This article on Yahoo! news talks about an interesting and disturbing development in the War in Iraq. A few weeks before the invasion of Fallujah, a Marine spokesman gave an official notice to CNN that the invasion had begun. He was lying. The report given to CNN, widely reported, and then widely retracted, was an attempt to guage how the insurgents in Fallujah would react to an invasion. This is called "Psy-Ops" (Psychological Operations) and is standard in warfare - dropping leaflets on the enemy was done by both sides in WW2 - but this is one of the first times that an American military spokesman gave bad information to an American news network. In other words, it is the first time that it was official military policy to decieve our own people.
This is troubling to me, and yet I am not sure which way to go on it. On the one hand, "All's fair in love and war," and this move did yield us valuable information. On the other hand, with a liberal population already predisposed to disbelieve anything put out by the Bush administration or the military, isn't this just taking away another level of credibility from our government. If we can't trust the military to be honest with its own people, how do we know it still understands who is "us" and who is "them"?
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