Now, the good news is, that you've mentioned, is I think General Pace, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said and probably upset the Secretary of Defense, that ‘I'm not’ -- I'm sort of paraphrasing him now -- ‘I'm not sure this makes sense when we do this kind of thing.’ Good on him. This is the second or third time that he's stood up to the Secretary of Defense.

The other thing that Rumsfeld said in that piece that you quoted, he sort of, in his mind, he mixed public affairs and psychological operations. “Public affairs” is what the Pentagon tells us. “Psychological operations” is what they tell the enemy. The former chief of staff, General Myers, was very concerned that these were coming together, like it sounded as if Secretary Rumsfeld wanted them to. They have to be separated, or we end up with a situation where the people who are supposed to be making democracy work don't have the truth to deal with, and then we've got real problems.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But there is this other area, not of what, as you say, public relations that they tell us or psychological operations against the enemy, but the public that surrounds, let's say, an insurgent force, and there's been a long history within the United States government of trying to influence public opinion through, quote, "legitimate press." I remember studies written about – in Guatemala, how the C.I.A., in the run-up to the 1954 coup against Arbenz, planted numerous stories in the Guatemalan press to sort of prepare public opinion for it, and most recently the – it was revealed in papers of the COINTELPRO F.B.I. operations in Puerto Rico how the F.B.I. regularly wrote and planted and got editors of legitimate newspapers to plant stories against the independence movement. So, there's been somewhat of a history of our government, unfortunately, resorting to using legitimate press to sort of shape public opinion.

COL. SAM GARDINER: Right, Juan, and you've, you know, you've probably had to mention the C.I.A. in most of those. There is a law which forbids the government to plant false stories in American press. The problem with technology is it's now no longer possible to separate those. So we get false stories that are planted overseas.

But let me just use an example in the early part of the Gulf War. About day one in Gulf II, the Pentagon reported, and it was reported in Doha, that the 51st Division, which was the division that Iraq had defending down there, had surrendered in total. The commander and all the people had surrendered. Now, that was put in, because the military wanted the people of Iraq to believe that the fighting was going very much on our side, and the units were disintegrating. That was not true, and the British ended up fighting this 51st Division in Basra for almost a week afterwards.

It's a good psychological operations technique to say that to the military in Iraq, but with current technologies, that was said to the American people, and it was not true. It was a lie. And that's where the psychological operations and the public affairs have become mixed, and, you know, it's hard to tell, you know, when we're getting the truth and when we're not.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Colonel Sam Gardiner, who is very experienced in whole issue of PsyOps, psychological operations, and Andrew Buncombe of the Independent. Andrew, when the whole operation takes place in Iraq, the planting of these stories, can you tell us about the process, the storyboards, how Iraqi journalists get these stories, the Pentagon writers who write them?

ANDREW BUNCOMBE: Yeah, I can tell you something. I can't tell you everything, the reason being that the Pentagon refuses to reveal its hand in this still. I spent some time trying to obtain examples of the stories that were being printed. That was refused on the basis that this investigation was still ongoing. Perhaps now that it's been concluded, we'll see what they were actually doing. But there were a number of ways. The stories were written by American troops, the Joint Operations Command – sorry, the Joint Psychological Operations Command. I'm sure that the colonel can correct me if I have got that wrong. But there are British troops trained to do this stuff, and they were either paid for or they were provided to editors through go-betweens in Iraq. Very often Iraqi editors didn't require payment. They were happy just to print stuff to fill their pages. In other cases, they were paid up to $1,000 to pay them.

What they also did, however, was that they courted local Iraqi journalists, correspondents, reporters. They established a so-called Baghdad Press Club, something which never previously existed, but a system whereby journalists would be invited to attend a Lincoln Group facility, and they’d be given money or gifts to go back to their offices and say they had these stories.

Now I spoke to some Iraqi newspaper editors who said – who were trying to professionalize the journalism post-Saddam Hussein, and they said there was no way they could compete with this, because in one morning an Iraqi journalist would be receiving from the Lincoln Group a month’s wages. Now, how do you deal with that if you're an editor? How do you say, ‘Well, that's not the sort of thing that we want,’ when, obviously, you can't check out your sources for every story that every reporter brings in and you're relying a lot on trust? And if you're an Iraqi journalist, why would you necessarily think anything wrong was happening, if you didn't know this was being done by the military?

Remember, of course, the U.S. military hid its hand in all of this; it didn't come out and say, ‘This is being done by the U.S. military.’ That's what the Lincoln Group is there for. Indeed, they hid their hand, and you know, let's be honest, if you're being given a month’s salary for a morning's work and you’ve got a family, and given the chaos and violence and madness that is the current situation in Iraq, who would not be tempted to take that money and to run with the story?

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds, but Colonel Sam Gardiner, you referred to a law, the Smith-Mundt Act, that prevents the propaganda – the government from putting it out in this country, but it can be done internationally. Now, with the global media, with the internet, would you venture to speculate, if some of this that they say is directed to the Iraqi population is actually the main point is to have it recycled back into the United States as a PsyOps operation right here at home?

COL. SAM GARDINER: Well, the Secretary of Defense told us he wanted to do that, and he was going to do that, when he started out with the Strategic Influence Group. Now, that still exists, and it has been transferred down to this contracting unit that contracted with the Lincoln Group, which is the Special Operations Command. And they have worldwide responsibilities, and I -- yeah, I think it certainly exists, and it's part of what's been making up the story.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you both for being with us. We certainly will continue to follow these stories, these planted stories. Colonel Sam Gardiner, retired Air Force colonel, taught strategy and military operations at various military colleges here in this country, and Andrew Buncombe, Washington correspondent for the London Independent.

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