Lies Leading To
No-Win War In Iraq
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Targeting Allies: Punishing the French

The tools of strategic influence were not only wielded against Saddam Hussein, they were also turned against foreign allies and domestic critics who dared to question Bush's agenda. The French were among the first to feel the sting of these attacks.

Sam Gardiner's report notes that the French were clearly "the focus of punishment in the strategic influence campaign." He has identified "at least eight times when false stories or engineered stories were aimed at them, the majority appearing after their lack of support in the UN for US and UK actions."

In September 2002, government sources informed the New York Times that the French and German governments had provided Iraq with precision switches that could be used to produce nuclear weapons. The Times ran the story before discovering that the France and Germany had both, in fact, refused to provide the switches.

"American intelligence sources" told the Washington Post that the French possessed illegal strains of smallpox virus. Again, the story was false.

The Washington Times received a tip from "US intelligence sources" that two companies in France had sold equipment to Saddam. The companies denied the charge and no evidence was ever provided to sustain the charge.

On April 9, 2003, Brig. Gen. Brooks told the media that his troops had discovered "an underground storage facility containing... Roland-type air defense missiles." Lt. Greg Holmes, an army intelligence officer, told Newsweek that US soldiers had found "51 Roland-2 missiles, made by a partnership of French and German arms manufacturers." Holmes also stated that at least one of the Roland missiles "was manufactured last year."

The story served to further defame the irascible French but, Gardiner writes with a touch of sarcasm, the story "was not very well put together" since it turned out that "the production line for the Roland-2 was shut down in 1993."

For the French, the War of the Leaks was just beginning. On May 6, 2003, "US intelligence officials" were quoted as telling the Washington Times that "an unknown number of Iraqis who worked for Saddam Hussein's government were given passports by French officials in Syria." The story was kept alive by a succession of press leaks attributed to "State Department and intelligence officials," and a bevy of "administration officials."

On May 6, Fox News reported that "Paris had been colluding with Baghdad before and during the coalition invasion." On May 7, the Washington Times, citing reports from "US officials," claimed that "officials of the Saddam Hussein government... fled Iraq with French passports."

The French government angrily denied the allegations and accused Washington of running a "smear campaign." But when the press confronted Rumsfeld about these accusations, he "followed pattern." Instead of confirming or denying the charges against the French, he simply smiled and said, "I have nothing to add."

As Gardiner sees it, the intended effect of that kind of non-answer was that "he wanted people to believe the stories."

This campaign of Francophobe fibbing eventually contaminated the White House press briefings. On May 14, a reporter asked White House press officer Scott McClellan about the stories accusing the French of selling Iraq arms and issuing passports to fleeing Iraqi officials. "Are those charges valid?" the reporter asked.

McClellan's response: Well, I think that those are questions you can address to France.

Reporter: On that point, Scott, do you have any information that the French did, in fact, issue passports to people so that....

McClellan: I think -- no, I think that's a question you need to address to France.

Reporter: Well, no. It's information the US claims to have.

McClellan: I don't have anything for you.

"The Secretary of Defense told us before the war he was going to do strategic influence," Gardiner notes wryly. "It appears as if the French were a target."

Targeting Domestic Critics:
The Galloway Forgeries

In Britain, Labor Member of Parliament George Galloway became an open skeptic of Tony Blair's rhetoric. In a bold attempt to avoid war, Galloway had gone to Iraq to interview Saddam Hussein in hopes of promoting a diplomatic resolution to the crisis.

Galloway's skepticism began to gnaw away at Bush-and-Blair's broad-brush claims that Hussein was only months away from building a nuclear bomb or that he was capable of launching a WMD attack within 45 minutes.

Galloway soon found himself under attack. Government officials leaked a packet of supposedly "classified documents" to the Daily Telegraph. The papers, which were represented as having been seized from Iraq's Foreign Ministry, suggested MP Galloway had accepted "payoffs" from the Iraqi government.

At the same time, in the US, a "retired general" contacted the Christian Science Monitor on April 25, 2003, with similar documents showing that Hussein had given Galloway $10 million.

Galloway's reputation was seriously sullied. It wasn't until June 20, that the Monitor disclosed that the "general's" incriminating documents were forged. The documents released in Britain also turned out to be forgeries. George Galloway remains a vocal critic of Tony Blair's war policies.

