The battle for hearts and minds. posted by Richard Seymour

I was shocked to learn that the government lies to us, and I'm sure you were too when you were first apprised of it. If you still don't realise it, then here's your wake-up call: BOO!

Tongue firmly dislodged from check and set in relatively unbifurcate mode, I'll just draw your attention to the extent to which you are a target for psyops organised by the state. In June 2003, The Herald revealed that:

BRITAIN ran a covert 'dirty tricks' operation designed specifically to produce misleading intelligence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction to give the UK a justifiable excuse to wage war on Iraq.
Operation Rockingham, established by the Defence Intelligence Staff within the Ministry of Defence in 1991, was set up to 'cherry-pick' intelligence proving an active Iraqi WMD programme and to ignore and quash intelligence which indicated that Saddam's stockpiles had been destroyed or wound down.

The existence of Operation Rockingham has been confirmed by Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector, and a US military intelligence officer. He knew members of the Operation Rockingham team and described the unit as 'dangerous', but insisted they were not 'rogue agents' acting without government backing. 'This policy was coming from the very highest levels,' he added.

'Rockingham was spinning reports and emphasising reports that showed non-compliance (by Iraq with UN inspections) and quashing those which showed compliance. It was cherry-picking intelligence.'

Ritter and other intelligence sources say Operation Rockingham and MI6 were supplying skewed information to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) which, Tony Blair has told the Commons, was behind the intelligence dossiers that the government published to convince the parliament and the people of the necessity of war against Iraq. Sources in both the British and US intelligence community are now equating the JIC with the Office of Special Plans (OSP) in the US Pentagon. The OSP was set up by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to gather intelligence which would prove the case for war. In a staggering attack on the OSP, former CIA officer Larry Johnson told the Sunday Herald the OSP was 'dangerous for US national security and a threat to world peace', adding that it 'lied and manipulated intelligence to further its agenda of removing Saddam'.

He added: 'It's a group of ideologues with pre-determined notions of truth and reality. They take bits of intelligence to support their agenda and ignore anything contrary. They should be eliminated.'

Well, you knew that. Anyone perusing Con Couglin's pathetic series of MI6-leaked scoops for the Telegraph can hardly have been unaware that someone was pissing down their leg. And it isn't even denied with any particular gusto that the Coalition Information Centre, set up a couple of weeks before the war on Iraq, was basically run from Number Ten by Alistair Campbell. Centcom was a more or less open joke without a punchline. But if you pick up a copy of Mark Curtis' excellent new book, Unpeople, he'll fill your ears with some hisses. The government, according to its own documents, is planning to increase psychological operations in the future. Government ministers, senior civil servants and foreign office officials recognise in various statements that a huge part of winning future wars is going to involve winning hearts and minds at home.

In future conflicts, "maintaining moral as well as information dominance will rank as important as physical protection". Thus spake the British Army. The MoD explained in a document entitled The Future Strategic Context for Defense that "we need to be aware of the ways in which public attitudes might shape and constrain military activity". It adds "Increasing emotional attachment to the outside world, fuelled by immediate and graphic media coverage, and a public desire to see the UK act as a force for good, is likely to lead to public support, and possibly public demand, for operations prompted by humanitarian motives". This prompts the demand for propaganda, which the MoD insist on calling "information support". The House of Commons Defence Committee retorts that "the concept has changed little from the traditional objective of influencing the perceptions of selected target audiences". The estimable and inestimable John Spellar MP explained to the House of Pushovers and Pullovers in 2000: "we shall depend increasingly, not on simple numerical superiority in firepower, but on information dominance".

The new strategy is mentioned in passing the Pentagon’s Joint Vision 2020 , in which the key term is ‘full spectrum dominance’ which ‘implies that US forces are able to conduct prompt, sustained and synchronized operations with combinations of forces tailored to specific situations and with access to and freedom to operate in all domains – space, sea, land, air and information’.

That last component is probably more important than you would think. A US army manual, Information Operations: Doctrine, Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures, published in 2003 makes it plain: "information is an element of combat power". Col Kenneth Allard has written that the 2003 attack on Iraq ‘will be
remembered as a conflict in which information fully took its place as a weapon of war’. He explains: "In the 1990s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff began to promote a vision of future warfare in which C4ISR (command,control,communi- cations, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) systems would be forged into a new style of American warfare in which interoperability was the key to information dominance – and information dominance the key to victory."

