Category: Uncategorized

Part II – 9/11, Psychological Warfare & the American Narrative Series

Building the Afghan Narrative with Black Propaganda, the People, the Process & the Product

By Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald

By definition, America’s use of Psychological Warfare is described as the “The planned use of propaganda and other psychological actions having the primary purpose of influencing the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of hostile foreign groups in such a way as to support the achievement of national objectives.” Of course this very definition is itself propaganda, a white lie which omits the fact that America’s domestic population is just as often the target of psychological warfare as any “hostile foreign groups.” goeThe state’s use of psychological warfare to bend the population to war is as old, if not older than the existence of states themselves. But it was perhaps Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering whose statement while on trial at Nuremberg best summed up the cynical simplicity of the logic.

“Of course people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders, that is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger.”

Psychological warfare in the form of propaganda comes in all shapes and sizes as well as shades of black, grey or white. America’s coordinated use of psychological warfare began in earnest during World War II and ever since has grown and expanded into public relations, advertising, cinema, radio and television, electronic video games and now social media. Its pro-war boosterism extends over sports, religion, education, news and entertainment (and of course the military) to form a seamless electronic cocoon-like web. It is employed on an ever growing list of those deemed as enemies of America as well as on a confused and agitated American public – whose corporate news networks frame and manage an increasingly shallow narrative while engaging in a kind of Orwellian Kabuki Theatre of fairness and balance.

Americans were heavily propagandized to support a U.S. entry into World War II and again heavily propagandized to accept the morality of deploying the atomic bomb to end it, despite dissent from within the scientific community. Even Mickey Mouse was conscripted for America’s total war effort along with the minds of America’s youth. Following the war Americans were heavily propagandized to accept the Cold War, the need for maintaining a permanent army, navy and air force as well as the buildup of a nuclear weapons arsenal.

afghan Since 9/11 Americans have been bathed in psychological warfare on Islamic terrorism despite the fact that only a handful of incidents in the West can be attributed to radical Islamists. What is generally not appreciated by America’s leadership about this kind of prolonged use of propaganda on the American public is that it exposes the rationale for the longest war in American history in Afghanistan as flimsy and unconvincing and completely sidesteps the outright lies and deceptions used to justify the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The origins of Washington’s war in Afghanistan have always been strategic, long term and particularly black, obscured throughout the Cold War by a narrative adapted from Britain’s 19th century colonial expansion.

Given little priority during the U.S.’s long involvement in Vietnam in the 1950s and 60s, America’s psychological warfare campaign shifted its attention to Central Asia in 1973 when Afghanistan’s king was overthrown by his brother in law and cousin Mohammed Daoud with the help of the Parcham faction of the Marxist/Leninist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). The role of the Communist party meant so little to the U.S. media at the time it remained invisible in both Time and Newsweek’s published reports of the coup. But to U.S. ambassador Robert G. Neumann, the presence of the PDPA meant that a “limited Great Game” with the Soviet Union was now back in play.

A coordinated campaign of pressure from U.S.-backed Pakistan and Iran soon ousted Daoud’s Marxist partner while the Shah’s dreaded spy agency SAVAK moved in to help Daoud clean house of leftists. The Shah even readied a military force to invade should Daoud waver in his newfound anti-Communist zeal. But by 1978 a new day for Iran and Afghanistan was about to dawn.

congEnter Hafizullah Amin. Before, during and after World War II the U.S. had created a number of psychological warfare organizations designed to compete with the political propaganda of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Integrated closely into the CIA’s intelligence and psychological warfare units after the war, organizations like Leo Cherne’s International Rescue Committee (IRC) and according to the CIA’s own website, the Congress for Cultural Freedom “helped to solidify CIA’s emerging strategy of promoting the non-Communist left–the strategy that would soon become the theoretical foundation of the Agency’s political operations against Communism over the next two decades.”

In constant competition with the KGB, the CIA was also known to target foreign students destined to hold high rank in their home countries. Handpicked by U.S. administrators to participate in a UNESCO/Columbia University program, Amin was sent to New York in 1957. He later completed a master’s degree at Columbia—coincidentally at a time when future National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was gaining prominence as a professor there.

aminAmin claimed to have become radicalized at the University of Wisconsin in 1958. He also claimed to have become a Marxist that summer but would conceal his emergence as a leader in the Kalq faction of the PDPA until much later. Despite being a Marxist, Amin was again chosen in 1962 by the Americans to attend Columbia, this time as a doctoral candidate and rose quickly to become the president of the Afghan Student Association. A disclosure in Ramparts magazine in 1967 would reveal the CIA’s sponsorship of that same Afghan Student Association during that time. Following his return Amin rose rapidly in Afghan politics and by 1978 was positioned to play a pivotal role in another Palace coup, this time of Prince Mohammed Daoud himself.