EmpowerPeace.com: Black Programs
and the Future of Propaganda

In the oddest example of perception management, Pentagon media masters actually created a website to promote world peace. The "EmpowerPeace" website appeared to represent a citizen's anti-war movement. The goal seemed to be to foster the impression that the US people (and especially US children) were essentially peace-loving. "It looked like a grassroots effort," Gardiner recalls. "It seems to have been aimed at the Arab audience set."

The EmpowerPeace website didn't last long. The reason, Gardiner suspects, is that its creation probably violated the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which bans the domestic dissemination of government propaganda.

Gardiner found another "strange website" called "The Iraq Crisis Bulletin," which offered daily updates and reports from around the world. The site was recommended by the American Press Institute but there was "absolutely no indication of the sponsor of the site." With a little research, Gardiner discovered that "the articles were [written] by Voice of America correspondents."

The problem with this, Gardiner notes, is that "the Voice of America is prohibited from doing communications for the American press. But, during Gulf II, it was getting the message to them." The VOA refused to respond to Gardiner's requests for information on "The Iraq Crisis Bulletin."

The Future: The OGC, the Roadmap and 'Strategic Fusion'

Mapping the Ministry of Propaganda, a
historic merging of politics, militarism and
public "perception management."
Click here for larger image

The Coalition Information Center with offices in the London, Islamabad and the White House started work in mid-2002 (six months before it was officially authorized by an Executive Order). In 2003, the CIC morphed into the Office of Global Communications, staffed by Tucker Eskew, Dan Bartlett, Jeff Jones, and Peter Reid. The OGC works closely with the White House Iraq Group, which consists of Karl Rove, Condi Rice, Jim Wilkinson, Stephen Hadley, Scooter Libby, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, and Nicholas Callo.

Perception management (the art of propaganda, misdirection and lies, if you will) is no longer discreetly hidden away in some dark wing of the intelligence or defense establishments: It has become firmly enshrined right down the hall from the Oval Office.

The Office of Global Communications (OGC) is centered in the White House. If there is a Ministry of Propaganda in the Bush administration, the OGC is it. As Gardiner notes: "The White House is at the center of the strategic communications process."

The OGC has two components: One committee deals with conducting the perception of the war on terrorism while a second committee concentrates on "more general" propaganda projects.

The Times of London described the $200-million-plus US operation as a "meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress, and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein," but said the exact dispensation of the OGC's operating budget is largely a mystery. It is known that the OGC spent $250,000 on its military pressroom in Doha.

Gardiner discovered that "at times there were as many as three Brits associated with the Office of Global Communications. These assets were networked. To insure the military would be a willing part of the network, three people from the White House Office of Global Communications were sent to work with Central Command. Jim Wilkinson became General Franks' Director of Strategic Communications.

"The war was handled like a political campaign. Everyone in the message business was from the political communications community. In London, there was a parallel organization and a parallel coordination process. They kept the coordination with secure video teleconferences."

The multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign run out of the White House and Defense Department was, in Gardiner's final assessment "irresponsible in parts" and "might have been illegal."

"Washington and London did not trust the peoples of their democracies to come to the right decisions," Gardiner explains. Consequently, "Truth became a casualty. When truth is a casualty, democracy receives collateral damage." For the first time in US history, "we allowed strategic psychological operations to become part of public affairs... [W]hat has happened is that information warfare, strategic influence, [and] strategic psychological operations pushed their way into the important process of informing the peoples of our two democracies."

Improved Strategic Influence for Future Wars?

The system worked well but, as John Rendon revealed at a London conference on July 3, 2003, there was still room for improvement. Rendon told his fellow conferees that the idea of using "embedded journalists" was quite successful and worked just as they hoped it would from tests they had run to gauge how reporters would perform once they bonded with the soldiers in their assigned units.

One of the mistakes, Rendon said, was that while they had taken command of the story, they had "lost control of the context." The problem was the veteran newsmen in the networks: they had "too much control of context," Rendon complained. "That has to be fixed for the next war," Rendon declared.

At the same conference, Captain Gerald Mauer, the Joint Staff Assistant Deputy Director for Information Operations, observed that public diplomacy and public affairs are slowly morphing into a single combined information operation. Mauer envisions a Strategic Fusion Center that "brings everything together." The Pentagon is already hard at work crafting an Information Operations Roadmap.

