PoliticalWarfare.org

US should investigate Congressman McGovern's FARC ties

Has the FARC used a US Congressman as a channel to influence Washington's policy toward Colombia? If so, how? Was the congressman an innocent in all this, or was there something more nefarious? These are important questions that the House Ethics Committee and Justice Department should investigate.

At issue is Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), the main figure in Congress behind trying to cut off vital support for Colombia's military, and stopping a free trade arrangement that would help the country's economy. The Wall Street Journal has alleged that McGovern is a FARC sympathizer. McGovern has a long record of sympathy for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and other leftist revolutionaries.

Colombian Senator Piedad Cordoba, pictured with McGovern and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is already under criminal investigation in her country for collaborating with the FARC.

Information contained in the laptop computer of the FARC's then-#2 commander, Raul Reyes, suggests McGovern may have gone over the line in building a liaison with the terrorist organization, and that the FARC may have had a plan to advance its interests through other members of McGovern's political party. The Colombian military killed Reyes and captured his computer on March 1. The Colombian Supreme Court says data from that computer, including 900 emails, are grounds for investigating Cordoba. McGovern says his actions were simply part of an innocent effort to help free FARC hostages.

Cordoba appears in the Reyes computer documents as advising FARC not to release hostage Ingrid Betancourt, the senator and former Colombian presidential candidate who was rescued last week. Cordoba wanted to use the hostage releases not as ends in themselves, but as means of improving the image of Hugo Chavez, according to the documents. In an October 27, 2007 email to Reyes, Cordoba called Chavez "my commander." (Click here for the original report, in Spanish, appearing in Colombia's Semana magazine.)

The FARC leader with the nom de guerre Cesar who led the unit holding Betancourt told Reyes in a December 11, 2007 email that Cordoba had urged the FARC to keep Betancourt as a hostage. The Colombian military captured Cesar when it rescued Betancourt and the others last week.

Cordoba, a leftist well known for her FARC ties, was briefly an official Colombian interlocutor last year to negotiate a FARC hostage release under an arrangement with Chavez. US immigration officers held Cordoba for more than two hours at New York's JFK airport last month, despite the fact that she had a diplomatic passport. (She is shown in the photo conversing with FARC Commander Reyes.)

McGovern is a top congressional opponent of the US-Colombia free trade agreement, and helped persuade Speaker Pelosi to sink the pact last April. McGovern has also tried to cut the US military aid to Colombia that has been decisive in taking down the FARC. These points are important, because nearly everything McGovern has done concerning Colombia has undermined that country's progress against, and arguably aided, the narcoterrorist group. The question is, has McGovern been malicious in intent, or just misguided? More importantly, did a foreign terrorist group use a US congressman as an agent or asset to influence and change US foreign and defense policy?

Anyone who has watched Jim McGovern as I have over the past 20-plus years, back to when he was a congressional staffer helping the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Cuban-backed guerrillas in El Salvador, knows that he has a soft spot, to put it politely, for the Latino extreme Left. The proposal of a McGovern-FARC go-between - an international negotiations setup involving US Members of Congress and pitting them against the Colombian and US governments - is a carbon copy of the same tactics McGovern promoted to save the Sandinistas and El Salvador's FMLN guerrillas from total defeat in the 1980s. That proposal appeared in the captured Reyes computer.

Nothing in the record suggests that McGovern ever publicly criticized the FMLN for killing American military personnel, or tried to use his influence to get the FMLN to stop killing American servicemen back when he had influence with the guerrilla group. McGovern denies he is a FARC sympathizer. He has gone on record of late criticizing the FARC for its brutality - but then, so have Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.

The Wall Street Journal commented on McGovern's FARC flirtation last March, when the contents of Reyes' computer became public. Journal editors ascribe McGovern's opposition to a free trade deal with Colombia to his sympathies toward the other side: "We think the documents reveal something else entirely: Some Democrats oppose the Colombia trade deal because they sympathize more with FARC's terrorists than with a US antiterror ally."

