Trying to get the message across without the lies

LETTER FROM AMERICA: It was a spectacular own goal. In the short but tragic history of the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), nothing became it like its leaving - a classic demonstration of the office's own purpose, the use of information and disinformation as an instrument of power.

In the week from the New York Times's disclosure that the OSI might be used by the administration to plant disinformation in the foreign media, the office had been subjected to a ferocious barrage - pattern bombing by cluster shells of righteous indignation (editorial) and, yet more effectively, pin-point, armour-piercing ridicule.

The demise of the office, only established shortly after September 11th to get the US message to the Afghan people, came just a day after President Bush expressed alarm at some of its proposed activities.

The office's director, Brig Gen Simon Worden, had circulated classified proposals that called for the military not only to drop leaflets and broadcast messages into hostile countries, but to expand that mission into allied nations in the Middle East, Asia and even western Europe.

The proposals included aggressive campaigns that used the foreign news media and Internet, plus covert operations, military officials said.

Briefings circulating in the Pentagon said the office should find ways to "coerce" foreign journalists and opinion makers and "punish" those who convey the wrong message. Here in the Washington bunker of The Irish Times we quaked.

On Monday, when asked whether he had told the Secretary of Defence, Don Rumsfeld, to close the office, the President said: "I didn't even need to tell him this. He knows how I feel about this." On Tuesday, Mr Rumsfeld denied that the new office would have spread misinformation, but he said commentaries and editorial cartoons about the office's proposed activities made it impossible for it to do its job.

"The office has clearly been so damaged that it is pretty clear to me that it could not function effectively," he told reporters. "So it is being closed down."

Had the Pentagon's integrity had been compromised?

"I doubt it," he said. "I hope not. If it has, we'll rebuild it."

Not that anyone imagines for one minute that the Pentagon is bowing out of the psyops (psychological operations) or propaganda business, perfectly legitimate tools of war, simply that there is no point in engaging in them from an office labelled "We tell lies here".

No journalist has ever, or should ever, simply take on faith all the Department's claims, although in these days of instant news and globalised information networks, it must and does work all the harder to make them credible - if that means telling the truth 99 per cent of the time to lie all the better the other 1 per cent, so be it.

It also means using the techniques of marketing in a more sophisticated way. How come, many have asked, that, operating from a cave, Osama bin Laden successfully outplayed the US in the communications war, at least where it mattered, in Afghanistan and the Middle East?

Some of it clearly is that he was playing to a naturally more responsive, empathetic audience given the region's history.

But some of the explanation lies in the US failure to move beyond old Cold War propaganda techniques like Voice of America, and its inability to listen to the region's young population.

Hence the State Department's employment of advertising executive Charlotte Beers as under-secretary for public diplomacy in an attempt to package the American message in a way that is palatable.

A radical alternative is suggested in an article in Foreign Affairs by David Hoffman, the president of Internews Network, an international press freedom NGO. He argues that instead of attempting to engage a hostile region with "counter-propaganda" the US should instead pump money and political support into assisting local people to produce their own free media.

It is a strategy, he insists, that has already been shown to work in Eastern Europe where the US spent some $175 million in the 1990s contributing to the training of some 1,600 broadcasters and 30,000 journalists, in the process helping to create a network of independent newspapers and broadcasting stations that in turn have given a new dynamic to politics.

He cites the Georgian station, Rustavi-2 in Tbilisi, which in October last exposed serious corruption and drug dealing in the Interior Ministry.

When police arrived to crack down, the news editor broadcast the events live and thousands of local people spilled out into streets to defend the station. The government was forced to back down. And the US was on the side of the angels.

The problem is that the United States has been too tied politically to repressive regimes in the Middle East, like the Saudis, to embark on such a strategy, even if in its long-term interest.

And that is grist to the mill of the Islamists.

But the truth is that only indigenous news outlets will inspire the confidence needed to undermine the militants' message.

The US, for example, would be far better off not spending the cash Congress is putting aside for a US-run Radio Free Afghanistan and giving it instead to a local state broadcasting system, while insisting the latter should be run independently of the government. It should then move to assist other embryonic independent media outlets throughout the region, he argues.