3/18/2002
Here's what else the executive branch wants to spend a pile of money on: lying to everybody. The brief and controversial career of the Office of Strategic Influence lasted only one week. Its creation was announced, and its mission was to guide public opinion at home and abroad toward acceptance and approval of American foreign policy. Its campaigns would range "from the whitest of white to the blackest of black," meaning they would be happy to tell the truth when it made the US look good, and just as happy to tell whatever lie they thought might make us look good. Secretary Rumsfeld of Defense assured us that the OSI would never, ever tell lies to the American public--that would be wrong--but planting lies in the media of allied countries was openly part of the plan. That created quite a stir, and before long the decision was made to scrap the department entirely (to appease public opinion, don't you know). Rumsfeld is the same guy who showed no remorse when caught trying to suggest poisoning the food supply of Afghanistan: not only a total abandonment of the Geneva Conventions, which we've since jettisoned again anyway, but I should hope the final resting place of anyone's credulousness for his insistence that slain civilians in that country have been "collateral." So it comes as no surprise that he shrugged the whole matter off flippantly when the plan was retracted. "What do you want, blood?" What some of us might have liked to see, actually, would be a discussion of the merits of the plan and the objections raised against it. Or an acknowledgement that the objections concerned ethics--or indeed any hint of evidence that Rumsfeld is aware of the idea of ethics.
I think it's crucially important to look past the ethical question raised by these proposed methods, for a moment, to the much more fundamental question raised by the very objective of the proposed office. This was to be an agency whose entire purpose was to make people in the world believe that decisions already made by government officials were good ones. The White House, the Pentagon and the CIA would make decisions--secretly, unilaterally, consulting not even our own Congress, let alone the populace or leaders of other countries. Then the OSI would try to cajole us all into approving--but at no stage would the executive branch ask anyone else for input. Utterly unilateral, the antithesis of democratic process--how much more aristocratic could their thinking be? If ever you doubt that our top military brass believes itself to be divinely inspired, above question, answerable to no one, remember the OSI.
But so deeply are they accustomed to this thinking that they had no compunction about admitting it to us, openly.
And it really caused them no harm, because in fact we're just as used to the idea as they are. Surely nobody who follows the news thinks that government-sponsored disinformation would have been new--even at home. I you do have doubts, read this article, maybe the best one I've seen on the OSI. The military/intelligence apparatus has been lying to us, even to Congress, pretty much constantly for a long time. Certainly it would be naive to imagine that backing away from the official OSI--which happened way too easily--is any sign of dropping its means or its mission.
Which leaves me with the last question about OSI--why bother? I must admit I'm annoyingly uncertain about this. I can think of one possibility; one more department is one more avenue by which to funnel money into counterintelligence snafus. Maybe OSI would have added an extra budget's worth to effort that's been going on all along. But I don't actually know that it was structured that way, and even if it was it seems like it would be just as easy to split the extra money between the existing budgets for defense and this new mongrel of "homeland" whatever. I feel like I'm missing something. Not something more insidiously clever--I don't believe the people running this show are all that bright, after all--that "intelligence" is dumb is pretty common knowledge. An alert Rumsfeld would be able to disguise his amorality, rather than showing irritation and brushing his fresh gaffes aside as soon as they're discovered; an insightful Bush would have had something moving, or at the very least human, to say on September 11, instead of bored-sounding rhetoric about moving forward and American way of life. But bumblers though they are, they do understand deceptive financing better than I do, and I often feel like I must have missed the whole point of the OSI.