Is Congressman McGovern a witting collaborator or an unwitting dupe? What does he have to say about Senator Cordoba? He should come clean right away - and he should justify how his attempts to cut off the Colombian military would have succeeded in taking down the hemisphere's most notorious terrorist group. The House Ethics Committee should launch a probe immediately. So should the Justice Department. Wittingly or unwittingly, Members of Congress should not be agents of influence for foreign terrorists and regimes.

(Click here for Senator Cordoba's webpage containing Congressman McGovern's letter criticizing the Colombian government for breaking off the "Chavez initiative" to negotiate with the FARC. Another page on Cordoba's website contains a quote by McGovern: "I am very disappointed by the termination of the Chavez facilitation initiative." http://www.piedadcordoba.net/indexprincipal.html. A link to the full text is dead.)

Brilliant results: Chavez proves we can goad our adversaries into doing our work for us

All it took was to expose raw battlefield intelligence and let the facts speak for themselves. The release of the contents of captured FARC computers has forced Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez on the defensive and deliver an astonishing propaganda blow to the narcoguerrillas whom he has been backing.

The sweet results came in yesterday, when Chavez unexpectedly caved under international pressure and publicly gave the FARC a propagandistic heave-ho. Here's the point: Hugo Chavez can be pressured to sell out his friends! His comments are an enormous psychological blow to the 44 year-old guerrilla movement, which through various means has lost several of its top leaders recently.

In an information operation that cost practically nothing, Colombia and its US ally has goaded Hugo Chavez has run a crippling PSYOP against the FARC that we could never do on our own. All we (or most probably, the Colombians who aren't as reticent as we are to release intelligence to fight a good international political warfare battle) had to do was quickly declassify the material and set it out for the world to see. The rest was up to international public opinion, including some great diplomatic work, to set up Chavez to deliver the message that we and the Colombians could not.

Chavez is not a brilliant strategist. To the contrary. It's easy to set him up. He's an egomaniac and a bigmouth. He's a tactician. He can be outmaneuvered. And so it was proven in this case. This is an important lesson for the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

Here's the astonishing story, as reported from Medellin on June 10 by London's Daily Telegraph:

The Venezuelan president said the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia [FARC] were "history", and called on them to release their hostages and end a decades-long war with the government.

"Enough of so much war, it is time to sit down and talk of peace," he said. "The guerrilla has passed into history.

"You in the FARC should know something: You have become an excuse for the empire to threaten all of us," he said, referring to the United States. "The day that peace arrives in Colombia, the empire will have no excuses."

He directly addressed the organisation's leader, Alfonso Cano, to tell him to release their hostages "in exchange for nothing".

The comments were a complete change of tack for Mr Chavez, who earlier this year asked the European Union to take the FARC off its list of terrorist organisations and recognise it as a legitimate guerrilla army. . . .

What might have prompted the change in heart are the contents of computers seized from guerrilla camp bombed in March by the Colombian air force in Ecuador.

Colombia troops violated Ecuadorean sovereignty to carry out the bombing raid, but killed the FARCs top commander, "Raul Reyes", and seized his corpse and three computers.

They allegedly contain proof that Mr Chavez gave the FARC $300 million and was exploring the possibilities of supplying them with weapons.

Hawks in Washington have already called for Venezuela to be added to the list of nations that sponsor terrorism, on which Mr Chavez's close allies Cuba and Iran lurk. . . . Officially accusing Mr Chavez of supporting the FARC could involve applying economic sanctions, including a ban on dealing with Venezuelan companies, as is the case with Cuba. . . .

Mr Chavez comments are just the latest in a series of setback that have the FARC reeling and put them in their most vulnerable position in 44 years of fighting. 

Chavez further validates this blogger's long-held view that the US and its allies release as much raw battlefield intelligence as possible to the public, in order to expose their enemies, turn the propaganda tide, and put the bad guys on the defensive. As much for the Islamist enemy as for the FARC and others. I argued this last year in Fighting the War of Ideas like a Real War.

