Vi är inne i vad som kallas Tredje Generations Krigsföring. I den första avgjordes kriget genom militär manstyrka på slagfältet. I den andra generationens krigsföring kunde krig avgöras på distans med hjälp av flygbombningar och mindre fysisk närvaro. Men i den tredje generationens krig har det blivit viktigare att påverka fiendens och den egna folkets uppfattning av vad som sker på slagfältet.

Fienden luras med propaganda att tro att deras egna ledare är svikare och onda män, att slaget är förslorat och att ockupationsmakten är goda kämpar för demokrati och fri vilja. Trots att fler människor dör, mördas, torteras och blir hemlösa eller föräldralösa idag än under alla år med Saddam.

Det som kallas Propaganda och Psykologisk Krigsföring riktad mot fienden, kallas Public Diplomacy och Perception Managment när den riktas mot det egna folket eller omvärlden.

Det kanske största hindret mot att kontrollera allmänhetens uppfattning om vad som händer i kriget är Internet. Internet bloggare, diskussionsforum och researchsajter har lyckats få fram budskapen, bilderna, det historiska sammanhanget och personerna bakom på ett aldrig tidigare skådat sätt.

Vi har därför sett nya former av Public Diplomacy termer dyka upp kallat Netpolitik.

Internet har blivit den viktigaste politiska arenan. Och inom en snar framtid kommer vi alla att vara infiltrerade av professionella informatörer som försöker kontrollera opinionen på sådana här offentliga diskussionforum.

I mer seriösa sammanhang kommer dom att debattera skapa opinion, starta bloggar, diskussionforum mm. Men det är också strategiskt riktigt att skapa osämja på diskussionsforum plantera rasism och hetska debatter mellan två professionella Agent Provocateurs i syfte att få folk att undvika forum genom ge dem en stämpel av racism eller oseriösa flumdebatter och UFOn och liknande.

Här är lite dokument som handlar om detta:

Science of Coercion
Christoffer Simpsons Science of Coercion är en omfattande redogörelse för CIA, Pentagon och andra amerikanska säkerhetstjänsters uteckling och begagnande av modern psykologisk krigsföring.


Science of Coercion - Communication Research & Psychological Warfare 1945-1960
http://82.182.73.213/ABCHAO/dokument/Science_of_Coercion.pdf


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Kampen om tanken.
Totalförsvarets Forskningsinstitut FOI översikt över hur Informationsoperationer (IO) fungerar. Perception Managment är konsten att påverka människors uppfattning av situationer och personer. PsyOps är psykologiska operationer i syfte att påverka motståndarens eller det egna folkets uppfattning. Det senare kallas dock oftast Public Diplomacy istället för ex.vis propaganda eller Informations Operationer.



Kampen om tanken
http://82.182.73.213/ABCHAO/dokument/04-04-kampen-om-tanken.pdf

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The Rise of Netpolitik
Aspen Institute Roundtable on Information Technology har gjort en sammanställning av hur Internet har ändrat världens politiska arena. Tekniken har gjort det möjligt för demokratirörelser i olika länder att nå ut till massorna utan att vara beroende av dom traditionella media kanalerna.

Det politiska spelet som traditionellt förts via mer eller mindre kontrollerade media har blivit allt svårare att styra. Internet är den nya politiska arenan.


The Rise of Netpolitik - How Internet is Changing International Politics and Diplomacy.
http://82.182.73.213/ABCHAO/dokument/NETPOLITIK.pdf

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Finding Americas Voice: A Strategy for Reinvigorating US Public Diplomacy
Council on Foreign Relations rapport om behovet att återskapa bilden av det 'Goda Amerika' efter invasionen av Irak. Framför allt handlar det om att återskapa förtroendet för USA i mellanöstern och central asien.

Dokumentet rekommenderar massiva propaganda operationer riktade mot folket i regionen. I år (2005) spenderade Pentagon 300 millioner dollar på dylika operationer med speciellt fokus på 'nya media'.