1978 was a pivotal year in the foreign policy of the United States as President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski made steady inroads into Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s power. By that year he had persuaded Carter to transfer jurisdiction over the CIA from the Inter-Agency Policy Review Committee, (headed by the secretary of state) to the National Security Council’s Special Coordinating Committee which he chaired. This shift gave Brzezinski control over covert operations in Afghanistan. It also gave him control of the psychological warfare campaign necessary to make those operations work both at home and abroad.

Hafizullah Amin played the perfect foil to Brzezinski’s propaganda war which, regardless of the lack of evidence, painted the PDPA takeover in Kabul as a clear example of the growing dangers of Soviet expansionism and their pursuit of dominance in the Persian Gulf. Throughout 1978 and into 1979 Amin’s actions dovetailed perfectly into the expanding psychological warfare campaign with Brzezinski blaming Amin’s February 1979 assassination of American Ambassador Adolph Dubs, on the Soviets.

Transcripts from Politburo meetings in Moscow from March 1979 show a Soviet leadership confounded as the events unfolded, referring to conversations with Amin as looking “like a detective novel.” Had the operation been scripted in advance by the CIA to confuse Moscow, it was working brilliantly.

The subsequent, December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ended détente, renewed the Cold War and opened a U.S. relationship with Communist China that could not have been imagined at the time. It established a new narrative of an expanding Evil Empire threatening America’s vital interests in the Persian Gulf and would redefine U.S. objectives along neoconservative lines. These lines were laid out within days of the Soviet invasion by former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Theodore Eliot and Harvard Professor Richard Pipes in a MacNeil Lehrer broadcast on January 2, 1980.

But it wasn’t until we probed this new narrative by going to Afghanistan ourselves in 1981 and were challenged personally in a public forum for doing so by Ambassador Eliot, that we realized there was much more to Ambassador Eliot and his narrative than met the eye. Copyright © 2011 Gould & Fitzgerald All rights reserved

Part 1: 9/11, Psychological Warfare & the American Narrative

A Campaign Where the Lie Became the Truth and the Truth Became the Enemy of the State

By Elizabeth Gould & Paul Fitzgerald

sept11 9/11. The number still rings in the mind as if chosen to act as a Pavlovian trigger: Outrage, anger, paranoia, retribution. A shadowy band of religious zealots fly not one, but two commercial airliners into the heart of America’s financial community while others deal a deadly blow to the Pentagon. It was a Hollywood movie, an act of war rivaling Pearl Harbor. Why did it happen? Who would do this to Americans, to America? How could a band of ragged terrorists plotting from a cave in faraway Afghanistan have accomplished such a complex task given the size and pervasiveness of the largest and most expensive military/intelligence apparatus in the history of the world? And even more curiously, why would Islamic radicals give the ideology-driven neoconservative administration of George W. Bush exactly the pretext they needed to launch a bloody invasion and further occupation of the Middle East?

According to the official narrative, 9/11 was an attack on everything American and in so doing changed everything about America. Like Kafkaesque characters who’d suddenly found themselves on the other side of a Cold War “Iron Curtain” mirror, Americans would now have to “watch what they say and watch what they do,” open up to questioning or face jail when prodded by squinty-eyed border guards and forsake any hope of privacy or dignity in a new world of electronic spies and full body scans. Former National Security Advisor, Admiral John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness program would be enacted and a preexisting “Patriot Act” would be signed into law to clamp down on dissent and real or imagined domestic terrorism.

Some careful observers like Anthony Lewis of the New York Times had already noticed the bizarre coup-like changes coming over Washington in the months leading up to the attack as the George W. Bush administration inaugurated radical shifts in domestic and foreign policy that seemed un-American and alien to anything that had gone before. But those concerns would soon be forgotten in the race for revenge.

9/11 would ultimately give President George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisors all the public approval they needed to transform America and invade Afghanistan and Iraq to cleanse the world of evil in an endless “war on terror.” In the end it would turn America’s reputation for racial and religious tolerance, military invincibility and economic dominance on its head.

Looking back on the carnage of the last ten years it’s easy to see how the psychology of 9/11 changed America. What’s not easy to see is how a long standing campaign of covert psychological warfare built up since the early days of World War II had made the slow destruction of American democracy and the ascension of rule by secrecy inevitable, long before the planes ever left the runway on 9/11:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” –Dr. Joseph Goebbels

As chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, Joseph Goebbels system of black propaganda not only helped Hitler’s rise to power but kept him there by utilizing near-hypnotic powers over the German people even after the consequences of his disastrous failures had become obvious.

cherneTo counter Goebbels’ propaganda theatre emanating from Nazi party headquarters at Munich’s Braunes Haus (Brown House), an organization named Freedom House was founded in New York City in 1941. Fronted by American celebrities and public luminaries such as Eleanor Roosevelt, the brains behind the outfit was Leo Cherne, the psychological warfare specialist/co-founder of the Research Institute of America (RIA), which would much later be labeled the “CIA for businessmen.”

If anyone was a match for Goebbels mastery of the black arts of psychological warfare it was Cherne. In 1938 Cherne had published a guide to industrial mobilization in Adjusting Your Business to War, prophetically forecasting the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 and on September 1st of that year completed a 3000-page report titled, Industrial Mobilization Plans for World War II, the very day that German troops crossed into Poland.

