arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

WASHINGTON Het Amerikaanse ministerie van Defensie overweegt buitenlandse nieuwsorganisaties met gekleurde en
zelfs onjuiste informatie te voeden.Dat schrijft de New York Times.Zo zou de steun voor de oorlog tegen terrorisme
versterkt moeten worden.

Nieuw aan de plannen is dat de VS nu naast vijandige regimes ook bevriende naties,waaronder die in West-Europa,met de propaganda zou willen bestoken.

De plannen moeten nog door het Witte Huis worden goedgekeurd.Volgens de New York Times is het idee zeer omstreden. Sommigen in Washington vrezen dat de VS zijn eigen geloofwaardigheid verliest

MEDIA ADVISORY:
Pentagon Propaganda Plan Is Undemocratic, Possibly Illegal

February 19, 2002

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

The OSI was created shortly after September 11 to publicize the U.S. government's perspective in Islamic countries and to generate support for the U.S.'s "war on terror." This latest announcement raises grave concerns that far from being an honest effort to explain U.S. policy, the OSI may
be a profoundly undemocratic program devoted to spreading disinformation and misleading the public, both at home and abroad. At the same time,involving reporters in disinformation campaigns puts the lives of working
journalists at risk.

Despite the OSI's multi-million-dollar budget and its mandate to propagandize throughout the Middle East, Asia and Western Europe, "even many senior Pentagon officials and Congressional military aides say they know almost nothing about its purpose and plans," according to the Times.
The Times reported that the OSI's latest announcement has generated opposition within the Pentagon among those who fear that it will undermine the Defense Department's credibility.

Tarnished credibility may be the least of the problems created by the OSI's new plan to manipulate media-- the plan may compromise the free flow of information that democracy relies on. The government is barred by law
from propagandizing within the U.S., but the OSI's new plan will likely lead to disinformation planted in a foreign news report being picked up by U.S. news outlets. The war in Afghanistan has shown that the 24-hour news cycle, combined with cuts in the foreign news budgets across the U.S., make overseas outlets like Al-Jazeera and Reuters key resources for U.S. reporters.

Any "accidental" propaganda fallout from the OSI's efforts is troubling enough, but given the U.S. government's track record on domestic propaganda, U.S. media should be pushing especially hard for more information about the operation's other, intentional policies.

According to the New York Times, "one of the military units assigned to carry out the policies of the Office of Strategic Influence" is the U.S.
Army's Psychological Operations Command (PSYOPS). The Times doesn't mention, however, that PSYOPS has been accused of operating domestically as recently as the Kosovo war.

In February 2000, reports in Dutch and French newspapers revealed that several officers from the 4th PSYOPS Group had worked in the news division at CNN's Atlanta headquarters as part of an "internship" program starting
in the final days of the Kosovo War. Coverage of this disturbing story was scarce (see http://www.fair.org/activism/cnn-psyops.html), but after FAIR issued an Action Alert on the story, CNN stated that it had already terminated the program and acknowledged that it was "inappropriate."

Even if the PSYOPS officers working in the newsroom did not directly influence news reporting, the question remains of whether CNN may have allowed the military to conduct an intelligence-gathering mission against the network itself. The idea isn't far-fetched-- according to Intelligence
Newsletter (2/17/00), a rear admiral from the Special Operations Command told a PSYOPS conference that the military needed to find ways to "gain control" over commercial news satellites to help bring down an
"informational cone of silence" over regions where special operations were taking place. One of CNN's PSYOPS "interns" worked in the network's satellite division. (During the Afghanistan war the Pentagon found a very direct way to "gain control"—it simply bought up all commercial satellite images of Afghanistan, in order to prevent media from accessing them.)

It's worth noting that the 4th PSYOPS group is the same group that staffed the National Security Council's now notorious Office of Public Diplomacy(OPD), which planted stories in the U.S. media supporting the Reagan
Administration's Central America policies during the 1980s. Described by a senior U.S. official as a "vast psychological warfare operation of the kind the military conducts to influence a population in enemy territory"
(Miami Herald, 7/19/87), the OPD was shut down after the Iran-Contra investigations, but not before influencing coverage in major outlets including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post.

