[iwar] [fc:Pentagon.May.Scrap.'Strategic.Influence'.Office.Proposal.to.Spread.Propaganda.Caused.Uproar]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-02-28 05:49:18


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Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 05:49:18 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:Pentagon.May.Scrap.'Strategic.Influence'.Office.Proposal.to.Spread.Propaganda.Caused.Uproar]
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Pentagon May Scrap 'Strategic Influence' Office Proposal to Spread Propaganda Caused Uproar

By SUSANNE M. SCHAFER
.c The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (Feb. 25) - While his defense secretary considered shutting down a 
new Pentagon office that reportedly has proposed spreading false information, 
President Bush pledged Monday: ``We'll tell the American people the truth.'' 

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has asked a top Pentagon official in 
charge of the new Office of Strategic Influence ``to take a very, very hard 
look at it'' and determine ``should it even exist,'' spokeswoman Victoria 
Clarke told reporters. 

Bush, questioned at the White House, said: ``I told Secretary Rumsfeld ... 
that we'll tell the American people the truth.'' 

Rumsfeld ``was just as amazed as I was about reading some allegation that 
somehow our government would never tell the American people the truth,'' Bush 
said, adding that he's confident the defense secretary will ``handle this in 
the right way.'' 

At the Pentagon, Clarke said she is ``always very, very concerned about our 
credibility.'' 

Last week, reports surfaced that the office had proposed giving false 
information to foreign journalists as a means of furthering the U.S. war 
against terrorism. 

The New York Times reported that the office, headed by Air Force Brig. Gen. 
Simon P. Worden, had begun circulating classified proposals calling for using 
the Internet and clandestine operations to spread such disinformation. 

On Sunday, Rumsfeld noted the office is only in its early stages and said he 
had never seen the charter setting it up. 

Appearing on NBC-TV's ``Meet the Press,'' Rumsfeld said there is a need ``to 
counter the lies'' of the Taliban in the war in Afghanistan. The defense 
secretary said the Taliban had been telling the Afghan people America was 
making war on Muslims and that the humanitarian rations being dropped by U.S. 
armed forces were poisonous. 

``The Pentagon needs to do that type of thing and that is all that the 
Pentagon does. The Pentagon does not lie to the American people. It does not 
lie to foreign audiences. It does not engage in those types of things,'' 
Rumsfeld said. 

Clarke, asked about the secretary's comments, said reports about the office 
had raised ``lots of questions and lots of concerns.'' 

Rumsfeld has asked Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, 
who oversees the new office, to determine its future. 

Rumsfeld said last week that the Pentagon might engage in strategic or 
tactical deception, as it has in the past. For example, if U.S. troops were 
about to launch an attack from the west, they might ``do things'' that would 
make the enemy believe an attack was instead coming from the north, Rumsfeld 
said. 

``That would be characterized as tactical deception,'' the secretary said. 

Feith, in an interview with reporters last week, said the main reason for 
creating the new office last fall was to centralize oversight of what the mi
litary calls ``information operations,'' such as spreading messages on a 
battlefield by leaflet or airborne broadcasts. 

``We have an interest in the enemy not knowing, not being comfortable about 
what we are going to do'' on the battlefield, Feith said in a breakfast 
interview with a group of reporters. 

He stressed that this would not include lying to the public. 

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