http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/EL05Aa03.html
December 5, 2003
Pentagon and Bogus News: All Is Denied
By ERIC SCHMITT
ASHINGTON, Dec. 4 - Early last year Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
disbanded the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence after it became known
that the office was considering plans to provide false news items to unwitting
foreign journalists to influence policymakers and public sentiment abroad.
But a couple of months ago, the Pentagon quietly awarded a $300,000 contract
to SAIC, a major defense consultant, to study how the Defense Department could
design an "effective strategic influence" campaign to combat global
terror, according to an internal Pentagon document.
Sound familiar?
Senior Pentagon officials said Thursday that they were caught unawares by the
contract and insisted its language was a "poor choice of words" by a
low-level staffer. They said the work did not reflect any backdoor effort to
resurrect the discredited office and was merely a study to understand Al Qaeda
better and find ways to combat it.
"We are not recreating that office," said Thomas O'Connell, the
assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity
conflict, the policy arm of the Pentagon that deals with the military's most
secretive operators and whose staff wrote the document.
But some critics of the former office voiced skepticism, saying that the
contract amounted to a veiled attempt to create a low-budget copy of its
ill-fated predecessor. A spokesman for SAIC referred all questions to the
Pentagon.
"It sounds very similar," said a senior military official who
opposed the former office. "To run a perception-management campaign at
the strategic level is the wrong thing for D.O.D. to be involved in."
The military has long engaged in information warfare against hostile nations,
but the ill-fated Office of Strategic Influence proposed to broaden that
mission into a strategic "perception management" campaign in allied
nations in the Middle East, Asia and even Europe. That would have given the
office a role traditionally carried out by civilians.
Mr. Rumsfeld and other administration officials have voiced concern that the
United States is losing public support overseas for its war on terrorism,
particularly in Islamic countries. The document, which describes details of
the SAIC contract and is entitled "Winning the War of Ideas,"
describes a bleak picture of how that battle is going.
"Our inability to seize the initiative in the `War of Ideas' with Al
Qaeda is perhaps our most significant shortcoming so far in the war against
terrorism," said the document, dated Sept. 17, 2003. "We do not
fully understand Al Qaeda and its relationship to supportive communities in
the Islamic world, and so are not yet able to develop an effective strategy
for countering its propaganda in those communities, let alone for winning the
information campaign in the war against terrorism."
The document said one goal was to establish a "road map for creating an
effective D.O.D. capability to design and conduct effective strategic
influence and operational and tactical perception-management campaigns."
When read that sentence, a senior defense official winced at the wording.
"We're asking for a menu of thoughts on how to approach this," the
official explained. "This is not a secret document on how we're going to
change the Arab world's perception of the U.S."