Finding Americas Voice: A Strategy for Reinvigorating US Public Diplomacy
http://82.182.73.213/ABCHAO/dokument/public_diplomacy.pdf
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Strategic Communication
Denna rapport beskriver behovet av en gemensam strategi för inrikes och utrikes propaganda samt så kallade psyops d.v.s. psykologiska operationer.

I dagens moderna krig är det inte längre vad som faktiskt händer på fältet som avgör krigets utgång utan fiendens och omvärldens uppfattning av vad som händer.

Det blir därför allt viktigare att kontrollera bilden av hur kriget fortlöper. Förslaget suddar ut gränserna mellan propaganda, nyheter och ex.vis falsk flag operationer.

Om man undanhåller uppgifter om civila offer och istället saluför HiTech bilder på Smarta Bomber är gränsen mellan sanning och lögn överträdd.

Med en media som inte förmår att granska eller ifrågasätta uppgifter som kommer från Vita Huset eller Pentagon blir det viktigare att vara kritisk mot dom uppgifter vi serveras.


Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication
http://82.182.73.213/ABCHAO/dokument/ ... rategic_Communication.pdf
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WAR.COM
Naval War Collage har skrivit denna avhandling om Internets betydelse för psykologisk krigsföring i framtida konflikter. Intressant i sammanhanget är att USA använde sig av e-mail för att försöka vinna över irakiska tjänstemän inför invasionen 2003.

Historiskt sett har man arbetat med flygblad, radiosändningar, TV och spelfilm för att försöka påverka folket i olika länder. Idag tittar man på hur man kan påverka genom internet, mail, mobiltelefoner och TV-spel.


WAR.COM - The Internet and Psychological Operations
http://82.182.73.213/ABCHAO/dokument/e-psyops.pdf

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Micheal Aquino - From PSYOP to MindWar - The Psychology of Victory
http://82.182.73.213/ABCHAO/dokument/ ... Psychology_of_Victory.pdf
Micheal Aquino - PsyOps and Ethics
http://82.182.73.213/ABCHAO/dokument/ ... ino-PsyOps_and_Ethics.pdf

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Joint Chief Of Staffs Strategi För gemensamma Psychologiska krigsstrategier.
http://82.182.73.213/ABCHAO/dokument/02_psyop-jp-3-53.pdf

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Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfelds Strategi för Informations Operationer.
http://82.182.73.213/ABCHAO/dokument/info_ops_roadmap.pdf

För den som är intresserad är här en samling kända historiska citat om vikten av Psykologisk Krigsföring och kampen om tanken.

The Mind Has no Firewall!!!


PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS
QUOTES

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"If your opponent is of choleric temper, try to irritate him. If he is arrogant try to encourage his egotism. (If the enemy troops are well prepared after reorganization, try to wear them down. If they are united, try to sow dissension among them."

General Tao Hanzhang, translated by Yuan Shibing, Sun Tzu's The Art Of War


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"To capture the enemy's entire army is better than to destroy it; to take intact a regiment, a company, or a squad is better than to destroy them. For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the supreme of excellence. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the supreme excellence."

Sun Tzu


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"The first casualty of war is truth."

Rudyard Kipling


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"One need not destroy one's enemy. One need only destroy his willingness to engage."

Sun Tzu


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"There are but two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run the sword is always beaten by the mind."

Napoleon Bonaparte


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"In War, the moral is to the material as three is to one."

Napoleon Bonaparte


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"All propaganda has to be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent of those towards whom it intends to direct itself."

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), Vol. I


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"...there was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, 'and this will always be the man in the street.' Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology...Hatred and contempt must be directed at particular individuals."

H. Trevor-Roper (ed), The Goebbels Diaries, p. XX, cited in Regan, Geoffrey. 1987. Great Military Disasters. New York: M. Evans and Company.


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"Capture their minds and their hearts and souls will follow"

Author Unknown


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"PSYOP...was a great threat to troop morale, second only to the coalition bombing campaign."

Iraqi General after Operation DESERT STORM


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"The mind of the enemy and the will of his leaders is a target of far more importance than the bodies of his troops."

Brigadier General S.B. Griffith, II, USMC


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"To seduce the enemy’s soldiers from their allegiance and encourage them to surrender is of special service, for an adversary is more hurt by desertion than by slaughter."

