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"In many parts of the world, America's Voice is becoming muted or going silent. . . . As far as I can tell, there is no long range, proactive strategic planning going on - based on solid research and calculated analysis of future political and economic realities."
- Myrna Whitworth,
Former acting director, Voice of America
Speech to Public Diplomacy Council
George Washington University, November 2006
The president and prime minister of Poland are waging aggressive "political warfare" against the Communists, discrediting them by exposing their collaborationist past and crimes on behalf of the Soviet Union.
The unusual team - President Lech Kaczynski and twin brother Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski - is bringing about change like no previous government has been able or willing to do. They want to break the back of the old Communist order once and for all.
The president signed a law to ban former collaborators with the communist secret services from serving as judges or holding senior positions in government-owned enterprises. The prime minister, Bloomberg reports, "is preparing a bill that would make public the names of people who spied for the secret services."
They say - properly - that the house-cleaning is crucial for Poland's full transition to democracy. But critics, who include former Communists and collaborators, predictably complain that the government is leading a "witch hunt" to distract from the country's high unemployment rate.
Destroying the old Communist power base and the Russian-backed intelligence appareatus behind it is vital for Poland to be trusted as a full NATO ally. But it's nothing that other countries like the Czech Republic haven't done already.
A Polish analysts tells Bloomberg, "This is more like waging a political war." '
"These people enjoy material privileges and remain entirely unpunished," Poland's culture minister, who co-authored the draft bill to name names, said in a January radio interview. "This isn't a settling of accounts but a project to implement justice in a free country.''
The president is also writing a bill to demote former military dictator Wojciech Jaruzelski (pictured) from general to private. Archival documents show that Jaruzelski was an agent of Soviet GRU military intelligence. (Click here to view original document.)
This blogger has long argued for such measures in the former Soviet bloc. He co-edited a book, Dismantling Tyranny: Transitioning Beyond Totalitarian Regimes (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), with Ilan Berman, to explore the secret police legacies in former communist countries.
Supporters of President Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq are fighting back on his opponents.
"Jihadists Against the Troop Surge," a spoof front group in New York, ran a poster today depicting the Democrat leadership in Congress as playing into the hands of the terrorists in Iraq.
The poster is the creation of the People's Cube, a political satire website.
Click on the image for a larger view of the poster. Click here for the direct link to the Al-Zawahiri poster and accompanying satirical story.
The People's Cube also ran a mock front page of the New York Daily News, headlined, "CONGRESS TO TROOPS: DROP DEAD."
"Now, with Russian President Vladimir Putin bullying his neighbors, manipulating the Russian media and throwing increasingly audacious anti-American tantrums, one would think US policymakers would have the sense at least to maintain relatively modest VOA operations in and around the Russian Federation," the Washington Post says in today's editorial.
"Yet President Bush's recently released 2008 budget proposal does just the opposite, cutting VOA programming for a range of post-Soviet states to finance programming expansion in other areas of the world."
Among the changes that the Post laments: cutting "the only direct contact Uzbeks have with the United States and the only unvarnished news in the region," and cutting broadcasts to Kazakhstan and Ukraine.
"The price of such programs is so low that federal financial constraints are hardly an excuse to kill them," the editors say.
What could the reason be, then? Might it have something to do with the fact that the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) member responsible for the former Soviet Union, D. Jeffrey Hirschberg, is a director of the pro-Kremlin US-Russia Business Council?
US government broadcasting into Iran is so ineptly managed that its programs "undermine US policy on Iran, often even supporting the propaganda of the Islamic Republic of Iran."
This according to Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma), who released two scathing reports that studied the content of US programming that is intended to promote the American image and discredit the Iranian regime.
The Interagency Iran Steering Group found that Radio Farda, which broadcasts pop music and light news in Persian into Iraq, "rarely takes a stance that could risk antagonizing the Islamic Republic." (Click here for the Iran Steering Group's report.)
Radio Farda re-broadcasts regime propaganda back into Iran
Radio Farda does not use its own sources to collect original news to broadcast into Iran, writes journalist Ken Timmerman, an Iran specialist who also runs the website Iran.org. According to interagency report, "the majority of the news read on Radio Farda is actually from the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), the official news agency of the Iranian regime."
