Information War is On

Friday November 29, 2002 12:19

by As do many many other ghosts

From Mediachannel News Disector Weblog

"In a policy shift that reaches across all the armed services, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and his senior aides are revising missions and creating new agencies to make ‘information warfare’ a central element of any U.S. war. Some hope it will eventually rank with bombs and artillery shells as an instrument of destruction.

"What is disturbing about Rumsfeld's vision of information warfare is that it has a way of folding together two kinds of wartime activity involving communications that have traditionally been separated by a firewall of principle.

"The first is purely military. It includes attacks on the radar, communications and other "information systems" an enemy depends on to guide its war-making capabilities. This category also includes traditional psychological warfare, such as dropping leaflets or broadcasting propaganda to enemy troops.

"The second is not directly military. It is the dissemination of public information that the American people need in order to understand what is happening in a war, and to decide what they think about it. This information is supposed to be true.

"Increasingly, the administration's new policy -- along with the steps senior commanders are taking to implement it -- blurs or even erases the boundaries between factual information and news, on the one hand, and public relations, propaganda and psychological warfare, on the other. And, while the policy ostensibly targets foreign enemies, its most likely victim will be the American electorate."

MILITARY-MEDIA MERGER?

One example from Paul Vann of the World Socialist website: "In the rash of articles that spread across the front pages of virtually every major newspaper earlier this week detailing U.S. plans for the invasion of Iraq, information was attributed to unnamed "military sources," "senior administration officials" or "Pentagon analysts.”

"An article appearing in the November 10 Washington Post, however, went further, providing its readers with a fleeting insight into the real relations that exist between the supposedly independent media and Washington's war machine.

"This article was discussed extensively in recent days with several senior civilian and military Defense Department officials," the Post reported. "At their request, several aspects of the plan are being withheld from publication. Those aspects include the timing of certain military actions, the trigger points for other moves, some of the tactics being contemplated and the units that would execute some of the tactics."

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Information War is On