...over the past five years, the money the military spends on winning hearts and minds at home and abroad has grown by 63 percent, to at least $4.7 billion this year, according to Department of Defense budgets and other documents. That's almost as much as it spent on body armor for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2004 and 2006.
This year, the Pentagon will employ 27,000 people just for recruitment, advertising and public relations — almost as many as the total 30,000-person work force in the State Department...
Does this mean filtering their spam is a terrorist act?
Maybe so.
...on Dec. 12, the Pentagon's inspector general released an audit finding that the public affairs office may have crossed the line into propaganda. The audit found the Department of Defense "may appear to merge inappropriately" its public affairs with operations that try to influence audiences abroad. It also found that while only 89 positions were authorized for public affairs, 126 government employees and 31 contractors worked there.
...Another audit, also in December, concluded that a public affairs program called "America Supports You" was conducted "in a questionable and unregulated manner" with funds meant for the military's Stars and Stripes newspaper.
The program was set up to keep U.S. troops informed about volunteer donations to the military. But the military awarded $11.8 million in contracts to a public relations firm to ...drum up support for the military at a time when public opinion was turning against the Iraq war.
The audit also found that the offer to place corporate logos on the Pentagon Web site in return for donations was against regulations...
"They very explicitly identify American public opinion as an important battlefield," says Marc Lynch, a professor at George Washington University...
So if the American public refuses to support the official Pentagon storyline, does that make us enemy combatants?
...In 2003, for example, initial accounts from the military about the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch from Iraqi forces were faked to rally public support...
The fastest-growing part of the military media is "psychological operations," where spending has doubled since 2003...
In Afghanistan, for example, a video of a soldier joining the national army shown on Afghan television is not attributed to the U.S. And in Iraq, American teams built and equipped media outlets and trained Iraqis to staff them without making public the connection to the military.
Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, director of strategic communications for the U.S. Central Command, says psychological operations must be secret to be effective. He says that in the 21st century, it is probably not possible to win the information battle with insurgents without exposing American citizens to secret U.S. propaganda...
The danger of psychological operations reaching a U.S. audience became clear when an American TV anchor asked Gen. David Petraeus about the mood in Iraq. The general held up a glossy photo of the Iraqi national soccer team to show the country united in victory... It was U.S. psychological operations that had quietly distributed tens of thousands of the soccer posters in July 2007 to encourage Iraqi nationalism...
In 2003, Rumsfeld issued a secret Information Operations Roadmap setting out a plan for public affairs and psychological operations to work together. It noted that with a global media, the military should expect and accept that psychological operations will reach the U.S. public...
In February, the Army released a new eight-chapter field manual that puts information warfare on par with traditional warfare.
The title of an entire chapter, Chapter 7: "Information Superiority."
"...I can tell you there wouldn't be a single American disappointed with anything that we've done that might be out there, that they don't know about," says Col. Curtis Boyd, commander of the 4th PSYOP Group, the largest unit of its kind. "Frankly, they probably wouldn't care because maybe they are safer as a result of it..."
And if they are disappointed, obviously they aren't real Amerikans, but insurgents who need to be fought.
Like Greenwald, of course:
...The Pentagon claim that recently popped up as Obama moved to close Guantanamo -- that 61 released detainees have "returned to the battlefield" -- has been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked. Nonetheless, CNN's Wolf Blitzer, as part of a fear-mongering segment on closing Guantanamo, just mindlessly repeated the Pentagon claim (and he even added the scary detail that 25 of those 61 "recidivists" have perpetrated an attack in the last 10 months). As Media Matters notes, establishment journalists are repeatedly reciting the Pentagon's recidivism claim without an ounce of skepticism, without even noting the ample disputes surrounding this claim.
The reason defenders of Bush policies rely on such patently fallacious "reasoning" (if X precedes Y, then it means X caused Y -- where X = torture/Guantanamo and Y = no Terrorist attack) is because they know that these media stars have neither the ability nor the inclination to devote even a molecule of critical thought to what they're being told.
A billion dollars buys a lot of credulity in the main$tream.
No comments:
Post a Comment