War / Peace

The U.S. armed forces are waging a propaganda war in Afghanistan with leaflets, radio broadcasts, and food according to an AP story. "The effort involves information soldiers from the 4th Psychological Operations Group at Fort Bragg, N.C., and the 193rd Special Operations Wing of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard, a division of the U.S. Air Force's Special Operations Command. The psy-ops soldiers have planes to scatter leaflets, mobile print shops that can be dropped by parachute and loudspeaker systems to blare messages. The soldiers use local languages to reach people on the ground.

In a TomPaine.com commentary, Institute for Public Accuracy's Sam Husseini warns of the chilling effect the Federal Communications Commission, the agency that controls broadcast licenses, could have on reporting U.S. military actions. Husseini recalls the Pentagon Papers, an internal report on Vietnam that few media outlets would touch for fear of drawing expensive and threatening FCC investigations.

The terrorist attacks of September 11 have generated new rhetoric from the White House, using terms such as "crusade," "infinite justice" and "homeland defense." This column by William Safire examines the background of some of these terms.

An editorial in the Dawn, a Pakistan newspaper, notes with approval that U.S. "official utterances and media commentaries to depict the 'war against terrorism' as a clash between western values and Islam or the Muslim countries" have been replaced by "strenuous efforts to correct that impression." However, the United States still has a long way to go if it wants to avoid turning the campaign against terrorism into a wider, religious war.