Pentagon Closes Office Accused of Issuing Propaganda Under Bush

[bigtree]

April 15, 2009

WASHINGTON — A Pentagon office responsible for coordinating Defense Department information campaigns overseas has been abolished in an effort by the Obama administration to distance itself from past practices that some military officers called propaganda, senior officials said Wednesday.

Military and civilian critics said the office, the Defense Department office for support to public diplomacy, overstepped its mandate during the final years of the Bush administration by trying to organize information operations that violated Pentagon guidelines for accuracy and transparency.

Pentagon officials said the position of deputy assistant secretary of defense for support to public diplomacy had been eliminated, with the staff members reassigned and the office closed.

Senior Pentagon officials said the decision to close the office was made by Michele A. Flournoy, the new under secretary of defense for policy, and was meant to ensure that global communications efforts by the Defense Department and military would be aligned with the rest of the government.

“Because of the history of the office, we needed a fresh start in how we integrate the critical function of strategic communications across the board,” said a senior Pentagon official, who spoke anonymously to discuss a change that has not been publicly announced.


report: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/us/politics/16policy.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

[Kaleko]

1. Good. Keep going.

[arcadian]

2. ...and opens it somewhere else under a different name.

[bigtree]

3. let's wait and see that report before judging this one

Michele Flournoy was put there by Pres. Obama to affect and influence policy at the Pentagon and this is just one in a recent string of reforms she's been at the head of.

(did I really say, 'wait and see'?)

[LooseWilly]

4. I think that it needs to be replaced with

... A Ministry of Silly Walks,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0STjDKhiMRg
to really get to work fixing the image of the US abroad.


On Edit: The clip actually ends on a particularly funny note... apropos of today.

[bigtree]

6. those guys

. . . are hopefully on the way out.

http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,401025,00.jpg

[Optical.Catalyst]

10. Next step is to get Rush Limbaugh off of Armed Forces Radio

We need to cut out the propaganda to our own troops while we are at it.

[uppityperson]

5. k&r for good, about time. Keep cleaning up the last 8 yrs shit. eom

[chill_wind]

7. They don't cite the full acronym, but I'm guessing it's DSPD?

Which has PsyOps in its bag of tricks.

They do mention it's precursor under Feith & Rumsfeld in related reading.

Here's a position paper from the summer.

The Pentagon and Public Diplomacy: In Flux

In it, they hail a "new model" of PD operations:

"...The creation of AFRICOM, the new regional COCOM, may well prove a new model for interagency cooperation. DOD is structuring AFRICOM around USAID, DOS, DOD,and foreign cooperation. AFRICOM is “not a warfighting command, a security-enhancing command,” explains the DOS liaison to DOD, “the lead will always be with Africans.”

Doran agrees that AFRICOM is a PD success story; though a former Assistant Secretary of State for African affairs is less sanguine, noting that the current AFRICOM strategy as a whole lacks a realistic PD approach, and “would benefit,
overall, from a much greater sensitivity to how the Africans see us."

Sounds like they are already looking for ways to live on.

pdf

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=4&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.publicdiplomacycouncil.org%2Fuploads%2FDOD_PD_Willard.pdf&ei=k7_mSaGMLOfonQfCuN2EBw&usg=AFQjCNEP3SOQHl8z_YGfHfxbfouOaUqoGg&sig2=gBoghZ_ThnKWoXhSg4rEKw

html link
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:H-IX7ftNljIJ:www.publicdiplomacycouncil.org/uploads/DOD_PD_Willard.pdf+Pentagon+public+diplomacy+office&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&lr=lang_en&client=firefox-a


K & R.

[barbtries]

8. this is good.

if only we had a functioning media the people might get the news.

[NNN0LHI]

9. Now we need to get to the USAID program which is just another propaganda arm

http://www.usaid.gov/iraq/legacyofterror.html