Flavius Vegetius Renatus, c. 378 AD


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"For a strong adversary (corps) the opposition of twenty-four squadrons and twelve guns ought not to have appeared very serious, but in war the psychological factors are often decisive. An adversary who feels inferior is in reality so."

Field Marshal Carl Gustav Baron Von Mannerheim, 1953


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"As the excited passions of hostile people are of themselves a powerful enemy, both the general and his government should use their best efforts to allay them."

Lieutenant General Antoine-Henri Baron de Jomini, 1838


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"The real target in war is the mind of the enemy command, not the bodies of his troops. If we operate against his troops it is fundamentally for the effect that action will produce on the mind and will of the commander; indeed, the trend of warfare and the development of new weapons – aircraft and tanks – promise to give us increased and more direct opportunities of striking at this psychological target."

Captain Sir Basil H. Liddell Hart, 1944


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"In most campaigns the dislocation of the enemy's psychological and physical balance has been the vital prelude to a successful attempt at his overthrow."

Captain Sir Basil H. Liddell Hart, 1944


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"It is your attitude, and the suspicion that you are maturing the boldest designs against him, that imposes on your enemy."

Frederick the Great, 1747


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"The enemy bombards our front not only with a drumfire of artillery, but also with a drumfire of printed paper. Besides bombs, which kill the body, his airmen also throw down leaflets which are intended to kill the soul."

Field Marshal Paul Von Hindenburg, 1847-1934


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"Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it nothing can succeed. He who molds opinion is greater than he who enacts laws."

President Abraham Lincoln


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"In the sphere of leaflet propaganda the enemy has defeated us . . . The enemy has defeated us, not as man against man in the field of battle, bayonet against bayonet; no, bad contents poorly printed on poor paper have paralyzed our strength."

German Army report, WW I


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"The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to have its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards."

Sir William Francis Butler


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"The mind of the enemy and the will of his leaders is a target of far more importance than the bodies of his troops."

Mao Zedong


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"Without a doubt, psychological warfare has proven its right to a place of dignity in our military arsenal."

General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower


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"In this war, which was total in every sense of the word, we have seen many great changes in military science. It seems to me that not the least of these was the develoment of psychological warfare as a specific and effective weapon.

General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower


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"Modern war has become a struggle for men's minds as well as for their bodies".

Brigadier General Robert McClure, Korean War


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"If we do go to war, psychological operations are going to be absolutely a critical, critical part of any campaign that we must get involved in."

General H. Norman Schwarzkopf III, Operations Desert Shield - 1990


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"I knew theoretically what PSYOP could do – I’d learned that in school. But having experienced it firsthand, I found they’re far more valuable than I knew. In the future, I would be out looking for PSYOP support before deployment."

503rd MP Bn Operations Officer during operations in Haiti


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"On the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that on other days and other fields will bear the fruits of victory."

General Douglas MacArthur


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"One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda."

General Douglas MacArthur


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"If you are going to win any battle, you have to do one thing. You have to make the mind run the body. Never let the body tell the mind what to do... the body is never tired if the mind is not tired."

General George S. Patton


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"By way of deception, thou shalt do war."

Israel's Mossad


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"If you give a man the correct information for seven years, he may believe the incorrect information on the first day of the eighth year when it is necessary, from your point of view, that he should do so. Your first job is to build the credibility and the authenticity of your propaganda, and persuade the enemy to trust you although you are his enemy."

A Psychological Warfare Casebook Operations Research Office Johns Hopkins University Baltimore (1958)


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"Psychological forces exert a decisive influence on the elements involved in war."

Carl von Clausewitz


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"War does not belong in the realm of arts and sciences; rather it is part of man's social existence…Politics, moreover, is the womb in which war develops."

Carl von Clausewitz


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"Killing the enemy's courage is as vital as killing his troops."

Carl von Clausewitz


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"The mind has no firewall."

