18th Dec 2002
Global Information War
Picking up the Big Brother theme I’ve been blogging about in recent days, I caught over the weekend on NRP’s On the Media an interview (transcript and Real Audio file) with host Brooke Gladstone and LA Times writer William Arkin on his recent article about the military’s continued dirty tricks vis-a-vis international disinformation policies. Both the interview and original article highly recommended. Here’s Gladstone’s intro from the interview:
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was roundly condemned last year when he unveiled the Pentagon’s new Office of Strategic Influence to feed disinformation to the foreign media. He claimed it was all a misunderstanding and supposedly scrapped the idea, but recently in the L.A. Times, military analyst and critic Bill Arkin explained that the Office of Strategic Influence is not dead but thriving under different names throughout the Pentagon. Arkin has obtained dozens of Pentagon documents that describe in detail how the military has restructured itself top to bottom to fight a global information war that could blow back into the United States.
Here’s the best paragraph of the LA Times piece:
Both the Air Force and the Navy now list deception as one of five missions for information warfare, along with electronic attack, electronic protection, psychological . attacks and public affairs. A September draft of a new Air Force policy describes information warfare’s goals as “destruction, degradation, denial, disruption, deceit, and exploitation.” These goals are referred to collectively as “D5E.”
UPDATE:
Struggling with my Hungarian on Adi’s blog just now, I found this related NYT article: “Pentagon Debates Propaganda Push in Allied Nations”
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