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25 NOV 2003 It's part of the new bill's redefinition of the term "financial institution" and "financial transaction," according to Wired, and allows the FBI to get such records by handing itself a national security letter saying those records are relevant to a terrorism investigation. "The FBI doesn't need to show probable cause or consult a judge," the magazine said. "What's more, the target institution is issued a gag order and kept from revealing the subpoena's existence to anyone, including the subject of the investigation." 9 NOV 2003 14 NOV 2003 The 56-page investigation was assembled by USAF Colonel (Ret.) Sam Gardiner. "Truth from These Podia: Summary of a Study of Strategic Influence, Perception Management, Strategic Information Warfare and Strategic Psychological Operations in Gulf II" identifies more than 50 stories about the Iraq war that were faked by government propaganda artists in a covert campaign to "market" the military invasion of Iraq. Gardiner has credentials. He has taught at the National War College, the Air War College and the Naval Warfare College and was a visiting scholar at the Swedish Defense College. According to Gardiner, "It was not bad intelligence" that led to the quagmire in Iraq, "It was an orchestrated effort [that] began before the war" that was designed to mislead the public and the world. Gardiner's research led him to conclude that the US and Britain had conspired at the highest levels to plant "stories of strategic influence" that were known to be false. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced plans to create an Office of Strategic Influence early in 2002. At the same time British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Strategy Director Alastair Campbell was setting up an identical operation in London. White House critics were quick to recognize that "strategic influence" was a euphemism for disinformation. Rumsfeld had proposed establishing the country's first Ministry of Propaganda. The criticism was so severe that the White House backed away from the plan. But on November 18, several months after the furor had died down, Rumsfeld arrogantly announced that he had not been deterred. "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." Gardiner's dogged research identified a long list of stories that passed through Rumsfeld's propaganda mill. According to Gardiner, "there were over 50 stories manufactured or at least engineered that distorted the picture of Gulf II for the American and British people." Those stories include: The link between terrorism, Iraq and 9/11 Iraqi agents meeting with 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta Iraq's possession of chemical and biological weapons. Iraq's purchase of nuclear materials from Niger. Saddam Hussein's development of nuclear weapons. Aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons The existence of Iraqi drones, WMD cluster bombs and Scud missiles. Iraq's threat to target the US with cyber warfare attacks. The rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch. The surrender of a 5,000-man Iraqi brigade. Iraq executing Coalition POWs. Iraqi soldiers dressing in US and UK uniforms to commit atrocities. The exact location of WMD facilities WMDs moved to Syria. Every one of these stories received extensive publicity and helped form indelible public impressions of the "enemy" and the progress of the invasion. Every one of these stories was false. "I know what I am suggesting is serious. I did not come to these conclusions lightly," Gardiner admits. "I'm not going to address why they did it. That's something I don't understand even after all the research." But the fact remained that "very bright and even well-intentioned officials found how to control the process of governance in ways never before possible." A Battle between Good and Evil Gardiner notes that cocked-up stories about Saddam's WMDs "was only a very small part of the strategic influence, information operations and marketing campaign conducted on both sides of the Atlantic." The "major thrust" of the campaign, Gardiner explains, was "to make a conflict with Iraq seem part of a struggle between good and evil. Terrorism is evil... we are the good guys. "The second thrust is what propaganda theorists would call the 'big lie.' The plan was to connect Iraq with the 9/11 attacks. Make the American people believe that Saddam Hussein was behind those attacks." The means for pushing the message involved: saturating the media with stories, 24/7; staying on message; staying ahead of the news cycle; managing expectations; and finally, being prepared to "use information to attack and punish critics." Audition in Afghanistan The techniques that proved so successful in Operation Iraqi Freedom were first tried out during the campaign to build public support for the US attack on Afghanistan. Rumsfeld hired Rendon Associates, a private PR firm that had been deeply involved in the first Gulf War. Founder John Rendon (who calls himself an "information warrior") proudly boasts that he was the one responsible for providing thousands of US flags for the Kuwaiti people to wave at TV cameras after their "liberation" from Iraqi troops in 1991. The White House Coalition Information Center was set up by Karen Hughes in November 2001. (In