Mauer also told his fellow perception managers that "We hope to make more use of Hollywood and Madison Avenue in the future." The overall goal remains the same Mauer explained: to allow the men who now control Washington to "disrupt, corrupt or usurp adversarial... decision-making."

Gardiner finds that the future envisioned by Rendon and Mauer is fundamentally "frightening." The phrase "adversarial... decision-making will be disrupted" reportedly was added by Douglas Feith, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. What it means, Gardiner warns, is that "we will even go after friends if they are against what we are doing or want to do."

Criticism, questioning and debate are now defined as "adversarial" and the new watchword out of Washington is: "If you don't agree with us, you could be the target of an information attack." The new reality is that "punishment of those who disagree is a dimension of the strategy."

"If the democracies of the United States and the United Kingdom are based upon informed, open debate of the issues," Gardiner states, "we've got some fixing to do.

"It's not enough to look at the arguments about weapons of mass destruction before the war," Gardiner argues. "There needs to be an inquiry of the broader question of how spin got to be more important than substance. What roles did information operations and strategic psychological operations play in the war" What controls need to be placed on information operations?"

Solutions Are Needed to Control Information Warfare

Sam Gardiner has become the Paul Revere of our generation. He has raised a cry: It is no longer "The Redcoats are coming!" but "The PSYOPS are coming!"

"We need a major investigation," Gardiner insists. "We need restrictions on which parts of the government can do information operations. We should not do information operations against friends. We have to get this back in control."

One remedy is the Smith-Mundt Act, which was created in the aftermath of WWII with the intent of protecting American citizens from brainwashing by covert government propaganda campaigns. Unfortunately, Gardiner has discovered, the Smith-Mundt Act "no longer works. We became collateral damage, a target group of messages intended for other groups."

Gardiner wraps up his 56-page investigation with a series of charts that assess several Defense Department press briefings to determine the role played by PSYOPS, false or engineered information, and non-informative responses. His conclusion: "Even if you give them slack for not giving any information, it turns out that more than half the answers were not truth ... Maybe a better way to say it would be that if an American (or Brit) were diligent about wanting to understand the war, he could not rely on the statements made by the US Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

Perhaps the penultimate example of the non-responsive response came in an April 7 DOD press briefing when General Myers was asked about the status of the chemical missile unit cited by Secretary Powell during his UN testimony. Powell had told the world that Iraq had outfitted a group of rockets on the outskirts of Baghdad with warheads filled with WMD and was prepared to fire them at a moment's notice.

According to Gardiner, Myers "was very evasive, saying that he did not recall ever having heard about such a unit."

Mainstream Media Guilt in Push for Iraq War

Gardiner's findings have not yet received due attention from the US media and with good cause. Gardiner's investigation revealed that the mainstream media not only failed to stand up to the government and insist on the truth, they all too often submitted in complicit cooperation with the government. Even in peacetime, the corporate media is an "embedded" media.

Gardiner has some hard questions for America's press barons:

• "How was it that the Washington Post took classified information on the Jessica Lynch story and published it just the way the individual leaking it in the Pentagon wanted?"
• "Why did the New York Times let itself be used by 'intelligence officials' on stories?"
• "Why did the Washington Times never seem to question a leak they were given?"
• "Why were newspapers in the UK better than those in the US in raising questions before and during the war?"

Since releasing his study, Gardiner has had the opportunity to talk with many people in the print media. While many have appeared "quite interested" in his findings, Gardiner admits that he has "not heard any self-criticism from reporters to whom I have talked." In conversations with TV producers and reporters, Gardiner found the prevailing reaction was that "the whole story is just too complex to tell."

Gardiner's most disheartening reaction came during a presentation at "a major Washington think tank." Most of the Washington veterans in the audience kept asking, "So, what's new?" And when Gardiner opined that there was "no passion for truth in those who were taking us to war," he distinctly heard callous laughter breaking out among his listeners.

It is the sound of that brittle laughter that keeps Sam Gardiner going. Things must be changed. The dragons of information warfare must be slain.

As Gardiner says: "I pain for our democratic process when I find individuals not angered at being deceived."

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Gar Smith is Editor Emeritus of Earth Island Journal, Roving Editor at The-Edge (www.the-edge.org) and co-founder of Environmentalists Against War (www.envirosagainstwar.org).

Sam Gardiner may be reached at: SamGard@aol.com

This information originally published 11/07/2003
on The-Edge.

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