Neo-Conned! Again
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By the end of the questioning, he implied they were not Americans.
I've talked to people who have seen the pictures taken when the individuals from the 507th were found. They described head wounds and fresh blood that could have been consistent with execution. Again, the pattern was that the story was more important than the facts. What is wrong with the truth? Why didn't these guys level with us? That frustrated me at the time, and it continues to frustrate me.
20. Shula district bombing
On March 29, 2003, 50 civilians were killed in a neighborhood in Baghdad. On April 2, 2003, the British Independent newspaper reports that its reporter, Robert Fisk, found a 30-centimeter piece of shrapnel at the site of the Shula bombing showing the serial number of the bomb, identifying it as a HARM built by Raytheon. On April 3, the CENTCOM cover story came from Jim Wilkinson. He said American forces have received “reliable information” that the Iraqi regime may be planning to bomb some Shiite Muslim neighborhoods of Baghdad, and then blame the U.S.-led coalition for the destruction. The U.K. side continued the “not us” line: on April 3 the U.K. Defense Chief Geoff Hoon said there was no evidence the market bombings were caused by coalition missiles.
It was part of the pattern. It is another one of those stories that is particularly painful. One keeps wanting to say, “Why did you do this?”
21. Capture of the 507th
General Pace did not have a very good day on March 27, 2003, on the Larry King Show on CNN. He said troops from the 507th were shot when they attempted to surrender.
It doesn't seem to have been true, though, according to the official Army report. It read, that “with no means to continue to resist, SGT Riley made the decision to surrender the two soldiers (Hernandez, and Johnson) and himself. PFC Miller moved beyond the crash-site, engaged the enemy, and was captured after being surrounded …. Hudson, also wounded, was immediately surrounded after the shooting stopped, and was pulled from the vehicle by Iraqis and captured.”
22. The red zone
There was something about the “Red Zone” that caught a lot of people's imaginations. The discussion began with a question to Rumsfeld on March 21, 2003, about the probability of WMD use by the Iraqis. He provided a fairly good answer; it would not have stimulated much of a story. It was probably close to the truth. Three days later someone got to CBS with more (from David Martin, CBS News: “Iraqis have drawn a red line on the map around Baghdad, and once American troops cross it, the Republican Guards are authorized to use chemical weapons.”), although that same day Franks with a statement tended to put it back in the box (“I actually think we don't know. There is a school of thought that says as the compression becomes tighter and tighter and tighter, the pressure will be greater and greater to use these weapons. So we don't know.”).
By March 25, Rumsfeld began to pick up the theme. He said: “There has been intelligence scraps – who knows how accurate they are – chatter in the system that suggest that the closer that coalition forces get to Baghdad and Tikrit, the greater the likelihood, and that some command-and-control arrangements have been put in place. But whether it will happen or not remains to be seen.” One can be alerted to strategic influence matter when he talks about “scraps of intelligence.” By April 2, the Red Zone had taken on a life. Brig. Gen. Brooks's statement makes this clear: “First, the red zone or the red lines that we describe is simply a term that characterizes that there may be a trigger line where the regime deems sufficient threat to use weapons of mass destruction, weapons that we know are available to them, weapons that we've seen the regime use on their own people in the past, weapons we believe are in the possession of some of their forces now.” Another official at U.S. Central Command said, on the same day, that “the imaginary red line, the conceptual trip wire for the danger zone, runs east from Karbala, about 50 miles south of Baghdad on the Euphrates River, to Kut on the Tigris River southeast of Baghdad.”
After April 2, there were, incredibly, more than 1500 articles using the “Red Zone.” By the middle of April, thousands of stories appeared in the written press about the Red Zone, including this representative USA Today piece from April 16:
[A] salt desert strip west of the town of Karbala, the gap is only a little more than a mile wide. It also lies inside what the Army commanders came to call the “red line” – turf so close to Baghdad that Iraqi troops might defend it with chemical weapons. U.S. commanders feared that the Iraqis would sucker advance units through the gap, only to “slime” them from behind with chemical weapons, cutting them off to be killed.
Even if one grants the administration some room for not knowing Iraq didn't have chemical weapons it was immediately prepared to use against us at the beginning of the war, by April 16 it did know. Joint Task Force 20, whose mission it was to go to the WMD sites first, would have been to the majority of them. The coalition air forces had even stopped flying sorties against WMD areas. The evidence would have been coming back to Washington. But, they kept the story alive.
My sense on this one was confirmed in September 2004 based upon a conversation I had with David Kay, who had been the WMD searcher for the CIA. Quite off-hand he mentioned the Red Zone. He confirmed that it was fabricated. He discovered that it was a concept that had come out of a wargame done by the Pentagon. In the game, the U.S. side simply played that Iraq had established a Red Zone. That then became part of the message.
Psychological Operations
One element of the darker side was psychological operations. Strategic influence is aimed at international audiences (and possibly domestic audiences, too). Psychological Operations (PSYOPS), on the other hand, are targeted at the bad guys. The problem is that during this war PSYOPS became a major part of the relationship between the governments of the U.S. and the U.K. and the free press.