Timothy L. Thomas, PARAMETERS, Spring 1998


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"Psychological Warfare has always rested as an uneasy activity in democracies, even in wartime. It is partly to do with the suspicion that using the mind to influence the mind is somehow unacceptable. But is it more unacceptable to shoot someone's brains out rather than to persuade that brain to drop down their weapon and live?"

Dr. Phillip M. Taylor, Author of "Munitions of the Mind", Manchester University Press, 1995


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"Psychological warfare does help save lives on both counts. On the count of the American soldier who isn't going to be killed trying to dig the enemy soldier out of his foxhole or bunker, and on the other count, the enemy soldier whose life is saved."

Dr. Al H. Paddock, Colonel,U.S. Army Retired, former Commander 4th Psychological Operations Group (Airborne) and Author, US Army Special Warfare, Its Origins: Psychological and Unconventional Warfare, 1941-1952. , Published by National Defense University Press, Washington D.C., 1982


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"Truth is the best PSYOP"

Colonel Fred Walker, USSOCOM


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"Psychological warfare employs age-old ideas in twentieth century dress."

D. Lincoln Harter and John Sullivan, Propaganda Handbook, 20th Century Publishing Co., 1953, p. 198


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"PSYOP is the most powerful weapon in the SOF inventory."

General Carl Stiner, Former CINCSOC, 14 April 1993, speaking at the AUSA Symposium


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"Strategic PSYOP proved to be the instrument through which the U.S. and Coalition Forces were successfully able to isolate the enemy and deny him acceptance by the world community."

General Carl Stiner, Former CINCSOC


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"The great 19th century strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously observed that: "War is the continuation of politics by other means." Yugoslavia’s release Sunday of the three American POWs suggests a corollary for the 21st century: Television is the continuation of war by other means."

Kenneth Allard on MSNBC News, May 5, 1999


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"There's a war out there old friend, a world war, and it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information: about how we think, how we see and hear, how we work. It's all about information".

"Sneakers", MCA Universal Pictures, 1992

Wow! Vilka bra länkar!

Jag har haft kontakt med föredetta NSA och Mi5 agenter eller medarbetare, eller anställde.

Det ledade till en hel del interessana diskutioner kring pschology, framtids visioner och planer (de brukar tänkar i 5, 20, 50, 100 och även 300 år i framtiden OCH med 7 lager alternativa planer för alla ideer) och att de har 3 generationer mera utvecklade dator technologi för att leka med.

Psychologi och krig har ALLTID funnits, men nu är det mer och mer viktagare.

Jag undrar hur mycket är sant och inte sant i detta.

Visst använder regeringar och propaganda folk media i ALLA former, Hollywood, SVT, Fox, BBC tidningar för att sätte i små ideer och har någon typ SOFT war... 24 är en bra exempel på detta men även värderingar och ideer som kommer frm med Dr Phil, Operah Uppdraggränsning, och sport..

Här är ett konkret exempel på att Rumsfeldt vill starta internationella falska nyhetskanaler. D.v.s. Information Operations riktade mot gemene man.

By Sam Urquhart
The PR men take over as Donald Rumsfeld declares war on the media
Earlier this month, the Government Accountability Office reported that the Bush administration had dispensed over $1.6 billion in public relations contracts over two and a half years. Of that, $1.1 billion went to the Pentagon, which used $100 million to hire an outside firm to secretly plant over 1,000 news stories in Iraqi newspapers through a secret program of bribes and subterfuge. The same week, we learned that the British taxpayer is financing their own fake news operation – a global satellite news service selling British foreign policy, mainly to the Middle East. This month, U.S. military planners requested 3,700 new psy-ops personnel, presumably for military use.

The exposure of propaganda operations, far from embarrassing the British and American governments, have only made them bolder. Rather than curtailing the controversial operations, the Pentagon, the State Department and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office are expanding their information manipulation programs as they seek not to remove, but to normalize propaganda as a weapon of war.

The paranoid manipulation of information for foreign policy ends has only just begun.

Managing reality

A Defense Science Board Task Force report, instigated by Paul Wolfowitz, outlined the basis for such propaganda. “Strategic communication is a vital component of U.S. national security,” it said. “It is in crisis, and it must be transformed with a strength of purpose that matches our commitment to diplomacy, defense, intelligence, law enforcement, and homeland security. Presidential leadership and the bipartisan political will of Congress are essential. Collaboration between government and the private sector on an unprecedented scale is imperative.”

