Responding to faltering international support for its war for global domination (aka the war on terrorism) military officials say the Pentagon is creating an office dedicated to spreading pro-USA disinformation and "black propaganda" to friend and foe alike. Initially reported in the New York Times, the news quickly spread around the world. Articles appeared in daily papers from New Delhi to Mexico City with headlines the likes of "Pentagon Plans More Lies." It's not surprising that this news has further undermined international support for the Pentagon's activities. It has also given aid and comfort to those folks who argue the USA is a monster that cannot be trusted. This Office of Strategic Influence hasn't even gotten its boots laced up and it is already two steps behind.

Trying to undo the damage caused by the Pentagon's clear admission of its moral ambivalence, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld later insisted that the Defense Department remains firmly committed to always telling the truth. "The Pentagon is not issuing disinformation to the foreign press or any other press," he said. In case no on believed him, he added, "government officials, the Department of Defense, this secretary, and the people that work with me tell the American people and the people of the world the truth."

Predictably, Rumsfeld's announcement failed to make quite the international splash as the announcement it was trying to counter. This is probably because anyone who has been paying attention thus far assumes he is of course lying.

The real disinformation is that this business of spreading lies is new territory for any branch of the US government, not least the Department of Defense. Interested citizens might wish to brush up on the Remember the Maine! incident that sparked the Spanish/American war, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident used to get the US involved in Vietnam, and the entirety of the Reagan and Bush the First Administrations. Readers of ETS! can rest assured that the accuracy of our reporting is unlikely to be adversely affected by the Pentagon's liars, as we have a hard time believing anything positive about the modern US military machine anyway.--Troy Skeels

Speaking of liars, that other superpower class of untrustworthies, the Russian military intelligence service, has released a scary analysis of US aims in the Mideast. According to the report cited by La Jornada (2/7/02) the US is gearing up to overthrow not just Sadaam Hussein but the regimes in Syria and Iran as well. Made public by the Kremlin on the heels of Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech, the document claims that the Kurdish minority in those three countries will be used as the USA's proxy army. The Russian report says this is phase two in the Bush Cartel's strategy to dominate the petroleum and natural gas rich Central Asian region. Encouraged by the rapid "success" in Afghanistan, the Pentagon figures that Kurdish attacks "from within," will make "direct aggression" by US troops unnecessary. According to the report, Saddam Hussein will be the first target in order to provide a "beachhead" for extending the Kurdish uprising to neighboring Iran and Syria. Once widespread combat is underway and the area sufficiently destabilized, the US will then use that as an excuse to "assist" the Kurds. As in Afghanistan, this assistance will consist of massive bombing from the air. Conveniently, US airbases are currently under construction in Uzbekistan and other nearby countries. In return for destroying these three nations, the US will support the creation of a nominally independent Kurdistan. The analysis points out that the hitch in this scenario will be staunch US ally Turkey, which has long waged a war of oppression against its own Kurdish minority. With a liberated Kurdistan on its borders it would be nearly impossible for Turkey to maintain its own hold on Kurdish territory. While this might seem like a poor way to repay Turkey for its unflagging support against all of America's evil enemies, as La Jornada matter-of-factly points out, "It would not be the first time that the United States saw its interests as more valuable than its ties of friendship." The Russian report says that by way of appeasement the US will offer Turkey a coveted natural gas pipeline from Azerbaijan. The report says that the US has begun supplying Iraqi Kurds with money and military supplies and reiterates that Kurdish "liberation" is only a pretext for drawing the US into a massive long-term war, the spoils of which are to be the world's remaining fuel supplies. Make of it what you will.--TS

In the hoopla over the Pentagon's new campaign to feed propaganda to the Middle East, commentators have sensibly pointed out that telling outright lies to the people of other nations will probably make them hate us more, not grow to love us. No has one pointed out, however, that the Pentagon already lies to the US press and public with impunity. The US press is largely to blame for not challenging Donald Rumsfeld's understatement: "We will not always tell you the truth." Because the Pentagon can so easily pull a hood over the US public, the government is cocky; it's not surprising that they think they can lie to anyone and get away with it.

