Gannett News Service October 24, 2001
Pentagon: Taliban practicing old war game of deceive and deny
By Carl Weiser
WASHINGTON -- This story may be a lie. Or, at least, disinformation.
In Afghanistan, as in every armed conflict since, well, the Trojan War, confusing the enemy and the public about the truth is standard practice. Pentagon officials call it "Denial and Deception," or just "D & D."
The Taliban, Pentagon officials say, are using denial and deception quite effectively: bringing the media to spots that may have been bombed in previous decades of war; claiming to have shot down a U.S. helicopter when some parts had fallen off after it hit some kind of obstacle; offering up, the Pentagon insists, grossly bloated claims of civilian casualties.
"That Taliban are doing very rudimentary efforts to fabricate evidence and to exaggerate claims and to exploit U.S. mistakes in the bombing campaign for propaganda purposes," said Tim Brown, a senior associate at Globalsecurity.org, a defense think tank.
But the efforts have been somewhat effective because the Pentagon has been slow to rebut the charges; spokespeople there instinctively offer no comments or "we're not aware of that."
Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke insisted that the Pentagon is trying to respond in "as timely a fashion as possible," but that is often too late for the instant news cycles in an age of Al Jazeera.
"Most of the information that has come out from the Taliban, I daresay just about everything we've heard for the last few weeks, has been wrong and outright lies," Clarke said Wednesday. "And they regularly throw out numbers about casualties, most of which are completely outrageous."
Pentagon officials urged the media and public Wednesday to look for tell-tale signs of fakery -- walls that have fallen in one straight line rather than in circular pattern that would be the result of a bomb; destruction without any bomb crater; refusal to let reporters freely interview witnesses.
The mind games between the Taliban and the Pentagon have escalated to where Pentagon officials are pre-emptively rebutting alleged Taliban lies before they even are uttered.
On Wednesday, Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem told reporters that the Taliban might be preparing to poison humanitarian food supplies, and then blame the United States.
Last week, Rear Adm. Craig Quigley suggested that the Taliban even might plan to blow up a mosque and blame the United States. Pentagon officials displayed a photo Wednesday of a Taliban helicopter that had been placed near a mosque, either to protect it or lure U.S. bombs.
Denial and deception can include simple things like setting up decoys, hiding leaders, dressing up several soldiers to look like Osama bin Laden, or, increasingly, more complicated stunts designed to woo public opinion.
During the war in Kosovo, Serbs set up bogus wooden tanks to lure U.S. bombers. They deposited a bloody doll at spots where stray U.S. bombs allegedly hit civilians, but Pentagon officials said the same bloody doll kept popping up in photos taken in different spots around the country.
In Iraq during the Persian Gulf War, Pentagon officials said, the Iraqi government set up signs reading "Baby Milk Plant" -- in English -- outside a factory the United States said really was a biological weapons factory.
The United States, of course, also engages in denial and deception, though officials have insisted that they would not lie to the media.
Brown, for example, questioned Pentagon-released videotape of planes being destroyed.
Perhaps that really was the Taliban air force, he said. But considering that the planes were parked nose-first into a berm -- hardly in a position to take off -- and appeared to be obsolete Korean War-era Russian planes, they might simply have been abandoned junkers. But it made good video.
"Both sides," Brown said, "are making attempts to shape the message."
Copyright 2001 Gannett Company, Inc.
