Friday, January 27, 2006

Rumsfeld's Roadmap to Propaganda

A secret Pentagon "roadmap" on war propaganda, personally approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in October 2003, calls for "boundaries" between information operations abroad and the news media at home, but provides for no such limits and claims that as long as the American public is not "targeted," any leakage of PSYOP to the American public does not matter.


Obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive at George Washington University and posted on the Web today, the 74-page "Information Operations Roadmap" admits that "information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP, increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice-versa," but argues that "the distinction between foreign and domestic audiences becomes more a question of USG [U.S. government] intent rather than information dissemination practices."

The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, amended in 1972 and 1998, prohibits the U.S. government from propagandizing the American public with information and psychological operations directed at foreign audiences; and several presidential directives, including Reagan's NSD-77 in 1983, Clinton's PDD-68 in 1999, and Bush's NSPD-16 in July 2002 (the latter two still classified), have set up specific structures to carry out public diplomacy and information operations. These and other documents relating to U.S. PSYOP programs were posted today as part of a new Archive Electronic Breifing Book.

Several press accounts have referred to the 2003 Pentagon document but today's posting is the first time the text has been publicly available. Sections of the document relating to computer network attack (CNA) and "offensive cyber operations" remain classified under black highlighting.

Article source and further reading National Security Archive

4 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

I love the word propaganda. Thanks for employing it!

January 27, 2006 11:15 pm  
Blogger rush said...

how delusional are these people? do they actually believe that acts and laws pertaining to information passed in distant cold war age are actually applicable in these age of blogs, google and news sources that don't really cater to any specific national demographic.. they are just going to make themselves look extremely lethargic and on the road to extinction.. is it just me or does donald rumsfeild have a distinctly reptillian air? ;)

January 29, 2006 12:13 am  
Blogger Unknown said...

Rush, as someone who once considered a career in herpetology, I would prefer if you wouldn't insult reptiles in such a manner.

January 29, 2006 3:04 am  
Blogger rush said...

Please extend my sincere apologies to everything reptillian. It was, on hindsight, an extremely inappropriate metaphor..

January 29, 2006 11:15 am  

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