Bush Administration Psychological Warfare Against the US? - Zeese

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Wed, 22 Jun 2005 09:58:43 -0700 (PDT)

Bush Administration Psychological Warfare Against the US? - Zeese

 

 

http://democracyrising.us/content/view/259/164/

 

Bush Administration Psychological Warfare Against the U.S.?

Written by Kevin Zeese

Wednesday, 22 June 2005

 

 

An Interview with (ret.) Colonel Sam Gardiner describes " what

propaganda literature would refer to as the big lie. "

 

 

 

Sam Gardiner has taught strategy and military operations at the

National War College, Air War College and Naval War College. He was

recently a visiting scholar at the Swedish Defence College. During

Gulf II he was a regular on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer as well as on

BBC radio and television, and National Public Radio. He authored " The

Enemy is Us " an article describing how the Bush Administration used

disinformation and psychological warfare - weapons usually used

against the 'enemy' - against the American public in order to support

the war in Iraq. He has done an extensive analysis of the media

coverage before the war, during the war and during the occupation as

well as of the statements of Administration officials. His conclusions

are startling and of great concern. He has put his findings in a

report entitled: " Truth from These Podia. "

 

 

Zeese: Describe your professional background and expertise.

 

Gardiner: Sure, Kevin. I'm a retired colonel of the US Air Force.

When I retired, I was teaching strategy at the National War College in

Washington, DC. Since I've been retired, I have continued to teach

military strategy. I've taught for the Naval War College. I've

taught at the Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama. I also spent a

period as a visiting scholar at the Swedish Defense College in Stockholm.

 

In addition, I have been doing war games. You may have seen

descriptions of some of the games I've done. I did one on Iran that

was covered in the December 2004 Atlantic Monthly. More recently, I

conducted a game addressing North Korea. It was covered in the

July/August Atlantic Monthly.

 

Zeese: What is: " Truth from These Podia " ? How did you conduct this

media analysis?

 

Gardiner: It is a paper I published on the web that reflected four

months of heavy research.

 

I had followed press reports of the war closely as it unfolded because

of a job I had. During the first couple months of Gulf II, I was

under contract with the Newshour with Jim Lehrer. With another

retired colonel, we did an almost daily on-air analysis of how the war

was going.

 

As the war unfolded, I became increasingly uneasy about what was being

reported out of the White House, Pentagon and Central Command. I was

hearing things that just did not make sense with what I knew and what

my intuition was telling me. I began tracking some of the stories.

It was just a matter of going over what we were told and connecting

that with the truth as it emerged later.

 

One of the first items that made me uneasy was when I heard we were

encountering " terrorist death squads. " I was very familiar with the

Iraq military forces. There were no terrorist death squads. It

became obvious the Pentagon wanted us to connect Iraq with 9/11.

Terrorists did 9/11. There are terrorists in Iraq. Iraq must have

been behind 9/11.

 

Zeese: Regarding the management of information about Iraq, I'd like to

focus on the build up to the Iraq War initially. There has been

growing indications from a series of memoranda and meeting minutes

from Great Britain that U.S. intelligence was " fixed " to support the

war. In your analysis of media management before the war do you see

any indication that the United States Congress and public was

manipulated into supporting the invasion of Iraq by misinformation?

 

Gardiner: Kevin, I find it amazing that there is now a growing

interest in the marketing the war. There is absolutely no question

that the White House and the Pentagon participated in an effort to

market the military option. The truth did not make any difference to

that campaign. To call it fixing is to miss the more profound point.

It was a campaign to influence. It involved creating false stories;

it involved exaggerating; it involved manipulating the numbers of

stories that were released; it involved a major campaign to attack

those who disagreed with the military option. It included all the

techniques those who ran the marketing effort had learned in political

campaigns.

 

Zeese: Can you give some examples of false or exaggerated stories put

out by the Bush administration in the build-up to the war?

 

Gardiner: In the summer of 2003, we know from the Downing Street Memo

that the Administration was talking about justifying a war by arguing

that Iraq was the nexus of terrorism and WMD.

 

The terrorism argument was what propaganda literature would refer to

as the big lie. The Administration's objective was to make enough

arguments connecting Iraq to terrorism and Bin Laden that the American

people would believe Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks. They used a

technique called the excluded middle. Iraq supports terrorists. The

attacks were by terrorists. Iraq must been behind the 9/11 attacks.

 

We the WMD story fairly well. We know the story of the uranium from

Niger. We know about the aluminum tubes that were not for uranium

enrichment. We know the biological labs Powell showed to the UN did

not exist.

 

Beyond these there are many exaggerations that have gotten very little

notice. Let me mention just a few.

 

A New York Times reporter was told by the Administration that Iraq was

buying excess quantities of atropine to get ready for chemical

warfare. It turns out the quantities were consistent with the Iraq use

of the substance for routing medical purposes.

 

The President told us in a speech in Ohio that Iraq had drone aircraft

that could possible deliver chemical weapons into the United States.

When that facility was found, the officers reported that it looked

more like a school project than a serious military program.

 

The Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told the Council on

Foreign Relations that Iraq had the capability to attack US computers.

They did not.

 

We were lead to believe a Navy pilot shot down during the first Gulf

War was alive and being held in Baghdad. He was not.

 

We were told on the State Department web sit that Iraq was forming

units of children to fight the United States. Iraq did not do that.

 

We were told the French were supplying air defense missiles to Iraq.

That was not ture

 

There were many more.

 

Zeese: How about information during the war? Did the embedded

journalists help give the U.S. a more accurate or less accurate

perspective? How did the Pentagon control information?

