| Author | Message | ||
     Anonymous |
Pentagon Propaganda Plan Is Undemocratic, Possibly Illegal February 19, 2002 The New York Times reported today that the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence is “developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations” in an effort “to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries.” ... According to the New York Times, “one of the military units assigned to carry out the policies of the Office of Strategic Influence” is the U.S. Army’s Psychological Operations Command (PSYOPS). The Times doesn’t mention, however, that PSYOPS has been accused of operating domestically as recently as the Kosovo war... a rear admiral from the Special Operations Command told a PSYOPS conference that the military needed to find ways to "gain control" over commercial news satellites to help bring down an "informational cone of silence" over regions where special operations were taking place. One of CNN’s PSYOPS “interns” worked in the network’s satellite division. (During the Afghanistan war the Pentagon found a very direct way to “gain control”-- it simply bought up all commercial satellite images of Afghanistan, in order to prevent media from accessing them.) It’s worth noting that the 4th PSYOPS group is the same group that staffed the National Security Council's now notorious Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD), which planted stories in the U.S. media supporting the Reagan Administration's Central America policies during the 1980s. Described by a senior U.S. official as a "vast psychological warfare operation of the kind the military conducts to influence a population in enemy territory" (Miami Herald, 7/19/87), the OPD was shut down after the Iran-Contra investigations, but not before influencing coverage in major outlets including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post (Extra!, 9-10/01... Indeed, as the Federation of American Scientists points out, “the Bush Administration’s insistent efforts to expand the scope of official secrecy have now been widely noted as a defining characteristic of the Bush presidency” (Secrecy News, 2/18/02). The administration’s refusal to disclose Enron-related information to the General Accounting Office is perhaps the most publicized of these efforts; another is Attorney General John Ashcroft’s October 12 memo urging federal agencies to resist Freedom Of Information Act requests... Rest of article at http://www.fair.org/activism/osi-propaganda.html |