The U.S., said the report, needed to be more like “insurgent” companies, forever shifting their brand position. This cannot be done through traditional methods, but by ”[mobilizing] greater private sector initiatives that contain a built-in agility, credibility and even deniability that will be missing from government-sponsored initiatives.” The U.S. needs to focus attention on its perceived strengths, “respect for human dignity and individual rights, individual education and economic opportunity, personal freedom, safety and mobility.” That is, away from the messy reality of their military operations.

The report suggests that U.S. foreign policy needs to be aggressively promoted to “winnable” constituencies in sensitive areas of the world, and maybe at home. Information campaigns need to be tailored to win over a core element of a target population. To win these people over, the administration need a watertight media campaign, and they need it to be hidden.

As the Defense Department report recommends, ”[any] new strategic communication function must be more comprehensive, substantive, locally agile and below the radar than public diplomacy today.”

Donald Rumsfeld has made it clear that he sees a strategic media as essential. In a February 1 DoD briefing, Rumsfeld said, “The only place we can lose is if the country loses its will, and the determinant of that is what is played in the media.”

This marks a shift in his attitude towards information operations. For a long time, he has played dumb about psy-ops and strategic communications. In 2002, during the invasion of Afghanistan, he was questioned about the $100,000 a month contract doled out to the Rendon Group, a secretive public relations company. In typical fashion he blustered, “It’s not clear to me that what you just read is true. You read it as though it were fact. To my knowledge, no people are quoted by name as to whether or not those things are true. I don’t believe they’re true. I know that if they are true, they won’t happen, so—because I’m not going to allow it to happen.”

But he did. The Rendon Group have profited mightily under Rumsfeld’s authority. Between 2000 and 2004 the company received contracts totaling between $50m and $100m, according to journalist James Bamford. In September 2005, they retained a $6m contract to provide “Strategic Communications Operation Support” in Baghdad.

Even as recently as October 2005, Donald Rumsfeld played down the need for an information strategy, remaining sensitive to charges of propagandizing. In a 31 October Defense Department briefing he said to reporters, “I thought you were thinking that we were going to fashion and announce a strategic communications plan for the Department of Defense, and that I doubt.” There have been recent signs that Rumsfeld was not being entirely honest.

Come February 2006 and the Quadrennial Defense Review, U.S. military planners included 3,700 psy-ops staff in their plans for future overseas operations. Few media outlets linked this expansion to the recent revelations concerning military propaganda.

Recently, the Pentagon have also seemed far more confident about adopting a strategic communications strategy. The way they’ve hit upon to do this is by attacking the media. In a February 17 speech, for example, he compared Ayman Al-Zawahiri to an “image consultant,” and compared Al-Qaeda to a “media relations committee.” Extremists “plan and design their headline-grabbing attacks using every means of communications to intimidate and break the collective will of free people,” said Rumsfeld. “They know that communications transcend borders – and that a single news story, handled skillfully, can be as damaging to our cause and as helpful to theirs, as any other method of military attack. And they are doing it.”

The heart of this rhetoric is the idea of a media war. As Rumsfeld urges, “Let there be no doubt – the longer it takes to put a strategic communications framework into place, the more we can be certain that the vacuum will be filled by the enemy and by news informers, that most assuredly will not paint an accurate picture of what is actually taking place.”

According to Rumsfeld, we can expect targeted campaigns to paint a positive view of America such as one carried out in Pakistan after the earthquake last year that – despite the terrible winter that many refugees endured – was deemed by the administration as a PR success story. “It was not long,” he said, “before the new favorite toy in Pakistan was a small replica of a Chinook helicopter, because of the many lives our helicopters saved, and the mountains of relief supplies they delivered.” Or so Rumsfeld says. If so, this is just the kind of “focused campaign” on winnable constituencies that the Defense Department Report envisaged back in 2004.

