Information Warfare, From Sorrows of Empire

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The attorney general appealed this decision to an even more obscure court—the FISA Court of Review—a special three-judge panel created by the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) that is supposed to oversee the surveillance court. This court had never met. Ashcroft’s appeal was the first case ever brought before it in its twenty-three year history. It is composed of three semi-retired judges whose names—unlike those of the FISC judges—have been revealed to the public; all three judges are Republicans appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan and then to seven-year terms on the special review court by Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Not surprisingly, the FISA Court of Review overruled the FISC and granted Attorney General Ashcroft the additional authority he wanted. The conclusion is unavoidable: a year and a half after September 11, 2001, at least two articles of the Bill of Rights, the fourth and the sixth, were dead letters, and the second half the Thomas Jefferson’s old warning “ that when the government fears the people, there is liberty; when the people fear the government, there is tyranny” clearly applied.

On February 7, 2003, Justice Department spokeswoman Barbara Comstock said to the press, “The department’s deliberations are always undertaken with the strongest commitment to our Constitution and civil liberties.” This statement brings us to the third sorrow that accompanies imperialism and militarism--the replacement of truth by propaganda and disinformation and an acceptance of hypocrisy as the norm for declarations coming from our government.

Official lying increases exponentially as imperialism and militarism take over. Our military sees propaganda as one of its major new functions. During the autumn of 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld created within the Pentagon an “Office of Strategic Influence” with the function of carrying out what defense planners call “information warfare”—disinformation and propaganda against foreign enemies as well as domestic critics who do not support presidential policies. Only when it becomes clear that the new office’s operations would include funneling false stories to American news media did Rumsfeld say that perhaps it was all a mistake and officially shut the operation down.

Nonetheless, the idea did not go away. In the autumn of 2002, Rumsfeld created a new position, deputy of undersecretary of defense for ”special plans” (a euphemism for “ deception operations”). These missions go beyond traditional military activities like jamming enemy radars or disrupting command and control networks. Deception operations include managing (and restricting) public information, controlling news sources, and manipulating public opinion. As the air force explained, the military must prevent “the news media going to other sources for information…U.S. and friendly forces must strive to become the favored source of information.” “Information warfare,” writes military analyst William M. Arkin, “includes controlling as much as possible what the American public sees and reads.” In January 2003, the White House followed up by forming its own version of Rumsfeld’s Pentagon propaganda agency, the “Office for Global Communications.” Its officials seem to spend their time auditioning generals to give media briefings and booking administration stars on foreign and domestic news shows. It’s approved in advance by the White House”
Typical information-warfare operations range from the trivial to major projects like inventing pretexts for war. An example of the former occurred on January 27, 2003, when the government arranged to have a large blue curtain placed over a tapestry reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica hanging near the entrance of the United Nations Security Council. Guernica, a small Basque village in northern Spain, was the site Adolf Hitler chose on April 27, 1937, to demonstrate his air force’s new high-explosive and incendiary bombs. He was then allied with the Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco. The hamlet burned for three days, and sixteen hundred civilians were killed or wounded. Picasso’s famous depiction of this atrocity is perhaps modern art’s most powerful antiwar statement. The government decided that the carnage wrought by the aerial bombing was an inappropriate backdrop for its secretary of state and its ambassador to the United Nations when they made televised statements that might lead to the bombing of Iraqi cities.

Other typical information-warfare operations included the February 2003 efforts of Bruce Jackson, a former Department of Defense official and subsequently head of a “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.” He played a “considerable role” in drafting a statement “supporting” the United States in its plans to invade Iraq and then in getting ten small European countries, the so-called Vilnius Ten—Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia—to sign it. President Jacques Chirac of France was so infuriated by this meddling in European affairs that at a European Union summit meeting in Brussels on February 17, 2003, he threatened to block their memberships in the union.

