Washington Post wrote:White House officials struggled this week to retool a war communications blueprint that did not allow for strong Iraqi resistance and overestimated the welcome allied troops would receive.
The administration countered setbacks on the global airwaves by using classic campaign techniques such as dogged repetition of scripted messages and flat denials of dissent. When the war plan itself was under attack, officials tried to regain their footing by saying that the plan was flexible enough to accommodate any eventuality.
"We should have made that part clearer early on," one official said.
President Bush's aides pride themselves on the iron message-discipline they maintained through his candidacy and early years in office, but their techniques have not immediately succeeded when applied to war. Now, Bush's messengers must compete with other sources of information that include reporters embedded with military units, commanders in the field who bluntly speak their minds and a vocal community of retired military officers receiving intelligence from the Pentagon.
The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has protested at restrictions it said the US military had imposed on reporters trying to cover the war in Iraq without accompanying US or British forces. The EBU, an association of state and commercial broadcasters which includes the BBC, CNN, Italian, French and German channels, said US and British forces were forcibly removing so-called "unilateral" journalists found in southern Iraq who were not assigned to specific military units.
"US Central Command policy is now actively restricting independent newsgathering from southern Iraq," EBU secretary-general Jean Stock said in a statement released in Kuwait.
Mr Stock said the EBU noted with dismay the treatment appeared to be particularly aimed at organisations from countries whose troops were not participating in the US-led invasion of Iraq which started on March 20.
He said the policy had put some camera crews in danger in southern Iraq as they had resorted to operating clandestinely
Минпечати считает "довольно странным поведение телекнала MTV", рекомендовавшего своим компаниям в Европе изменить вещание в связи с войной в Ираке. Об этом говорится в информационном сообщении пресс-службы министерства, переданном в четверг. После начала военной операции в Ираке департамент вещательных стандартов MTV распространил по своим европейским офисам директиву, которая рекомендует не показывать клипы, содержащие демонстрацию "войны, солдат, боевых самолетов, бомб, ракет, бунтов, общественных беспорядков, казней". Кроме того, директива предостерегает от показа клипов песен, в текстах которых есть намеки на войну. В "черный список" попали и антивоенные ролики. В связи с этим в Минпечати отмечают, что "подобная редакционная политика MTV напоминает цензуру которая неприемлема в свободном демократическом обществе". "Телекомпания "MTV-Россия", присутствующая на российском рынке, должна осознавать, что ее деятельность строится на основе российского законодательства о средствах массовой информации", – говорится в сообщении пресс-службы. //Интерфакс
Washington Post wrote:Friday, April 4, 2003; Page A01 NAJAF, Iraq, April 3 -- U.S. Army troops and sympathetic Shiite Muslims today collaborated to blow up an equestrian statue of President Saddam Hussein as part of a campaign to win hearts and minds in this vital Euphrates River city.
Shortly before 5 p.m., combat engineers laid plastic explosives along the pedestal and Iraqis detonated the charge to pitch the statue of Hussein -- holding an upraised sword -- into a street intersection, Army sources said.
The gesture was part of a choreographed effort to suggest local support for the U.S. occupation. Earlier in the day, a Shiite force of 150 paramilitary fighters was expected to declare an insurrection against the Hussein government after claiming credit for capturing a Fedayeen motor pool that actually had been secured by 101st Airborne Division soldiers. Only 23 Shiites showed up, however -- their allegiance to the Americans signified by white armbands -- and the statute-toppling operation was launched.
"We're in the extremely confusing situation of trying to link up with a bunch of guys who look exactly like the guys we're trying to kill," one Army staff officer said.
Detecting disinformation, without radar By Gregory Sinaisky
How to tell genuine reporting from an article manufactured to produce the desired propaganda effect? The war in Iraq provides us plenty of interesting samples for a study of disinformation techniques
CNN, the US cable news network exposed itself as a fighting arm of US military endangering the lives of journalists in Iraq after when its armed personnel started firing at a checkpoint outside Tikrit yesterday.
"To our knowledge, this is the first time press vehicles have travelled with armed security guards. It did not happen in the Balkans and it didn't occur in the first Gulf War," a spokesman for the Paris-based watchdog Reporters sans Frontières said.
The organisation added: "This behaviour creates a dangerous precedent that could imperil all other reporters covering this conflict and others in the future. There is a real risk that belligerents will believe all press vehicles are armed."
reuters wrote:PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - It is one of the most famous images of the war in Iraq: a U.S. soldier scaling a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad and draping the Stars and Stripes over the black metal visage of the ousted despot.
But for Harper's magazine publisher John MacArthur, that same image of U.S. military victory is also indicative of a propaganda campaign being waged by the Bush administration.
"It was absolutely a photo-op created for (U.S. President George W.) Bush's re-election campaign commercials," MacArthur, a self-appointed authority on U.S. government propaganda, said in an interview. "CNN, MSNBC and Fox swallowed it whole."
In 1992, MacArthur wrote "Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War," a withering critique of government and media actions that he says misled the public after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
Reports in the Dutch newspaper Trouw (2/21/00, 2/25/00) and France's Intelligence Newsletter (2/17/00) have revealed that several officers from the US Army's 4th Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) Group at Ft. Bragg worked in the news division at CNN's Atlanta headquarters last year, starting in the final days of the Kosovo War.
In the U.S. media, so far only Alexander Cockburn, columnist for The Nation and co-editor of the newsletter CounterPunch, has picked up on the story. Cockburn's column on the subject is available at http://www.counterpunch.org.
The story is disturbing. In the 1980s, officers from the 4th Army PSYOPS group staffed the National Security Council's Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD), a shadowy government propaganda agency that planted stories in the U.S. media supporting the Reagan Administration's Central America policies.
A senior US official described OPD as a "vast psychological warfare operation of the kind the military conducts to influence a population in enemy territory." (Miami Herald, 7/19/87) An investigation by the congressional General Accounting Office found that OPD had engaged in "prohibited, covert propaganda activities," and the office was soon shut down as a result of the Iran-Contra investigations. But the 4th PSYOPS group still operates.
NY Times wrote:Pentagon and Bogus News: All Is Denied
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.