That same year Cherne asked a young protégé named William J. Casey, the future director of the CIA, “How do you take a country like ours, stuck in depression, and convert it into an arsenal?” Their combined answer was the loose-leaf book called The War Coordinator. Cherne and Casey’s psychological warfare campaign would establish a narrative that didn’t just embrace freedom as its major theme, in their minds their ideas would actually become Freedom and through the use of propaganda would grow and harden over the decades into an impenetrable shield-like narrative of American triumphalism.

Cherne’s prophecies on war and business attained a near mystical quality and over the decades following World War II he would attract the most powerful and influential figures in American business and politics to his causes. A listing of Freedom House trustees on its 50th anniversary in 1991 includes people as diverse as Kenneth L. Adelman, Andrew Young, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Albert Shanker, Donald Rumsfeld and James Woolsey. It has since become an exclusive neoconservative bastion.

freedomhouseFreedom House’s narrative is no less than the narrative of the American century where, “It has fought on the side of freedom and against aggressors in struggles that can be evoked by simple words and phrases: the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, NATO, Hungarian Freedom Fighters, the Berlin Wall, the Prague Spring…” and of course Afghanistan.

We experienced Freedom House’s simple words and phrases and their dark influence on the major media in the spring of 1983 in a televised Nightline program following a trip to Afghanistan with Harvard Negotiation Project Director, Roger Fisher. We had brought Fisher to Afghanistan to explore the possibilities of a Soviet withdrawal of forces and discovered the Soviets were desperate to get out. But instead of expanding on Fisher’s efforts to get the Soviets out of Afghanistan, host Ted Koppel undermined the very premise of the discussion by introducing a political officer of the Jamaat-i Islami, which Koppel described as “an anti-communist resistance group based in Pakistan. He is here in the United States under the auspices of two American organizations, concerned with democracy in Afghanistan, the Afghan Relief Committee and Freedom House.”

Had Koppel and Freedom House really been concerned about democracy in Afghanistan, their choice of the Jamaat-i Islami could not be viewed as anything but the darkest of black propaganda, an outright lie.

Originally founded by the Pakistani theologian Abul Ala Maudidi in 1941, the goal of the Jamaat-i Islami was more than just that of gaining political representation for radical Islamists. The Jamaat was to be an all-embracing, extremist Islamic Society, crafted through the strictest interpretation of Islamic law, as a replacement for a modern western-style democracy.

Through the help of the mainstream media during the 1980s the psychological war promoted by Freedom House and Ronald Reagan’s C.I.A. director William J. Casey held the Soviets in Afghanistan for an additional six years, destabilized Central Asia, encouraged the growth of the largest heroin operation in history and enabled the rise of the very Islamic extremists that allegedly planned and carried off the attacks on 9/11.

Ten years after 9/11 Afghanistan remains the center of a growing Islamic insurgency and the longest war in American history. The success of America’s seventy year old psychological warfare campaign, where the lie became the truth and the truth became the enemy of the state, has now so disorientated America’s institutional thinking that we have reached the moment when the state can no longer shield the American people from the consequences of that lie. Copyright © 2011 Gould & Fitzgerald All rights reserved


A “Moment” of reflection for Hamid & Ahmed Wali Karzai

by Paul Fitzgerald & Elizabeth Gould

“The Diem Moment” for Karzai Brothers?

And so the notorious Ahmed Wali Karzai (A.W.K) is dead, killed by a (formerly) trusted bodyguard who had worked closely with U.S. Special forces and the C.I.A. The assassination of a C.I.A. strategic asset, alleged Kandahar drug boss and tribal “fixer” for his half brother Afghan president Hamid Karzai raises a lot of questions, not to mention issues, about the nature as well as the future of America’s involvement in Afghanistan.

Not surprisingly, the Taliban issued a statement claiming credit for the killing as retribution for his role in “Cooperating with the Americans, Canadians and Britons… for spreading the net of intelligence of the Western invaders and boosting their sway in south-west Afghanistan.” They also claimed he continued to receive “high salary from CIA.”

As it was elsewhere in Afghanistan, America’s approach to Kandahar after 2001 was always counterintuitive. Putting hated warlords back in charge to fill the leadership vacuum left by fleeing Taliban was expedient but self-defeating. But U.S. reliance on this unorthodox strategy for success has remained consistently curious for the Taliban-stronghold. During a trip to Kabul in the fall of 2002 we were told that Pakistani ISI were crossing the Durand line (the disputed border between Afghanistan and Pakistan) to openly recruit Afghans for al Qaeda/Taliban cells in the villages of the province. No one we spoke to could explain such a lapse in U.S. intelligence, considering that at the time, (prior to the Iraq invasion) the U.S. had all the resources necessary to deal with such a flagrant cross-border operation.