Rumsfeld also mentioned that “several hundred” blogs are currently “receiving CENTCOM content” and talked of the need for “24-hour press operation centers” and “rapidly deployable military communications teams” to cover crises. His overarching theme though, is the need to win that war of ideas. “It is a test of wills and it will be won or lost with our public and the publics of free nations across the globe. We will need to do all we can to attract supporters to our efforts, to correct the lies being told which so damage our country, and shatter the appeal of the enemy.” Yet he provides just one example, that of the Koran-in-the-toilet furor sparked by a Newsweek report.

To this end, the U.S. military engaged PR firm Hass MS&L to provide bloggers with “exclusive editorial content.” Hass then e-mailed military bloggers in January 2006 hawking their goods. As the message read, “The Army believes that military blogs are a valuable medium for reaching out,” but according to William Arkin, writing in the 6 January Washington Post, this outreach “is not the nitty gritty of deployments and living conditions overseas. It is planned to be an official counter to the perceived unwillingness of the mainstream media to report the “good news” from Iraq and the war on terror.”

Rumsfeld and his cronies have their sights trained on the media and their wallets wide open for the PR industry.

Branding Britain abroad for the War of Ideas

Rumsfeld is far from alone in waging a post-modern war of ideas. Britain pioneered branding as a tool of foreign policy, and now it may be going further.

Few governments in the world are as keen to shape public opinion as the Blair government. Few are as closely wedded to corporations either. It was no surprise therefore, when the Guardian reported on a little known satellite broadcaster called British Satellite News (BSN).

As David Miller reported, BSN supplies a “news service” to fourteen out of seventeen Middle-Eastern nations, and to 400 news organizations around the world – all at the British taxpayers’ expense. In 2001, the Foreign Office spent £340m, a figure that has surely grown as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have taken off.

The genesis of the current BSN came about as the Blair government began to make the case for the British role in the Iraq invasion. The Foreign Policy Centre (FPC), a London based think-tank, led the way in calling for an effective “public diplomacy” to construct a British narrative of the war distinct from that of the U.S., in order to “differentiate itself from American foreign policy and counter suspicions that war is motivated by a clash of civilizations,” according to a February 2003 press release. A form of the service had existed before, and was utilized during the Kosovo conflict, but had fallen into disuse. With war looming in Iraq, the image-conscious Blair government sought to resurrect it as a means of selling the conflict abroad.

What was proposed was a self-conscious plan to promote Britain abroad, in the Middle East in particular, as the representative of a tolerant, multicultural, cosmopolitan and democratic world. Yet “Propaganda doesn’t work”, the center wisely counseled and criticized State Department initiatives to portray the U.S. in a similar light as lacking content and appearing insincere. U.S. strategy, “has given international broadcasting “a reputation for propaganda” whilst videos of Muslims living happy lives in the US fail to address concerns about foreign policy.”

Somehow, the FPC wanted the British government to manipulate the image of Britain abroad without being seen as a cynical tactic to sell unpopular foreign policies. Perceptions that the West was anti-Islamic, and that Muslims were discriminated against in Britain had to be combated by a media assault, but there was no paternalistic talk of teaching democracy to Arabs. “A higher percentage (around 88%) of Muslims approved of the statement ‘I approve of democratic ideals’ than Western Christians,” they pointed out, “higher, in fact, than all other religious groups.”

From the start, BSN was different to American schemes that sought to instruct Iraqis and Afghanis in “civil society.” BSN sought to promote Britain as a “brand.” Spawned from the ideology of the market, it would out-compete Islamic radicalism and promote British interests where there might be a doubt about their reception.

One of the flagship products provided by BSN was “Toward Freedom,” a news feed beamed into Iraq from a modified C-130 aircraft codenamed “Commando-Solo” although it eventually found a ground transmitter. Running during 2003 and 2004, Towards Freedom carried speeches by Blair, as well as footage of British and American troops liberating Iraq. Absent were pictures of cluster bomb victims, missile wreckage, prison abuse or the widespread allegations of incompetence and corruption inside the CPA.

