Neo-Conned! Again
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Dick Cheney met with the three Senators before their legislation was introduced to explain that it would usurp the President's authority and interfere with his ability “to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack.” The White House also sent a message to Capitol Hill threatening a veto of the defense bill if the anti-torture provisions were included. Obviously it hasn't really learned its lesson vis-à-vis Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. Yet it remains inconceivable that the tyrants in the White House would balk at a law that merely dictated that someone under American control be legally protected from abuse and mistreatment. Thus far has this country fallen.
What's most objectionable about DiRita's article – beyond the repugnant position it defends – is that it comes from an employee of the Defense Department (DoD). The issue is one of national policy, and those employed by the outfit chartered with defending the country shouldn't be wasting taxpayer dollars participating in a publicity campaign run out of the White House targeting the American public and members of Congress. DiRita's job is to inform the American people about DoD operations (read the DoD “principles of information” for a little education), not to persuade Congress. This is the fundamental problem, also, with the executive-branch conduct detailed in Col. Gardiner's essay. Happily, the colonel's piece was well received, as we understand it, by a few DoD “public affairs” (PAO) personnel, such as the top uniformed PAO for the Joint Chiefs, and Ken Bacon, who had DiRita's job a couple of terms ago.
CHAPTER
34
Truth from These Podia:
A Study of Strategic Influence, Perception Management, Information Warfare, and Psychological Operations in Gulf War II
………
Col. Sam Gardiner, USAF (ret.)
MY INTENT WAS not to do this myself. The work had to be a combination of the kind of research I was doing and investigative journalism. I could do the outside part. Someone had to talk to those inside. After my return from an information warfare conference in London in July 2003 I began looking for interest from one of the major newspapers. I found that interest in Mark Fineman at the LA Times.
Mark had covered the war and previously had been bureau chief for the paper in the Philippines, India, Cyprus, and Mexico City. Although he had covered some of the stories I examined in my research, he saw very early the point I was making about the implication of their being seen as a whole: the strategic picture. We continued to exchange emails, talk by phone, and we met four times after our initial session. He shared information he was uncovering. I shared my developing research.
Mark Fineman died of an apparent heart attack while on assignment in Baghdad on September 23, 2003.
Introduction
It was not bad intelligence. It was much more. It was an orchestrated effort. It began before the war, was a major effort during the war and continues as post-conflict distortions.
When I began this study I thought it was going to be an analysis of Pentagon spin called “Truth from this Podium.” That was to be a play on promises we were given before the war. The more I did, the more it became clear that it was not just the Pentagon. It was the White House, and it was Number 10 Downing Street. It was more than spin.
I thought about calling it “Apparatus of Lies,” connecting to a title the White House gave a paper on Iraq's decade of fabrication, mostly about weapons of mass destruction. Although lies were part of the effort, that title would have been off the mark because the story is more about aversion to truth rather than the open lie.
I also missed on the subject. I thought it was going to be about spinning the stories of the conflict. The real essence of what I found was a much broader problem. It is a problem about the future as much as the past. This problem became the story of the study.
This study demonstrates that the United States and Britain conducted a strategic influence campaign that:
distorted perceptions of the situation both before and during the conflict;
caused misdirection of portions of the military operation;
was irresponsible in parts;
might have been illegal in some ways;
cost big bucks; and
will be even more serious in the future.
This is serious. I did not come to these conclusions lightly. It is because my plea is for truth in war, I have tried not to fall into a trap of describing exaggerations with exaggeration. I expect some will believe I have been guilty of the same sins. As long as we can have some discussion about truth in war, I accept the criticism.
My analysis and comments show I do not accept that the first casualty of war is truth. I think we have to have a higher standard.
In the most basic sense, Washington and London did not trust their peoples to come to right decisions. Truth became a casualty. When truth is a casualty, democracy receives collateral damage.
We have to restore truth as currency of government in matters as serious as war. My story would be important if it were the last chapter of the book. It's not. There is more to come. As the United States struggles with a post-conflict Iraq, distortions continue. Of more concern, major players in the game are working on ways to do it “better” in future conflicts.
In other words, it appears as if the issues of this war will become even more important for future wars. We have reason to be concerned.
Another way to summarize my conclusions is as follows:
(1) The assumption of some in the government is that the people of the United States and the United Kingdom will come to a wrong conclusion if they are given the truth.
(2) We have taken “Information Warfare” too far.
(3) We allowed strategic psychological operations to become part of public affairs.
(4) We failed to make adequate distinction between strategic influence and intelligence.