In the ensuing years, Ahmed Wali Karzai filled in for the U.S. absence by running Kandahar province as a Karzai family protectorate. With C.I.A. backing A.W.K. built his power base up from nothing and in 2005 was elected to Kandahar’s provincial council. With local officials and tribal elders in his pocket, he was a sure bet to take over the governor’s office. In 2008, A.W.K. ran afoul of his C.I.A. beneficiaries and was subjected to an intense effort by senior US military officials to remove him prior to the “surge” of U.S. forces. That effort failed, but the acrimony and distrust of Ahmed Wali’s methods and alliances remained.

As a linchpin in General Petraeus’s 2009 “surge” strategy for victory over the Taliban, A.W.K. symbolized the dysfunctional symbiosis stretching between the Presidential Palace, the American Command and the U.S. Embassy. His sudden absence now leaves either a strategic vacuum in U.S. plans or a long awaited opportunity – just as the promised U.S. draw down begins and Petraeus ends his Afghan tour to become the Director of Central Intelligence.

In September of 2010, former Chief of the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Operations, Dr. Charles Cogan invoked the ghost of Vietnam when he posted a blog asking whether the United States wasn’t approaching “the Diem Moment” in relation to Hamid Karzai and his powerful brothers. Vietnamese president Diem and his brother Nhu were perceived as having become anti-American and were making passes at France and even the enemy in Hanoi. Cogan suggested that the time was fast approaching for Mr. Karzai and his family members to be offered safe passage out of Afghanistan before the worst befell them.

But as Dr. Cogan should know, A.W.K’s assassination smacks of another event in Afghan history far more appropriate to this moment than allusions to Vietnam, and it’s that moment which we’ll call the “Hafizullah Amin moment” that better provides the clues to the strange death of Ahmed Wali Karzai.

Hafizullah Amin was the U.S. educated, pseudo-Marxist Afghan-nationalist-strongman overthrown by the Soviets that December 1979, after playing out his role in a tragicomic farce to lure the Soviets into their own Vietnam. It was well known at the time that Amin had a longstanding relationship with the C.I.A. and was cutting a deal (brokered by Pakistan) with his fellow Ghilzai Pashtun, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. U.S. ambassador Adolph Dubs had been carefully trying to work Amin away from Soviet influence but was so worried about his provocative behavior Dubs had gone to his own C.I.A. station chief and demanded to know if Amin was a C.I.A. agent. In February of 1979, Dubs ran into the deeper agenda already underway when he was kidnapped by a band of Tajik Maoists and assassinated when Amin ordered an attack on the room where he was being held hostage.

In the months leading up to the Soviet invasion, Amin tried to twist out of the knot by filling Kabul’s ministries with his closest relatives, arresting scores of old friends and agreeing to accept the Durand line as the permanent border with Pakistan, but his time in the saddle had run out. Amin had become hated by his own people and a disposable nuisance to all concerned, both American and Soviet. The rest, as they say, is history.

Fast Forward to 2011 as a panicked President Hamid Karzai surrounds himself with relatives, anti-US advisors and religious fanatics drawn once again from the ranks of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hesb-i Islami, as he fends off hostile attacks and conspiracies from a dozen directions meant to bring him down.

With his power-broker-brother gone and his access to Kandahar’s complex patronage system cut off, Hamid Karzai has been dealt a severe blow. The death of Ahmed Wali Karzai closes off a major option for his half brother Hamid at a crucial moment when Washington has shifted into phase two of its ten year program for Central Asia and with the Durand line once again the focus of the U.S. war. Next up comes the large military bases that the U.S. wants to occupy beyond 2014 and a status of forces agreement. This is something which Karzai cannot afford to allow for fear of alienating Afghanistan’s population and his regional neighbors and at the same time cannot refuse and continue to accept protection as an American client. Karzai is desperate to find allies to save him, but time is short. Should he get the nod from strongman Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s backers in Iran and Pakistan to merge his dwindling political forces with those of the Hesb-i Islami he may get a reprieve, but without his man in Kandahar, Ahmed Wali to do his dirty work, Hamid Karzai’s “Hafizullah Amin moment” may be right around the corner.

Copyright © 2011 Gould & Fitzgerald All rights reserved

THE HUFFINGTON POST

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

As the first journalists to enter Kabul in 1981 for CBS News with Dan Rather following the expulsion of the Western media the previous year, we continue to be amazed at how the American disinformation campaign between Hollywood, Washington and Wall Street built around the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan lives on. We’ve seen this pattern from the media again and again. It happened AGAIN in Huffpost’s July 8th 10 Jaw-Dropping Journalism Scandals that missed the biggest scandal of all.

Watch our critique of the MSM “narrative” Exposing the Official 1980s – created to build support for Charlie Wilson’s War following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Click here for the Mary Williams Walsh 1990 interview in The Progressive Magazine that lays out the charges of fakery against CBS News for its Afghanistan coverage.