The OPD may be gone, but the Bush administration's recent recess
appointment of former OPD head Otto Reich as assistant secretary of state
for Western Hemisphere affairs is not reassuring. It suggests, at best, a
troubling indifference to Reich's role in orchestrating the OPD's
deception of the American people.

Indeed, as the Federation of American Scientists points out, "the Bush
Administration's insistent efforts to expand the scope of official secrecy
have now been widely noted as a defining characteristic of the Bush
presidency" (Secrecy News, 2/18/02). The administration's refusal to
disclose Enron-related information to the General Accounting Office is
perhaps the most publicized of these efforts; another is Attorney General
John Ashcroft's October 12 memo urging federal agencies to resist Freedom
Of Information Act requests.

In addition, the Pentagon's restrictive press policies throughout the war
in Afghanistan have been an ongoing problem. Most recently, Washington
Post reporter Doug Struck claims that U.S. soldiers threatened to shoot
him if he proceeded with an attempt to investigate a site where civilians
had been killed; Struck has stated that for him, the central question
raised by the incident is whether the Pentagon is trying to "cover up" its
actions and why it won't "allow access by reporters to determine what
they're doing here in Afghanistan" (CBS, "The Early Show," 2/13/02).

Taken together, these incidents and policies should raise alarm bells formedia throughout the country. Democracy doesn't work if the public does not have access to full and accurate information about its government.

Dit kreeg ik vandaag in mijn mailbox, van een vriend. Ik heb het hier geplakt - als aanvulling:

Pentagon plans propaganda war
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_1830000/1830500.stm

Secretary Rumsfeld is checking the legality of proposals

By Tom Carver
Washington correspondent

United States defence officials are examining the possibility of planting
propaganda and even misleading stories in international media as part of
George Bush's war on terrorism.

A new department in the Pentagon has been set up, called the Office of
Strategic Influence, to try to shape international opinion, especially in
the Middle East.

However officials stress that no final decision about its role has been
made.

The Office of Strategic Influence is being run by a brigadier general and is
well funded.

It has circulated a number of proposals within the Pentagon.

These range from doing more to get the message out abroad about what the
Pentagon is trying to achieve, to e-mailing journalists and community
leaders abroad with information undermining unfriendly governments.

'Black propaganda'
-------------------
The most controversial suggestion is the covert planting of disinformation
in foreign media, a process known as black propaganda.

The options range from "the blackest of black programs to the whitest of
white", one official told the New York Times.

And they have sparked off a fierce debate inside the Pentagon.

Some generals are worried that even the suggestion of disinformation would
undermine the Pentagon's credibility and the US Government's various
attempts to improve its image abroad.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has asked a team of lawyers to check the
proposals' legality.

The Pentagon is forbidden from spreading black propaganda in the American
media, but there is nothing to stop an American newspaper picking up a story
carried abroad.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_1830000/1830500.stm

en:

Pentagon overweegt propagandaoffensief

20/02/2002

WASHINGTON (ap) -- In de strijd om de internationale publieke opinie
overweegt het Amerikaanse ministerie van Defensie om de berichtgeving over
de strijd tegen het terrorisme te gaan beïnvloeden met de verspreiding van
gekleurde, pro-Amerikaanse berichten. Dat heeft een woordvoerder van het
Pentagon dinsdag gezegd.

Het Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) zou een centrale rol moeten gaan
vervullen in het mediaoffensief. Die afdeling -- vrij vertaald de Dienst van
Strategische Beïnvloeding -- is na de terroristische aanslagen van 11
september opgezet om de publieke opinie ten gunste van de Verenigde Staten
te bewerken. Het Pentagon was bang de mediaoorlog te verliezen nadat Osama
bin Laden de aanvallen op Afghanistan in oktober ,,een aanval op de islam''
had genoemd.

Het OSI heeft inmiddels de consultancyfirma Rendon Group ingehuurd. Dat
bedrijf heeft in het verleden veel pr-werk gedaan voor de CIA, de
Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst. Volgens de New York Times overweegt het
ministerie van Defensie de publieke opinie te beïnvloeden met een waar
propagandaoffensief, waarbij ook verzonnen berichten de wereld ingestuurd
zouden kunnen worden.

Om argwaan over de herkomst van sommige verhalen bij de media weg te nemen,
zou overwogen worden om een mediapartner te zoeken.

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