Reply #9: Everyone here should be aware of this..... [View All]

[ParanoidPat]

D5E: Destruction, Degradation, Denial, Disruption, Deceit, and Exploitation

CONCEPT PAPER


Working Group on Preventive and Preemptive Military Intervention


William W. Keller and Gordon R. Mitchell1
Project Coordinators

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U.S. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called for an FBI investigation into the forgery of documents cited by President Bush and Secretary Powell as proof of Iraq’s nuclear transactions with Niger. As Rockefeller explained in a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller: “There is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq.”26

The timeliness of Rockefeller’s proposed inquiry was underscored by the appearance of official documents that lay out official American deception plans: "In a document last autumn, the joint chiefs of staff stressed the need for strategic deception and influence operations as tools of war. The army, navy and air force have been directed to devise plans for information warfare."27

According to defense analyst William Arkin, the Bush strategy lays out goals for information warfare that pursue D5E: "destruction, degradation, denial, disruption, deceit, and exploitation." Arkin notes that the wide array of sites and ractices of information control brought into the range of this policy "blurs or even erases the boundaries between factual information and news, on the one hand, and public relations, propaganda and psychological warfare on the other."28

This fusion of military deception programs with media propaganda efforts enabled the Office of Strategic Influence to commission officers from the U.S. Army's Psychological Operations Command to work as interns in the news division of CNN.29

Eventually, the Bush Administration was burned by the political heat generated when the Office of Strategic Influence was leaked to the media. The ensuing firestorm of controversy prompted Secretary Rumsfeld to close the propaganda unit. Yet less than a year later, Rumsfeld stipulated that his action had only been symbolic, and that information warfare missions were still underway at other Pentagon offices: 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.30

The political implications of blurring military strategic deception and public sphere propaganda are worth exploring, given Arkin's concerns about military deception that "while the policy ostensibly targets foreign enemies, its most likely victim will be the American electorate."31

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