[ALBSA-Info] NYTimes.com Article: Bush Will Keep Wartime Office Promoting U.S.

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The Ministry of Truth and The Ministry of Peace finally merge into Mini-truth-Max-pax in order to deliver the world from ignorance and at the same time make the world safer (for ourselves), i.e., bring peace in the world.

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Bush Will Keep Wartime Office Promoting U.S.

February 20, 2002 

By ELIZABETH BECKER and JAMES DAO


 

WASHINGTON, Feb. 19 - President Bush has decided to
transform the administration's temporary wartime
communications effort into a permanent office of global
diplomacy to spread a positive image of the United States
around the world and combat anti-Americanism, senior
administration officials said today. 

"The president believes it is a critical part of national
security to communicate U.S. foreign policy to a global
audience in times of peace as well as war," said Dan
Bartlett, the White House communications director. 

While discussions are at a preliminary stage, officials
said there was general agreement in the administration that
the intense shaping of information and coordination of
messages that occurred during the fighting in Afghanistan
should become a permanent feature of national security
policy. 

The White House office to be created to carry out the
policy will coordinate the public statements of State,
Defense and the other departments like the Voice of America
to ensure that foreign correspondents in Washington as well
as foreign leaders and opinion-makers overseas understand
Mr. Bush's policies. 

"What is important is we want to do a better job of using
the government seamlessly to give direction to the
president's global diplomacy," a senior administration
official said. 

Officials said the new office would be entirely separate
from a proposed Office of Strategic Influence at the
Pentagon, which would use the media, the Internet and a
range of covert operations to try to influence public
opinion and government policy abroad, including in friendly
nations. 

That office is contemplating plans, which are being
reviewed by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, to
disseminate information, and possibly even disinformation,
in foreign media as part of an aggressive campaign by the
military to promote American policies overseas. 

Today, the president of the Radio- Television News
Directors Association, Barbara Cochran, wrote a letter to
Mr. Rumsfeld objecting to any plans involving the spread of
false or misleading information by the Pentagon. 

Like the office of Homeland Security, the efforts to
centralize public diplomacy following the Sept. 11 attacks
have grown in importance and urgency in the last six
months. 

So far, the new White House office has no name, no director
and no budget, though officials say Mr. Bush has said money
will be no obstacle in pursuing the effort. The earlier
White House push to create a more positive image of the
United States after Sept. 11 was led by Karen P. Hughes,
senior adviser to the president and is known as the
Coalition Information Center. 

The major goal, officials said, is to stem what the White
House sees as a rising tide of anti-Americanism. 

"A lot of the world does not like America, and it's going
to take years to change their hearts and minds," said a
senior official involved in the discussions. 

The president broached the possibility of a permanent
mission in a meeting with the top people who speak for the
administration in September. "He told us that we were going
to be at this for a long, long time," one participant said,
"that we were setting a template for future presidents,
that we had to think big, strategic, historic thoughts." 

Global diplomacy as envisioned in the new office will
inject patriotism into the punishing 24-hour, seven-day
news cycle, officials said. It will include information
campaigns about Mr. Bush's domestic policy - like education
bills - as well as traditional information about the
military, diplomatic and economic sides of national
security policy, officials said. 

Rather than create agencies, the new office would take
advantage of the huge communications network of American
embassies, their media offices and the broadcast network
already in place under the State Department. 

Charlotte Beers, a former advertising executive now in
charge of public diplomacy at the State Department, has
used her marketing skills in an attempt to make American
policies as familiar as American culture. 

Officials involved in the global communications effort said
it required clear direction from the White House to break
down the bureaucratic walls built up around the government
after the cold war ended and the focus on defeating a
clear-cut enemy disappeared. 

Foreign journalists say they have given up getting
meaningful interviews from American officials here. Only
the most senior ambassadors from allied countries meet
regularly with government policy makers. 

"There was often the feeling that we were either taken for
granted or considered irrelevant," said Patrice de Beer,
the former Washington correspondent for Le Monde, the
French daily. "We don't expect anyone to deliver state
secrets to us but to be accessible to explain what the
policy was. That's all." 

In the earlier White House effort, Ms. Hughes joined forces
with her British counterpart to put together the Coalition
Information Center, known as the war room. 

When Washington decided to highlight the Taliban's policy
against women's rights, officials enlisted not only First
Lady Laura Bush but Cherie Blair, the wife of the British
prime minister. 

"The Afghanistan women's campaign was the best thing we've
done - giving insight into their vision of the future,"
said Jim Wilkinson, the head of the Coalition Information
Center.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/20/international/20INFO.html?ex=1015197345&ei=1&en=aeacced076fc6345



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