Asia Times: Pentagon ponders disinformation campaign


	February 26, 2002	atimes.com

WAR ON TERROR

Pentagon ponders disinformation campaign
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - When the Pentagon insists that one of its missiles hit senior al-Qaeda leaders meeting near Khost, Afghanistan, but local residents swear that the victims were peasants salvaging scrap metal, who is more credible?

When US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declares that Iran is actively helping al-Qaeda leaders to escape from Afghanistan but the Iranian government insists it is not, who is more credible?

The burden of proof will almost surely shift against the Pentagon if it goes through with plans for a new propaganda campaign that, according to Tuesday's New York Times, might include "disinformation" to persuade public opinion overseas to back Washington's war against terrorism.

The plans, which have provoked objections from the uniformed military as well as within the administration, appear to mark a new phase in a broader campaign to influence opinion particularly in the Islamic world and Europe, where opposition to any expansion of the war beyond Afghanistan is especially strong.

Top civilian officials in the Pentagon, together with Vice President Dick Cheney and his senior advisers, are eager to take the war to Iraq in hopes of ousting President Saddam Hussein but are opposed by the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which historically have run US propaganda campaigns. "The fact that the Pentagon is doing it has got to be an issue," said former State Department spokesman Alan Romberg. "If it's a covert action, using disinformation, it's the CIA which has the mandate."

Assembling the plans is the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), created several weeks after last September's terrorist attacks in the United States. Headed by Brigadier-General Simon Worden, it consists of some 15 people and reports to the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict. The head of that office in turn reports to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, one of the administration's best-known and fiercest anti-Saddam hawks.

The OSI also coordinates closely with the White House's new counterterrorism office, run by retired General Wayne Downing, who in the late 1990s helped devise and sell a war plan against Saddam Hussein on behalf of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a coalition of Iraqi exile and Kurdish groups whose cause right-wing Republicans long have championed. It was no surprise, therefore, when the OSI contracted with the Rendon Group, a Washington-based lobbying and consulting firm retained by the Kuwaiti royal family to represent it during the 1990-91 Gulf crisis and later by the INC for its efforts to lobby the White House and Congress for millions of dollars in political and other support.

"I think it's safe to say that this is an initiative of the Iraq hawks, who have had Saddam in their sights virtually from September 12," said one official, who asked not to be identified.

The OSI "rolls up all the instruments within DOD [Department of Defence] to influence foreign audiences", its assistant for operations, Thomas Timmes, a former colonel in the army's psychological operations unit, told a recent conference. "DOD has not traditionally done these things," the Times quoted him as saying.

According to Pentagon officials who spoke with the Times on condition of anonymity, the plans call for planting news items with foreign media organizations through sources that may not have obvious ties to the Pentagon and sending journalists and foreign leaders e-mail messages that promote US views or US targets without identifying the source as the military.

Under US law, neither the CIA nor the Pentagon may engage in propaganda activities in the United States or direct them at a domestic audience. The law was tightened in the mid-1970s after investigations revealed that the CIA planted stories abroad that were, in some cases, reprinted in the United States - a process referred to as "blowback".

According to the Times account, which was clearly leaked by Pentagon officials who oppose the plan, Worden has very much the same kind of legally questionable operations in mind. "Information is much more global now and moves much more swiftly than it did 25 years ago," said Thomas Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism here, who cited the Internet as one reason separating foreign from domestic media audiences no longer makes sense. "It would mean blowback, and that makes [these plans] much more complicated and either somewhat naive or disingenuous on the Pentagon's part," said Rosenstiel.

More than that, added Romberg, the Pentagon, if it goes through with the plans to use disinformation, risks losing its credibility. "People anticipate that the intelligence agencies do that; that's part of the game. But it would be a very dangerous mistake for the Pentagon to do it."

From virtually the outset of the counterterrorism campaign, the administration has been concerned with influencing foreign opinion. Secretary of State Colin Powell recruited Charlotte Beers, a retired top advertising executive, to become his undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs. Best known for developing the images of major products and US corporations, her primary focus has been to refurbish Washington's image, particularly in the Arab world.

During the 1980s, the State Department housed a public diplomacy office on Central America that reported to the National Security Council and was later found by a Congressional investigative body to have engaged in "prohibited, covert propaganda" operations when it, among other things, authored articles purportedly written by leaders of the Nicaraguan contras for publication in US newspapers. Several high-ranking members of the Bush administration contributed to that effort, including Otto Reich, who headed the office and is now assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, and Elliott Abrams, who was assistant secretary then and is now a top National Security Council aide to Bush.

A third, Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, was to be named as Downey's deputy at the White House anti-terrorist office but apparently fell victim to strenuous protests from Congressional Democrats who recalled that he and Abrams had pleaded guilty to lying to Congress in the Iran-contra affair, only to be pardoned by then-president George Bush Sr.

The Rendon Group had a CIA contract to do media work on behalf of the INC in the mid-1990s, for which it was reportedly paid US$23 million, an amount that prompted a brief but inconclusive congressional investigation. It worked for the government in Panama during and after the 1989 US invasion "Operation Just Cause", and performed similar services when US troops intervened in Haiti to restore exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Its most recent Pentagon contract, for just under $400,000, was to last four months, subject to renewal.

A spokesperson at Rendon told IPS on Tuesday she could confirm only that the group had a contract with the Pentagon and could provide no other information. Public affairs officials at the Pentagon held a closed-door meeting about the Times article on Tuesday but did not return phone calls seeking comment.

(Inter Press Service)