Our opportunity to see inside a Soviet-occupied Afghanistan revealed a complex story of political betrayal, women’s rights and a struggle for modernity, but the footage we returned with didn’t conform to the evil empire image that CBS News had been promoting. Four weeks after our return, a story about our trip was aired, cross-cut with footage created by the Soviets that in no way represented our experience. But as an anti-Soviet piece, it was masterful. Then in 1983, under contract to ABC Nightline, we invited Roger Fisher, director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, to return with us to assess the chances of negotiating the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Roger told us that the Kremlin’s chief Afghan specialist said, “Give us six months to save face and we’ll leave the Afghans to solve their own problems.” This information was rejected as news by ABC World News Tonight. Then the Soviet request – as explained by Roger on Nightline – was framed in such a way by host Ted Koppel, that it dispelled any notion that there was a chance of a Soviet withdrawal.

As the decade of the 1980s wore on, the Soviet occupation left the realm of journalism and transformed into a Ramboesque struggle of holy warriors against the evil empire. Then in 1989 when the Soviets withdraw, the Afghan story disappeared from the media’s radar completely. The cold war had ended and the mythology dictated that the U.S. had “won.” The Afghan people were left to deal with the blowback from the mujahideen fighters who had been supported by the largest publicly known U.S. covert operation since Vietnam. Over the next few years that process would give rise to the Taliban and morph into the threat the U.S. faces today. Without any serious reflection on the consequences of funding and training extremists for the purpose of defeating the Soviet Union, the American media not only missed the deeper story, but ignored where the Afghan story had been corrupted for political purposes.

Then articles in the New York Post by Janet Wilson in 1989 and a Columbia Jounalism Review article by Mary Williams Walsh  in 1990 charged that CBS News repeatedly aired fake battle footage and false news accounts. The accusations caused no serious questioning by the media. It wasn’t until 9/11 that Afghanistan got back on the media’s radar. But the media continues to resist the deeper analysis necessary to bring about the kind of thinking required by America’s current intervention in Afghanistan.

To this day, the press largely accepted, without investigation, the view that a Soviet triggered Muslim Holy War against communism was taking place. Even when both Robert Gates, the former Secretary of Defense, and Zbigniew Brzezinski President Carter’s national security adviser, admitted in print (Gates, in his book, From the Shadows; Brzezinski, 1998 interview in Le Nouvel Observateur), that the U.S. had been secretly undermining its own diplomatic efforts in order to give the Soviets their own Vietnam in Afghanistan, the American press failed to see it as news.

Brzezinski’s Le Nouvel Observateur remarks are addressed in a 2005 interview he did with Samira Goetschel for her film, Our Own Private Bin Laden. She asked: “In your 1998 interview with the French Magazine Le Nouvel Observateur you said that you knowingly increased the probability of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.” Brzezinski responded: “The point very simply was this. We knew the Soviets were already conducting operations in Afghanistan. We knew there was opposition in Afghanistan to the progressive effort which had been made by the Soviets to take over. And we felt therefore it made a lot of sense to support those that were resisting. And we decided to do that. Of course this probably convinced the Soviets even more to do what they were planning to do…”

As we document in our books, the record contradicts Brzezinski’s assumption that the Soviets would have invaded. The world was remade with the Soviet folly in Afghanistan, a Communist empire destroyed and the West’s pre-eminence assured. But the price in human suffering in Afghanistan and the impact on our democratic freedoms and aggressive press coverage has yet to be understood.

A Game Changer for Unifying Afghanistan

Afghanistan has suffered through over 30 years of incessant war which has led to the annihilation of its secular tribal structure, transforming it into one of the most violent and poverty-stricken places on earth. Saving this war-torn country will take more than simply “thinking outside the box” – it requires throwing the entire box away, as was done to create the audacious reconciliation process that we wrote with New World Strategies Coalition. Click here to read: An indigenous peace process for unifying a shattered nation

Have a great day!

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

THE HUFFINGTON POST

by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

The stakes are perhaps as high as they have ever been for the post-Cold War United States as Senator John Kerry wades through the Central Asian quagmire in Islamabad. Ironies abound. A war begun ten years ago by Skull and Bonesman George W. Bush requires another Skull and Bonesman to end it. It all seems so personal, not to mention private. Two members of the same secret society flanking the (war on terror) like a set of parentheses. But then, that’s why secret societies are secret.

An article in the London Times on Thursday September 20, 2001 titled Secret plans for 10-year war, by Michael Evans laid out the plan. “AMERICA and Britain are producing secret plans to launch a ten-year ‘war on terrorism’ – Operation Noble Eagle – involving a completely new military and diplomatic strategy to eliminate terrorist networks and cells around the world.”

The article goes on to report that the whole “long-term American approach,” was being driven by Vice President Richard Cheney and Secretary of State General Colin Powell in the mold of the war on drugs or poverty with special attention paid to “hearts and minds” and the sensitivities of Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan.

Most Americans don’t know what goes on inside the secrets halls of Skull and Bones anymore than what kind of secret dealings led to their country being embroiled in the war on terror. But it’s safe to assume that after ten years the only thing the war on terror shares with the war on drugs or poverty, hearts or minds or the sensitivities of Islamic fundamentalists, is failure.

