[FAIR]
“The Los Angeles Times revealed this week (12/1/04) that the U.S. military lied to CNN in the course of executing psychological warfare operations , or PSYOPS, in advance of the recent attack on Fallujah. This incident raises serious questions about government disinformation and journalistic credibility, but recent discussions of the government’s propaganda plans have excluded some valuable context.”
“In an October 14 on-air interview, Marine Lt. Lyle Gilbert told CNN Pentagon reporter Jamie McIntyre that a U.S. military assault on Fallujah had begun. In fact, the offensive would not actually begin for another three weeks. The goal of the psychological operation, according to the Times , was to deceive Iraqi insurgents into revealing what they would do in the event of an actual offensive.”
“This operation raises obvious questions about the government’s use of media to broadcast disinformation at home and abroad– not to mention questions about journalistic gullibility and reluctance to question official claims . But the CNN story has received little pick-up so far from other news outlets– and when it is covered, it’s treated like an isolated episode, even though recent history shows that U.S. government plans to deceive journalists and the public are widespread and systematic, not aberrational.”
“Shortly before the launch of the “war on terror,” an unnamed Pentagon war planner seemed to warn journalists everywhere when he told Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz: “This is the most information-intensive war you can imagine… We’re going to lie about things.” (9/24/01)”
“In February 2002, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) was “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.””
“The story got widespread attention, and the Pentagon announced that the office would be eliminated. But considerably less media attention was paid when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld later said that, while the OSI had been closed, its mission would be taken up by other agencies.”
“Earlier this year, another Los Angeles Times scoop (6/3/04) revealed that one of the most enduring images of the war– the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in a Baghdad square on April 9, 2003– was a U.S. Army psychological warfare operation staged to look like a spontaneous Iraqi action:”
“As the Iraqi regime was collapsing on April 9, 2003, Marines converged on Firdos Square in central Baghdad, site of an enormous statue of Saddam Hussein. It was a Marine colonel– not joyous Iraqi civilians, as was widely assumed from the TV images — who decided to topple the statue, the Army report said. And it was a quick-thinking Army psychological operations team that made it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi undertaking.”
“CNN ‘s history of voluntary cooperation with PSYOPS troops is also worth considering. In March 2000, FAIR and international news organizations revealed that CNN had allowed military propaganda specialists from an Army PSYOPS unit to work as interns in the news division of its Atlanta headquarters.”
“As FAIR reported at the time (3/27/00), some PSYOPS officers were eager to find ways to use media power to their advantage. One officer explained at 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.”
“Of course, the full extent of these programs is not yet known. But the fact that the U.S. government is intentionally lying to journalists, and by extension to the public, should be big news. Unfortunately, the L.A. Times report is generating little mainstream media attention.”
Read more: The Return of PSYOPS
2021-week15
