Michael Hastings, who wrote the profile of Stanley McChrystal that ended his career, has another shocking story in Rolling Stone:
The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in "psychological operations" to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war, Rolling Stone has learned – and when an officer tried to stop the operation, he was railroaded by military investigators....
The orders came from the command of Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, a three-star general in charge of training Afghan troops – the linchpin of U.S. strategy in the war. Over a four-month period last year, a military cell devoted to what is known as "information operations" at Camp Eggers in Kabul was repeatedly pressured to target visiting senators and other VIPs who met with Caldwell. When the unit resisted the order, arguing that it violated U.S. laws prohibiting the use of propaganda against American citizens, it was subjected to a campaign of retaliation.
Psy-ops – propaganda and psychological techniques to get inside the target's head and influence their emotion and behavior – are supposed to only be used on "hostile foreign groups." It's illegal for the military to use it on a domestic audience.
Who was targeted in the operation? Among others, John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Jack Reed, Al Franken, Carl Levin, Rep. Steve Israel (House Appropriations Committee), Adm. Mike Mullen (Joint Chiefs of Staff), and a variety of think-tank analysts.
[T]he general wanted the IO unit to do the kind of seemingly innocuous work usually delegated to the two dozen members of his public affairs staff: compiling detailed profiles of the VIPs, including their voting records, their likes and dislikes, and their "hot-button issues."...
[W]hat Caldwell was looking for was more than the usual background briefings on senators. According to Holmes, the general wanted the IO team to provide a "deeper analysis of pressure points we could use to leverage the delegation for more funds." The general’s chief of staff also asked Holmes how Caldwell could secretly manipulate the U.S. lawmakers without their knowledge. "How do we get these guys to give us more people?" he demanded. "What do I have to plant inside their heads?"
Caldwell had pushed the envelope when he was the top U.S. spokesperson in Iraq, trying to expand the accepted parameters of how the military could use information operations. He literally tried to rewrite the official rules on how they could be used. (He didn't succeed.)
In Afghanistan, he ordered the IO unit to probe the psychological terrain of visiting dignitaries to figure out how to work on them most effectively:
Holmes was even expected to sit in on Caldwell’s meetings with the senators and take notes, without divulging his background. "Putting your propaganda people in a room with senators doesn’t look good," says John Pike, a leading military analyst. "It doesn’t pass the smell test. Any decent propaganda operator would tell you that."
Instead of being allowed to use his team to assess the effects of U.S. propaganda on the Taliban and the local Afghan population as per their original mission, Lt. Colonel Holmes, the leader of the IO unit, was ordered to concentrate their efforts exclusively on "distinguished visitors" and told that his new instructions were to "take priority over all other duties."
Read the whole thing here: Another Runaway General: Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators