and I hear Ghaddafi studied political science at Stanford.
THE US has personally trained just about EVERY SINGLE DICTATOR in the world today.
And you, beardedOldMan have been listening to way too much propaganda.
In case you missed the news: Your government, specifically the Bush administration, has just created a White House office for global propaganda. They are not calling it that, of course. They are calling it the Office of Global Communications. Its purpose: to explain and promote U.S. policies and actions to the rest of the world. Or, as White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said, the new office will put out the word about ``what America is all about and why America does what it does.''
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0813-06.htmThe communications office helps devise and coordinate each day's talking points on the war. Civilian and military personnel, for example, are told to refer to the invasion of Iraq as a "war of liberation." Iraqi paramilitary forces are to be called "death squads."
The effects of that discipline are evident almost daily. When questions arose recently about whether the United States could find Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, U.S. spokesmen and spokeswomen--from the White House to the Pentagon to the Central Command in Qatar--simultaneously insisted that the war was "not about one man."
So controlled is the administration's message that officials from Bush on down often use identical anecdotes to make their points, for example about Hussein's brutality. But the White House sometimes has been unable to provide details or documentation to back up those stories, and some human-rights activists have expressed skepticism about them.
One oft-repeated anecdote, for example, concerned an Iraqi woman who ostensibly waved at a U.S. military unit. When the unit returned to the area, the story goes, it found the woman hanged from a lamppost.
Yet U.S. officials never specified where that happened or gave any further details, and they declined to say how they know about it beyond citing "intelligence reports."
A second story involved an Iraqi man who, having criticized Hussein's regime, was tied to a post in a Baghdad square after his tongue was cut out and bled to death. "That's how Saddam Hussein retains power," Bush said at Camp David on March 27.
The story was repeated by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and Pentagon briefers during the next several days. But administration officials have declined to say when the incident occurred or who saw it.
Although the chilling stories sound familiar to those who have documented Hussein's atrocities, the specific anecdotes could not be corroborated by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, journalists in the region or U.S. intelligence sources.
<snip>
Bush's global communications strategy is the brainchild of one of his closest advisers, Karen Hughes. It is a strategy born of the Bush team's experience in political campaigns and honed during the war in Afghanistan, and its chief objective is to respond nearly instantly to criticism of the administration or the war anywhere in the Arab world throughout the 24-hour-a-day news cycle.
The office, expected to remain in place after the Iraq war ends, handles not only daily planning but also longer-term issues. That ability to chart a course far ahead of time, and adhere closely to it regardless of outside distractions, has been a Bush hallmark.
"That crowd that came out of Texas didn't succeed by worrying only about a day at a time or a week at a time," one senior administration official said.
The Pentagon put its own public-relations team in place shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, when it hired The Rendon Group on a $100,000-a-month contract. The State Department launched its campaign to sell American ideals overseas when it hired a former Madison Avenue advertising executive to run its Office of Public Diplomacy.
Target No. 1: Hussein
When Bush created the Office of Global Communications by executive order on Jan. 21, its aim was to coordinate public relations across the administration. The office's first report, issued almost immediately, was "Apparatus of Lies: Saddam's Disinformation and Propaganda 1990-2003."
The office is headed by Tucker Eskew, a soft-spoken but brass-knuckles political operative who ran Bush's South Carolina presidential primary campaign.
Every morning at 9:30 Washington time, a conference call with Global Communications offices in Qatar and London and other U.S. agencies sets the message of the day. The Washington office also issues the "Global Messenger," a daily e-mail to U.S. embassies and others outlining the administration's message.
On March 24, while the U.S. media were reporting that the invasion had fallen behind schedule, the Messenger reported that "news accounts today paint a vivid picture of joy and relief inside Iraq. American and coalition troops were being welcomed by smiling Iraqis."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-0304070189apr07,1,4382383.story
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