The Office of Strategic Bald-Faced Lies

It was tempting, while Donald Rumsfeld burst a few blood vessels railing against those who questioned the Pentagon's disinformative "Office of Strategic Influence," to agree with Rumsfeld that such criticism was indeed unfair: the Pentagon has been engaged in misleading the American public for years, and the country's major media usually plays right along. As if to confirm such cynicism (or, at the least, confirm that Rumsfeld's rebuke was respectfully received), proof of the syndrome showed up last Monday (3-4-02), in a remarkable New York Times article seeking to convince Americans that our blossoming war against Colombian rebels is not only necessary, but inevitable.

Unfortunately, "Colombian Rebels Step Up Attacks," written--or at least given a byline--by Juan Forero, isn't labeled as an op-ed; it's in the international news section, and its unsubtle pretext is exactly what the headline suggests.

Dubious? Take a look. Here's the lead paragraph:

"Peace talks between the government and Marxist rebels collapsed just 11 days ago, and it took no time at all for Colombia to plunge into a new, ominous phase of the long-running conflict. Almost immediately after the talks ended, the rebels launched a coordinated series of attacks aimed at spreading misery across this vast country while demonstrating the government's inability to stop them."

As with any well-spun Pentagon story, there is nothing factually inaccurate here--only, as Rumsfeld tried to explain to us, a bit misleading. (Though the gratuitous characterization of FARC as "Marxist" comes dangerously close, in terms of being flatly untrue in revealing the article's intent.)

It is true enough that only 11 days had passed between the end of Colombia's "peace process" and the article, and that lots had happened in between. But it was enough time for a central element to develop, not mentioned by Forero. Or rather, it's mentioned, but buried, after several paragraphs describing rebel attacks. Ferero gets to how peace talks ended only in the sixth paragraph, at which point we learn that:

"The rebel aggression began hours after [Colombian President Andres] Pastrana broke off negotiations with the rebels on Feb. 20, ending a three-year peace effort. It has prompted the government to declare a large region of south and central Colombia a war zone in which the army has new authority to bring order."

And even this isn't quite accurate, as Forero further clarifies in paragraphs 13 and 14:

"The new wave of violence began after Mr. Pastrana, in a nationally televised address, angrily broke off talks with [FARC] ... The Colombian Air Force then began bombing a large region in southern Colombia that Mr. Pastrana had ceded to the rebels in 1998 as a venue for peace talks. Elite army forces soon entered..."

And all hell has consequently busted loose. The remainder of the article's 34 paragraphs are devoted to descriptions of FARC's effectiveness in the past week in attacking the country's infrastructure--a development so predictable that even I saw it coming, in my daily workingforchange.com column, a month ago, on February 8. Here's what I wrote:

"Any [crackdown on FARC] ... will for the first time bring Colombia's war to its big urban centers. There, a terror campaign by drug kingpin Pablo Escobar brought the country to its knees in the '80s; FARC ... can and probably would inflict much, much more damage."

Why They Need Us

But there's another subtext, more important than the semi-factual narrative, in the Times article: building the case for the urgent US need to intervene militarily, emphasized by several Pentagon and Capitol Hill quotes. (No opponents to US intervention are quoted.) Here, Forero's omissions come closest to outright falsehood, by linking FARC with the drug trade:

"The Bush administration has decided, for now, to limit American involvement mostly to the war on drugs, which undercuts the rebel's main source of financing."

The problem here--aside from plenty of "unofficial" US involvement in the war itself--is that as drug trade connections go, FARC is relatively clean; far more drug money goes to and through the Colombian military and various paramilitary groups that have close links to the Colombian military and have committed a majority of that country's human rights atrocities.

This is not to hold FARC blameless; it has, in fact, unleashed a series of high-profile bombings, kidnappings, and acts of sabotage. And it's rarely productive, in the midst of war, to try to keep score of who really started it; lives lost on all sides are a tragedy and an outrage.

Dissecting articles like this is tedious, but it is instructive as a reminder of the myth of media objectivity in this (or any other) country. Here we have, on one hand, reality: that Colombia's president responded to a guerrilla hijacking with an angry public denunciation and massive retaliation (amidst a presidential election--another factor Forero ignored); and that, in turn, has led to the current guerrilla offensive. And then, we have the New York Times' make-believe version: talks somehow "ended," the (Marxist, drug-loving) guerrillas attacked seemingly without reason, and the government has (large scale bombing notwithstanding) been helpless to resist FARC's "terrorism." Only America can help.

Either Rumsfeld was lying about having ended the Office of Strategic Influence, or he never needed it in the first place. Consider yourself influenced.