Eric Umansky

President Bush Fibs About 10 'Plots'

And the biggest play that gets is on A6--three weeks later:

A White House list of 10 terrorist plots disrupted by the United States has confused counterterrorism experts and officials, who say they cannot distinguish between the importance of some incidents on the list and others that were left off.

Intelligence officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the White House overstated the gravity of the plots by saying that they had been foiled, when most were far from ready to be executed. Others noted that the nation's color-coded threat index was not raised from yellow, or "elevated" risk of attack, to orange, or "high" risk, for most of the time covered by the incidents on the list....

"We don't know how they came to the conclusions they came to," said one counterterrorism official, who spoke anonymously for fear of angering the White House. "It's safe to say that most of the [intelligence] community doesn't think it's worth very much."

Looks like the CIA v. White House war continues!  Anyway, it's instructive to look at how the major papers covered the president's  speech.  The Post simply, and mindlessly (Miller-like) parroted Bush's assertion: "BUSH SAYS 10 PLOTZ BY AL QAEDA WERE FOILED."

The other major papers  did  question  the president's contentions. The Los Angeles Times in particular did a good job, noting citing "senior law enforcement officials" who "said authorities have not disrupted any operational terrorist plot within the United States." So the paper did the digging, but as is so often the case with the papers, it didn't feel comfortable putting that non-official storyline in the headline.

It's not about adhering to objectivity; it's about deference.   After all , "PRESIDENT ASSERTS 10 'PLOTS' BY AL QAEDA FOILED, INTEL ANALYSTS SKEPTICAL" would have been  an  'objective,' and informative, headline. But instead of that we got,  "BUSH LIKENS WAR ON TERROR TO COLD WAR; Iraq is a staging ground for militants who seek a 'radical Islamic empire,' he warns, and says 10 Al Qaeda plots have been foiled since 9/11."

So today's lesson: The papers are willing to counter the official narrative. It's just they're trigger-shy about making the questioning itself the main story, even if the facts support such an interpretation. So what happens, as in the case of the LAT, is that the official narrative gets the headline--and with it  the  80 percent of readers who just glance at the paper get misled. 

Another Bad Idea?

I'm surprised there's been no talk about this report in Time:

The U.S. Special Operations Command, which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has given the lead role in the global war on terrorism, doesn't just have gun-toting commandos out launching attacks. For the past six months, it has been dispatching two- to four-person teams of psychological warriors to the Pentagon's overseas commands, armed with plans for pro-U.S. advertising campaigns to counter propaganda from enemies, including Islamic extremists. The teams are part of a new unit called the Joint Psyops Support Element (JPSE), nicknamed "gypsy."

I've always been skeptical of the "public diplomacy" thing. I don't have a problem with it in the absract. The question is  exactly we're talking about. Call me naive, but the best ways to promote a positive U.S. image is to exemplify it, no? So a C-SPAN for the Arab world--I'm all for it. An ad campaign cooked up by military psy-op guys? Well, jeez, I dunno.

The risk isn't just that it won't work. But that it will be counter-productive. Ham-fisted advertising makes you look insincere. Remember the winning "Muslims as Apple Pie" series?

Card Trick: Standing by their man

This morning:

Tim Russert:  Is the president the least bit troubled by the ethical allegations being made against Congressman DeLay?

WH Chief of Staff Andy Card: We have not seen anything that would suggest that those allegations have any merit. We do know that the House is taking action to take a look at them to see whether or not they think there's been any violation of the House rules, but I don't know anyone who believes that there is necessarily merit to the allegations that have been put forward.  But the House will take a look at that.  That's a matter for the House to consider.  It's not one for the executive branch.

It's the Bolton strategy. Brazen it out.

The key lines from NYT's propaganda takeout

Here's really all you need to know:

In three separate opinions in the past year, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that studies the federal government and its expenditures, has held that government-made news segments may constitute improper "covert propaganda" even if their origin is made clear to the television stations. The point, the office said, is whether viewers know the origin. Last month, in its most recent finding, the G.A.O. said federal agencies may not produce prepackaged news reports "that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television viewing audience that the agency was the source of those materials."

[...]

On Friday, the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget circulated a memorandum instructing all executive branch agencies to ignore the G.A.O. findings. The memorandum said the G.A.O. failed to distinguish between covert propaganda and "purely informational" news segments made by the government. Such informational segments are legal, the memorandum said, whether or not an agency's role in producing them is disclosed to viewers.

Call me a sucker, but earlier  I had my doubts about how much all this propaganda stuff was really overseen  by the White House itself (as opposed to something more subtle going on, like agency folk simply brown-nosing).  Consider me a true believer, b/c the thing is, the OMB is White House central.