At the lower end of the scale, when Rumsfeld and London officials kept saying the days of the “regime” were numbered, they were talking to people in Iraq who might have been thinking of fighting. Comments like “The days of Saddam Hussein are numbered” (March 19, 2003); “the regime is starting to lose control of their country” (March 21, 2003); and “the outcome is clear. The regime of Saddam Hussein is gone. It's over” (Rumsfeld, March 21, 2003) were most likely part of the Strategic PSYOPS, with the U.S. press used to communicate the message.
Furthermore, when the British commander, Air Marshall Brian Burridge, gave a presentation to the international press on March 24, 2003, and talked about an uprising, he was not giving an assessment as a professional about likely outcomes, he was broadcasting to see if he could inspire that to happen. It was a psychological operation.
It's probably unnecessary at this stage in the campaign to focus on him as one man. The key aspect is the regime itself. Once the regime recognizes that its days are up, then they will crumble. And while they are crumbling, others who for some years maybe have had designs on overthrowing the regime, will probably develop greater levels of courage themselves. So we'll see a crumble and Saddam's place in that is largely becoming immaterial.
Thus we can see where psychological operations begin to color the free press. It would have been wrong to conclude from his remarks that he was predicting overthrow. His target audience was inside Iraq.
1. A psychological operation?
A major example of PSYOPS distorting the free press with false information was the case of the 51st Division. On the 21st and 22nd of March 2003 their surrender was a major story. It was told as if it were a truth. It was told on both sides of the Atlantic. It had been coordinated. It was not true.
“The commander of Iraq's regular 51st Division,” Washington Reuters reported on March 21, 2003, “on Friday surrendered to American marines advancing through the desert toward Baghdad in southern Iraq, U.S. defense officials said…. The defense officials, who asked not to be identified, did not provide details but told Reuters that both the commander and vice-commander of the division had surrendered … the unit had been peppered in recent weeks wit
h tens of thousands of air-dropped leaflets calling on the Iraqi military to give up.”
CBS News followed this up on March 22, 2003: “An entire division of the Iraqi army, numbering 8,000 soldiers, surrendered to coalition forces in southern Iraq Friday, Pentagon officials said. The move marked the largest single unit to surrender en masse.”
However, by the 23rd of March, because of interviews with the commander who was supposed to have surrendered, it became clear the 51st had not surrendered. For instance, Agence France-Presse, on March 23, reported: “An Iraqi commander near the southern city of Basra said Sunday that his division, which Washington earlier said had surrendered, would continue to resist U.S. and British forces. 'I am with my men in Basra, we continue to defend the people and riches of the town,' Col. Khaled al-Hashemi, commander of the 51st Mechanized Division, told the satellite television channel Aljazeera.” And UPI, on March 25, quoted Col. Chris Vernon, a U.K. spokesman, as follows: “It's quite clear elements of the Iraq regular army – the 51st Division that was west of Basra – have pulled back into the town, of what scale and size, we're not quite clear.”
If the first unit the coalition encountered had surrendered as a group immediately, it would certainly have been a powerful message to the rest of the Iraqi military to do the same. Certainly, it was not an intelligence failure. You would know if you have an entire division.
The U.S./U.K. announcement of the surrender of the 51st Division was a psychological operation.
2. A psychological operation?
A story that appeared in the Times of the U.K., reporting that Saddam Hussein had worked out a plan to take members of his family to Libya, involving an alleged $3.5 billion deposited in Libyan banks, was planted.
In this case the British seem to have been given the lead on another strategic psychological operation, with the target most likely the people of Iraq.
Remember, the secretary of defense told us he was going to do this kind of thing.
Black Propaganda
I should also mention the black propaganda. There are some very powerful historical examples from the cold war. A former CIA manager for clandestine operations, Milt Bearden, has suggested that some of that kind of thing probably took place in this war. After one sees the pattern of the stories in the press, it is possible to see that some black operations might have been generated by the U.S. and the U.K. Both countries have organizations whose missions are to generate these kinds of stories.
Milt Bearden raises a profound question. If we would manipulate truth, would we also manipulate evidence? Is that what the secretary of defense meant when he said he was going to be doing strategic influence?
Here are some possibilities of black propaganda.
1. A black program?
There are, first of all, the Niger nuclear materials documents that came to the CIA through the Italians and the British, mentioned in the President's State of the Union Message, and reported in the September 2002 U.K. dossier on the threat from Iraq. The chronology went something like this:
February 2002. Joseph Wilson sent to Africa to investigate the reports.
September 24. CIA to Congressional committee.
September 26. Powell in closed hearing.
December 19. State position paper; first public.
January 28, 2003. State of the Union Message.
March 7. IAEA reveals forgeries.
The Niger documents were forged. We have to ask: who would have benefited? For what groups was the fact that Iraq might be close to having nuclear weapons important? There are three possibilities.
