Are There Really Five Sides to Every Question? (02/20/2002)
Just when you thought it was safe to go out in the world again, safe from terror of all kinds, it turns out that the Pentagon has squirreled away a "multimillion dollar budget," the exact amount of which "has not been disclosed," money that was taken from the $10 billion emergency supplement granted to the Defense Department by Congress in October, for the purpose of creating the Office of Strategic Influence (James Dao and Eric Schmitt, "Pentagon Readies Efforts to Sway Sentiment Abroad," NY Times, 02/18/2002). A natural domestic sentiment that any tax-payer might have, even voice, is what exactly is this undisclosed fortune intended to accomplish? According to Dao and Schmitt, "many senior Pentagon officials and Congressional military aides say they know almost nothing about its purpose and plans." To review briefly, then: the Pentagon has an undisclosed amount of money attached to something called the Office of Strategic Influence whose purpose is essentially unknown, not to outsiders, but to many of the people on the inside of the Military-Congressional Axis that is supposed to be running this country. That is certainly reassuring, if not just the kind of thing you most wanted to hear from and about an administration composed largely of people who worked for and managed the largest corporate rip-off and fraud in US history. That fraud is spelled-"E-n-r-o-n"-in case you have not heard or have forgotten. Bush's Secretary of the Army, in fact, is a 12-year veteran of the Enron-War against the American economy, where he served proudly as the second-in-command of the Energy Services department that helped amass the debt, artfully hidden in offshore partnerships with the help of Wall Street investment bankers, that eventually brought the House of Lay down to its current level of wealth, somewhere around 26 cents per share from its previous and vastly inflated value of somewhere around $90 per share. Good work General White. As a reward for such diligence, the General has been given his quarter-share of the multi-trillion-dollar budget the Pentagon now enjoys at the expense of everything else the government supposedly cares about.
Part of that budget, of course, is funding for the Office of Strategic Influence, which Dao and Schmitt describe as a plan the Pentagon is developing "to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations as part of a new effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries." Sounds like exactly the kind of thing a "General White" ought to be able to handle, since one obvious requirement of Enron managers and executives was the ability to fabricate as many lies as necessary to keep the fortune of the company they were running from finding its true level of value in the ebb and flow of business as usual. I must say something else about General White: everyone who knows him says he is an honest and descent man. I have no reason to believe otherwise and am not suggesting he is anything other than what he appears to be.
The problem I see here is one related to the fact that most of the money appropriated for the Pentagon, even under the best of accounting methods which the Brass rarely employ, cannot certainly be traced or found after the fact of its dissemination. Give the Pentagon a dollar and it asks for ten more from programs that feed children and two weeks later no one on the face of the earth can tell you where the twenty dollars it got was spent. "Trust us," they say, "we would never deceive the American people." Even as they make that claim, they are in the process of creating an office with an "undisclosed" multimillion dollar budget whose apparent purpose is to disseminate false information to foreign journalists in both friendly and unfriendly countries in an effort to combat a rising tide of anti-American sentiment resulting from US foreign policy initiatives. Those same stories are likely to be reported in US newspapers and on TV news programs. Hence the lie told will be retold to Americans. The government, of course, will conceal the fact that this or that story is false because it will undo the purpose of lying in the first place if it ever admits to any factual discrepancy in any of its planted stories. Brace for a radical increase in the number of national security claims we are likely to hear from the Bush administration once the Office of Strategic Disinformation gets its clubbed and cloven feet on the ground.
What is most disturbing about this idea is that it institutionalizes falsehood as an acceptable function of national governance. Giving that right to a Cabinet level Department with an already clouded past in the way it disseminates information to the American public, especially in terms of how it accounts for the money it spends and losses, seems both appropriate and inappropriate at the same time. What agency in the Federal Government is better equipped, after all, than the Pentagon to fabricate falsehood? People there have been doing it for years. Some will argue that lying to your enemy carries with it no shame, even if you must send the lie through your unsuspecting friends for it to be fully effective. That it eventually gets back to citizens and voters here in an unvarnished version, misleading us as much as it does our enemies, is just another price we have to pay to maintain our freedom. The fallacy in that argument, of course, is that a citizen who does not know the truth cannot be called free.
Should the existence of falsehood as a means of governance in the Bush administration come as a shock to anyone? Certainly not. Enron, which has supplied even countless shrubs for the land- and/or goat-scaping of Bush's war-time theme park and think tank, built its corporate presence as the seventh largest US company by consistently and unabashedly lying about its assets and debts. Lying was a way of life wherever Enron walked. The Office of Strategic Influence, and its mission of disseminating falsehood, is simply an extension of Enronesque management schemes, which were meant to deceive, not Enron's enemies, but its investors and employees. That should stand as warning enough about who the administration's actual targets are. Check your back for the bull's-eye.