January 2003, the CIC was renamed the Office for Global Communications.) The CIC hit on a cynical plan to curry favor for its attack on Afghanistan by highlighting "the plight of women in Afghanistan." CIC's Jim Wilkinson later called the Afghan women campaign "the best thing we've done." Gardiner is quick with a correction. The campaign "was not about something they did. It was about a story they created... It was not a program with specific steps or funding to improve the conditions of women." The coordination between the propaganda engines of Washington and London even involved the respective First Wives. On November 17, 2001, Laura Bush issued a shocking statement: "Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women's fingernails for wearing nail polish." Three days later, a horrified Cherie Blaire told the London media, "In Afghanistan, if you wear nail polish, you could have your nails torn out." Misleading via Innuendo Time and again, US reporters accepted the CIC news leaks without question. Among the many examples that Gardiner documented was the use of the "anthrax scare" to promote the administration's pre-existing plan to attack Iraq. In both the US and the UK, "intelligence sources" provided a steady diet of unsourced allegations to the media to suggest that Iraq and Al Qaeda terrorists were behind the deadly mailing of anthrax-laden letters. It wasn't until December 18, that the White House confessed that it was "increasingly looking like" the anthrax came from a US military installation. The news was released as a White House "paper" instead of as a more prominent White House "announcement." As a result, the idea that Iraq or Al Qaeda were behind the anthrax plot continued to persist. Gardiner believes this was an intentional part of the propaganda campaign. "If a story supports policy, even if incorrect, let it stay around." In a successful propaganda campaign, Gardiner wrote, "We would have expected to see the creation [of] stories to sell the policy; we would have expected to see the same stories used on both sides of the Atlantic. We saw both. The number of engineered or false stories from US and UK stories is long." The US and Britain: The Axis of Disinformation Before the coalition invasion began on March 20, 2003, Washington and London agreed to call their illegal pre-emptive military aggression an "armed conflict" and to always reference the Iraqi government as the "regime." Strategic communications managers in both capitols issued lists of "guidance" terms to be used in all official statements. London's 15 Psychological Operations Group paralleled Washington's Office of Global Communications. In a departure from long military tradition, the perception managers even took over the naming of the war. Military code names were originally chosen for reasons of security. In modern US warfare, however, military code names have become "part of the marketing." There was Operation Nobel Eagle, Operation Valiant Strike, Operation Provide Comfort, Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Uphold Democracy and, finally, Operation Iraqi Freedom. The "Rescue" of Jessica Lynch The Pentagon's control over the news surrounding the capture and rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch receives a good deal of attention in Gardiner's report. "From the very beginning it was called an 'ambush'," Gardiner noted. But, he pointed out, "If you drive a convoy into enemy lines, turn around and drive back, it's not an ambush. Military officers who are very careful about how they talk about operations would normally not be sloppy about describing this kind of event," Gardiner complained. "This un-military kind of talk is one of the reasons I began doing this research." One of the things that struck Gardiner as revealing was the fact that, as Newsweek reported: "as soon as Lynch was in the air, [the Joint Operations Center] phoned Jim Wilkinson, the top civilian communications aide to CENTCOM Gen. Tommy Franks." It struck Gardiner as inexplicable that the first call after Lynch's rescue would go to the Director of Strategic Communications, the White House's top representative on the ground. On the morning of April 3, the Pentagon began leaking information on Lynch's rescue that sought to establish Lynch as "America's new Rambo." The Washington Post repeated the story it received from the Pentagon: that Lynch "sustained multiple gunshot wounds" and fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldier... firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition." Lynch's family confused the issue by telling the press that their daughter had not sustained any bullet wounds. Lynch's parents subsequently refused to talk to the press, explaining that they had been "told not to talk about it." (Weeks later, the truth emerged. Lynch was neither stabbed nor shot. She was apparently injured while falling from her vehicle.) Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers let the story stand during an April 3 press conference although both had been fully briefed on Lynch's true condition. "Again, we see the pattern," Gardiner observed. "When the story on the street supports the message, it will be left there by a non-answer. The message is more important than the truth. Even Central Command kept the story alive by not giving out details." Gardiner saw another break with procedure. The information on the rescue that was released to the Post "would have been very highly classified" and should have been closely guarded. Instead, it was used as a tool to market the war. "This was a major pattern from the beginning of the marketing campaign throughout the war," Gardiner wrote. "It was okay to release classified information if it supported the message." Operation TELIC The attempts to control those "first images" were of overriding interest to the coalition's ministries of propaganda. Because it was believed that the city of Basrah would quickly fall to the coalition troops, the "Battle of Basrah" was heavily scripted long before the first soldiers even entered Iraq. Marines were given food packets to hand out to Basrah children. Journalists were to be bused to the newly captured city and TV crews were to be flown in to film the "liberated" citizens welcoming coalition soldiers with smiles and flowers. The UK had expected to lead the attack on Basrah but, over Blair's objections, the US insisted on giving this plum assignment to the US Marines. Gardiner's sources in Britain told him that the sole reason was that the US "wanted to have their forces lead the victory into Basrah." When the residents of Basrah refused to be "liberated," the carefully planned media event evaporated in a hail of gunfire. "It was about image," Gardiner marvels. "So much effort and money on image." Salman Pak In a widely publicized September 12, 2002 briefing paper entitled, "Decade of Deception," the White House described "a highly secret terrorist training facility in Iraq known as Salman Pak, where both Iraqis and non-Iraqi Arabs receive training on hijacking planes and trains, planting explosives in cities, sabotage, and assassinations." "This facility became a major part of the strategic influence marketing effort," Gardiner writes. Yet, in the invasions aftermath, the Pentgon offered no "compelling evidence" that such a site existed. In his February 3 presentation to the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell flashed a photo of an Ansar al-Salam "poison factory" in northern Iraq. In September 3, seven months after Powell's presentation, an Los Angeles Times reporter managed to reach the "poison factory," which he described as "a small cinderblock building bearing brown granules and ammonia-like scents." When the Times had the material tested, the granules turned out to be a commercial rat poison. Secretary Powell claimed that Iraq possessed mobile trucks designed to produce biological weapons. When invading forces located the trucks it turned out they were actually designed to produce hydrogen for surveillance balloons and Iraq had bought the trucks from the Britain. US Lied about
Attacks on Iraq's Power Grid The facts would subsequently show that the US had targeted portions of the power grid. In the North, a special operations team staged an attack on the Hadithah Dam on April 1 or 2. Human Rights Watch documented at least two attacks on the power grid south of Baghdad "along Highway 6 [that] included a Tomahawk [missile] strike using carbon fibers." The use of a sophisticated carbon-fiber weapons is significant since the deployment of these specialized devices required prior approval from Washington. Iraq's "Dirty Bomb" In June 2002, an Iraqi expatriate named Khidhir Manza told the Wall Street Journal that the situation was "ideal for countries like Iraq to train and support a terrorist operation using radiation weapons." Manza's interview with the Journal was arranged by the Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqi exiles that was set up by the Rendon Group and supported financially by agencies of the US government. (See Weapons of Mass Deception, by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton.) Helping to make Manza's charges more credible, unnamed intelligence officials earlier had told the International Herald Tribune that "they are kept awake at night by the prospect of a dirty bomb." Astute readers will note that these anonymous sources never actually said Iraq had a dirty bomb. It was all managed through suggestion and innuendo. American's Heroic Hostage In an episode that recalled the creation of the "Old Shoe, the fictitious hero concocted by Robert deNiro's ace "perception manager" in the film "Wag the Dog," Washington's propaganda artists literally brought someone back from the dead. Lt. Commander Scott Speicher had been shot down during the first Gulf War in 1991. In an attempt to generate sympathy and support for Bush's pre-emptive war, "intelligence sources" began circulating a bizarre new story to the US media. In what Gardiner called "a pattern typical of created stories," these unnamed sources started a rumor that Commander Speicher had not only survived but that he had somehow spent the past decade trapped in an Iraqi prison. Iraqi officials vehemently denied that they were holding Speicher or, for that matter, any Americans. When asked about the Iraqi denial at a press conference, Rumsfeld's response was calculatingly oblique. "I don't believe much the regime puts out," Rumsfeld stated. In Gardiner's estimation, Rumsfeld's answer "was too clever not to have been formulated to leave the impression that [Speicher] was alive." Gardiner was troubled by Rumsfeld's