U.S. Will Not Lie to Public, Defense Chief Says

A new Defense Department office created to try to influence public opinion abroad will not lie to the public or plant disinformation in the foreign or U.S. media, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday.

“The Department of Defense, this secretary and the people that work with me tell the American people and the people of the world the truth,” Rumsfeld said in Salt Lake City, where he was attending the Winter Olympics.

Both Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney drew distinctions Tuesday between lying to the public and engaging in tactical deception on the battlefield, which Cheney called a practice that has “historically been important.”

“During the Gulf War, when we spent a great deal of time practicing in a very visible way for amphibious operations,” Cheney said in Fresno, Calif., the Iraqis “tied up five or six divisions defending the beach in Kuwait City when obviously the main thrust of the attack was not going to be over the beach but out to the west.”

Rumsfeld and Cheney commented on the new Office of Strategic Influence as some critics expressed concern over tentative plans to disseminate information, possibly disinformation, to more directly influence foreign public opinion and assist U.S. forces fighting terrorism.

Steven Aftergood, head of the Federation of American Scientists’ project on government secrecy, said that a “pernicious consequence” of plans for secret information operations is that they “call into question the credibility of government officials.”

“The problem with disinformation is it has the potential to corrupt the channels of public discourse,” Aftergood said. “Today, as never before, there is a global media network, and it is no longer possible to plant a story in a particular foreign outlet and have any assurance at all that it will not feed into the global information stream.”

Douglas Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy and the official responsible for overseeing the office, said its mandate is still being formulated.

He said no plan for planting disinformation in the media would be approved.

“Defense Department officials don’t lie to the public,” Feith said. “We are confident that the truth serves our interests in the broadest sense of our national security and specifically in this war.”

He also said the Office of Strategic Influence would not be involved in “covert action.”