| Pentagon Efforts to Sway Sentiment Abroad. | DeWaarheid - 19.02.2002 19:10
Pentagon Readies Efforts to Sway Sentiment Abroad.
WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon is developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones [N.B.], to foreign media organizations as part of a new effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries, military officials said.
The plans, which have not received final approval from the Bush administration, have stirred opposition among some Pentagon officials who say they might undermine the credibility of information that is openly distributed by the Defense Department´s public affairs officers.
The military has long engaged in information warfare against hostile nations -- for instance, by dropping leaflets and broadcasting messages into Afghanistan when it was still under Taliban rule.
But it recently created the Office of Strategic Influence, which is proposing to broaden that mission into allied nations in the Middle East, Asia and even Western Europe. The office would assume a role traditionally led by civilian agencies, mainly the State Department.
The small but well-financed Pentagon office, which was established shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was a response to concerns in the administration that the United States was losing public support overseas for its war on terrorism, particularly in Islamic countries.
As part of the effort to counter the pronouncements of the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and their supporters, the State Department has already hired a former advertising executive to run its public diplomacy office, and the White House has created a public information "war room" to coordinate the administration´s daily message domestically and abroad.
Little information is available about the Office of Strategic Influence, and even many senior Pentagon officials and Congressional military aides say they know almost nothing about its purpose and plans. Its multimillion dollar budget, drawn from a $10 billion emergency supplement to the Pentagon budget authorized by Congress in October, has not been disclosed.
Headed by Brig. Gen. Simon P. Worden of the Air Force, the new office has begun circulating classified proposals calling for aggressive campaigns that use not only the foreign media and the Internet, but also covert operations.
One of the office´s proposals calls for planting news items with foreign media organizations through outside concerns that might not have obvious ties to the Pentagon, officials familiar with the proposal said.
General Worden envisions a broad mission ranging from "black" campaigns that use disinformation and other covert activities to "white" public affairs that rely on truthful news releases, Pentagon officials said.
"It goes from the blackest of black programs to the whitest of white," a senior Pentagon official said.
Another proposal involves sending journalists, civic leaders and foreign leaders e-mail messages that promote American views or attack unfriendly governments, officials said.
Asked if such e-mail would be identified as coming from the American military, a senior Pentagon official said that "the return address will probably be a dot-com, not a dot- mil," a reference to the military´s Internet designation.
The new office has stirred a sharp debate in the Pentagon, where several senior officials have questioned whether its mission is too broad and possibly even illegal.
Those critics say they are disturbed that a single office might be authorized to use not only covert operations like computer network attacks, psychological activities and deception, but also the instruments and staff of the military´s globe- spanning public affairs apparatus.
Mingling the more surreptitious activities with the work of traditional public affairs would undermine the Pentagon´s credibility with the media, the public and governments around the world, critics argue.
"This breaks down the boundaries almost completely," a senior Pentagon official said.
Moreover, critics say, disinformation planted in foreign media organizations, like Reuters or Agence France-Presse, could end up being published or broadcast by American news organizations.
In the mid-1970´s, it was disclosed that some C.I.A. programs to plant false information in the foreign press had resulted in articles published by American news organizations. (NYT. 19 February 2002)
 Website: http://www.DeWaarheid.nu/
| | Hoe doen ze dat dan tegen de eigen bevolking? | 19.02.2002 22:07
En hoe gaan ze voorkomen dat Amerikanen buitenlands nieuws te zien krijgen?
Wat voor konkrete leugens zijn er dan al aan de vijand verkondigd waar onze pers over heeft gezwegen?
Er vanuitgaande dat dit niet ongemerkt voorbij is gegaan.
| | leugens in de media | theli - 19.02.2002 22:58
Als ze dit nu overwegen, waarom zouden ze het dan niet eerder gedaan hebben...
bijv in Golfoorlog, Kosovo, Servie, Afghanistan, Somalie, Korea, Vietnam, Columbia etc..
Ze maken het er zelf naar dat er steeds meer weerstand komt.
gelukkig is er nog zo iets als indymedia en consorten.
ga vooral door met zulke artikels.
| | Modderaar, mag dit in het midden | 20.02.2002 01:44
| | Woensdagavond in Netwerk | M02 - 20.02.2002 20:44
vanacht na middernacht herhaling dus , over dit onderwerp.
Ned.1
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