(5) Message became more important than performance.
The concepts of warfare got mixed up in this war. What happened is that information warfare, strategic influence, and strategic psychological operations pushed their way into the important process of informing the people. The United States and Britain became too good at concepts they had developed for future warfare.
The best way to describe my methodology is to use the words that came from Admiral Poindexter's unfunded project, “Total Information Awareness,” later known as “Terrorism Information Awareness.” What I have done in this study is look for “inconsistencies in open source data with regard to known facts … and goals.”
The Terrorism Information Awareness program believed that by discovering linkages, it was possible to “identify intent, methods of operations, and organizational dynamics.”
Through this methodology, it was possible to do what the Pentagon wanted to do, “to reduce vulnerability to open source information operations.”1
Some would say I don't know – or am sloppy about – the definition of information warfare. It's not that I don't appreciate the clarity that comes from precise meaning. It's because almost all of the pre-war definitions were violated in implementation. I was left with these questions: “What was true, and who was affected by the non-truth?”
They told us what they were going to do. The Department of Defense created a storm early in 2002 when it revealed that there were plans to create an office to do strategic influence. That attempt halted with White House agreement. On November 18, 2002, the secretary of defense announced on an aircraft going to South America, that he was just kidding when he said he would not do strategic influence:
And then there was the Office of Strategic Influence. You may recall that. And “oh my goodness gracious isn't that terrible, Henny Penny the sky is going to fall.” 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.
The White House gave a similar warning. Andrew Card, the President's Chief of Staff, told us they would undertake a major campai
gn to sell the war. Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's then Strategy and Communications Director, was orchestrating the same in Britain. “From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August,” White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. told the New York Times in September 2002. Card was explaining what the Times characterized as a “meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress, and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein.” And it would cost over $200 million, according to the London Times (September 17, 2002).
We had, therefore, in our research for this study, to discover what they did and how they did what they said they were going to do.
I'm not going to address why they did it. I would like to ask them, “Why do it? Didn't you know there would be consequences?” It was not necessary. They could have told the truth. You don't defend democracy by making light of its most basic elements. Why do it?
Overview
The results of our investigations brought to light just over four dozen “stories” which were manipulated, managed, manufactured, or engineered that distorted the picture of Gulf War II for the American and British people. The list is not definitive. These four dozen are simply those on which I ended up doing detailed research. For each one of them, I attempted to look at when and where the story originated, which officials made statements related to the story, and then look at how it came out. Obviously my four dozen are those where the outcome – i.e., the facts of the story – ended up being different from the story that was told by the spokesmen. In what follows I'm just going to provide a number of examples, which will prove sufficient to demonstrate the validity of my thesis.
The following list summarizes the results of my investigation:
Terrorism and 9/11
Lt. Cmdr. Speicher
Drones
Mohammad Atta meeting with Iraqis
Ansar al-Islam
Chemical and biological weapons
- Quantities
- Location
- Delivery readiness
Weapons labs
WMD cluster bombs
Scuds
Cutting off ears
Cyber war capability
Nuclear materials from Niger
Aluminium tubes
Nuclear weapons development
Dirty bombs
Humanitarian operations
Attacking the power grid
Russian punishment
- Signing long term oil contracts
- Night-vision goggles
- GPS Jamming equipment
- Saddam in embassy
German punishment
Attack and Surrender of the 507th Maintenance Company
Uprising in Basra
Red Zone
Liberations of Umm Qasr and Basra
Iraqi white flag incidents
U.S. and U.K. uniforms to commit atrocities
Execution of prisoners
Salman Pak training facility
Private Lynch rescue
- Language
- Holding the story
Children soldiers
1000 vehicle attack from Baghdad
Civilian casualties
Woman hanged for waving
French punishment
- High precision switches
- Smallpox strains
- Signing long term oil contracts
- Spare parts for aircraft
- Roland missiles
- Passports for Iraqi leaders
British Parliamentarian attack
WMD location
- Moved to Syria
- Hidden
- Just-in-time program
The post-conflict enemy
Status of infrastructure repairs
What becomes important is not each story taken individually. If that were the case, it would probably seem to be only more of the same. If you were to look at them one at a time, you could conclude, “Okay we sort of knew that was happening.” It is the pattern that becomes important. It's the summary of everything.
Recognizing that I said at the outset that I wouldn't exaggerate, it would not be an exaggeration to say the people of the United States and U.K. can find out more about the contents of a can of soup they buy than the contents of the can of worms they bought with the 2003 war in the Gulf.