Such an information warfare tactic helps the good guys win while saving lives and shortening the conflict.

Only a fool would think that Chavez will actually cut off the FARC completely. For now, that's almost beside the point; we must assume he will continue and we must continue to expose him. What our side must do now, though, is to pocket a pivotal political victory and drive that psychological stake through the hearts of the FARC and its ideological supporters around the world: Hugo Chavez has abandoned them, sold them out, and called them a threat to the progressive movement. The FARC is shaken. It's time to break the organization's will to fight, and then break its will to become a political force.

New torch and logo designs for Beijing Olympics

Our friends at the People's Cube have come up with new designs for the torch and logo of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

Marking the continued persecution of Tibet, the spirited comrades at the Cube incorporate the horrific self-immolation of a Buddhist monk with the Olympic torch. They redesigned the official logo, which already incorporates a flame motif, with a fire exit sign.

As a bonus, they created a PRC "Official List of Easy People to Beat Up."

(Note: Click on the image for a popup that provides a clearer view.)

A sound psychological warfare effort emerges

The New York Times is reporting on a new military effort to exploit the enemy's ideological and cultural weaknesses in a new mode of attack.

This is an exciting development, because it shows adaptation of a much more sophisticated approach that a handful of psychological warfare experts have been promoting for years. The very report in the Times is almost a psychological operation in itself, revealing what is almost surely a tiny effort and magnifying it into something big - and playing on the paranoia inherent in ideological extremist movements.

While I don't claim credit for any of the developments, as others were working on them apart from my efforts, it's striking to see how the details in the March 18 New York Times article closely parallel the policy recommendations in my book, Fighting the War of Ideas like a Real War, and in the early drafts which circulated through the Pentagon and CIA since 2004. The ideas in the Institute of World Politics-sponsored book aren't new: They date from the times of the ancient Hebrews, Aristotle and Sun Tzu, and as the Times says, were practiced during the Cold War. But they're new to the war effort.

Here are some of the points in the article that the book advocated. The quotes are taken from the March 18 NYT story. The numbers in parentheses are the corresponding pages in the book.

