[Media-watch] Tribune: Agency wages media battle

[Laura Miller]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-0304070189apr07,1,4382383.story 

Agency wages media battle

Team makes sure war message is unified, positive
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 By Bob Kemper
Washington Bureau

April 7, 2003

WASHINGTON -- The Office of Global Communications, a controversial agency 
created by President Bush in January, has blossomed into a huge 
production company, issuing daily scripts on the Iraq war to U.S. 
spokesmen around the world, auditioning generals to give media briefings 
and booking administration stars on foreign news shows.

The office--a sort of global public-relations firm for the Bush 
administration and the U.S. war effort--tightly coordinates the message 
of the Pentagon, the State Department and the military command in the 
Persian Gulf, ensuring that any war commentary by a U.S. official is 
approved in advance by the White House.

Critics are questioning the veracity of some of the stories being 
circulated by the office and deriding it as a propaganda arm of the White 
House. But administration officials insist the office does not deal in 
disinformation and they say it serves a crucial purpose.

"We must do everything we can to help communicate the ideals and the 
policies of our country," said White House Communications Director Dan 
Bartlett. "In some countries we haven't paid as much attention, or spent 
enough time, doing that."

The communications office helps devise and coordinate each day's talking 
points on the war. Civilian and military personnel, for example, are told 
to refer to the invasion of Iraq as a "war of liberation." Iraqi 
paramilitary forces are to be called "death squads."

The effects of that discipline are evident almost daily. When questions 
arose recently about whether the United States could find Iraqi President 
Saddam Hussein, U.S. spokesmen and spokeswomen--from the White House to 
the Pentagon to the Central Command in Qatar--simultaneously insisted 
that the war was "not about one man."

So controlled is the administration's message that officials from Bush on 
down often use identical anecdotes to make their points, for example 
about Hussein's brutality. But the White House sometimes has been unable 
to provide details or documentation to back up those stories, and some 
human-rights activists have expressed skepticism about them.

One oft-repeated anecdote, for example, concerned an Iraqi woman who 
ostensibly waved at a U.S. military unit. When the unit returned to the 
area, the story goes, it found the woman hanged from a lamppost.

Yet U.S. officials never specified where that happened or gave any 
further details, and they declined to say how they know about it beyond 
citing "intelligence reports."

A second story involved an Iraqi man who, having criticized Hussein's 
regime, was tied to a post in a Baghdad square after his tongue was cut 
out and bled to death. "That's how Saddam Hussein retains power," Bush 
said at Camp David on March 27.

The story was repeated by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy 
Paul Wolfowitz and Pentagon briefers during the next several days. But 
administration officials have declined to say when the incident occurred 
or who saw it.

Although the chilling stories sound familiar to those who have documented 
Hussein's atrocities, the specific anecdotes could not be corroborated by 
Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, journalists in the region or 
U.S. intelligence sources.

Amnesty International spokesman Alistair Hodgett said the severed-tongue 
story resembles an event that occurred two years ago, well before the war 
in Iraq began.

"What we've seen with the use of our information in this campaign, 
particularly by the U.S., is that they certainly will be eager to cite 
from fairly old documents, which obviously are accurate but which are 
loosely cited from to justify what's occurring at the moment," Hodgett 
said.

Sticking by its stories

The White House would say only that the stories match what is known about 
Hussein's cruelty.

"The brutality of the Iraqi regime has been well-known for years and 
documented by human-rights groups and others," said White House spokesman 
Scott McClellan.

Bush's global communications strategy is the brainchild of one of his 
closest advisers, Karen Hughes. It is a strategy born of the Bush team's 
experience in political campaigns and honed during the war in 
Afghanistan, and its chief objective is to respond nearly instantly to 
criticism of the administration or the war anywhere in the Arab world 
throughout the 24-hour-a-day news cycle.

The office, expected to remain in place after the Iraq war ends, handles 
not only daily planning but also longer-term issues. That ability to 
chart a course far ahead of time, and adhere closely to it regardless of 
outside distractions, has been a Bush hallmark.

"That crowd that came out of Texas didn't succeed by worrying only about 
a day at a time or a week at a time," one senior administration official 
said.

The Pentagon put its own public-relations team in place shortly after 
Sept. 11, 2001, when it hired The Rendon Group on a $100,000-a-month 
contract. The State Department launched its campaign to sell American 
ideals overseas when it hired a former Madison Avenue advertising 
executive to run its Office of Public Diplomacy.

Target No. 1: Hussein

When Bush created the Office of Global Communications by executive order 
on Jan. 21, its aim was to coordinate public relations across the 
administration. The office's first report, issued almost immediately, was 
"Apparatus of Lies: Saddam's Disinformation and Propaganda 1990-2003."

The office is headed by Tucker Eskew, a soft-spoken but brass-knuckles 
political operative who ran Bush's South Carolina presidential primary 
campaign.

Every morning at 9:30 Washington time, a conference call with Global 
Communications offices in Qatar and London and other U.S. agencies sets 
the message of the day. The Washington office also issues the "Global 
Messenger," a daily e-mail to U.S. embassies and others outlining the 
administration's message.

On March 24, while the U.S. media were reporting that the invasion had 
fallen behind schedule, the Messenger reported that "news accounts today 
paint a vivid picture of joy and relief inside Iraq. American and 
coalition troops were being welcomed by smiling Iraqis."

The office has taken on myriad production duties too. At the forward 
headquarters of Central Command, Eskew's colleagues primed Gen. Tommy 
Franks, who is overseeing the war, for his first wartime news conference.

When Bush gave his State of the Union address, the office arranged for 
Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz to watch it with about 20 reporters 
from Egypt, China, Russia and elsewhere. Afterward, Wolfowitz did 
individual interviews, providing White House spin to TV markets around 
the world.

The Global Communications Office was created about a year after the 
Pentagon met with disaster with a similar operation. The Pentagon's 
Office of Strategic Influence was accused of planning to spread 
disinformation. The Pentagon denied the accusations but shut it anyway.

Three days after the White House office opened, Eskew went to the Foreign 
Press Center in Washington to introduce himself to foreign reporters and 
to field questions. The first question, from a German reporter, was 
whether he was setting up the "Office of Disinformation" the Pentagon had 
tried to set up.

"Our executive order," Eskew told the reporters, "insists that we deal 
with the truth."


Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune 
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Laura Miller
Associate Editor, PR Watch
Center for Media & Democracy 
520 University Avenue, Suite 310
Madison, WI 53703 
phone: 608-260-9713
fax: 608-260-9714
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