Fucking CNN Along With Faux News: Lying Military Right Wing Arms of the Same Ugly Bushian Creature

 MEDIA ADVISORY:

The Return of PSYOPS

Military's media manipulation demands more investigation



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.



As Rumsfeld put it, "I went down that next day and said 'Fine, if you

want to savage this thing, fine-- I'll give you the corpse. There's the

name. You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that

needs to be done and I have.'" (FAIR Media Advisory, 11/27/02)  So the

revelation that a misinformation campaign bearing a striking

resemblance to the description of the OSI was actually being carried out ought not

to come as a total surprise.



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.



And a 1996 unofficial strategy paper written by an Army officer and

published by the U.S. Naval War College ("Military Operations in the

CNN World: Using the Media as a Force Multiplier") urged military

commanders to find ways to "leverage the vast resources of the fourth estate" for

the purposes of "communicating the [mission's] objective and endstate,

boosting friendly morale, executing more effective psychological

operations, playing a major role in deception of the enemy, and

enhancing intelligence collection."



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.  CNN's

Aaron Brown reported the story (12/1/04), admitting that "none of us are

particularly comfortable when we're talking about things, about

ourselves if you will."



Brown also made another, even more revealing comment: "There is an

important and explicit bargain between the press and the

Pentagon in a time of war. We don't do anything to endanger the troops

or operations. They don't lie to us. Each is essential in a free society

and each is made more complicated by the information age, but it seems that

sometimes in an effort to mislead the enemy the military has come

close, very close, to crossing the line and misleading you."



Of course, in this case the military did not come "very close" to

misleading the public; they did mislead the public.  And while Brown

may have confidence that such a "bargain" exists between the press and the

military, it would appear that the Pentagon does not agree.  If

journalists were more willing to accept the old adage that "all

governments lie," we might all be better served.