John Kerry has a big job ahead of him as he meets to discuss U.S. predator drone attacks, accusations that Pakistan harbors Islamist militants, the failure of Pakistan’s military to engage the Taliban and the killing of Osama bin Laden.

But the biggest job of all may be coming to grips with the growing list of conflicting interests that are hobbling American policy while rewriting the American narrative to reflect the unpleasant reality that the war on terror was only a stage in an evolving process leading to an endless escalation of war.

To the shock and awe of many both inside and outside the United States, instead of breaking with the national security policies of George W. Bush, the Obama administration has, in many cases only furthered programs and practices implemented by his predecessor. In fact it appears that President Obama has embraced the largely discredited 1992 program for America’s global dominance known as the Defense Planning Guidance crafted under another Bonesman, President George Herbert Walker Bush. It was assumed that following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States would rethink the need for war. Instead, the ’92 Defense Planning Guidance set the stage for a whole new era of confrontation stating that “Our first objective is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival.”

The administration faces a rising coalition of regional rivals due to convene in Astana, Kazakhstan on June 15 under the banner of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). It also faces a self-imposed deadline for a troop withdrawal beginning this July, and the intensifying fear that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons will fall into terrorist hands.

Hints of a shockingly perverse response to a nuclear threat from political fanaticism or religious fundamentalism have been surfacing sporadically over the last few years. In January, 2008 the Guardian’s Ian Traynor reported on a “radical manifesto” for a pre-emptive nuclear attack put forward by NATO’s most senior military officers to “halt the ‘imminent’ spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.” The manifesto called for the “first use” of nuclear weapons by NATO to prevent their potential use by terrorists or a rogue state.

California State Associate Professor of Political Science Cora Sol Goldstein’s August 2010 suggestion in Small Wars Journal that “the use of nuclear weapons is not yet justified,” hinted strongly that the time would soon come when they were. And Brookings Institute Senior Fellow Bruce Riedel’s comment in a February 2011 posting that if the U.S. had to fight a war with Pakistan to occupy it, it would be a “nuclear war,” suggested the option was already on the table.

The Hindu Kush has proved to be the ultimate crossroads for empires down through the millennia. Its graveyards and mountain passes overflow with the skulls and bones of invaders. Bonesmen have played an inordinate role in getting the United States to that crossroads. Let’s hope a Bonesman can get us through without triggering the end of the world.

Copyright © 2011 Gould & Fitzgerald All rights reserved

The Huffington Post

Mission Accomplished?

Crossing Zero: How and Why the Media Misses the AfPak Story

How and Why the Media Misses the Af-Pak Story

By Rory O’Connor
Two experts explain how the media has reported — and misreported — the ongoing story of the “AfPak war” during the past three decades.
April 14, 2011

A unique husband and wife team, Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould have reported for decades on the issues and conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the spring of 1981 they received the first visas to enter Afghanistan granted to an American TV crew and produced an exclusive news story for the CBS Evening News. They also produced a documentary for PBS, returned in 1983 for ABC Nightline, and later worked under contract to Oliver Stone on a film version of their experience.

In 1989 the Soviet Union finally withdrew its forces from Afghanistan, and the Cold War soon ended with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. But as civil war followed in Afghanistan, the United States also walked away – and in 1994, a new strain of religious holy warrior called the Taliban arose, sweeping into Afghanistan from Pakistan. By 1998, as the horrors of the Taliban regime began to grab headlines, Fitzgerald and Gould began collaborating with Afghan human rights advocate Sima Wali, filming her return from exile and producing another film.

In the years since 9/11 they continued to follow the AF/Pak story closely, ultimately writing a book entitled Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story. Their latest effort, Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire, examines what they call “the bizarre and often paralyzing contradictions of America’s strategy” in the region.

Crossing Zero has been hailed by Daniel Ellsberg as “a ferocious, iron-clad argument about the institutional failure of American foreign policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” and praised by filmmaker Stone, who noted that Fitzgerald and Gould “have been most courageous in their commitment to telling the truth — and have paid a steep price for it. Their views have never been acceptable to mainstream media in our country, but they deserve accolades.” Media reformer Norman Solomon, author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, called their latest work “a searing expose of distortions that have fundamentally warped U.S. perceptions and actions in the ‘AfPak’ region,” and onetime CIA Senior Soviet Analyst Melvin A. Goodman said it should be “required reading at the National Security Council and the Pentagon.”

I recently interviewed the authors about how the media has reported — and misreported — the ongoing story of the “AfPak war” during the past three decades.

Q: In your book you raise difficult questions and inconvenient truths – why hasn’t mainstream media done the same in your view?