That was, of course, never the purpose. “Toward Freedom” took on the challenge of defending the coalition regardless of whether evidence showed their inevitable faults or betrayed the complexities of occupying a nation such as Iraq. It bore little relation to the ideals proposed by the FPC in 2003. Since then, BSN has expanded, and extended its reach around the globe, with the implantation of its stories in 400 news outlets worldwide.

A classier brand of propaganda

BSN has remained propaganda, despite its initial good intentions. A search on its website for “anti-war” produces one hit, tucked inside a report about the Middle-East Studies department at Exeter University, as does a search for “peace movement,” which describes a prayer vigil held by Pax Christii. “WMD” produces a more fertile bunch of results, but on closer inspection they come up lacking. The most recent is a press conference transcript in which Tony Blair repeats a discredited canard from the pre-invasion case for war, “he [Saddam] was developing ballistic missile programmes of a long-range strategic nature in breach of the United Nations resolutions.”

“Torture” is a fruitful term. The most recent result is not an investigation of torture in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, but a rambling denial by Foreign Secretary Jack Straw from December 2005, of British involvement in the “torture flights” furor broken by Dana Priest in the Washington Post the week before. “First of all,” he begins, “there are no secret prisons in the United Kingdom, all right. I think that is an allegation not yet been made, unless I deny it, it quite soon will be. You heard it first, this denial of an allegation which may yet to be made [sic].”

Searches for news items about actually existing torture, such as at Abu Ghraib, return 0 entries. BSN appears to offer little actual news, critical discussion or analysis to speak of.

An item on cluster bombs is a case in point. On Nov 11 2005, BSN ran an item highlighting charities that work to mitigate the effects of cluster bombs and landmines across the world. However, at no point did the news item make any mention of who put many of the cluster bombs there to explode, whilst giving the impression that Britain stood for their removal. Britain does not. It is one of the most prolific users of cluster bombs in the world today.

In Kosovo, according to the UK Working Group on Landmines the British government suppressed the actual figures of casualties from cluster bombs, claiming a failure rate of 5% when the actual rate was 11-12%. In March 2002, the Guardian reported refugees living amongst unexploded cluster bomb droplets in Eritrea that had clearly been manufactured in Bedford, England. During the war in Iraq, a map released by the British Army showed hundreds, perhaps thousands of unexploded cluster bombs around Baghdad and Kirkuk and the Guardian reported in September 2003 that cluster munitions had been responsible for the deaths of over 1,000 Iraqi children during the war.

At the time, U.K. Defense Minister Adam Ingram said, “cluster bombs are not illegal…There were troops, there was equipment in and around the built-up areas…the bombs were used accordingly to take out the threat to our troops.”

Britain might be better advised to shut up.

BSN is run by World Television, a corporation that specializes in providing “rich communications solutions” for customers who wish “to use television to influence audiences, motivate employees, excite customers, change perceptions, or inform investors.” They claim that their service, “uses many news services, including Reuters World News Service (WNS) and APTN, to distribute your news to broadcasters across the world,” and always seek to “meet or exceed the high editorial and production standards required by the world’s major broadcasters.” Past clients include GlaxoSmithKline, BP and Nestlé, excellent training for promoting the murderous and immoral.

They are refreshingly open about their appeal for governments. “Do you work in government communications?” they ask, suggesting “you might want to support diplomatic work by giving news and features to the world’s media.” They understand “that governments can use television actively to sow a deeper, broader understanding of key policies and idea [and] can also improve perceptions of a country overseas.”

Now, however, John Reid and Donald Rumsfeld are trying to paint the media as propagandists. In his Kings College speech of 20 February, Reid stated this hypocrisy in outrageous clarity. “One observer” he told us, “with one videophone, or today even one mobile phone, standing in one square metre of a vast and hugely complex theatre of operations can convey an oversimplified and sometimes misleading picture with an impact that is incalculable.” Yet that is what the U.S. and British governments do day after day – and will escalate in the future.

From publicity to propaganda

This is not just about branding. The U.S. and U.K. do not simply want to make their “products” look good in a global marketplace. They actively seek to condition the choices that people make through the strategic use of media and the manipulation of debates. A small group of secretive, scandal-ridden companies provide the means to make this happen.