Another function of information warfare is to decontaminate as best as possible incidents of blowback or incidents that could lead to blowback that cannot be denied but are embarrassing. Decontamination techniques include bald-faced lying, classifying relevant documents, refusing requests under the Freedom of Information Act, stonewalling, and obfuscating (as in the cases, of instance, of Agent Orange and Gulf War Syndrome sicknesses). One particular strategy is the coining of new terms that make it sound like the Pentagon has always had a situation under control or that give the embarrassing event or act or phenomenon a spuriously scientific aura or downplay its significance. A classic example is the term “collateral damage” for the killing of innocent bystanders in a military attack. The newest term for incidents like the Reagan administrations selling weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein is “mission myopia,” meaning that hardworking officers were so focused on the task at hand they did not bother to try and imagine its repercussions down the road. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is particularly fond of neologisms such as “forward deterrence” and “unwarned attacks,” which he seems to think are strategic innovations. Perhaps he is merely trying to disguise their more familiar names: ”aggression”—that is, what Nazi Germany did to Russia on June 22, 1941—and “surprise attack”—what the Japanese did to us at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Probably the most corrupt function of information warfare is to fabricate intelligence to justify the policies of a president and his staff. This is a criminal offense, even if it is rarely prosecuted. It involves a conspiracy among technical experts, field ages, supervisors, and leaders to complicit or timorous journalists, and a trusting public. When it is exposed, it inevitably undermines the credibility of government officials and the agencies that perpetrated the fraud. It also makes it likely that subsequently, if intelligence should reveal a genuine impending threat to the nation, the public will not believe the president when he warns them about it.

Over the years many governments have manufactured pretexts for going to war. Perhaps the classic instance was the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939—Germany claimed that it was avenging attacks by Polish soldiers, who it said had seized a German radio station and broadcast hostile statements. After the war it was revealed that the “raiders” were actually German SS troops dressed in Polish uniforms. The U.S. government also has a long, sad record of inventing pretexts for military action, ranging from the manufactured hysteria over the 1898 sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor to President Lyndon Johnson’s use of the nonexistent attack on U.S. destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin in the 1965 to get Congress to endorse a massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam.

During the 1960s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff actually delivered to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara a proposal, dubbed Operation Northwoods, that the military clandestinely shoot innocent people on American streets, sink boats carrying refugees from Cuba, and carry out terrorist attacks in Washington, Miami, and elsewhere and then pin the blame on Cuban agents. The intent, after the failed Bay of Pigs operation, was to provide an excuse for a new invasion of Cuba. Every member of the Joint Chiefs signed off on it. McNamara silently refused to act on it and a few months later forced the retirement of General Lyman Lemnitzer, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the U.N. Security Council to set the stage for war by presenting what he called definitive American secret intelligence proving the existence of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons in Iraq. The secretary of state even went out of his way to try to emulate the famous occasion in 1962 when U.N. ambassador Adlai Stevenson introduced photographs taken by a low-flying U-2 spy plane showing Russian nuclear missile emplacements in Cuba. Powell came with hi own blowups of satellite reconnaissance photos. Apparently to add to the credibility of hi presentation, Powell placed the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, in a chair directly behind him. Tenet appeared in all television pictures of Powell speaking. He made no comment, but his presence seemed to imply that what Powell had to say came with the full backing of the CIA.

In his statement to the Security Council, Powell pointed to a satellite photograph dated November 10, 2002, and said, “Look at the image on the left. On the left is a close-up of one of the four chemical bunkers…The truck you see is a signature item. It’s a decontamination vehicle in case something goes wrong. This is characteristic of those four bunkers.” Powell showed another photo of U.N. vehicles arriving at the same sit on December 22, 202, and said that “the signature trucks are gone….Iraq had been tipped off to the forth coming inspections.” On February 14, 2003, chief United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix directly countered this testimony, commenting that his inspectors had visited the site in the Powell photo often and that the truck was just a truck. He also said, “Since we arrived in Iraq, we have conducted more than 400 inspections covering more than 300 sites. All inspections were performed without notice, and access was almost always provided promptly. In no case have we seen convincing evidence that the Iraqi side knew in advance that the inspectors were coming.”

More about deception on America in,

The Sorrows of Empire, by Chalmers Johnson, pp. 298-302