• Sow confusion, dissent and distrust among the enemy. "To counter efforts by terrorists to plot attacks, raise money and recruit new members on the Internet, the government has mounted a secret campaign to plant bogus e-mail messages and Web site postings, with the intent to sow confusion, dissent and distrust among militant organizations, officials confirm." (65, 74, 130-131)
• Amplify voices of certain Islamic authorities. "At the same time, American diplomats are quietly working behind the scenes with Middle Eastern partners to amplify the speeches and writings of prominent Islamic clerics who are renouncing terrorist violence." (70-73, 122, 139)
• Plant seeds of doubt in terrorists' minds to exploit cultural shame and religious beliefs. ". . . if the seeds of doubt can be planted in the mind of Al Qaeda’s strategic leadership that an attack would be viewed as a shameful murder of innocents — or, even more effectively, that it would be an embarrassing failure — then the order may not be given, according to this new analysis." (123, 132)
• Fight the terrorists in their battlespace: Online. "Terrorists hold little or no terrain, except on the Web. 'Al Qaeda and other terrorists’ center of gravity lies in the information domain, and it is there that we must engage it,' said Dell L. Dailey, the State Department’s counterterrorism chief." (30-31, 144)
• Establish combat teams to exploit terrorist computers for propaganda purposes. "Some of the government’s most secretive counterterrorism efforts involve disrupting terrorists’ cyberoperations. In Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, specially trained teams have recovered computer hard drives used by terrorists and are turning the terrorists’ tools against them." (122)
• Make better use of captured intelligence to humiliate and demoralize the enemy. "Other American efforts are aimed at discrediting Qaeda operations, including the decision to release seized videotapes showing members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a largely Iraqi group with some foreign leaders, training children to kidnap and kill, as well as a lengthy letter said to have been written by another terrorist leader that describes the organization as weak and plagued by poor morale."
• Exploit local cultures and rhetoric against the enemy. "Even as security and intelligence forces seek to disrupt terrorist operations, counterterrorism specialists are examining ways to dissuade insurgents from even considering an attack with unconventional weapons. They are looking at aspects of the militants’ culture, families or religion, to undermine the rhetoric of terrorist leaders." (38-75)
• Amplify local voices to sow doubts and break the enemy's will. "For example, the government is seeking ways to amplify the voices of respected religious leaders who warn that suicide bombers will not enjoy the heavenly delights promised by terrorist literature, and that their families will be dishonored by such attacks. Those efforts are aimed at undermining a terrorist’s will. "'I’ve got to figure out what does dissuade you,' said Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, the Joint Chiefs’ director of strategic plans and policy. 'What is your center of gravity that we can go at? The goal you set won’t be achieved, or you will be discredited and lose face with the rest of the Muslim world or radical extremism that you signed up for.'" (32-34, 138-144)
• Widen rifts between terrorists and their friends. "Efforts are also under way to persuade Muslims not to support terrorists. It is a delicate campaign that American officials are trying to promote and amplify — but without leaving telltale American fingerprints that could undermine the effort in the Muslim world. Senior Bush administration officials point to several promising developments. Saudi Arabia’s top cleric, Grand Mufti Sheik Abdul Aziz al-Asheik, gave a speech last October warning Saudis not to join unauthorized jihadist activities, a statement directed mainly at those considering going to Iraq to fight the American-led forces. And Abdul-Aziz el-Sherif, a top leader of the armed Egyptian movement Islamic Jihad and a longtime associate of Mr. Zawahri, the second-ranking Qaeda official, has just completed a book that renounces violent jihad on legal and religious grounds. Such dissents are serving to widen rifts between Qaeda leaders and some former loyal backers, Western and Middle Eastern diplomats say." (123)
• Peel away at the concentric rings of support around the terrorists. "'Obviously, hard-core terrorists will be the hardest to deter,' [Pentagon special operations policy planner Michael G.] Vickers said. 'But if we can deter the support network — recruiters, financial supporters, local security providers and states who provide sanctuary — then we can start achieving a deterrent effect on the whole terrorist network and constrain terrorists’ ability to operate." (34-35, 76, 120-123)

Footnote: This is a very productive piece of journalism. I would be remiss in not pointing out that one of the co-writers, Eric Schmitt, was also a co-writer of the February 19, 2002 New York Times report that falsely branded the Pentagon's new Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) as a disinformation unit. That careless report was the product of a turf battle in which Pentagon spokeswoman Torie Clarke leaked the false story to the Times with the intent of inflicting political damage on OSI and forcing it to be shut down. This is indeed what happened. Clarke has never been held accountable for this action (nor has Schmitt or the New York Times), which set back psychological and ideological warfare operations by three years or more.

New twist: Lawyers for terrorists sue Blackwater

When Blackwater CEO Erik Prince said that the Center for Constitutional Rights lawsuit against his company is "politically motivated," he was right.

The Center for Constitutional Rights heralds itself as a civil or human rights group, but over the past four decades it has established a firm track record of providing legal assistance, propaganda support, and direct action for terrorists and political extremists who murdered FBI agents and police officers. Its leader is a William Kunstler protege named Michael Ratner (pictured).

Another lawyer in the suit is representing an organization that the US Treasury Department has designated as a fundraising operation for al Qaeda.

I wrote about the terrorist lawyer connection in the October 17 New York Post. The op-ed, titled "Lawyers for Terror," is available here.

The suit is said to be on behalf of ordinary Iraqis whom Blackwater security guards allegedly wounded or killed in the September 16 shootout in Baghdad. The question is, of the million-plus lawyers in the United States, how and why did ordinary Iraqis align themselves with American lawyers who support terrorists? 

Will Bush administration cave in to Iraqi corruption?

The whole world is watching how the Bush Administration will respond to the crooked Iraqi Interior Ministry's demand that the State Department fire the security company that has so effectively protected American diplomats, personnel and VIPs.

