Mike Booth: The Gringo Chronicles

I’m Aghast But Not Surprised

In a bombshell article published yesterday in the NY Times, entitled “Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand,” investigative journalist David Barstow reveals a continuing Pentagon psychological operations (PSYOP) maneuver to disinform the American public through the manipulation of retired senior military officers employed by the media as news analysts. Barstow says, “Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance…”

The 14-page article was based on smoking-gun official Pentagon documentation–8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation–obtained by the NY Times after suing the Defense Department to gain access.

So, ever since the outset of the Iraq war, almost every time the American public was “informed” by one of those venerable old-warrior experts, whether on radio or television news programs or in newspaper opinion articles, they were victims of an elaborate disinformation campaign created and run by the Rumsfeld Pentagon. One of the officer participants, Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. He said, “This was a coherent, active policy.” According to Allard, as conditions in Iraq deteriorated he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private Pentagon briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

Barstow relates how Allard graphically described the Defense Department’s process of recruitment of analyst candidates: “Oh, you have no idea. You’re back. They listen to you. They listen to what you say on TV. It was like PSYOPS on steroids.”

The operative word here is “PSYOPS.” According to the psychological operations manual (FM 3-05.30, MCRP 3-406) elaborated by the United States Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Ft. Bragg, NC, “The effectiveness of deterrence hinges on U.S. ability to influence the perceptions of others. The purpose of PSYOP is to induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behavior favorable to U.S. national objectives. PSYOP are characteristically delivered as information for effect, used during peacetime and conflict to inform and influence.”

Until recently these military opinion-bending techniques were used exclusively on foreigners, but Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged that Americans were also recipients when, in January of 2006, he said that information spread by the Pentagon to influence foreign peoples and enemies increasingly seeped back home and was “consumed by our domestic audience.” What he failed to say in this left-handed disclaimer was that Americans were being deliberately targeted at home at that very moment by his own Pentagon PSYOPS team. (Note how this 2006 blog post largely anticipates the premise of yesterday’s NY Times article.)

Though the Pentagon would have us believe this is a simple exercise in public relations, it’s much more sinister than that. It’s an elaborately-orchestrated campaign by the American government to deceive their own people on issues of life-and-death importance. Americans might well ask themselves if Rumsfeld, Bush and company shouldn’t face the logical penal responsibilities which derive from this matter.

There’s more. According to Barstow’s article, most of the Pentagon-prepared colonels and generals used as news analysts by the mainstream American media were employed at the same time as representatives of “more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants.” It was not until Barstow pointed this out that anybody smelled the possibility of multi-billion-dollar conflicts of interest.

Another unsettling detail which emerges from the Pentagon documents is the level of disrespect shown by Rumsfeld’s team towards the military analysts, referring to them as “talking heads,” “message force multipliers” or “surrogates.”

The Pentagon disinformation team, led by former public relations executive Torie Clarke, carefully monitored the results of their work and found them to be highly satisfactory. Within days after a group of analysts was rushed down to Guantanamo for an executive visit in the wake of torture allegations in the press, “transcripts of analysts’ appearances were circulated to senior White House and Pentagon officials, cited as evidence of progress in the battle for hearts and minds at home.” It seems that all Americans are considered grist for the Pentagon’s disinformation mill, all PSYOP fodder.

These retired colonels and generals, unrestricted as analysts either by journalistic codes of ethics nor the Uniform Code of Military Justice, form part of the Neocons’ parallel universe of extra-legal, unregulated resources like the “security contractors” who impose rough justice both in Iraq and at home.

The saddest part of this whole matter is that this excellent article, a veritable depth charge dropped in the middle of the Bush administration’s submarine information wolf pack, will probably be ignored, shrugged off by an American public which didn’t want to know in the first place and is now sated with news of dishonesty and deceit in their government and military failures in Iraq. This vital information will no doubt be considered simply more inconvenient unpleasantness, to be buried in the media under the impending news of Paris Hilton’s (or Bill Clinton’s) next sensational fellatio.