apparent disinterest in the truth but, as a former military officer, there was another question that bothered Gardiner even more. "Why didn't [Rumsfeld] consider what he was doing to Speicher's family?" On January 11, 2001, Speicher's status was changed from KIA (Killed in Action) to MIA (Missing in Action). As the invasion forces gathered in the Middle East, Speicher's status was changed once more, to "captured." Navy officials who contacted ABC News reported that they had been pressured to make this change. In January, "intelligence officials" continued to leak information to the media that suggested Speicher was still alive. In April, the secretive ministry of propaganda leaked a report that his initials had been found on the wall of a cell in Iraq. Gardiner found this leak particularly strange since "Military POW recovery personnel are very careful about releasing information that would cause false hope in families." The release of such information would also, obviously, endanger the captives. Long after Baghdad fell and the media's attention had been drawn to the fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction, a reporter thought to ask Rumsfeld about America's lost hero. The secretary replied vaguely that there was "nothing turned up thus far that I could elaborate on that would be appropriate." On July 16, a Washington Times investigation belatedly concluded that there was "no evidence" Speicher had survived or had been held captive in Iraq. Iraq's Planned
Computer Attack on America The warning came from a single source who claimed that Iraq's Intelligence Service was working with the Babylon Software Company to break into US computers, steal documents and spread viruses. There were no such attacks. There was no such program. Iraqi Troops in
US Uniforms On March 26, Pentagon spokesperson Victoria "Tori" Clarke embellished the story. Clarke told reporters that "we knew they were acquiring uniforms that looked like US and UK uniforms. And the reporting was ... [that Saddam Hussein would] give them to the thugs, as I call them, to go out, carry out reprisals against the Iraqi people, and try to blame it on coalition forces." Two days later, Rumsfeld added a new twist, claiming that Saddam Hussein's troops planned to don UK an US uniforms "to try to fool regular Iraqi soldiers into surrendering to them and then execute them as an example for others." There were never any reports of Iraq attempting such stunts. In his report, Gardiner concludes: "The way it was put by Jim Wilkinson (a name that keeps appearing in these questionable stories), it seems to fit a pattern of pre-blaming Iraq. It has the feel of being a created story." Iraq's Scud Missiles In October 2002, a CIA report determined that evidence for the existence of Iraqi Scuds was inconclusive. Nonetheless, by the time Colin Powell stepped up to the plate at the UN, the missiles had become an accepted fact as far as Washington, London and Tel Aviv were concerned. During the invasion, "American officials" told the New York Times that "the sheer tenacity of the Iraqi fight" near a compound at Al Qa'im had led them to believe that "the Iraqis might be defending Scud missiles" hidden at the site. Gardiner notes laconically: "No Scuds or WMDs were found at Al Qa'im." Saddam's Remote-Controlled Drones The CIA's October report also claimed that Iraq had converted some J-29 jet fighters to deliver chemical and biological weapons. George W. Bush quickly seized on this specter for a speech in Cincinnati, where he told the astonished crowd that Saddam's poison-laden aircraft were capable of hitting US soil. By the time Powell testified before the UN, the threat had been measurably pared down -- the fighter jets had become smaller, remotely piloted drones. Mr. Bush went public with the extraordinary claimed that these tiny drones could strike the US. On June 15, an Air Force team in Iraq finally seized the drones. The Los Angeles Times described them as "five burned and blackened 9-foot-wings." The Air Force captain in charge of the inspection concluded that the drones could have been "a student project or maybe a model." A subsequent investigation by the USAF determined that the drones' only possible mission was to take pictures. Targeting Critics, Spreading Lies, and PSYOPS 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, 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 Postthat 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, 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." Punishing the French For the French, the War of the Leaks was just beginning. On May 6, "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 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 he same time, in the US, a "retired general" contacted the Christian Science Monitoron April 25, 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. The Execution