The forgery could have been by someone inside the U.S. government probably other than the CIA. It could have been done by parts of the Department of Defense. It could have been done by Israeli intelligence. Israeli intelligence was participating with the Department of Defense in the Iraq information-collection effort. Israel had a great deal to gain. There was a pattern of bad intelligence from the Iraqi National Congress. This could have been part of that pattern. If it were any of the three, the American people certainly have a “need to know.”
There was an interesting timing of the Africa connection. On September 9, 2002, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) released a report about nuclear weapons that said Iraq was “only months away if it were able to get hold of weapons grade uranium … from a foreign source.” The U.K. dossier came out shortly after that, quoted the IISS report and mentioned that Iraq had tried to get nuclear materials from Africa. Someone gave IISS bad information. Their argument was compounded in the dossier by more bad information.
2. A black program?
And what about the case of George Galloway, a British Member of Parliament?
The April 22, 2003, Daily Telegraph (U.K.) reported papers retrieved from Iraq's Foreign Ministry which alleged payoffs to George Galloway, a long-time critic of taking a hard line against Hussein. Three days later, the Christian Science Monitor reported that Saddam Hussein had paid George Galloway $10M over 11 years. Documents were supposedly obtained from a retired general. On May 11, the British Daily Mail reported that it had received documents from the same source that were in fact forgeries. And on June 20 the Christian Science Monitor reported that their analysis also revealed that their documents were forgeries.
The nail in the coffin came when it was reported by the U.K. Guardian on December 2, 2003, that a British high court judge awarded George Galloway damages of £150,000 in a judgment against the Telegraph.
Who had something to gain? Is this part of the pattern of punishment?
The same retired general told the Christian Science Monitor that he had documents proving 6 of the 9/11 hijackers learned to fly in Iraq.
Documents were forged to suggest direct links between George Galloway and the Iraqi regime. Was this part of the pattern of punishment? Was this a black operation?
3. A black program?
Another story with a feeling of blackness was when Aljazeera reported that Saddam Hussein was in the Russian Embassy in Baghdad. The White House, however, picked up on the story and reported as if it were truth. Lines were “hot” to Moscow over the issue. There are, however, two possibilities. Either it was just a rumor, or it was a planted rumor. This latter possibility seems more likely because of the way the White House picked up on it. There is no other case that I know of where the White House picked up on an Aljazeera rumor.
More Strategic Influence
Voice of America serving the U.S. press
“The Iraq Crisis Bulletin” was a strange web site. It provided a daily update and reports from around the world about the crisis in Iraq, which could be subscribed to by email. It was not indicated on the site at all as to who was the sponsor of the site, but the articles were by Voice of America correspondents. It was fairly good and was even recommended to reporters by the American Press Institute. The problem is that the Voice of America is prohibited from providing communications for the American press, but during Gulf War II, it was getting the message to them.
To follow up, I contacted the press office at VOA and asked if they were aware of the “Iraq Crisis Bulletin” and who maintained the site. I got no response. So my question remains: who was maintaining the site? Who was paying?
Attack those who disagree
The thrust of the attack on Hans Blix was to focus on what he did not do or say. The personal attacks were left to affiliate organizations. The Dixie Chicks were attacked for remarks against the war at a concert in the U.K. The affiliates did the attacks. John Rendon, the veteran information operations professional, said of the retired military television commentators that they were one of the failures, because they took discussion of context away from the administration. Attacks on them were left to Cheney and Rumsfeld. Pierre Schori, the Swedish ambassador to the UN, opposed the war, and the U.S. refused to allow him to be considered as the EU envoy to Kosovo. Ambassador Wilson found the Niger yellowcake story to be without foundation, and the administration exposed his
wife's cover at the CIA. An ABC News reporter interviewed soldiers who complained about their mission in Iraq, saying “if Donald Rumsfeld was here, I'd ask him for his resignation.” The White House “communications shop” placed a call, telling Matt Drudge that he should review an article about the same ABC News reporter in a gay magazine. The first headline for the resultant piece was “ABC News Reporter who filed troop complaints – openly gay Canadian.”
An example of strategic influence through no coverage
The White House was successful in keeping the images and the issue of civilian casualties off U.S. television and out of the public eye. This was not true in the rest of the world. Furthermore, emerging studies suggest Iraqi civilian casualties will end up being much greater than military deaths. A BBC poll showed that the rest of the world does not believe we were careful to prevent civilian casualties, despite that being a major theme in almost every CENTCOM and OSD briefing. Nevertheless, the White House was successful in keeping images of the bodies of soldiers returning home off the television. Casualties were mentioned only in a passing way at the beginning of the briefings. And neither the President, secretary of defense, nor Chairman of the JCS attended any funerals.
Strategic influence scorecard
One of the Pentagon media consultants said there were five separate audiences in the perception war. After all these efforts, it's possible to conclude that the truth is the best story. Only two audiences were influenced positively by the strategic influence campaign, and that influence is now diminishing.