If the US government pulls Blackwater USA's contract to provide security in Iraq, it will be sending the following messages:

1. Extortion pays: If American security companies want to keep working for the US government in Iraq, they must pay bribes in the form of spurious "license fees" to the corrupt Iraqi Interior Ministry. (Blackwater, we are told, refused to pay such bribes.)

2. Terrorism pays: The US will reward terrorists - like Spain did after the Madrid bombings - by caving into demands that it change its policies in Iraq. If terrorists can goad Washington into removing its effective forces from the field, the terrorists win.

3. Political warfare pays: Foreign crooks and terrorists need only turn up the political heat on Washington to remove effective elements of the war effort from the fight.

4. The truth is worthless: Whether or not the Blackwater guards acted properly - initial US government reports say they did - means nothing. Cutting some kind of deal to appease inept Iraqi leaders is more important than establishing the facts.

5. Saving American lives doesn't pay: The administration will appear to be saying that US security companies might be better off financially if they protect their clients less aggressively and lose a few State Department officials once in a while.

6. When the chips are down, President Bush won't stand behind the Americans who risk all to protect his diplomats from terrorists in Iraq.

Stay the course, Mr. President. Ride this one out. Tell Prime Minister Maliki that his own Interior Ministry is a bigger threat to the Iraqi people than any American company could ever be. (Download iraq_interior_ministry_report.pdf .) The sooner he builds an honest, effective and service-minded army and security force, the sooner we Americans can leave. Until then, Blackwater and the others stay.

Pointed critique proposes solutions for Iraq IO failure

In a blunt but productive critique of Coalition information operations (IO) in Iraq, an IO practitioner offers a way out of the mess.

Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) Senior Fellow Andrew Garfield writes in the Middle East Quarterly that US-led efforts to communicate with Iraqis have been unimaginative, disorganized, largely irrelevant to the target audiences, slow to anticipate or respond, and often wasteful of funds and resources. The bottom line, he argues, is that current IO strategy is not supporting the warfighters in Iraq. The enemy is running IO circles around us.

My read on Garfield's article is that our IO policy is getting our guys needlessly killed.

The "insurgents," Garfield says, have mastered various forms of political and cultural communication, from high-profile images and videos of their attacks to the simple stuff like grafitti, art, poetry, songs, leafletting, publishing and multimedia productions.

While US-led forces should reign supreme in all those areas - and monitor the enemy's visual imprint to diminish its psychological presence - the effort fumbles. "The slow speed of the U.S. military's clearance process—typically it takes three to five days to approve even a simple information operations product such as a leaflet or billboard—creates an information vacuum that Iraqis fill with conspiracy theories and gossip often reflecting the exaggerations or outright lies of insurgents and extremists," Garfield says.

The insurgents, terrorists and militiamen are adept at exploiting TV cameras to project their message globally, while "US authorities handicap themselves. US military lawyers fear 'blowback' to US domestic audiences, which they interpret as a violation of the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which prohibited domestic distribution of propaganda meant for foreign audiences. As a result, US commanders forbid coalition authorities to openly engage on the Internet. The decision has ceded this key tool to the Iraqi insurgents," he adds.

Indeed, the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 pertains only to the State Department. Congress narrowly defined the law to pertain exclusively to State and to what became the US Information Agency, which has since been absorbed into the State Department. Military lawyers and PAOs who invoke Smith-Mundt to limit Defense Department information ops are flat wrong. This blog published an alert about Smith-Mundt last May.

Garfield identifies wastefulness in US-funded information operations: "While the coalition has spent a hundred million dollars on advertising in Iraq, the strategy of re-awarding huge contracts to advertising firms who spend tens of millions of dollars on nationally-broadcast radio and television commercials but who cannot demonstrate effective audience penetration is questionable. Local Iraqi firms have designed the most effective commercials at a relatively low cost. For example, one commercial showing the impact of an improvised explosive device on an Iraqi family cost only $15,000 to make. However, most coalition advertisements, perhaps one hundred times more costly, lack resonance and relevance among ordinary Iraqis, even as they saturate the airwaves."