of Prisoners Unfortunately, further evidence was exactly what Blair lacked. The very next day the sister of one of the dead soldiers told the Daily Mirrorthat her brother's colonel "told us he was not executed. We just can't understand why people are lying." Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clarke also told reporters that the Iraqis had killed "Americans who had either surrendered or were attempting to surrender." This report turned out to be "unconfirmed." A week after the British press had attacked the "executions" story as a total fabrication, and Blair's press spokesperson had been forced to admit that there was no "absolute evidence" to support the story, George W. Bush told the American Forces Press Service: "They have executed prisoners of war." Bush repeated the falsehood on April 5 and Rumsfeld echoed the lie on April 7. The US press attempted to catch up to their British counterparts by questioning Rumsfeld on April 7. As usual, Rumsfeld's defense was the non-answer. Reporter: Mr. Secretary, you stated flatly that American POWs have been executed. On what basis do you make that statement? Rumsfeld: I think I said they have executed prisoners of war. Reporter: Are you saying that there have not been American prisoners executed then? Rumsfeld: I'm not saying that either. There may very well have been, but I'm not announcing that, if that's what you're asking... We do know that they executed a lot of prisoners of war over the years." The Shula District
Bombing British journalist Robert Fisk reachned the site soon after the massacre and uncovered a 30-centimeter shard of shrapnel that showed the serial number of the weapon that caused the massacre. It was a HARM missile built by the US military contractor Raytheon. On April 3, CENTCOM issued a new story claiming to have received "reliable information" that the Hussein regime was planning to bomb Shiite Muslim neighborhoods in Baghdad so that it could blame the damage on the US-UK coalition. "The CENTCOM cover story came from Jim Wilkinson," Gardiner discovered. The British, however, refused to support this argument. They continued to claim (rightly, it now appeared) that no British bombs had caused the death and devastation in the Shula District. PSYOPS There was no better example of PSYOPS "distorting the free press with false information," Gardiner claims, than the alleged surrender of Iraq's 51st Division. On March 21, Reuters (citing "defense officials, who asked not to be identified") reported the stunning news that an entire Iraqi division had surrendered en mass to US Marines in southern Iraq. CBS News followed with a report the next day claiming that "an entire division of the Iraqi army, numbering 8,000 soldiers, surrendered to coalition forces." CBS's source: unnamed "Pentagon officials." The surrender of the 51st became a major news story that truly seemed to confirm the Pentagon's predictions of a quick and easy victory. "It was told as if it were a truth," Gardiner writes. "It was told on both sides of the Atlantic. It had been coordinated. It was not true." The story was intended to break the fighting will of the Iraqi army. On March 23, reporters from Agence France-Presse and Al-Jazeera TV managed to reach Col. Khaled al-Hashemi, the commander of the 51st. He replied in no uncertain terms that he not only had not surrendered but he would remain in Basrah and "continue to defend the people." The surrender of an entire division would have been a powerful blow to the will of the Iraqi army. The perception managers knew this. It is clear to Gardiner that this story "was not an intelligence failure. You would know if you have an entire division" suddenly surrendering. The story was a PSYOPS hoax. Other PSYOPS hoaxes were to follow. Stories were leaked that Hussein had made secret plans to spirit his family out of Iraq to safety. It was rumored that Hussein had deposited $3.5 billion in Libyan banks. The Future: The OGC, the Roadmap and 'Strategic Fusion' 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. According to the Times of London, the exact dispensation of the OGC's $200 million 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 system worked well but, as John Rendon revealed at a London conference on July 3, 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." 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." ----- 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). 9 NOV 2003 Former MI6 Agent: Kelly Murder Was 'Sloppy Work' A contact of mine, a former MI6 spook, was speaking about the circumstances of Kelly's death. He said he's been taught how to "make anything look like anything" and said that there must have been some kind of struggle at the scene of Kelly's death. He said it was
sloppy work that Kelly's body was found with enough pills for an
overdose but hadn't ingested them, he said that should have been
removed from the scene under normal procedure. He added "You
can slit someone's wrists and make it look like suicide easily but
it's a lot harder to make someone swallow tablets." He also
said the heart monitor pads found on Kelly's chest were "simply
there to make sure he was dead." He also said those should
have been removed and suspects the agents involved were disturbed
by someone in the process of the killing. |
CITIZINE SLIDES 06
Feb 2003 04
Feb 2003 Phil
Spector Slide Show.. Dennis Prager to Wrangle for U.S. Senate Seat LOS ANGELES 12 February 2003 (CitizineMag) - Local personality Dennis Prager hopes to make his moral voice one of the 100 most powerful in the country by challenging Senator Barbara Boxer for her U.S. Senate seat in 2004, according to a February 4, 2003 broadcast of The Dennis Prager Show. Prager
for Senate?
AUSTIN! Look
for
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