063,00.html
Britain is to step up its propaganda battle in the Arab and wider Muslim world next week as part of preparations for the potentially decisive Iraqi declaration on weapons of mass destruction.
The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, is to publish a Foreign Office dossier on Monday setting out the brutal human rights record of the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein.
"In the Arab and Muslim world, we have just got to keep reminding people about the nature of the person we are dealing with," a Foreign Office source said.
Various other initiatives are planned for next week, including a new station, Radio Sawa ("together"), set up by Washington, which has begun to try to woo the Arab world.
Combined with this, the US is dropping leaflets across southern Iraq in an effort to demoralise the population.
Planes dropped 360,000 leaflets over the southern no-fly zone on Thursday following US-led attacks on unmanned communication facilities between al-Kut and Basra.
Iraq is required by a United Nations resolution to declare by December 8 all biological, chemical or nuclear-related weapons or components in its possession, if any. The British government is adamant that President Saddam is hiding such weapons and that if he insists in the declaration that he is not, it will provoke a crisis.
Mr Straw, who will visit Turkey on Tuesday, is planning an interview with Muslim media outlets in the Arab world and in Britain next week to put across a message that war is not inevitable and that a route to peace is open to Iraq if it chooses to follow it.
A similar message will be conveyed in a signed article by the prime minister, Tony Blair, today in Jang, an Urdu daily widely read in Britain as well as Pakistan and south-east Asia.
The British government has been more energetic than the US since September 11 in the pursuit of hearts and minds in the Muslim world.
Mr Blair, in the immediate aftermath of the Twin Towers attacks, succeeded in persuading the US president, George Bush, and the state department to stress that the "war on terrorism" was not a war against Islam.
The dossier, a follow-up to one published in September that was supposed to make a case that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction, pulls together human rights abuses in Iraq over the last two decades and focuses on the treatment of women and of prisoners.
For legal reasons, Britain, unlike the US, cannot justify an attack on Iraq on the grounds of regime change. The Foreign Office source denied that the dossier was designed to make such a case.
The source said President Saddam's behaviour towards his own people explained why he could not be trusted with weapons of mass destruction. "His disregard for human life is why we can't let him have these weapons," he said.
The Foreign Office is also making longer-term plans to try to encourage changes in the Middle East through educational and cultural programmes, dealing especially with democracy, human rights and freedom of women.
More generally throughout the Middle East, the US is attempting to win hearts, if not minds, with Radio Sawa.
At a cost of $35m (£22.5m), it broadcasts almost non-stop music - a sugary mixture of Arab and western pop, carefully researched to appeal to the under-30s. There are also brief news bulletins in Arabic every half hour.
Radio Sawa is intended to replace Voice of America's Arabic service, which has proved unpopular in the region.
The Public Broadcasting System of the US is planning to broadcast a two-hour documentary on the life of Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, on December 18 and a day later rebroadcast a two-hour documentary on the diverse interpretations of Islam around the world.
The documentaries are mainly for internal consumption within the US.
The American leaflet drop on Iraq on Thursday is the fifth such in the last two months. It is designed to demoralise air defence forces and to discourage workers from repairing equipment damaged in air raids.
One leaflet warned Iraqis in Arabic not to attempt to repair fibre-optic cables.
"You are risking your life," it said. "The cables are tools used to suppress the Iraqi people by Saddam and his regime, they are targeted for destruction."
Another leaflet, addressed to Iraqi air defence forces, says: "The destruction experienced by your colleagues in other air defence locations is a response to your continuing aggression towards planes of the coalition forces.
"No tracking or firing on these aircraft will be tolerated. You could be next."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,851063,00.html
http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/2002/11/112702.html
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld last week likened the brewing controversy over the Total Information Awareness program to an earlier dispute over the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence, which critics asserted -- erroneously, according to the Pentagon -- was created to engage in disinformation.
As a result of all of the negative publicity, the Office of Strategic Influence was shut down. Or maybe it wasn't. Rumsfeld said last week that only the name has been abandoned. The Office's intended functions are being carried out.
"And then there was the Office of Strategic Influence," Rumsfeld reminisced on November 18. "You may recall that. And 'oh my goodness gracious isn't that terrible, Henny Penny the sky is going to fall.' 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."
See excerpts from Rumsfeld's November 18 media availability:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2002/11/dod111802.html
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/324/living/Pentagon_drawing_battle_lines_with_press-.shtml
WASHINGTON - When Army Times writer Sean Naylor linked up with the 101st Airborne Division in Kandahar to cover the Afghanistan fighting, he found that instead of the traditional practice of being housed with the troops, reporters were ''quarantined'' in media tents. During USA Today reporter Andrea Stone's visits to Guantanamo, Cuba, she was never even allowed within shouting distance of the US-held detainees. And although he was traveling with US forces, San Diego Union-Tribune reporter James Crawley had to scan transcripts of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's Washington briefings to glean any hint of information about the Afghan war-related mission he was covering.
''People on the ship wanted to talk about it,'' he said. But ''everything was directed from the Pentagon. What do we need to do about it next time?''
