In my last post I wrote about the New York Times investigation into the Pentagon’s use of retired military officers to act as mouthpieces, oops, I mean respected dispassionate, objective analysts, on U.S. military activities. But for all the hue and cry very little has happened. See this Huffington Post for detail. Yes, the Pentagon suspended the program to investigate whether it complies with the letter of the law but does anyone serious expect it will be terminated? Let’s just say I’m not holding my breath. 

Of course, it is hardly the sole fault of the Pentagon. Has anyone noted any of the networks in question saying, for example, they won’t employ retired officers who are also working for companies that are seeking Pentagon business and might gain an inside edge due to the connections such officers maintain by virtue of regurgitating Pentagon talking points? I haven’t. 

Remember that any halfway decent paper worth its name would never allow its own reporters to do such a thing. This is what they like to call a conflict of interest. But such ethical considerations, evidently like old soldiers, just fade away when it comes to dealing with an executive branch behemoth like the Department of Defense. Probably editors feel that maintaining ethics is just not worth the pain in terms of lack of access to the Defense Department. Can you say corporate media? 

Still, we need to put this in context. Egregious as it might appear it is just another day at the office for what the Pentagon likes to euphemistically call “information operations.” And really, who can blame them?  After all, they get legal sanction to do it every day when it comes to manipulating public opinion in other countries. 

For example, remember the Lincoln Group? This is the Arlington, VA. contractor hired by the United States military to perform public relations. On November 30, 2005, the Los Angeles Times revealed the company had been paying for news stories in Iraqi newspapers. Prior to that report, Lincoln Group of Washington, DC was awarded an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract, with a potential maximum value of $100,000,000, for media approach planning, prototype product development, commercial quality product development, product distribution and dissemination, and media effects analysis for the Joint Psychological Operations Support element and other government agencies.

Now, just 27 months later USA Today reports that the Pentagon is setting up a global network of foreign-language news websites, including an Arabic site for Iraqis, and hiring local journalists to write current events stories and other content that promote U.S. interests and counter insurgent messages. The news sites are part of a Pentagon initiative to expand “Information Operations” on the Internet. Neither the initiative nor the Iraqi site, Mawtani.com, has been disclosed publicly.

And for those with longer memories there was the Office of Strategic Influence.  This was a department created by the Pentagon on October 30, 2001, to support the war on terrorism through psychological operations, including provision of news items, and possibly false ones, in targeted countries. The closure of the office was announced by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld soon after its existence became publicly known. The OSI would have been a center for the creation of propaganda materials, for the stated purpose of misleading enemy forces or foreign civilian populations.

The plan was troubling for many reasons: It was profoundly undemocratic; it would have put journalists’ lives at risk by involving them in Pentagon disinformation; and it’s almost certain that any large-scale disinformation campaign directed at the foreign press would have led, sooner or later, to a falsified story being picked up by U.S. media.

But whether the office ever actually closed down is debatable. Rumsfeld said in a press briefing on November 18, 2002 that the Office of Strategic Influence was closed down only in name, that the activities of the office still continue. Rumsfeld: “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 salvage 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. That was intended to be done by that office is being done by that office, NOT by that office in other ways.”

Of course, the Pentagon is not alone in trying to shape opinion. Consider this, from the briefing yesterday by Dell L. Dailey, U.S. State Department Coordinator of the Office for Counterterrorism. He was presenting the just released annual Country Reports on Terrorism 2007.

The Baghdad Security Plan initiated in February with assistance from local citizens, has succeeded in reducing violence to late 2005 levels. It has disrupted and diminished AQI infrastructure, and driven some surviving AQI fighters from Baghdad and the Al Anbar province into northern Iraqi provinces. While AQI remained a threat, there was a noticeable reduction in the number of security incidents throughout much of Iraq, including the decrease in civilian casualties, enemy attacks, and improvised explosive device attacks in the last quarter of the year.

From that one would never know that the overall levels of violence reached a plateau from October 2007 through early 2008. There has only been a marginal decrease in overall violence since October 2007, with an average of 570 attacks per week, while in October and November 2007 there were 600 attacks per week By the way, the early 2008 (through mid-February)  level of violence is equal to or greater than the unacceptable levels of violence witnessed through 2004 and 2005. 

For Dailey’s statement above to make sense one has to set the bar for success to a new low. 

Incidentally, the figures on overall levels of violence come from the Pentagon’s most recent quarterly report to Congress, released in mid-March. Somehow none of the retired military analysts managed to mention that. Hmmmmm.