The Pentagon may eliminate a new office intended to influence public opinion and policy makers overseas, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Sunday. Proposals from the new agency, the Office of Strategic Influence, have caused an uproar in Congress and elsewhere in the government.
Its director, Brigadier General Simon Worden of the Air Force, has proposed that the office coordinate activities ranging from public press releases to secret "information warfare" in friendly as well as unfriendly countries, military officials said. In the past, such secret operations included the spreading of inaccurate or misleading information.
Rumsfeld on Sunday reiterated comments he made last week after The New York Times reported the office's existence and proposed activities: He said the military would not be permitted to tell lies to promote American policies or views. But he said on Sunday that the disclosures about the office's potential activities may have doomed its credibility.
"The person who's in charge is debating whether it should even exist in its current form, given all the misinformation and adverse publicity that it's received," Rumsfeld said on US television.
Distancing himself from the office, which reports to Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, Rumsfeld said he would leave its fate in the hands of his top lieutenants.
He said he had "never even seen the charter for the office."
But the office's assistant for operations, Thomas Timmes, a former Army colonel and psychological operations officer, said at a recent industry conference that Worden had briefed Rumsfeld on the purpose and goals of the office at least twice, and that Rumsfeld had given his general support.
The office, which has a secret multimillion-dollar budget and a staff of about 15, had started planning its activities and coordinating with the National Security Council, the State Department and other federal agencies.
Top aides to Rumsfeld have confirmed that he supported the broad mission of the Office of Strategic Influence, but they said he had not approved any of the classified proposals that were circulating at lower levels of the Pentagon, the ones that have stirred up heated internal debate.
"We're into the frustrating part of ironing out differences within our family," Timmes told those attending the conference, on Feb. 8 in Arlington, Virginia.
The new office was formed after the Sept. 11 attacks to coordinate disparate information operations geared toward assisting the military overseas. Administration officials, including Rumsfeld, have voiced concern that the US was losing public support overseas for its war on terrorism, particularly in Islamic countries.
"The Afghan people were being told that the food rations we were dropping were poison, and they weren't," Rumsfeld said on US television, adding: "And the Taliban and the al-Qaeda were lying about it, and we needed to find ways to tell these people of Afghanistan that they could eat that food. Millions of these were dropped."
Rumsfeld continued, "There are lots of things that we have to do to direct people where they can get humanitarian assistance. So we need to be in the business of communicating that kind of information. But this department is not in the business of misinforming people."
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