for this defense think tank. This think tank that is connected with & endorsed by Donald Rumsfeld. The author (James Waller) is not a PhD. in Latin American history, or a specialist in international affairs, or any other kind of expert on Mexico. I find his job description interesting. "Information Operations" is a unit of the military that is devoted to spreading propaganda and psy-ops. This "Center for Security Policy" is nothing more than a propaganda arm for the Pentagon. In 2002, Waller wrote another article on the importance of using propaganda to "win hearts and minds" for the war effort.
Losing a Battle for Hearts and Minds By J. Michael Waller
Will the U.S. military's hard-fought gains against international terrorists be undermined because the people back in Washington still don't understand how to win hearts and minds? That's what some supporters of President George W. Bush are beginning to fear as the U.S. government finds itself incapable of waging effective public-diplomacy and political-warfare campaigns abroad.
Across the federal government, the situation is the same: A national-security and foreign-policy bureaucracy that is managing the military and diplomatic dimensions of the war effectively is bumbling and botching the crucial
information campaigns around the world needed to discredit terrorists and their supporters and foster support for the military effort...
To date, most U.S. public-diplomacy and
information operations in support of the war effort have been piecemeal, tactical and mostly reactive instead of strategic, comprehensive and anticipatory. A long-term strategy has yet to be developed, according to administration officials. That, critics say, leaves the enemy to define the terms of debate and severely complicates U.S. diplomacy and military planning.
"The United States ought to have a political-warfare capability, which is another corollary of public diplomacy, but there is no place in the U.S. government that considers it its business to conduct political warfare abroad," Lenczowski says.
(James Waller - "Losing a Battle for Hearts and Minds.")
http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/papers/vp01.cfm?outfit=pmt&folder=10&paper=1525 Army "Information Operations" web-site -
http://www-tradoc.army.mil/tpubs/pams/p525-69.htmInteresting miltary blog on the use of "Information Operations" in the media. -
http://armchairgeneralist.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/03/information_ope.htmlCheck this out: From the National Security Archives - In 2003, Rumsfeld personally approved a secret "Information Operations" plan to spread false propaganda to the foreign media. At the time, this raised an outcry because these false stories could easily make it into the US press. Rumsfeld denied, though, that this could happen. So, Rummies favorite think tank has a branch for "Informations Operations" at the same time that Rummie approves a "Information Operations" plan to spread false propaganda. This think tank is a part of spreading that false propaganda on Rumsfeld's behalf. Now, why would the Pentagon want people to be mad at Mexican immigrants? By quoting this site, aren't you falling into the Defense Dept. propaganda?
The Archives has a copy of the Rumsfeld plan & wrote a description of the memo on its website.
Rumsfeld's Roadmap to Propaganda - copies of secret Rumsfeld "Informations Operations" road-map.
A secret Pentagon "roadmap" on war propaganda, personally approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in October 2003, calls for "boundaries" between information operations abroad and the news media at home, but provides for no such limits and claims that as long as the American public is not "targeted," any leakage of PSYOP to the American public does not matter.
Obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive at George Washington University and posted on the Web today, the 74-page "Information Operations Roadmap" admits that "information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP, increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice-versa," but argues that "the distinction between foreign and domestic audiences becomes more a question of USG intent rather than information dissemination practices."
The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, amended in 1972 and 1998, prohibits the U.S. government from propagandizing the American public with information and psychological operations directed at foreign audiences; and several presidential directives, including Reagan's NSD-77 in 1983, Clinton's PDD-68 in 1999, and Bush's NSPD-16 in July 2002 (the latter two still classified), have set up specific structures to carry out public diplomacy and information operations. These and other documents relating to U.S. PSYOP programs were posted today as part of a new Archive Electronic Breifing Book.
Several press accounts have referred to the 2003 Pentagon document but today's posting is the first time the text has been publicly available. Sections of the document relating to computer network attack (CNA) and "offensive cyber operations" remain classified under black highlighting.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB177/
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