The Theory
I'm not writing about a conspiracy. I'm writing about a well run and networked organization. My basic argument is that very bright officials found out how to control the process of governance in ways never before possible. I have no way of knowing intent. Those who believe the administration influenced by a small group could point out that, for that group, manipulating the truth is an important and even necessary dimension of governance.
Standing back from the details of the stories, the strategy of strategic influence and marketing emerges. It is portrayed as a struggle between good and evil. This is the major theme of the war on terrorism as well as Gulf War II. Terrorism is evil. We are good. The axis is evil, and we are the good guys. Ironically, the mirror of this is in the Muslim world where the U.S. is called the “Great Satan.” The subtle theme throughout Gulf War II is that Iraq was behind the attack on the World Trade center. This is what propaganda theorists would call the “big lie.” The plan was to connect Iraq with the 9/11 attacks, and make Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was behind those attacks. The effort followed the basic framework of effective propaganda. (And the mirror of this is the rumor that Israel was behind the Twin Towers bombing to produce an anti-Arab climate.)
Beyond the themes we can see certain strategic techniques, required by the 24/7 news cycle:
saturate the media time and space;
stay on message and stay ahead of the news cycle;
manage expectations;
no matter how bad the story, it tends to level; accelerate the process as much as possible; and
keep the message consistent daily: Qatar, Pentagon, White House, London.
These come from John Rendon, of the Rendon Group, one of the media organizations hired by the Department of Defense. The Group was deeply involved in selling the first Gulf War, as well as this one. It has received nearly $200 million from the CIA and the Pentagon to turn public opinion against Saddam Hussein.1 John Rendon calls himself an information warrior and a perception manager. Others within the administration have pushed another strategic technique: the use of information to attack and punish critics.
It's possible to get a sense of how strategic influence and the organization for combat came together by looking at a pattern from before the Gulf War II campaign.
In November 2001, the White House Coalition Information Center (WHCIC) sought to highlight the plight of women in Afghanistan. WHCIC became the Office of Global Communications officially in January 2003. It was in full operation, however, by the time the White House began its marketing campaign in September 2002. What we saw in the Afghanistan effort were patterns that would continue through Gulf War II. It was designed to “build support.” As the Washington Post of November 16, 2002, said, the “women's campaign was designed to build support in countries in which there is heavy skepticism of the anti-terrorism coalition.” It was not a program with specific steps or funding to improve the conditions of women.
On November 17, 2001, Laura Bush said: “Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women's fingernails for wearing nail polish.” And on November 20, 2001, Cherie Blair confirmed: “In Afghanistan if you wear nail polish, you could have your nails torn out.”
Jim Wilkinson, who was working with the WHCIC at the time, called this effort “the best thing we've done.”
When he said it was the best thing they had done, it was not about something they did. It was about a story they created. Story was all important.
The other important pattern in the Afghanistan family campaign is the close coordination between the White House and Downing Street. The coordination was so close that Laura Bush
and Cherie Blair used almost the same phrase in speeches only separated by three days. The message was coordinated in the Afghanistan campaign. It would also be coordinated for Gulf War II.
Another pattern emerged that we would see in the run up to the war. One might say they followed the concept that if you don't know the truth, fill the vacuum with speculation that would support policy. That certainly was true during the period of the anthrax scare; U.S. and U.K. “intelligence sources” told the press that everything pointed to Iraq.
For instance, David Rose, writing in The Observer, October 14, 2001, said that, according to U.S. and U.K. intelligence sources.
Iraq has the technology and supplies of anthrax suitable for terrorist use. “They aren't making this stuff in caves in Afghanistan,” the CIA source said. “This is prima facie evidence of the involvement of a state intelligence agency. Maybe Iran has the capability. But it doesn't look likely politically. That leaves Iraq.”
The story lingered. It was not until the middle of December 2003 that the White House put out a paper (not an announcement) that said it looked as if the source of the anthrax was domestic.1 We would have expected to see the same kind of thing in Gulf War II. If a story supports policy, even if incorrect, let it stay around.
Based upon what went before, we would have expected to see the creation of stories to sell the policy, and to see the same stories used on both sides of the Atlantic. We saw both. The following summarizes what we noted from each category:
Parallel Storyline
Terrorism
“Armed conflict” and “regime”
Materials from Niger
45 minute release time
Surrender of the 51st Division
Uprising in Basra
Weapons labs
British Parliamentarian in pay of Iraq
US/U.K. uniforms (picked up from Wilkinson report)
Baghdad neighborhood bombings
Executing prisoners