[R-G] America still has an office of disinformation. It's called the Pentagon - John R. MacArthur

[shniad at sfu.ca]

The Globe and Mail			   Monday, March 11, 2002

Lies the Pentagon told us

     America still has an office of disinformation. It's called the Pentagon


     By John R. MacArthur

U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld's abrupt abortion of the Office of
Strategic Lying (a.k.a. the Office of Strategic Influence) -- in response to
critics who feared for Washington's stellar reputation for honesty --
deserves to be ranked as one of the great propaganda coups of modern times.

Mr. Rumsfeld sounded upset, I know, but that was just another aspect of his
public relations brilliance. Reading the literal-minded, largely positive
reaction to his announcement, I realized that a good many citizens must have
inferred that the Pentagon and the White House have been routinely telling
the truth over the past few decades.

In all frankness, the only thing more dishonest than an Office of Strategic
Influence aimed at deceiving foreigners is the suggestion that the Bush
administration, or any other since the Second World War, likes to tell
Americans the truth.

"The office is done," a seemingly hurt, aggrieved Mr. Rumsfeld told a press
conference. "It's over. What do you want, blood?" Thus, with three short
phrases and a touch of martyrdom, the former drug company chief executive
officer swept away the Pentagon Papers, the Church Committee hearings and
the collected works of journalist Seymour Hersh, all of which speak to the
vast array of lies perpetrated by the U.S. government since the world's
greatest superpower took centre stage, at Hiroshima in 1945.

The Washington Post reported Mr. Rumsfeld's retreat as a "victory for the
military public affairs community," which "had worried that the new office
would blur the line between their work of dealing with the media and the
public and the 'black' world of covert operations, which sometimes involves
disseminating false information." When was the line ever clear?

Of course, it hardly seems to matter anymore whether the government lies or
conceals, now that the war on terrorism justifies almost anything. The Bush
administration set the tone immediately after the commencement of bombing
with a strict military censorship policy that forbids reporters from
covering U.S. troops engaged in what was initially dubbed "Operation
Infinite Justice" (unless they work for Hollywood producers Jerry
Bruckheimer and Bertram van Munster, who are making a Pentagon-approved
"reality TV series" for ABC).

Technically, this is a secrecy policy, not censorship. But it permits lying
at a far more effective level. Censorship rules can always be broken by
eyewitnesses, but it's harder to report what you can't see. If the
government says such-and-such a target was surgically bombed and so many
al-Qaeda members were killed, you can repeat it in the newspaper, but you
can't refute or corroborate it.

Lately, the military has gotten annoyed with pesky reporters concerned that
the "military public affairs community" might be lying about its selection
of military targets in Afghanistan -- and how it is that so many civilians
have been killed and wounded when bombing has been likened to a delicate
medical procedure. Last month, Washington Post reporter Doug Struck went to
investigate some corpses in a village and was held at gunpoint by a U.S.
Army officer who told him, perhaps truthfully, "Don't move or we'll shoot."

In the lexicon of government-lying, there are specific lies, big,
overarching lies, and there is propaganda. A specific lie is the Eisenhower
administration saying that above-ground nuclear testing in Nevada posed no
danger to the soldiers who were asked to witness it. A specific lie is the
Johnson administration's version of the Gulf of Tonkin incident in which
North Vietnamese gunboats were said to have fired, without provocation, on
American vessels, this in order to justify a massive military buildup
without having to resort to a straightforward declaration of war.

A specific lie is the Kuwaiti/White House/Hill and Knowlton invention of the
baby-incubator atrocity, allegedly committed by Nazi-like Iraqi soldiers,
which whipped up popular support for liberating freedom-loving, tolerant
Kuwait from the iron grip of tyranny. (All of these lies were disseminated
through "regular" channels and "subcontractors," a practice that Mr.
Rumsfeld said will continue.)

A big, overarching lie is the assertion that the U.S. can impose a
government on Afghanistan and that Prime Minister Hamid Karzai has anything
like genuine control over his countrymen. And then there's the lie, ably
distributed by Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, that the Saudi royal
family really wants peace in the Middle East and a solution to the
Palestinian-Israeli bloodletting.

My own Israeli source, a diplomat based in New York, tells me that the Saudi
government helped subvert the Clinton-Barak peace proposal, before the
latest Palestinian uprising, by spreading the word among the Islamic
faithful that Yasser Arafat had no authority to negotiate the future of
Jerusalem because of its "holy sites." The Saudis and the U.S. foreign
policy establishment prefer a measure of instability in the Middle East
because it distracts attention from the vast corruption of the Saudi elite
and the complicity of its oil-craving U.S. backers.

Propaganda sometimes involves smaller lies or lies by implication. In early
January, we learned that the U.S. military was dropping leaflets on
Afghanistan that accused "Usama Bin Laden" [sic] of faithlessness to his
Afghan hosts and al-Qaeda henchmen: ". . . the murderer and the coward has
abandoned you and run away. Give yourself up and do not die needlessly . .
.."

On the front of the leaflet, the warning photograph of a corpse seemed
genuine enough, but on the back an obviously fabricated picture of Mr. bin
Laden -- smiling, beardless and attired in Western business clothes -- gave
the lie to this shabby little promotion. Around the same time, the State
Department placed ads in U.S. newspapers under the headline, "What can you
do?" [to stop terrorists]. . . . Bad enough that the ad copy said Mohammed
Atta was "interested in crop dusting" when he never said any such thing at
his Florida flying school.

Worse still that the ad (along with another headlined "Can a woman stop
terrorism?") implied that ordinary citizens were to blame for Sept. 11 by
not being vigilant enough -- "If someone had called us, his [Mr. Atta's]
picture wouldn't be spotted in this ad." Surely the government bore no
responsibility.

But perhaps the biggest lie is that Mr. Rumsfeld is peeved by the latest
sniping about Pentagon disinformation. I still remember him in great good
humour last fall, mocking the Pentagon beat-reporters who wanted more
regular and truthful briefings: "Let's hear it for the essential daily
briefing, however hollow and empty it might be." 

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper's Magazine.