"Residents of Iran do not need to turn to Radio Farda to receive IRNA news. This is probably one reason why Iranians do not turn to Radio Farda as a source of fresh news."
VOA programming is 'arguably worse' than Farda
Things are "arguably worse" at the Voice of America (VOA), according to Timmerman: "VOA's Persian service rarely invites U.S. government officials to debate or even explain U.S. policy. But it has given ample air-time to top Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon, and to anti-American advocates, the report found."
Click here for the rest of Timmerman's article, which appeared February 14 on Newsmax.
Click here for Senator Coburn's letter to President Bush.
Click here for transcript of Radio Farda coverage of Bush's 2007 State of the Union address.
With Shi'ite extremist Moqtada al Sadr fleeing Iraq in fear of the upcoming surge in US troop deployments, the time is now for the American military to run him down.
If we can't drop a JDAM on him as he fears, we can at least take advantage of cultural norms of pride and shame and attack his image. The Big Man of Baghdad is running away.
What a great animation it would be: the fat, scraggly, yellow-toothed fanatic running away from his own people in Iraq and hiding out in Iran. Surely the cultural experts at PSYOP can come up with something fast and rhetorically lethal. We should be airing the recordings of him squabbling with his top aides for good measure. We have a lot of good intercepts of him. Let's use them right now.
It was a red-hot afternoon at the Heritage Foundation on February 12, when four international communication experts from the Institute of World Politics had a panel discussion on the "war of ideas."
The subject matter: Professor Juliana Pilon's newest book, Why America Is Such a Hard Sell (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).
Dr. Lee Edwards, who is both a fellow at Heritage and an Adjunct Professor at IWP, was the moderator. The other two IWP professors were Dr. J. Michael Waller, Annenberg Professor of International Communication at IWP and editor of PoliticalWarfare.org; and Associate Professor John Yurechko, an information operations pioneer who is currently director of analysis and collection at the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (ONCIX).
To watch the video of the event, click here. Or click for Streaming MP3, Save MP3, or Details.
Former Voice of America Director Robert Reilly lays into the mindless pop culture strategy of the US Broadcasting Board of Governors which runs US-sponsored radio, TV and Internet programming abroad. His provocative and challenging piece appears in the February 9, 2007 Washington Post. An excerpt follows:
"In the spring of 2003, across a field of rubble in Baghdad, a young Iraqi journalist accosted me and demanded: 'Why did you stop broadcasting substance and substitute music?' The year before the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the government entity in charge of radio broadcasting, had shut down the Voice of America's Arabic service, and it ended most of its Farsi service in 2003. Voice of America had been broadcasting features, discussions of issues and editorials reflecting U.S. policies. But now it filled 50 minutes of each hour on Arabic-language Radio Sawa and most of the time on Persian-language Radio Farda with Eminem, J. Lo and Britney Spears.
"This change in format provoked other angry questions: Are Americans playing music because they are afraid to tell the truth? Do they not have a truth to tell? Or do they not consider us worth telling the truth to?
"We did not fight communism with pop music. In fact, during the Cold War, America used its government media institutions to broadcast its ideas and beliefs. So why are we not refashioning those successful broadcast strategies and trying to spread our ideas in the Muslim world, the breeding ground of much of the world's terrorist threats?" [For the full text, click here.]
The Voice of America (VOA) has shut down its broadcasting to Russia.
The decision was made by the US Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) with the endorsement of Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes.
Rather than fight for more funding to expand US broadcasting, Hughes (pictured) has gone along with the BBG's plans to cannibalize existing programming and transfer the resources to new high-priority areas such as the Middle East. Kommersant carries the report from Moscow.
Following the lead of Clinton appointees on the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the Bush Administration has decided not to ask Congress for needed funds to continue important international broadcasts around the world.
According to the new 2008 budget proposal, the administration - with the support of Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes - wants to terminate Voice of America broadcasts in Cantonese, Croatian, Georgian, Greek, Thai and Uzbek.
Hughes also plans to axe radio broadcasting to the volatile former Yugoslavia in Albanian, Bosnian, Macedonian and Serbian, and to do the same in apparently unimportant languages like Hindi and Russian.
Source: Bangkok Post.
