Appearing on Andrews' panel was Brigadier General Simon ('Pete') Worden, the former head of the defunct OSI. Worden had a long history of selling new defense policies to international audiences. While a major, he worked for then-Vice President George Bush in explaining 'Star Wars' to a worldwide audience. Before assuming his present job as head of OSI, he was Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz's communications director. He also awarded a $70,000 per month propaganda contract to the Rendon Group, a public relations firm with longstanding links to the CIA, which worked closely with the U.S. Army's 4th Psychological Operations Group.
Bush surrounded himself with people who championed disinformation programs. He named as his new counter-terrorism chief, retired Army General Wayne Downing. Downing, in turn, named an old friend, retired Army Colonel Jeffrey Jones, to be the Special Assistant to the President for Strategic Communications and Information. General Worden stated that Jones was charged with integrating 'strategic influence' across the U.S. government. Since Jones worked in the National Security Council alongside Bush's National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, the President was aware about the Pentagon's plans to conduct disinformation campaigns. If the President was not in on the strategic influence program, such plans should have certainly been known to senior policy makers in the West Wing, including Karen Hughes and Karl Rove, the president's senior counselors.
Hughes appeared to be unaware of what President Bush's new homeland security advisors were up to. With the Pentagon having other ideas concerning the feeding of disinformation to the international media, Hughes failed to clear up with her boss her own stated commitment to provide reporters with "the facts." The information war planners at the Pentagon declared their goals were to interdict and censor news, something the Pentagon called 'influence operations.' Worden declared in February 2002 that the Pentagon 'can control the Internet, the electromagnetic spectrum, radio, and television.'
One of Worden's colleagues, Lieutenant Colonel Brad Ward, the head of the 'International Military Information Group,' a relatively new group within the State Department's International Information Programs (IIP) Bureau, was even more precise about the Pentagon's activities. Ward revealed that his group worked with the Voice of America on influence operations. From its base within the State Department, he said the military operated Internet web sites in seven languages directed at select foreign media in targeted countries and ran 'secondary radio stations' that broadcasted programs through the auspices of Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs). A more troubling aspect of Ward's operations was found in his statement that his group assisted in the UN War Crimes Tribunals in The Hague and Arusha, Tanzania to 'discredit rebel factions.' Such a revelation threw into question the fairness of the trials.
Ward also admitted other 'successes' of his group:
- It worked on the Serbian presidential election campaign to 'ensure Slobodon Milosevic did not get elected.'
- It operated Internet web sites in seven languages that were password protected but gave select foreign media access in targeted countries.
- It worked with the UN Security Council in certain 'support missions.'
- Videos illustrating the crimes of Liberian President Charles Taylor were produced in Conakry, Guinea for distribution in Liberia.
- The group was involved in 'detaining operations' at Camp X Ray and Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The fact that Ward's group represented a military PSYOPS component within a State Department bureau that had once been the independent U.S. Information Agency (USIA) should have troubled anyone concerned with receiving untainted news from its own government. It was retiring Senator Jesse Helms, wielding the power of Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, who forced the USIA to come under the State Department's bureaucratic umbrella in 1997. That move effectively made the entire U.S. public diplomacy apparatus vulnerable to the professional propagandists and deceivers within the military and intelligence community.
More ominously, Ward disclosed that his group would be supplemented by a 20-person Operational Center, which was to draw from CIA and other intelligence personnel. People who live by the maxim 'when you screw up, you cover up' thus were able to decide what the U.S. government wrote and broadcasted to foreign audiences. And such propaganda did not stop abroad "when false stories were run by foreign news agencies they were frequently picked up by U.S. media outlets."
One of the main tasks of Worden's OSI was to stem the belief held by many, and not merely those in the Muslim world, that Israel was involved or behind the 9/11 attack. With that belief now gaining momentum and facts to back it up, Feith, Shulsky, and their neocon friends are pushing for a larger OSI, this time as a propaganda czar watching over the State Department.
Worden has been rewarded with the job of Director of NASA's Ames Research Center where he is championing the 100-year Starship Project to travel to and settle other planets. With people like Worden at the helm of such programs, the movie "Avatar" may turn out to be a prequel to what the Pentagon has planned for other planets and their possible inhabitants.
Neocon dream: A return to the Cold War
The Feith/Shulsky report also sees a return to Cold War methods for conducting U.S. diplomacy and cites the covert aid the CIA used in 1948 to interfere in the Italian election, thus preventing the Italian Communist Party from coming to power.
Feith and Shulsky also look to the Internet to replace Cold War-era projects like Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Their proposals include the following micro-grant program to aid pro-U.S. foreign NGOs: "Organize ways to fund projects through micro-granting, possibly through the Internet." Micro-grants through NGOs like the Ford Foundation constitute an old CIA influence-peddling program, one that goes back to at least 1965 post-Sukarno Indonesia where President Obama's mother arranged for micro-grants and loans to pacify Javanese farmers and artisans and woo them away from the Communists and Sukarno leftist nationalists.
Feith and Shulsky identify some NGOs worthy of support from a neo-US Information Agency. They are: Quilliam Foundation (UK), WORDE " World Organization for Resource Development and Education, Wahid Institute (Indonesia), and the American Islamic Congress.
Feith and Shulsky argue for U.S. support for Arab, Iranian, and Indonesian stand-up comics who "already perform stinging political satire but few are well-known and even fewer have outlets, though if they were discovered their listenership could be in the hundreds of millions." And in a pitch that matches nicely with the ideas proffered by White House Office of Information Regulatory Affairs chief, Cass Sunstein and his "cognitive infiltration" plan for web sites, Feith and Shulsky offer their own contribution to the cause of Internet disruption: "The extremists' use of internet websites and "chat rooms" to communicate among themselves is a vulnerability that U.S. covert action could exploit. If a covert action operative could pose convincingly as an extremist group representative, for example, he or she could sow dissension and confusion as part of an overall strategy to discredit extremist ideas."
Obama and Clinton may have drank the neocon Kool Aid on US propaganda effort
There is a possibility that Feith's and Shulsky's program is already being adopted, in part, by the Obama administration. In their report, Feith and Shulsky talk in terms of a slush fund called an Innovator's Fund, to supplement America's "ideological effort": "though many ambassadors don't see ideological work as part of their mission, an Innovators Fund could incentivize embassies to leverage their contacts, resources and technology to contribute to the ideological effort." In the jaded and cabalistic world of the neocons, only they could refer to a slush fund for bribery as an "Innovator's Fund."
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