Some US-funded ads, he says, have done more harm than good. Lack of IO coordination is another problem: "There is an interagency process meant to coordinate the coalition's information campaign but, in reality, this becomes a forum for information sharing rather than a mechanism for command and control."

Garfield calls for "a single command authority" to "guide and supervise all information and psychological operations and public affairs staff," rather than have the current competing structure with many chiefs and little grand strategy.

A slow message approval process has killed excellent initiatives. Senior officials, Garfield writes, "take days if not weeks to clear information operations products, even excellent products developed by Iraqis for their own ethnic groups." Approval of an advertisement for a newspaper in an Iraqi city like Fargo, North Dakota, requires passing through a colon of staffers, lawyers and senior officers up to the three-star level. Garfield proposes a quick approval process modeled after that of private news organizations.

Garfield provides a mother lode of observations and ideas to fix the current chronic IO problem in Iraq. Everyone in the IO community should read and debate it. To read the article, click here.

US Naval Institute Proceedings gives thumbs-up to war of ideas book

Proceedings, the magazine of the United States Naval Institute, runs a favorable review of my book, Fighting the War of Ideas like a Real War.

In the August 2007 issue, Lt. Dan Reiher, USN, says that the book "clearly demonstrates that the new thrust in the war of ideas does not have to originate in US government releases."

The Navy reviewer concludes, "By focusing primarily on the offensive aspects of strategic communication, the author has made a worthwhile contribution to what must be a key component of U.S. strategy in the terrorism war. For those who find themselves in a position to affect U.S. communication efforts, or to influence our image among allies and adversaries, this book should be placed at the top of their must-read list."

Proceedings does not publish the book reviews in its current online editions, but the attached document contains a copy of the review: Download proceedings_review_aug_07.pdf

Sophisticated online movie poster campaign proliferates on Islamist websites

Supporters of the insurgency in Iraq show a native fluency in American popular culture in a chilling new online propaganda campaign aimed at undermining American troops.

In an exclusive July 9 report, Sky News exhibits 14 Hollywood-style movie posters, most based on horror or action movies, satirizing the American military. The posters feature images of American troops and war casualties. The artistic quality of the posters exceeds most of the extremist propaganda aimed at Iraqi or other Muslim audiences.

While the origin of the posters at this time is uncertain, Sky News reports that the images are proliferating on extreme Islamist websites and attributes them to the insurgents. To show the type of propaganda the US is up against, we reproduce some of those posters at left and below. The full selection is available here.

The US has mounted no comparable effort, though this blogger has long advocated the widescale use of satire as a weapon in his new book, Fighting the War of Ideas like a Real War.

Let's see how long it takes before more "mainstream" American and British opponents of the war start using these posters for their own political purposes.

Why advocates of Islamic law in US should be considered subversive

Advocates of instituting Islamic Sharia law in the United States are not protected by the Constitution's freedom of religion provisions.

Sharia law, in which a civil constitution is abolished and replaced by arbitrary interpretations of the Koran, is coercive political warfare. Advocacy of Sharia law by definition means advocacy of the overthrow of the Constitution - a political position, not a religious one. Due to Sharia's usually coercive nature, taking action to advocate the imposition of Sharia law in the US is therefore a crime in this country.

Such activity - even if expressed as verbally, with no direct political action - is a felony under the "treason" chapter of the US Criminal Code (Title 18, Part I, Chapter 115, Section 2385).

According to Section 2385, "Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; or

"Whoever, with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or attempts to do so; or

"Whoever organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof—

"Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.

"If two or more persons conspire to commit any offense named in this section, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.

"As used in this section, the terms 'organizes' and 'organize', with respect to any society, group, or assembly of persons, include the recruiting of new members, the forming of new units, and the regrouping or expansion of existing clubs, classes, and other units of such society, group, or assembly of persons."  [Emphasis added]

It's time to start enforcing the law.