The Word at War

These media-related tactics aren't limited to wartime. Remember those columnists paid to write in support of Bush administration education and marriage initiatives? And the dissemination of fake TV news stories to promote the administration's prescription drug plan? "The Daily Show" dubbed these techniques "infoganda."

But none of this is new -- especially not in war. The effort to sway, influence, deceive and propagandize is as old as combat.Back in the 4th century B.C., Alexander the Great ordered his troops to craft huge breastplates of armor that they left behind to trick the enemy into thinking Alexander had giants in his army.

During World War I, the U.S. government's Office of Public Information dispatched thousands of "four-minute men" in cities and towns across the country to make boisterous and emotional pro-war appeals.

During World War II, there was the Orwellian-sounding Office of Facts and Figures, later renamed the Office of War Information. It touted war bonds and rationing. It immortalized "Rosie the Riveter" to propel women to leave their homes and go to work. It leaned on Hollywood to make patriotic films. It warned Americans to watch their tongues. A famous wartime poster said: "Loose Lips Might Sink Ships" -- now a timeworn and abbreviated cliche.

Rumsfeld's 'Roadmap'

But Americans just don't understand. The culture hasn't come to grips with information as a part of warfare. That's Garfield, lecturing again.

"I think we've got to back up a little bit and look at warfare," he says, telling how the conventional notion of war has changed, with insurgencies and asymmetric conflict growing more prevalent, meaning that bullets and bombs alone won't win. Information -- its strategic use -- can tip the scales. And yet this fact does not yet resonate in American culture.

"People are more comfortable with killing than they are with influencing," he says. "The majority can be convinced that the use of military force is acceptable, but everybody becomes very uncomfortable when you talk about the use of information," like "promoting your cause, promoting your ideals" and "discrediting the tactics and the arguments and the strategy of the enemy."

Not surprisingly, considering who the Lincoln Group's big client is, Garfield sounds very much in sync with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld's got an "Information Operations Roadmap," which he approved in 2003 and which was declassified earlier this year. It's supposed to "advance the goal of information operations as a core military competency."

The Roadmap follows an earlier information effort, the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence, which was dismantled in 2002 after news reports, since denied, that the Pentagon intended to plant false news items in the foreign press. A version of that effort was then outsourced to the Lincoln Group, though Craig and Garfield say they traffic only in truth.

In an op-ed piece last month in the Los Angeles Times, Rumsfeld bemoaned the uproar over the Lincoln Group and described its work as a "non-traditional means to provide accurate information to the Iraqi people in the face of an aggressive campaign of disinformation. Yet this has been portrayed as inappropriate: for example, the allegations of 'buying news.' "

In a way, this is the price to be paid for not going covert all the way. Had the program been conducted completely undercover, it would have been better, says Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA case officer and now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.