Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
Investigative journalist Michael Hastings recently broke a story on BuzzFeed about an amendment that is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill. The amendment would “legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences.” Hasting reported that the amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon. He says the “tweak” to the bill would “neutralize” two other acts—the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987—which were passed in order “to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns.” Rep. Mark Thornberry (R, Texas) and Rep. Adam Smith (D, Washington) are co-sponsors of the bipartisan amendment.
Hastings says that “the new law would give sweeping powers to the State Department and Pentagon to push television, radio, newspaper, and social media onto the U.S. public.” One Pentagon official who is concerned about the amendment told Hastings, “It removes the protection for Americans. It removes oversight from the people who want to put out this information. There are no checks and balances. No one knows if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false.” The official added that there are “senior public affairs” officers in the Department of Defense who would like to “get rid” of the Smith-Mundt Act “and other restrictions because it prevents information activities designed to prop up unpopular policies—like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
In a Mediaite piece last week, Josh Feldman wrote of how the US military has been looking for new ways to spread U.S. propaganda “on social media websites for a while now.” Feldman also made reference to an article that was published in Wired last July. In the article, Pentagon Wants a Social Media Propaganda Machine, Adam Rawnsley told of how the DoD “has been working on ways to monitor and engage in ‘countermessaging’ on social media sites like Twitter.”
According to Hastings, the Pentagon already spends about $4 billion dollars annually to “sway public opinion.”
Here’s something to chill you to the bone: Hastings reported that USA Today had recently published an article about the DoD having spent “$202 million on information operations in Iraq and Afghanistan last year.” Well, it appears that the reporters who worked on the USA Today article were targeted by “Pentagon contractors, who created fake Facebook pages and Twitter accounts in an attempt to discredit them.” (Read about that story here.)
One of Hastings sources on the Hill told him, “I just don’t want to see something this significant – whatever the pros and cons – go through without anyone noticing.” The source added that the law would allow “U.S. propaganda intended to influence foreign audiences to be used on the domestic population.”
Michael Hastings:
The evaporation of Smith-Mundt and other provisions to safeguard U.S. citizens against government propaganda campaigns is part of a larger trend within the diplomatic and military establishment.
In December, the Pentagon used software to monitor the Twitter debate over Bradley Manning’s pre-trial hearing; another program being developed by the Pentagon would design software to create “sock puppets” on social media outlets; and, last year, General William Caldwell, deployed an information operations team under his command that had been trained in psychological operations to influence visiting American politicians to Kabul.
The upshot, at times, is the Department of Defense using the same tools on U.S. citizens as on a hostile, foreign, population.
Is this how we want our tax dollars being spent—to produce propaganda aimed at us Americans to sway public opinion?
SOURCES
Congressmen Seek To Lift Propaganda Ban (BuzzFeed)
Congress May Reverse Ban On Domestic Distribution Of Propaganda Material (Mediaite)
Pentagon Wants a Social Media Propaganda Machine (Wired)
Misinformation campaign targets USA TODAY reporter, editor (USA Today)
1zb1,
em: the summary is a direct quote from the amendment. In that sense it is accurate. however, if a summary was the whole bill we would not need the rest of it to make clear what it does and the summary would not be a summary but the whole bill.
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So…what’s your point? What do you think the intent of the amendment is?
BTW, Congressional bills/amendments rarely make things clear. They tend to obfuscate with an overabundance of language. Summaries are written to clarify the intent of a bill/amendment.
oh, i forgot, there really is no one out there who wants to blow us up. its all just government propaganda. how silly of me.
em; your right, we should leave all the crap making to private enterprise and the rest of us, afterall, in a democracy the right to exploit others with loads of crap is one of our most fundemetnal rights.
of course, as long as people are out there in the world trying to blow us up we should not want to other suggesting to them in anyway we are nice people and please don’t try and blow us up. why would we want to even think about trying to fight a war with ideas rather then with bullets all the time. how silly of me.
em: the summary is a direct quote from the amendment. In that sense it is accurate. however, if a summary was the whole bill we would not need the rest of it to make clear what it does and the summary would not be a summary but the whole bill.
i think it is also important to look at the original article which takes a bill that generally provides a means to release information about the crap we are feeding overseas to the american public and links it to a wider and insidious effort. there are some pretty big leaps taken with the article in that regard that i say are manipulative and insidious in their own right.
apparently people here don’t mind us spreading crap around the world as long as we don’t get to find out and know what that crap is.
1zb1,
I don’t think our government should be in the business of producing “crap” with our tax dollars.
em: btw, aren’t you at all interested in what kind of crap we might be feeding the rest of the world, or are you affraid Americans are too stupid to tell the difference between the kind of crap they give us in cereal boxs and the kind of crap the government says overseas.
1zb1,
Do you think the House Rules Committee’s summary of the Smith/Thornberry Amendment provides a correct explanation of the amendment?
em… our comments crossed…. …
however, the article you posted is pured editorial propaganda hyperbole as opposed to rational legal analysis of the bill…. in no way does it contribute to the actual understanding of the meaning or implication of the amendment one way or the other
1zb1,
I guess you didn’t read my correction:
Elaine M.
1, May 21, 2012 at 8:41 am
Note: I apologize. That was a SUMMARY of the Smith/Thornberry Amendment that I found on the website of the House of Reprsentatives Rules Committee.
Congress Wants the Department of Defense to Propagandize Americans
By Juan Cole
http://www.juancole.com/2012/05/congress-wants-the-department-of-defense-to-propagandize-americans.html
Excerpt;
Two congressmen are attempting to insert a provision in the National Defense Authorization act that would allow the Department of Defense to subject the US domestic public to propaganda. The bipartisan amendment was introduced by Rep. Mac Thornberry from Texas and Rep. Adam Smith from Washington State.
Nothing speaks more urgently to the creeping fascism of American politics than the assertion by our representatives, who apparently have never read a book on Germany in the 1930s-1940s or on the Soviet Union in the Stalin period, that forbidding DoD and the State Department from subjecting us to government propaganda “ties the hands of America’s diplomatic officials, military, and others by inhibiting our ability to effectively communicate in a credible way.” And mind you, they want to use our own money to wash our brains!
As Will Rogers observed, “This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.”
I love our guys and gals in uniform, but they can be extremely obnoxious in any discussion about US government policy that ‘gets off point’ or ‘doesn’t serve the mission.’ At Washington think tank events, I’ve seen them repeatedly close down discussions among e.g. State Department foreign service officers. You don’t want most of the DoD types providing information to us, because it won’t be in any way balanced.
Of course, having a Pentagon propaganda unit at all is highly anti-democratic. The best defense of the truth is a free press. It should also be remembered that nowadays everything in Washington is outsourced, so government propaganda is often being turned over to Booz Allen or the American Enterprise Institute, which have a rightwing bias.
EM what you listed is not the text of the amendment but rather an administratively issued summary used to track amendments.
the actual proposed amendment.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hr5736/text
gene, btw, you don’t get to ignore the antecedent either, not to mention the earlier parts of the amendment…. try reading those as well.
Note: I apologize. That was a SUMMARY of the Smith/Thornberry Amendment that I found on the website of the House of Reprsentatives Rules Committee.
Here is the text of the Smith/Thornberry Amendment:
“Would amend the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 (known as the Smith-Mundt Act) and the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Years 1986 and 1987 to clarify the authorities of the Department of State and the Broadcasting Board of Governors to prepare, disseminate and use public diplomacy information abroad and to strike the current ban on domestic dissemination of such material. Would clarify that the Smith-Mundt Act’s provisions related to public diplomacy information do not apply to other Federal departments or agencies (including the Department of Defense).”
http://www.rules.house.gov/Legislation/legislationDetails.aspx?NewsID=828
forget the “in genera….”…. read and reread the sections you highlighted….. and btw also consider your own cherry picked bones of contention….
fyi… this is a bill that was sent to house and nothing has happened with it (so far)….
What would happen if I wanted to do a documentary for American audiences about the use of American “Propaganda” in Iraq and include actual propaganda material in the documentary as examples?
1zb1,
You’re wrong alright. Just not about what you think you are wrong about. You need to re-read the entire section and consider the effects of the modifying clauses to your cherry picked bone of contention. “In General” has rather broad exceptions applied to it by those clauses. So broad as to render the “In General” statement effectively moot in operation.
Gene,
Thanks for the clarification on the clarification!
Gene, i think you are smart enough to understand the sections you highlight do not change the meaning of:
“In General- No funds authorized to be appropriated to the Department of State or the Broadcasting Board of Governors shall be used to influence public opinion in the United States. ”
You need to reread the passages.
Then again perhaps I am wrong about you being smart enough.
`SEC. 208. CLARIFICATION ON DOMESTIC DISTRIBUTION OF PROGRAM MATERIAL.
`(a) In General- No funds authorized to be appropriated to the Department of State or the Broadcasting Board of Governors shall be used to influence public opinion in the United States. This section shall apply only to programs carried out pursuant to the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 (22 U.S.C. 1431 et seq.), the United States International Broadcasting Act of 1994 (22 U.S.C. 6201 et seq.), the Radio Broadcasting to Cuba Act (22 U.S.C. 1465 et seq.), and the Television Broadcasting to Cuba Act (22 U.S.C. 1465aa et seq.). This section shall not prohibit or delay the Department of State or the Broadcasting Board of Governors from providing information about its operations, policies, programs, or program material, or making such available, to the media, public, or Congress, in accordance with other applicable law.
`(b) Rule of Construction- Nothing in this section shall be construed to prohibit the Department of State or the Broadcasting Board of Governors from engaging in any medium or form of communication, either directly or indirectly, because a United States domestic audience is or may be thereby exposed to program material, or based on a presumption of such exposure. Such material may be made available within the United States and disseminated, when appropriate, pursuant to sections 502 and 1005 of the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 (22 U.S.C. 1462 and 1437), except that nothing in this section may be construed to authorize the Department of State or the Broadcasting Board of Governors to disseminate within the United States any program material prepared for dissemination abroad on or before the effective date of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012.
[emphasis added]
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Apparently some think cherry picking is for breakfast.
It takes a lot more than that to manipulate some around here.
Oh the horror of it all: The actual proposed amendment…
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.5736:
SEC. 208. CLARIFICATION ON DOMESTIC DISTRIBUTION OF PROGRAM MATERIAL.
`(a) In General- No funds authorized to be appropriated to the Department of State or the Broadcasting Board of Governors shall be used to influence public opinion in the United States.
(Sure doesn’t take much to manipulate anyone here.)
idealist707, I would guess that fewer people will vote due to republican suppression through voter id laws. Maybe the combination of voter suppression and the movement to not vote will result in a Romney win. That seems to be the desired outcome.