That question was a rallying cry for the more than 100 journalists - many of them veterans of conflicts from Kosovo to Afghanistan - who gathered here last week for a conference sponsored by the two-month-old organization Military Reporters & Editors. With a potential war in Iraq on the horizon, the answer they heard was not reassuring. Given Afghanistan as an object lesson, the consensus was that Rumsfeld's Pentagon has taken the art of information control to new heights. And that isn't likely to change in any battle for Baghdad. (Although keynote speaker Bob Woodward of the Washington Post offered the distinctly dissenting view that there was no more than a 50-50 chance of conflict.)
''This Pentagon practices, regularly, lack-of-information warfare against the press,'' said Mark Thompson, Time magazine's national-security correspondent. ''Longtime sources in the building that you could call up and visit, they don't want to be called. ... This is a much different place.'' History Channel host Arthur Kent - best known as NBC's ''Scud Stud'' during the 1991 Gulf War - predicted that in the event of another war with Iraq, ''attempts to muzzle us ... are going to be unprecedented.''
The media and military's competing - if not clashing - agendas were highlighted in the remarks of Air Force Colonel Jay DeFrank, a Defense Department representative. Even as news outlets make plans to cover another war against Saddam Hussein, DeFrank declined to discuss such a contingency, saying that ''the president has made no decision about what we're going to do.''
''We're committed to access,'' he told the MRE gathering. ''But it's probably not going to be the access you want.''
Problems with access to battlefields is a major reason why the MRE was conceived during a journalism confererence at the University of Maryland last spring. Actually, as MRE president and Seattle Post-Intelligencer staffer James Wright acknowledges, the organization's origins can be traced to a slightly lubricated bull session in a lounge ''where everyone was griping like you couldn't believe.''
But MRE is about more than lobbying the Pentagon for a better view. It plans to offer training for journalists, providing them with practical advice on how to travel with troops, helping them understand the military culture, and advising them on how to win the trust of the men and women in uniform. Veteran Scripps Howard reporter Peter Copeland recalled how his editor once told him the way to achieve that last goal was to ''act like you're on your first date.''
If many of the speakers spoke warmly of the relationship between journalists and rank-and-file troops, there was concern about the Pentagon's top-down strategy of news management.
''There is a general sense that [information control] is just a higher priority with this administration,'' said USA Today military writer and MRE vice-president Dave Moniz. ''Even a lot of uniformed military officers are blanching at these restrictions.''
Compound that with all the lethal uncertainties of a new war in Iraq, and the outlook isn't good for reporters. Retired Army Major General John Meyer Jr. said that if the war plans he had read about were accurate, ''inherently, you have chemical, biological, and nuclear potential on the battlefield. ... I would think your access will be harder to get.''
Wall Street Journal staffer John Fialka told his colleagues that such a war holds out the possibility that ''we're going to have some dead bodies among us.''
Perhaps nothing reflected the uneasy relationship between the military and the media more clearly than a discussion of the Pentagon ''boot camp'' training for journalists that began last weekend.
The physically rigorous program has been lauded by some media outlets as a positive step in improving the relationship between the Defense Department and reporters.
But juxtaposing the harsh physical demands of the boot camp with predictions of minimal access to any war, USA Today's Stone mused aloud, ''Maybe they're just trying to scare people off.''
This story ran on page C3 of the Boston Globe on 11/20/2002.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/324/living/Pentagon_drawing_battle_lines_with_press-.shtml
http://www.bouldernews.com/bdc/nation_world_news/article/0,1713,BDC_2420_1545202,00.html
November 14, 2002
WASHINGTON — Sometime after the first of the year, residents of Baghdad could find some new programming on their FM radio dial: a soothing Arabic voice urging them to remain in their homes or away from the approaching U.S. troops who will liberate them from Saddam Hussein.
Meanwhile, the faxes or cell phones of Iraqi military and security officers may whir or chirp with more explicit and personal messages: "We know who you are. Lay down your arms or else."
Top Pentagon officials and members of the Iraqi opposition are now crafting what could be the most widespread and complex psychological operations campaign mounted by the American military since the Vietnam War, should President Bush give the order to invade Iraq, said defense officials and retired psy-ops officers.
"If you can minimize the conflict by way of information warfare, that's a significant thing," said a source familiar with recent psy-ops discussions that have included Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. "Communicating with them is a very high priority."
The ambitious plan includes sending targeted radio messages to the groups that make up the 5 million residents of Baghdad, a polyglot of urbane Sunni Muslims, impoverished Shia Muslims and pockets of anti-foreign nationalists. In addition, though Iraq is a modern and secular country, there are elements of fundamentalism in both Muslim communities.
Another part of the operation will be to persuade members of Saddam's military and security forces not to resist the invading allied force.
Keeping the citizens of Baghdad on the sidelines will be an important part of any U.S. military operation in the Iraqi capital, a city that could quickly turn into a bloody battlefield should Saddam's forces dig in and fight and civilians get caught in the mix, officials said.