A: As you say, because it’s inconvenient and difficult. Afghanistan was a real crossroads for the American mainstream media, coming on the heels of Vietnam. A lot of journalists and news organizations were being cast in a bad light for allegedly “losing Vietnam” for the United States. Walter Cronkite was reviled in some quarters for giving that famous newscast in February of 1968 calling for a negotiated way out of the American engagement after the Tet offensive.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan offered a way out for a lot of budding media stars, who wanted to avoid the inconvenient truths about Vietnam and surf the incoming wave that became the “Reagan Revolution.” Dan Rather inaugurated his ascension to the coveted CBS News anchor chair as Cronkite’s replacement with his Inside Afghanistan special, which established the “Russia’s Vietnam” narrative. They kept framing the narrative to fit the story line… the communist government in Kabul was supposed to collapse as soon as the Russians left, just the way the anti-communist government in Saigon did when the US pulled out. But of course that didn’t happen. The Afghan communists ran the country for three more years until Boris Yeltsin cut off their funding and Afghanistan then descended into chaos.

Q: How is your book an antidote to the mainstream accounts?

A: Mainstream accounts keep repeating the same narrative, which is based on a lot of fabricated information and disinformation and Cold War propaganda that wasn’t true to begin with. Now, even people who should know better can’t tell fact from fiction. What we’ve done from the very beginning is to challenge this artificial narrative with alternative information that broadens the perspective and that sets the record straight.

Some people don’t like what we do because we shatter a lot of illusions. But we’re just reporting and documenting the facts. We’ve done this from outside the mainstream media and without their support for decades now. Even so we’ve recently been acknowledged by some mainstream authorities, who say that our account provides a wider and more helpful perspective.

Q: On page 66, you speak of our ‘distorted image’ of the politics of Pakistan. What do you mean?

A: When it comes to Pakistan, American journalists are helping to sustain a false and deceptive narrative and that’s a real problem. As an example, on the left, Rachel Maddow ought to be challenging the narrative. Instead she looks to Dan Rather and Zbigniew Brzezinski who initiated the crisis. Why? This is a big and profound question that goes to the root of our experience. A lot of our work focuses on the prevailing assumptions that underlie mainstream media’s approach to the outside world. How did we get these assumptions about Pakistan? Most people don’t think about the fact that they’ve had absolutely no choice in influencing American foreign policy. Nor do they understand that the process of choosing an ally is most often self-fulfilling.

Any way you cut it Pakistan is a tough sell. U.S. elites like Brzezinski want Pakistan because it’s a friend to China and a front line state against Russian interests. That results in a lot of very bad things getting intentionally overlooked. We got Pakistan from Britain in 1947. It was largely the creation of Lord Mountbatten, who wanted to retain an Anglo-Saxon military influence in Central Asia, keep the Soviets at bay and stifle the influence of a united, nationalist India. So the territory was divvied up according to what suited this agenda. The U.S and U.S.S.R were the only game in town when the narrative surrounding this process was forming. The U.S. looked to Britain for guidance and got Britain’s agenda, attitudes and long-term strategy in return.

The U.S simply did not have the people with the background in the region, with the languages or the culture. So, relying on Pakistan’s English speaking, British-trained military to run the operation based on a 19th century corporate colonial model was perceived at the time as the only solution. U.S media elites merely bought into the narrative of the Pakistani military elites without ever questioning whether they ought to be challenged. Over time the U.S. became more like them than they became like us, the British/Pakistani assumptions became the American assumptions, became the American media assumptions.

As we enter the second decade of the 21st century these assumptions become less and less valid to the point where accepting them becomes dangerous. The political awakening that is exploding throughout the Middle East is no less desired in Pakistan or Afghanistan. People have had enough with military regimes and terrorists. But look what the U.S. continues to offer them by backing Karzai and Kayani and negotiating with the Taliban. The U.S. is making itself irrelevant. Everybody seems to know there is something very wrong with the lack of leadership here, but nothing really changes because the U.S. media doesn’t challenge the narrative. The realities have changed profoundly since 1947, but Washington steams along as before and the U.S. media steams along with them.

Q: Please supply more detail on what you call the Rendon Group’s “padding the truth” and “neutering journalists” to ensure a “military-friendly and subservient media” in Afghanistan.

A: An August 29, Stars and Stripes story titled “Army used profiles to reject reporters” reported that the U.S. military used secret profiles to deny disfavored reporters access to American fighting units and influence press coverage in order to guarantee that only favorable stories would be written about their operations. If your intel experts are already admitting that they can’t trust their own intel and need independent news reports to get down to the ground truth, then what you’re doing by filtering out the bad news is polluting your only valid system for gaining information at the source.

Again we’re back to assumptions. Does the U.S. military really think that a journalist, screened and approved by a public relations firm hired by the U.S. military and escorted into the field alongside U.S. military units is going to be one hundred percent objective? This was an enormous issue for us when we went to Kabul in 1981 and again in 1983 with Roger Fisher. We had to constantly fight to get clear of the communist government’s censorship and control. We had to get the foreign minister’s pledge on tape that we would not be censored or stopped from filming what we wanted on the streets of Kabul and still had to fight the censor when we left. It almost became an international incident. And then we were repeatedly challenged by CBS and ABC whether what we saw had been sanitized for our benefit by the communists. So we caught flak at both ends of the job at the time. It’s tough to maintain your integrity and stick to the story, but that’s what you’re supposed to do as a journalist and you take the consequences. But I don’t see that kind of standard being applied to reporters embedded with the U.S. military today. In fact, we get the impression that if you’re not embedded, you’re somehow disloyal or not getting the story right. And that’s just 180 degrees from where American journalism should be.