 

Gardiner: A number of democratic institutions failed us during the

war. Certainly, the press was among those. I attended a conference

in London in July 2003 at which one of the PR firms that advised the

Pentagon talked about lessons learned from the effort. They were

pleased that they were able to dominate the story. That was their

objective. The embedded notion had been tested in Afghanistan, and it

proved to be effective. The product was lots of coverage with

personal stories of soldiers. That was the Pentagon objective. Keep

their story on television. Keep people talking about Meals Ready to

Eat, and they won't criticize the war.

 

As I mentioned, I had done analysis during the major offensive

operations. One of the things that the head of this PR firm said at

that conference was that in the next war the Pentagon wanted to

control context more and not let it be done by retired military people.

 

Zeese: You spend a lot of time in your article on the story regarding

the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch. Why is that important?

 

Gardiner: Kevin, the Jessica Lynch story touched me personally, and it

became representative of the whole effort to manipulate the truth.

 

From beginning to end, the Lynch story was a press event. It started

with the description that the unit was " ambushed. " The unit was not

ambushed. It got lost and drove into Iraqi lines, and then it retraced

its path back through Iraqi lines.

 

The Pentagon was in such a hurry to get out the story of an individual

who had fought off the Iraqi they did so with incomplete information.

All of the heroic stuff was really about a soldier in the unit who was

killed, not about Lynch.

 

The Secretary of Defense allowed the story to stay around for days

despite knowing the truth and despite the family insisting that the

information was not about their daughter.

 

My father was wounded and captured by the Germans during WW II. He did

some heroic things during the period of his capture. The manipulation

of the Lynch story was an insult to his heroism.

 

 

Zeese: And in the occupation phase? What kind of media control

occurred as that phase began? Is it continuing today?

 

Gardiner: There have been major media strategies during the

occupation. For the first year, the same pattern continued. We heard

exaggeration and deflection from the press conferences from Baghdad.

After the first year, the White House strategy shifted. The idea what

that it wanted the American people to forget about the war. They quit

having press conferences in Baghdad. Central Command quit having

press conferences. The military spokesperson from Iraq became junior

officers and enlisted people. The Brigadier Generals disappeared.

 

The current strategic communications strategy is to make it seem as if

there is progress, keep the number of stories down and certainly to

continue to hide casualties. You may know that the United States is

the only coalition country that did not honor its returning dead.

 

Zeese: Is the media being fooled by the Administration or is it

complicit in this effort to misinform the public?

 

Gardiner: The media have been fooled. They have been lazy. They have

lost sight of the historic calling of journalism. Journalists have

been replaced on television by cheerleaders.

 

Zeese: Was any of this illegal?

 

Gardiner: Some of it may have been illegal. A case was brought

against the Secretary of Defense in a Chicago court by Judicial Watch

for violating the law that limits defense money being used for

propaganda inside the United States.

 

There was another illegal dimension. Most people don't know but the

military is the only profession where it is illegal to lie. It is a

violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for an officer to

tell a lie. There were some officers who violated the Uniform Code of

Military Justice as they marketed for the Administration.

 

Zeese: You say in " Truth from these Podia: " " In the most basic sense,

Washington and London did not trust the peoples of their democracies

to come to right decisions. Truth became a casualty. When truth is a

casualty, democracy receives collateral damage. " Does this mean that

if the people of Washington and the United States were told the truth

they would not have supported the invasion of Iraq and therefore had

to be misled by the Bush administration?

 

Gardiner: One irony of the whole mess is that the American people (and

the British people) would most likely have supported strong actions

against Iraq had they been told the truth.

 

The other irony is that if truth had been valued inside the

Administration, we probably would not have gone to war. In very early

2003 I had done an extensive analysis of the likely humanitarian

consequences of an invasion of Iraq. I was able to get quite a few

mid-level people to review my briefing. I even briefed my results of

the National Security Council Staff. The bottom line of my

presentation was that the United States was not ready to deal with

what was coming. That was clearly not a piece of information anyone

wanted.

 

My efforts and those of others are described in a January 2004 article

in the Atlantic Monthly by Jim Fallows, " Blind into Baghdad. "

 

Zeese: How much did this campaign of misinformation cost?

 

Gardiner: Tough question, Kevin. I don't think it possible to get a

total handle on the effort. I have read one estimate that put the

marketing at $200 million. That cost is trivial, however, to the

collateral damage that has been done to democracy.

 

Zeese: What do we do to prevent this from occurring in the future?

 

Gardiner: Wow, I wish I had an answer to this question. Based upon

the initial work done after the offensive phase by those involved in

strategic communications, I have to tell you, as I said in my paper,

if you think this was bad, wait until the next war. They will be even

better at manipulating the story.

 

Zeese: You conclude " Truth in these Podia " with the " Last Chart " and

suggest that we need an investigation to determine the extent of

information management and legislation to prevent the people of the

United States from being victimized by war propaganda in the future.

What type of investigation? What type of legislation?

 

Gardiner: We need a commission. This one would not be about

intelligence. This would be focused on strategic communications. I

have been able to uncover some of the manipulation that went on before

and during the war, but I think I have only scratched the surface.

Some is still classified or buried. For example, who within the US

Government told the press that the French gave Saddam Hussein a

passport so he could sneak out of Iraq? Who told the press Saddam

Hussein was hiding in the Russian embassy?

 

The United States needs a robust public diplomacy effort, but I

believe we cannot allow government officials to insert non-truth into

media that will be seen by Americans. We can't allow officials to

damage democracy in the name of extending democracy.