A striking example is Strategic Communications Laboratories , a leader in the field of modern propaganda – exhibiting prominently at DSEi 2005, the largest defense fair in Europe – where they reminded customers that “In a world where the perception is the reality, all countries need to have the capability to manage their own perceptual alignment – otherwise someone else will.” On their website, they promise to provide the technological know-how to set up “Op-centres” in sensitive regions, computerized hubs for information processing which put “influence, control and power back into the hands of the government and military, giving them greater power to influence the enemy in time of conflict and enhanced access to their citizens during a crisis.” They even promise to provide the means of overriding national media networks during crises. In their opinion, “The Opcentre is a formidable tool for Homeland Security, Conflict Reduction, International Public Diplomacy and un-mediated Government communications.” For others, it may seem like a propaganda production line.

The Fellowes Group are linked to SCL via somewhere called the Behavioural Dynamics Institute, a quasi-academy for propaganda studies. According to their website, they specialize in breaking “paradigms” – the opposition held by people to GMOs for example – and remaking them in terms favourable to their clients. These paradigms, they say, hold their force by providing a “predictive function.” The Fellowes group, and strategic communicators in general, believe in breaking this function – rebranding companies as green, selling wars as humanitarian interventions, reduced safety standards as ‘modernization’. We’ve all seen them at work.

Their operations are equally applicable to the media, or as Fellowes calls it, the “Infosphere.” Propaganda succeeds by “overcoming… source credibility issues. Reliable evidence of the invalidity of the [paradigm] model cannot, by definition, come from the source that the model is set up to monitor.” Hence the need to plant stories in the Iraqi press, set up NGOs to destabilize governments, and create opposition groups through PR companies as the Rendon Group did with the Iraqi National Congress.

SCL now provide an exclusive “homeland security” deal for governments (their own site claims that they have built a psyops center for an unspecified “Asian government”). Amongst many services, they promise to “Engender support within the national community for proposed military action,” “develop national resilience and behavioural compliance for homeland security issues” and to “launch a powerful psyop campaign against an engaged enemy.” The company, like Rumsfeld, see such operations as integral parts of modern war. With the Pentagon launching a revamped psy-ops campaign, the State Department funding new “democracy promotion” strategies and the ever ready Blair government to pay public money to private propaganda companies, the means of deceiving entire nations has rarely been more accessible, or profitable.

Squeezing the independent media into the corner

Individuals and the conventional media have good reason to worry. One is that government intrusion into the media is making reporting less safe across the world. As Maggy Zanger, professor at the University of Arizona and a supporter of the free Iraqi media puts it,, “If these revelations are true that a U.S. defense contractor paid to plant stories in Iraqi newspapers and paid a number of Iraqi journalists, it has put all Iraqi journalists in even more danger…As if they don’t face enough already, they now have to overcome the public assumption that they may be on the US payroll. People get killed for far less.”

The second is the defense of a free media as an essential element of democracy. The U.S. and Britain are actively opposing the media in Iraq by funding propaganda which discredits other journalists, breeds mistrust and prevents Iraqi citizens obtaining accurate information. Zanger again, “The past two years presented an opportunity to develop a free and independent press, and many of us worked hard to do that—not for the US government, but for the benefit of the Iraqi people.”

Borzou Daragahi, an experienced observer of Iraq, makes a similar point in an interview with GNN from December 2005. “Iraqis do care [about the media bribes scandal]. In many ways, it reminds them of what went on during the time of Saddam Hussein, who also used to pay off journalists to write flattering pieces about him.” Every planted story pushes Iraqi society away from openness and towards fear and paranoia.

The third reason is the obvious one, that it is immoral to use false information to launch a war, and to lie to the citizens in whose name the war is launched. The beauty of the propaganda offensive is that separating reliable information from planted stories, or calculated half truths, is becoming harder and harder. Despite the rapid rise of the Internet and the widespread democratization of news dissemination, spinning war is actually getting easier. The greater the volume of propaganda produced, the harder it seems to tell lies from facts, even if much of it is hopelessly inept. The rest of us have to be vigilant – and keep a close watch on our paradigms.

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