Pentagon mixed propaganda with PR, report finds John Byrne

Published: Friday December 12, 2008





Print This Email This The Pentagon may have mixed propaganda with public relations in an effort to win the "war of ideas" as part of the Iraq war, according to a little-noticed report released Thursday.



An inspector general's report said a whopping $1 million had been used to merge propaganda and PR efforts in 2007 and 2008. The Senate recently stripped out $3 million from the Pentagon budget for a Defense Department "strategic communication" program.



"Without clearly defined strategic communications responsibilities, DoD may appear to merge inappropriately the public affairs and information operations functions," the inspector general said in a report released yesterday nestled in a Washington Post article. Such programs should be the province of the undersecretary of defense for policy, it added.



The Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs "should only perform strategic communications responsibilities related to its public affairs mission," while calling attention to a 2005 Pentagon document, "Public Affairs," which asserted that PR and "information" ops "differ with respect to the audience, scope and intent and must remain separate."



"The inspector general also raised questions about the Office of Public Affairs' use of funds and personnel from the Armed Forces Information Service to carry out its functions without specific authority," veteran intelligence reporter Walter Pincus noted Friday . "AFIS, which was recently renamed Defense Media Activity, runs Pentagon internal communications including Stars and Stripes as well as the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. With a budget of more than $160 million and about 1,200 staff members, it nonetheless comes under the authority, direction and control of the assistant secretary for public affairs, whose authorized staff is only 89, according to the report."



Strikingly, the Washington Post is the only media outlet to have reported on the report, according to an examination of Google News Friday morning.