But some military analysts and retired officers are cautioning that not all psychological operations employed in past conflicts have had good results. Moreover, reaching the different groups within Iraq and cutting through anti-Western feelings or anger over the decade-old U.N. sanctions may be difficult, they said.
"I think it's going to be a terribly challenging effort. There are all kinds of different audiences. You've got to somehow figure out how to reach people," said retired Army Col. Charles P. Borchini, who commanded the 4th Psychological Operations Group during the U.S.-led bombing campaign against Serbia. The group, based at Fort Bragg, N.C., takes the lead in writing scripts, beaming radio and TV messages and publishing newspapers aimed at foreign foes and their civilian counterparts.
William Arkin, a former Army intelligence officer and now a military analyst, said that if the United States invades Iraq, "bombs are going to do the talking," rather than any psychological operation that attempts to influence the entire country. Some elements of Iraqi society might not trust an American-led campaign to set up a new government, said Arkin, who also doubted U.S. operatives would be able to reach any Iraqi officers with the "Gucci methods" of cell-phone calls or faxes.
Still, Iraqi opposition officials and longtime observers of Iraq contend that after nearly a quarter-century of living under a brutal dictator, strong support exists within the country for an overthrow of Saddam, even if it has to be carried out by the United States.
"Nobody wants a continuation of the regime. They want a return to normalcy," said Phebe Marr, a former professor at the National Defense University. "I think they want the job done and over with, and they don't want any long-term American occupation."
Marr said U.S. forces must send a simple and straightforward message: "We are not occupiers, we are liberators. We are going to help you set up your own government as rapidly as possible."
Said an Iraqi opposition official, "These folks don't support Saddam. What's necessary is to explain to them what's happening and what they can do."
Meanwhile, officials with the opposition Iraqi National Congress are providing the Pentagon with cell phone numbers, fax numbers and home addresses of key Iraqi security officials in an effort to drive a wedge between them and Saddam. The message would be, "We know who you are. It's definitely in your interest to lay low," said the source familiar with the Pentagon plans. "We are working actively to get that message to them when it counts."
U.S. military plans for city fighting say that "the key to success" might lie in the ability to "influence the thoughts and opinions of adversaries and noncombatants," according to "Doctrine for Joint Urban Operations," a Joint Chiefs of Staff publication that was updated in September. To do this, U.S. forces must seize what the plan terms "the information environment."
Retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., who has written extensively on urban warfare, said it's vital in any conflict to immediately capture and control the sources of information for civilians. "The images have to be ours, not (Saddam's)," said Scales. "Mao said the surest way to win a war is to separate the army from its people."
Radio transmissions are expected to be the most effective way of getting the message out, officials said, since televisions aren't nearly as widespread as radios. Moreover, some of the initial targets of U.S. warplanes would likely include TV transmitters and other communications facilities, thereby preventing Saddam from contacting the population or his military once the war starts.
Sophisticated broadcasting planes operated by the 193rd Special Operations Wing of the Pennsylvania National Guard, together with ground transmitters in Kuwait and elsewhere, would be used to transmit anti-Saddam programming to the Iraqi populace, officials said.
The psychological operation also is expected to include leaflet drops — some of which started last week over the southern no-fly zone in Iraq with a warning to Iraqi soldiers not to fire on patrolling allied aircraft. And, once troops are on the ground, newspapers printed in Arabic by specialized U.S. Army units are to be distributed.
Daniel T. Kuehl, a professor of information warfare at the National Defense University, said a psychological operation in Iraq may be the most extensive effort since the Vietnam War, which included a 6-year-long wave of loudspeaker announcements, radio and TV broadcasts, newspapers and leafleting by U.S. forces.
Although U.S. psychological operations units were active during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, they did not focus on the civilian population. Instead, they concentrated on the Iraqi forces in Kuwait with leaflets and radio broadcasts.
Such tactical efforts were effective, said Arkin, the military analyst. Specific Iraqi army units were named in the leaflets and radio messages, which urged them to abandon their vehicles or risk being bombed. Iraqi units fled their armored vehicles and surrendered in droves.
"It was sending a message of omnipotence," said Arkin. "That kind of message had an enormous impact."
http://www.bouldernews.com/bdc/nation_world_news/article/0,1713,BDC_2420_1545202,00.html
Forked-Tongue Warriors
October 9 - 15, 2002
http://www.villagevoice.com/specials/war
Edged between a rack of 99-cent Cheetos and a display of pork rinds stood a life-sized cardboard cutout of a buxom blond in a red miniskirt. Resting on her inner thigh was a frosty bottle of Miller Genuine Draft. "That's essentially what we do," an army major remarked, pointing to the stiletto-heeled eye-catcher. "But we don't sell beer."
The scene was a recruitment barbecue conducted by the U.S. Army's 11th Psychological Operations Battalion ("Psy-ops," for short), held last month at Andrews Air Force Base, outside of Washington, D.C. Amid the Cheetos, cheesecake, and a sweaty game of softball, there was casual chitchat about the workplace challenges faced by these fatigue-wearing PR execs whose job it is to sell Brand America in foreign and hostile territory.
Part ad men and part ethnographers, these speci