Now, the law in Britain is what it is. We have no legal right to prevent our government from trying to brainwash us, however ineptly. In America, however, they have something called the Smith-Mundt Act (1948) whose purpose is to prevent the US government from disseminating propaganda to domestic audiences. Foreigners and commies are a fair target but not, according to the law, US citizens. Never mind that this law has been broken tons of times before (off the top of my head, Cointelpro and those wonderful 'Black Panther colouring-in books' that the CIA pushed through mail-boxes in white neighbourhoods). Never mind that MKUltra was directed against American citizens just as much as it was overseas. And suspend for a second the vague memory of Operation Northwoods, a planned campaign of US government orchestrated terrorist attacks against US citizens to persuade them of the need to invade Cuba. Forget all that, as most of you probably have anyway. The fact is that during the recent assault on Iraq, many suspected the Bush administration of directing psychological operations against American audiences. One man who suspected this more than others was Col Sam Gardiner who, while lecturing and appearing as a military analyst on news programmes began to notice something odd about the kinds of stories and images that were making their way to American audiences. They were frighteningly similar to the kinds of products that he used to work on while in the military.

The Bush administration, he concluded, was attempting to brainwash the American public. He counted at least fifty stories that were not merely exaggeration or based on bad intelligence but downright fabrications designed to galvanise or pacify the public. He had attended a meeting in which John Rendon, of the PR corporation The Rendon Group, discussed news management with the Bush administration. Embedding, he said, worked great. "It was the war version of reality television." Unfortunately, the 'context' had been ceded to the networks and this would have to be won back. However, of greatest value was the pliant media. Gardiner outlined some of the most egregious falsifications; dirty bombs; poison factories; missing terrorist training camps. Saddam was conspiring with bin Laden, and concealing his weapons with high mobility labs that scuttled around the desert. And when weapons didn't show up, this just proved that he was engaged in some fiendish plot to hide them and reconstitute them at some later date. (As David Aaronovitch might say "the clever, clever, clever bastard"). All of it was, to coin a paraphrase, a parcel of bollocks. And much of it was sourced directly to 'intelligence'.

We had better remember then, if we don't want our hearts and minds colonised as surely as Iraq has been, to spare a thought for the lonely spook, tweaking this news story, planting that seed, fertilising it with a steady supply of horseshit. I think of this in particular when we recall the ferocious spinning that met the Lancet report, or indeed Kevin Sites' footage of a US soldier killing a wounded prisoner which provoked many sophisticated defenses of murder. On that note, you might be interested in reading Kevin Sites' response to the torrent of abuse and accusations that he has been met with:

Immediately after going in, I see the same black plastic body bags spread around the mosque. The dead from the day before. But more surprising, I see the same five men that were wounded from Friday as well. It appears that one of them is now dead and three are bleeding to death from new gunshot wounds. The fifth is partially covered by a blanket and is in the same place and condition he was in on Friday, near a column. He has not been shot again. I look closely at both the dead and the wounded. There don't appear to be any weapons anywhere.

"These were the same wounded from yesterday," I say to the lieutenant. He takes a look around and goes outside the mosque with his radio operator to call in the situation to Battalion Forward HQ.

I see an old man in a red kaffiyeh lying against the back wall. Another is face down next to him, his hand on the old man's lap -- as if he were trying to take cover. I squat beside them, inches away and begin to videotape them. Then I notice that the blood coming from the old man's nose is bubbling. A sign he is still breathing. So is the man next to him.

While I continue to tape, a Marine walks up to the other two bodies about fifteen feet away, but also lying against the same back wall.

Then I hear him say this about one of the men:

"He's fucking faking he's dead -- he's faking he's fucking dead."

Through my viewfinder I can see him raise the muzzle of his rifle in the direction of the wounded Iraqi. There are no sudden movements, no reaching or lunging.

However, the Marine could legitimately believe the man poses some kind of danger. Maybe he's going to cover him while another Marine searches for weapons.

Instead, he pulls the trigger. There is a small splatter against the back wall and the man's leg slumps down.

"Well he's dead now," says another Marine in the background.

I am still rolling. I feel the deep pit of my stomach. The Marine then abruptly turns away and strides away, right past the fifth wounded insurgent lying next to a column. He is very much alive and peering from his blanket. He is moving, even trying to talk. But for some reason, it seems he did not pose the same apparent "danger" as the other man -- though he may have been more capable of hiding a weapon or explosive beneath his blanket.