OSI

The Office of Strategic Influence
Is it the truth, or is it a lie? 

JAMES O. GOLDSBOROUGH / San Diego Union-Tribune 28feb02

The rise and fall of the Pentagon's "truth" office in the space of a week should not erase from our minds the lessons of this unfortunate episode.

The first lesson is that this is what a free press is all about. The Office of Strategic Influence has been shuttered because its existence came to light. Had someone in the Pentagon (who clearly disagreed with the idea) not leaked the story to The New York Times the happy band of strategic influencers would still be laboring away.

A second lesson is that this is where anti-terrorism paranoia can lead. If we managed to get through two world wars and hot wars in Korea and Vietnam without a Pentagon truth office, surely we can survive a bunch of maniacs.

A third lesson is that this is where unaccountable military spending can lead. Our government seems determined to put every available dollar into military spending – $396.8 billion in next year's budget – and that means a lot of bad choices being made.

To advise the truth office, the Pentagon had hired – at $100,000 a month, a public relations/communications firm to advise it. That firm, the Rendon Group, will continue to be paid, presumably to do other work.

Government has an information role both at home and abroad. Since 1942, when the Voice of America was created to counter Nazi propaganda, it has broadcast information to foreign nations. The VOA has fought like hell – and continues to fight to this day – to keep it that way.

During the Cold War, our government entered the propaganda business, this time to counter the Soviet Cominform. We had no choice, was the argument. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were created, later followed by Radio Marti, Radio Free Asia and now Radio Free Afghanistan.

These stations (the first two supported for a while by a CIA secret fund), served their Cold War purpose, but no one ever confused them with the VOA.

Here's the difference:

During the 1961 U.S.-sponsored invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles, the CIA asked the VOA to broadcast the same message into Cuba that was being aired on Radio Swan, the CIA's own clandestine station.

The message was as follows: "The forces of liberation are being greeted with jubilation and are winning major triumphs on the ground."

Trouble was, the head of the U.S. Information Agency, which ran the VOA at the time, was veteran CBS war correspondent Edward R. Murrow. Murrow knew the message was false and refused to broadcast it.

In 1976, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Congress reaffirmed the VOA's mandate and eventually severed its ties to the USIA and the State Department. VOA oversight passed to a presidentially appointed board of governors, whose job is to assure that the VOA's reporting is, as its charter states, "accurate, objective and comprehensive."

But the pressure to distort the news never stops, and since Sept. 11 has increased sharply.

Shortly after Sept. 11, the VOA scheduled an interview with the Taliban leader Mullah Omar. It was part of a comprehensive broadcast on Afghanistan that included interviews with anti-Taliban groups. The White House and the State Department got word of the Omar interview and complained to the VOA's oversight board.

The broadcast went ahead.

The issue of government taking liberties with facts is not new. "Hooey pleases the boobs a great deal more than sense," in Mencken's words.

But lies are more than hooey. The Pentagon has been through this before and should know better.

In 1962, Arthur Sylvester, an assistant secretary of defense during the Cuban missile crisis, asserted publicly that government had the right to lie on matters of national security.

Sylvester never lived it down. In democracies, government is the people, and we don't want to be deceiving ourselves now do we? A few years later, Congress passed laws specifically excluding the Pentagon and CIA from propagandizing to Americans.

Nothing, however, apparently keeps them from lying to foreigners. Creating a new bureaucracy to do it, however, one with a name too Orwellian even for Orwell, is an extravagance we don't need.

Lies – big or little, at home or abroad – don't work. In a nation like ours, one which tries to inspire others through what John Quincy Adams called the "benign sympathy of our example," lies stand out like Pinocchio's nose. Pretty soon we don't know what to believe. Dictatorships can get away with lying for a while, but what dictatorship has lasted 213 years?

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says the whole thing was a misunderstanding, and that the OSI never intended to lie.

Which reminded me of a question on an undergrad logic test:

Answer: Cretin says: "All Cretins are liars."
Question: Is he lying or telling the truth? Demonstrate your answer.

Let's reformulate the question:

The Office of Strategic Information says it is telling the truth.
Is it lying or telling the truth?

Office of Chief of Psychological Warfare was created in Jan. 1951. source: US Army website 11apr02

U.S. Closes Office of Strategic Influence
Says effectiveness was damaged by media

US Dept of State, International Information Programs 27feb02

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the Office of Strategic Influence is being closed down shortly after it was opened because its effectiveness has been damaged by negative treatment in the media.

"[M]uch of the thrust of the criticism and the cartoons and the editorial comment has been off the mark, the office has clearly been so damaged... that it could not function effectively. So it's being closed down," Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon briefing in Washington February 26.

Rumsfeld said planting false information would not have been part of the function of the office. He said the Defense Department has not and will not engage in such an activity.

"[T]his department is not going to do what you said. It was not, it has not done it," Rumsfeld said. [W]e will not do it, we are not doing it now, and we will not in the future."

