Official U.S. policy: Keep the public disinformed'

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U.S. soldiers forced to stare at nuclear explosion during tests in Nevada in 1952. Disinformation policy kept these men from knowing that 16 SOCIALIST ACTION AUGUST 1986 A stretch of California desert and the airspace above it is declared a "national security area"-possibly for several years to come-after a radar-evasive F-19 "stealth" fighter crashes on July 11. The Pentagon imposes an extraordinary news blackout, refusing to admit the aircraft even exists.

Some 22 million documents are added to classified government files last year as the "black"-secretly funded-portion of the U.S. defense budget grows by eight fold over the last five years.

CIA Director William Casey threatens to prosecute The Washington Post and the National Broadcasting Company for report -ing government "secrets" revealed in the trial of alleged Soviet spy Ronald Pelton.

The Defense Department and CIA adopt a "disinformation" policy to feed the public deliberately false information on U.S. military projects.

As these developments indicate, U.S. military/foreign policy is becoming increasingly shrouded in secrecy. The reason, however, is no secret—the biparti -san policy of the Democratic and Repub -lican parties continues to shift toward a growing reliance on such time-honored techniques as coups, military strikes, invasions, and assorted CIA "dirty tricks" to achieve its objectives.

That's why President Reagan, as spokesman for America's ruling rich, prefers to keep a curtain of secrecy lowered on nearly every of aspect his adminis -tration's military and foreign policy decisions.

The trend toward ever-greater secrecy should come as no surprise, of course, considering how U.S. policy is carried out in Nicaragua, Libya, and elsewhere. Real government policy would not stand up too well should it reach the full light of public scrutiny.

As Secretary of State George Shultz put it, with non-diplomatic candor: "We have to get over the idea that covert is a dirty word."

Deception and lies

At the Defense Department and CIA, the drive toward greater secrecy falls under the rubric of "disinformation," or what Pentagon publicists prefer to call "impeding the technical data flow" on U.S. weapons programs. To the rest of us it has another name-lying.

It is, of course, a practice of long standing, but this year it has been elevated to the status of official policy, as Aviation Week & Space Technology reports in its issue of March 17, 1986.

The idea is ostensibly to fool the Soviets concerning the true state of U.S. military preparedness. But it is not incidental that the American people, who are expected to support every increase in military spending because "the Russians are ahead of us," are also victims to such deception.

A Defense Department official explained that " disinformation can be injected at every stage of a weapon program." In fact, it is not even limited to existing weapons programs. The policy includes releasing data on weapons that do not even exist.

One of the most favored disinformation techniques, according to Aviation Week, involves mixing truth with fiction -spreading false information about existing programs in combination with other facts that are accurate. "This gives the Soviets a lot more to worry about," says the defense official.

Significant among those programs that do exist and are earmarked for deception is the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars). In a related report, Flora Lewis reveals in a many would contract cancer in later years.

New York Times column (Dec. 4, 1985) that scientists involved in Star Wars research tests have been forbidden to publicly discuss any tests that fail. They are free, however, to speak out on tests that succeed-although several independent scientists critical of the program report that nearly every test has so far failed to perform up to par.

A Livermore Lab physicist, Ray Kidder, complained to the press that "the public is getting swindled by one side that has access to classified information and can say whatever it wants and not go to jail, whereas we [the skeptics] can't say whatever we want."

Cooperative mood in Congress As U.S. policy shifts toward more reliance on covert action by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, even the ineffectual congressional oversight com -mittees set up in the 1970s to monitor intelligence activities have become an annoyance to the Reagan administration. It is considering legislation to abolish such oversight committees, despite the fact that the Senate and House committees have provided "almost unbroken support" for the CIA, as The New York Times recently noted (July 7, 1986).

These "watchdog" committees have, in fact, overseen a tripling of the intelligence budget in the last decade, while covert actions have more than doubled in recent years.