In the meantime, a truth that was flashed all over world press outlets (except for the US) back in December and January has now finally been grudgingly acknowledged by the CIA: Afghanistan is sliding towards civil war, largely because of fighting among warlords and ethnic cleansing against Pashtuns in the north of the country. The US government is still opposed to sending UN peacekeepers into the country, even though the new Afghan President Hamid Karzai has begged for them on bended knee. If you look hard enough, you might find a single, short article about this in a recent edition of your local newspaper. Look hard. It's there somewhere! --Maria Tomchick

Another bit of news that ETS! brought to you back in September, after the World Trade Center attack, is that Osama bin Laden doesn't (and didn't) run Al-Qaida on his own. In fact, the Pentagon now admits that Al-Qaida is being regrouped and run by a long-time member of its ruling coalition, a Palestinian named Abu Zubaydah--one of the thousands of Al-Qaida members who escaped to Pakistan in December. "He's as dangerous as anyone we are looking for, including bin Laden," said an unnamed US official. No, really? It's a reminder that the hunt for one man, or two, or three, and the use of military force will never end terrorism. Only an effort to address the root causes will suffice. --MT

Apparently, if terrorists crash a jetliner into the Columbia Tower or Space Needle and kill thousands, we just don't have any state laws that would outlaw such a thing. That's the only possible explanation for a series of bills now rumbling through Olympia that would mimic John Ashcroft's federal assaults on privacy and expansions of law enforcement powers--and, in some cases, worsen them.

With a March 8 deadline looming, the worst of this legislation, dueling omnibus "anti-terrorist" bills that have passed Olympia's House (HB 2879) and Senate (SB 6704), now move on to the opposite chamber to get amended and passed. The two are both unnecessary, loaded with new powers and longer sentences, but the House version (which passed 82-16) is worse. Among other things, it creates a new class of state death penalty, which for the first time makes non-premeditated crimes eligible to become capital cases. The new standard would be if a defendant who is "seeking to affect government conduct" commits an act that "manifests an extreme indifference to human life." (When do we get to indict government officials for such crimes?)

Needless to say, such language is open to all sorts of political bias. The state ACLU, which has done yeoman's work mobilizing opposition to this stuff, thinks it's likely to obstruct justice, by inspiring foreign countries where suspects may have fled to refuse extradition, as Canada and Brazil have done in recent years for local murder cases; and that it's likely to be unconstitutional under state law, given the standards that the state's courts have set for capital cases.

But above all, it's a ridiculous and completely unnecessary expansion of state power in response to a phantom crisis. If past experience is any guide, one of two things will happen during the crazed period in which countless bills compete for legislators' time and action: either the bills will die quiet, merciful deaths, with each chamber able to boast that it passed something (and it was the other folks' fault it didn't become law); or some back room compromise will be hammered out and most legislators in both houses will vote for it without even reading through the actual legislation to learn what it does. Preventing the latter from happening is up to us; we've got ten days.--Geov Parrish

Speaking of terrorism, the Enron hearings in Congress have stolen the spotlight from the real story: endless accounting scandals in the nation's boardrooms. The Wall Street Journal reminds us: "History confirms what a lot of stock analysts and investors have been discovering to their chagrin lately--that burst bubbles and accounting controversies tend to go hand in hand." (2/11/02, C1) In other words (and more to the point), market hype creates an atmosphere of "anything goes," and fraud quickly follows. Economic historians are shocked to find that Enron's complex web of partnerships and holding companies looks suspiciously like the accounting tricks used by companies brought low in the stock market crash of 1929. And now the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating similar problems with Global Crossing (a huge, high-flying telecommunications company). Qwest has been caught up in the Global Crossing debacle, since it was involved in some of GC's suspicious transactions. Tyco International has announced efforts to spin-off some of its complex partnerships to avoid an investigation of its books. And even blue chip companies IBM and Cisco Systems are not immune. In spite of analysts' "happy talk" about a strong recovery just around the corner, the unfolding scandals and resulting write-downs, layoffs, and hits to employee 401(k) plans will keep the economy low for a while yet. Where's the FBI when it's really needed?--MT

And now a story that could be a turning point for the other war in the Middle East: hundreds of Israeli reservists have signed a pledge not to serve in the Occupied Territories. Reservists are the backbone of Israel's policing of the territories. Many of these resisters are veterans who are coming forward to describe their experiences while wearing an Israeli uniform, and they confirm the human rights abuses that Palestinians have complained of to the world: beatings and shootings of unarmed women and children, bulldozing of people's homes and orchards, halting ambulances at roadblocks, and the thousands of daily indignities suffered by a people under occupation. These reservists are not raw recruits: they include among their ranks a deputy brigade commander and a fighter pilot. This courageous resistance has arisen independently from the Israeli peace movement and is a protest of conscience: men and women who can't take anymore of the largely one-sided fighting--whose only aim is to support a handful of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. They advocate a unilateral withdrawal of Israeli troops back to the 1967 borders, in acknowledgment that the peace process has failed. There have always been Israeli conscientious objectors, but not in these numbers; Ariel Sharon has suspended them from duty, but he'll be hard-pressed to stop this movement from spreading.--MT. See: http://www.seruv.org.il/defaultEng.asp.