Rumfeld said the United States had a need to publicize vital information during the campaign in Afghanistan. He said in the future, the United States will conduct information operations through a different office.

"We did a whole series of things that are characterized as influence or strategic influence or information operations. And we have done that in the past, and we will do that in the future," Rumsfeld said.

"We told people where they could get humanitarian assistance. We told people the difference between cluster bomb packages and food packages. We had to defend [against] the lies that the food packages were poison and tell the Afghan people that they were not poison; in fact, they were culturally appropriate for them. So there's lots of things that we have to do, and we will do those things. We'll just do them in a different office," Rumsfeld said.

Following are excerpts from the transcript of Rumsfeld's February 26 briefing containing his comments about the Office of Strategic Influence:

Q: Mr. Secretary, the president said yesterday that you and he were reading from virtually the same page, paraphrasing, on the Pentagon's controversial new Office of Strategic Information. He said that the American people — and, we assume, the world — will not be misled on U.S. strategic policy. Are you going to kill that office?

Rumsfeld: I was — I met with Undersecretary Doug Feith this morning, and he indicated to me that he has decided to close down the Office of Strategic Influence.

Q: Why? Could you tell us why?

Rumsfeld: Well, you know, there have been so many stories about this office, and commentary, some portion of which has contained inaccurate speculation and assertions that the office would — could become involved in activities that the department has in fact not done, is not doing, and would not condone. I guess notwithstanding the fact that much of the thrust of the criticism and the cartoons and the editorial comment has been off the mark, the office has clearly been so damaged that it's unclear to me — it's pretty clear to me that it could not function effectively. So it's being closed down.

Q: Mr. Secretary, from the outset, though, within days after September 11th, I think you were one of the first in the administration to stand here and say it's imperative for the United States to reach out and in fact educate the rest of the world, if not the Muslim world —

Rumsfeld: Yeah.

Q: in terms of what the U.S. is and will be doing.

Rumsfeld: We —

Q: So how can the Pentagon do that effectively, or is it going to be —

Rumsfeld: We'll just have to do it with the offices that existed previously. There's no question but that we do have an obligation, as you remind us all, to — we had to tell the world that this was not an effort against the Afghan people. We had to find ways to do it, and we had an aircraft that flew over with radio broadcasts, and we dropped leaflets. We did a whole series of things that are characterized as influence or strategic influence or information operations. And we have done that in the past, and we will do that in the future. We told people where they could get humanitarian assistance. We told people the difference between cluster bomb packages and food packages. We had to defend [against] the lies that the food packages were poison and tell the Afghan people that they were not poison; in fact, they were culturally appropriate for them. So there's lots of things that we have to do, and we will do those things. We'll just do them in a different office. (Chuckles.)

Q: So those activities will be conducted, but -

Rumsfeld: The activities that are appropriate to this department we certainly will be doing.

Q: And disinformation is not one of those activities?

Rumsfeld: It most clearly is not.

.....

Q: Mr. Rumsfeld, you said that some of the reporting about the Office of Strategic Influence has been off the mark. But isn't it in fact the case that at least some of the proposed activities of this office, even if they weren't things that were approved, included discussion of planting false information in foreign news media? Wasn't that one of the things that was discussed as a possible activity for this office?

Rumsfeld: You know, it's — if we think about this, this office was, I think, established sometime shortly after September 11th for the reason that was discussed earlier, because of the need — there already was an office, as I understand it, in the Joint Staff called Information Operations. And that office was serving as the linkage with the White House and the Department of State and the rest of the government on the subject of information. And Doug Feith properly decided that he felt that there ought to be an office of the Secretary of Defense, a civilian office, that monitored that activity. And that's when that office was — began to be stood up, and people started being brought in to do it. It's my understanding that they have even to this day not developed a charter, that it has been under discussion within the office. I've not seen such a charter. So what it was to do was an open question, even today as it ends its very short, prominent life. (Laughter.)

I don't have — I can't say to you with assurance exactly what was discussed by people in that office or by other people with that office. What I do know is exactly what I have said; that regardless if something may or may not have been discussed down at a lower level, this department is not going to do what you said. It was not, it has not done it. We had — we will not do it, we are not doing it now, and we will not in the future.

Q: Well, it just seemed that you were saying that the office — that you were closing this office because it had been essentially tainted by inaccurate press reporting.

Rumsfeld: I said some of the press has been off the mark, and that is a fact.

Q: But that was —

Rumsfeld: Some of the editorial comment and some of the cartoons. But that's life. We get up in the morning and we live with the world like we find it. Therefore, the office is done. (Laughter.) It's over. What do you want, blood?! (Laughter.)

Q: Have you got any?

Q: Mr. Secretary, has Pentagon credibility suffered?

Rumsfeld: I doubt it. I hope not. If it has, we'll rebuild it.

source: http://usinfo.state.gov/regional/nea/sasia/text/0227rmfd.htm 11apr02

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