Word: propaganda
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When Afghan President Hamid Karzai's office recently said it was holding peace talks with the Taliban, the Taliban countered with a press release. A spokesman for the militants dismissed Karzai's announcement as a propaganda ploy to suggest a schism within the Taliban's ranks. Not only was that not true, the press release that was subsequently sent to journalists announced the start of the Taliban's spring offensive, dubbed "Operation Victory." It was the latest exchange in a critical second front in the Afghan war - a war of words that U.S. and Kabul government officials privately concede they...
...Taliban has a wide-range of propaganda weapons, spanning high and low technology. Since mid-2005, the militants have maintained a multilingual website that has repeatedly changed service providers to avoid being shut down. On April 9, The Washington Post reported that, for more than a year, a Houston-based firm had unwittingly hosted a site claiming to be the voice of the "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" (the name of Mullah Omar's regime, deposed by the 2001 U.S. invasion) before it was identified as such. It was updated with official messages and battlefield reports that were clearly and incredulous...
...outcry, provincial officials invited a group of bloggers and journalists to investigate the circumstances of Li's death. The unusual exercise in public participation stumbled when jail officials refused to provide critical pieces of evidence, including surveillance tapes of the detention center. The comments of one provincial propaganda official, Wu Hao, who told the Southern Metropolis Daily that "online public opinion ... is best resolved by the laws of the Internet," further heightened suspicion that the investigation was more focused on controlling public opinion than preventing prison deaths. (See pictures of China on the wild side...
Roosevelt was enormously popular (hence the fourth term), and later administrations have tried to associate themselves with his early success. "Jerk out every damn little bill you can," President Lyndon Johnson reportedly commanded his strategist Larry O'Brien in 1965. "Put out that propaganda ... that [we've] done more than they did in Roosevelt's hundred days." Propaganda or not, Johnson actually had a very effective 100-day run: after being sworn in as Kennedy's sudden and unexpected successor, he advanced the passage of the Civil Rights Bill, established the Warren Commission to investigate J.F.K.'s assassination...
...final irony: the torture techniques around which the SERE training was devised were used by Chinese interrogators during the Korean War, not to gather actionable intelligence but to force false confessions from captured U.S. soldiers - confessions that could then be used in anti-American propaganda...