Of course, despite the cooperative mood in Congress toward the military/intel -ligence establishment, there's always the chance that false information could get passed to Congress as a result of the disinformation policy. A Defense Depart -ment official reassures us, however, that "there are channels on the Hill that can be used to get the correct information to the people who need to know." Naturally, the CIA and Defense Department will be the ones deciding which people "need to know."

Roy Godson, an associate professor of government at Georgetown University and a paid government adviser, admits that the disinformation program represents "a dangerous precedent" because, by its very nature, it consciously misleads the American people. Still the professor is all for it, despite the fact that the "U.S. democratic political system" makes such a policy difficult to implement.

For one thing, Godson says, too many people would have to be aware that false information is being circulated. For such a program to be effective, it would have to be "a tightly held secret." Unfortunately for the fomentors of falsehood at the CIA and Defense Department, we live in what the professor calls a "very information-porous system."

An "information-porous system." That is what the democratic traditions of American society are reduced to in the Penfagonbureaucrat mentality—a minor irritant to be maneuvered around, if not bulldozed over, in the name of "national security."

Aviation Week, in noting an "increased emphasis" on disinformation tactics, cites the existence of a 6-in.-thick disinformation primer making the rounds at the Defense Department. The handbook includes advice on providing "false or misleading information" at press interviews.

Still, if deception doesn't work, CIA Director William Casey is not above throwing his weight around to keep the media more directly in step with administration policy.

Casey has made repeated threats to prosecute The Washington Post, the National Broadcasting Company, and other media sources for reporting "secrets" alleged spy Ronald Pelton gave to the Soviet Union. Curiously, the "classified" infor -mation the CIA chief is so worried about was publicly reported on NBC News several months ago—without a whimper of protest from the CIA or the administration.

Credibility gap

There certainly may be a credibility gap at the CIA, but there's no gap in logic as far as Casey's intentions in this case. The top spy in Washington is more worried about media disclosures that may serve to foster public debate over the administration's policies than in any revelations that allegedly compromomise "national security."

It's all somewhat ironic, considering that the big-business media conglomerates hardly need any help disinforming the public. The Washington Post, for example, has admitted it suppressed material on the Pelton case and on U.S. military strikes against Libya under pressure from the White House.

Consider, too, the almost total news blackout of what Alexander Cockburn called in The Nation (June 1, 1985), "the most ferocious aerial war ever seen in the America's"-the Salvadoran Air Force's bombing campaign against the civilian population of that country.

This campaign-which has dropped more than 3000 tons of U.S.-made bombs-has displaced more than 20 percent of the population from their homes and killed some 2000 people since 1984. Yet as Project Censored, a media watchdog panel, reports, the story ranks as the number one under-reported news story of 1985.

Consider also U.S. policy toward Nicaragua. While Ronald Reagan was getting misty-eyed during the Statue of Liberty celebration-undoubtedly cheered by the House of Representatives' approval of another $100 million for the contra war for "freedom" and "democracy" in Nicaragua-the reality of what U.S. policy actually stands for went nearly unnoticed in the U.S. media.

On July 3, a truck carrying 33 Nicaraguan civilians-including 12 children—hit a land mine on a road about 160 miles northeast of Managua. The explosion instantly killed all but one of the passengers. The land mine was believed to have been a U.S.-made M15 contact mine.

At the same time, the contra radio station in Honduras was warning listeners in Nicaragua not to take polio vaccine administered by government health workers because it is a "communist brainwashing fluid."

Death, destruction, and disease-this is what lies beneath the surface of Ronald Reagan's pious pronouncements comparing the "noble" cause of the contras with that of the American Revolution in 1776.

The strategic interests of America's rulers are motivated by one cardinal rule —safeguard corporate profits, foreign investments, and governments friendly to "U.S. interests"—no matter how repre -hensible their record of repression. • That is why U.S. foreign policy requires subterfuge, secrecy, outright lies, and a compliant media—to keep the American people from getting wise to the brutal reality that lies behind the democratic facade of U.S. foreign policy.

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LIFE Army/courtesy