It’s the kind of psychological approach more akin to what the Soviets demanded of their journalists back in the 70s and 80s. They were expected to tow the party line or face expulsion from the privileged ranks. The U.S military already has a problem with self-serving intelligence as well as a marked inability to tell friend from foe or fact from fiction. Pressuring reporters to embed only adds to a system already sickened by its own self-created narrative and dooms the war effort to failure. Things were supposed to get better under the Obama administration, not worse. But the Rendon Group’s practice of grading potential embedded journalists is not a change we can believe in.

Q: Speaking of PR, you reference the rather infamous US Information Agency effort to train Afghans in journalism at Boston University. How did this program come about? How was it flawed? Were there other, similar ones?

A: The main program was run out of the School of Public Communication at BU and spearheaded by Dean Joachim Maitre, who was a defector from the East German Air Force. This was done under the leadership of John Silber, who had come to BU from Texas and turned the left-liberal orientation of the university into a flagship for a pro-business right wing ideology. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hesb-i-Islami was the primary beneficiary of the program. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan represented a field day for this group and BU acted as a kind of incubator. We found that a lot of the exile community had been brought in to service the anti-Soviet narrative, but no objective analysis of what was really going on was being done.

It wasn’t really academic at all. It was a flat out bogus propaganda operation intended to win support from foreign audiences through the Voice of America. Of course some of it eventually fed back into the American media and was aired as legitimate news stories. The narrative was framed as black and white while focused on hurting the communists as much as possible. So the whole project was grounded in ideology and not journalism from the start. It was important to train Afghans and get the word out about what was going on. It was extremely dangerous to arm a whole cadre of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s radical followers in the nuances of political disinformation. This flawed approach helped embed a deliriously false narrative during the Reagan years and it refuses to go away.

The University of Nebraska also took part in training Afghans for Jihad under a USAID contract reportedly worth about $60 million. Although run by USAID, the CIA helped to design and implement the program.

Q: Why was the American press so fawning in its coverage of Hekmatyar?

A: Hekmatyar was the go-to guy for the U.S. beginning in 1973 when Mohammed Daoud and Marxist Babrak Karmal overthrew King Zahir Shah. Hekmatyar won friends in the Pakistani military and Saudi elite for his radical religious views and continues to find support within their ranks. As we remarked before, the American press seems to fall in line when it comes to accepting the official line on Afghanistan. When it comes to Hekmatyar they simply don’t challenge the rhetoric — we assume because the CIA and Pakistan continue to see a role for him to play in a post-Karzai era. Much to our amazement he has a PR guy in Los Angeles that goes around challenging anything bad said about him.

The U.S. media won’t touch the fact that Hekmatyar, (who’s been officially labeled a terrorist), has free access to threaten people who challenge him. We saw this kind of thing back in the 1980s when the U.S. was actively funding Islamic extremists to kill Russians, bringing them to the U.S. and putting them on shows like Nightline to espouse their cause. But now we’re supposed to be on the other side of that issue. So why is the U.S. still letting them roam free?

Q: Do you agree with people like Tom Johnson and Chris Mason that the MSM’s reporting is “no longer just misinformed or misguided” but “has crossed the line into being completely out of touch with reality?”

A: Johnson and Mason have done a lot of fieldwork to back up their opinions and have seen the narrative grow ever more delusional over the years. We’ve seen it as well in pieces written by some of Washington’s instant experts who know nothing of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but get front page and top billing regurgitating pro-Pakistani or anti-Afghan opinions that were baked in a Washington think-tank and paid for by lobbyists.

So much of what the U.S. consumes on the AfPak war is invented in Washington for Washington and has absolutely nothing to do with what is really going on, on the ground. This is a result of a process that has been broken for a very long time and cannot reform itself. But the moment has arrived where the drawbacks to this approach outweigh the benefits. In crossing zero line the U.S. has fed itself its own policy and may just now be realizing that its efforts over the last ten years add up to nothing more than zero. Not to realize that this moment has arrived and adjust to the new realities can only result in catastrophe.

Q: Finally — on page 106, you speak of the “military/industrial/media/academic complex.” Why do you include the media?

A: The medium IS the message. Marshall McLuhan’s theories have become Marshall McLuhan’s Law. We now live in a world where we pay for reality by the gigabyte. Nobody really knows what Barack Obama and his handlers say or do when they sit down with other world leaders. We only know what the official media feeds us and what they feed us is dictated by a complex set of instructions defined by academia for our banking industry and enforced by our military. Specifically the media has not only become the delivery system of the prevailing order, it has become the all encompassing 24-7 environment of cell phones, GPS, twitter, Facebook, email and web that cocoons us within their agenda, whether we like it or not.

Posts navigation

1 2 3 … 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 … 28 29 30
Scroll to top