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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GLOBAL 'WAR' ON TERROR (GWOT) Years 1 and 2, ie 9/11-2003
Background Briefing on Taliban Denial and Deception Techniques 
Background Briefing on Taliban Denial and Deception Techniques Senior Defense Department Official Foreign Press Center Background Briefing Washington, DC November 2, 2001 Copyright (c)2001 by Federal News Service, Inc., 620 National Press Building, Washington, DC 20045, USA. For information on subscribing to the FNS Internet Service, please email Jack Graeme at info@fnsg.com or call (202) 824-0520. 10:32 AM SR. DEFENSE DEPT. OFFICIAL: (In progress.) I am accustomed to audiences in official circles in the Pentagon and some academic lecturing. So I'll probably go from being in abject terror of you as an audience to perhaps even arrogant in my attitude. So, forgive me that. Also, if I slip into any acronyms or terms that don't make sense, just point a finger at me, and we'll try and clarify those this morning. What we are going to talk about this morning is denial and deception, or as we so lovingly call it, "D&D," in the Pentagon. And we think this is an important aspect of any military strategy in any military campaign, and we wanted to highlight some of the denial and deception activities we are seeing in the current campaign. We think this is of importance for all of us to understand. For the current campaign, it's a very important facet of military strategy to try to deny your adversary key information obviously, and also present false information to confuse your adversary. We tend to summarize that by saying in denial and deception -- in denial we are showing -- I'm sorry, concealing the truth -- and in deception we are showing the fake. So these two terms have come to be associated in military circles as a certain technique that we use in conducting military operations. Denial, very simply, is concealing key personnel or equipment on the battlefield -- masking the movement of your leadership; and deception is portraying false targets in order to divert strikes away from key military targets. It may even be used to try to attract strikes to civilian targets in order to cause an embarrassment and a moral dilemma. It can also go to the extreme of manipulating or staging a site to make it appear that damage has occurred there, again for the purpose of securing some political or moral points. In between those two realms of denial and deception is that all- important area of disinformation and propaganda. And I know all of you in the press corps face this problem all the time: What in fact is the truth, what is the story that I am being fed that has some other purpose? So today, very quickly, I am just going to walk through some examples of where we see this activity, and how it might impact our own understanding of what is going on and what may not be going on. This is my first arrogant slide, if you will, How to recognize manipulated bomb damage. And we put this up here because historically we have seen this on several occasions, both in the Balkans and Iraq where a particular site has been manipulated. And one of the examples, what we are calling linear, or collapsed wall, occurred in Iraq near a mosque, and the press corps was brought to the scene and told that the coalition forces had bombed this mosque. On closer examination it was clear the wall had fallen in a straight line, and that's not the kind of damage you tend to see when a bomb detonates. And, in fact, we were able to detect that a bulldozer had been used to knock down the wall, again to simulate damage. Sometimes the attempt is even a little more sophisticated, where wreckage will be strewn in a circular area -- again to make it look like an actual bomb has detonated. And sometimes in those cases you can detect that the site has been staged, because the crater simply isn't deep enough, or there isn't scorch marks, et cetera. Staging a scene can get into certain technical areas, such as the case of scorching, that I mentioned. The use of tires, burning tires or smoke pots, to make it appear again that an actual fire has occurred and that there was a strike on the facility. There are other techniques that can be used in order to manipulate how you see an area and make it appear quite differently than it actually is. In some cases you may realize you are only seeing a part of a facility, and other parts of the facility are deliberately being hidden from your view. Again, this is an age-old technique that zeroes in on only a portion of the picture to show a damaged area that may appear to be a civilian site, when it fact it is on the grounds of the actual target, which may be a military target. Sometimes we are paraded in front of sites that are older damage. A complex problem in Afghanistan, because the country has, as you all know, been at war for over 20 years, and there has been damage over that period of time, and again you need to kind of closely inspect the wreckage. And we have this problem in looking at wreckage -- you know, Was this caused by a current strike or a strike that occurred some time ago? And you can tell from dust patterns and et cetera. Finally, we have to look at who is providing the information -- what are the bona fides of the spokesperson? Is this a representative of an NGO, a non-governmental organization? Is it an official of the host state, like a Taliban official, or some unidentified person that you as part of the press corps may not be familiar with or haven't seen before? And these are all factors that kind of enter into the equation when you are trying to decide whether some kind of deception is going on. Of course there are more insidious kinds of disinformation dispersal that we have all seen historically, and this is nothing new. It goes back to ancient warfare. It has been used by every war fought by the human race; that is, the planting of false information that in some cases may directly be developed by the intelligence service of a country and fed into the media through an article or story published, and then proliferated in our modern information age. We consider this quite critical in the current period, because the nature of modern communications can quickly disseminate a story worldwide before it can be examined and studied for its accuracy. There are of course other visual kinds of examples, and I have just highlighted two here. One of the more famous ones is the baby milk factory where this sign was put in front of a factory in Iraq with English on it, again for the purposes of highlighting what the Iraqis said was a strike an innocent facility. We have already seen some examples of this in Afghanistan. It's a little difficult to say exactly what this sign, "No Weapons" means. Does that mean there are no weapons inside, so don't bomb this building? Or, no weapons are permitted inside, et cetera? The curiosity here is, again, it's in English, and clearly put out there for consumption. We do have some more serious concerns about staged tours for journalists, and we are highlighting an example here that occurred a few weeks ago, and that was an invitation to some 15 Western journalists who previously were refused entry into Afghanistan. And the Taliban offered to take them to what they called a mass casualty site. Our concern was this was in a convoy of Taliban vehicles at night, and we had already on previous occasions struck these kinds of vehicles, because they are official vehicles that are associated with the government and the military. So we felt this was placing the staged tour deliberately at risk. It's again the kind of thing we watch carefully and with some concern. Finally, I want to finish with a fairly specific example here of again denial and deception techniques that involve the risk of collateral damage, and placing military equipment at civilian facilities or near religious facilities. This is a picture of an early-warning site near Herat airport. You see the runway over here in Herat, and a mosque down here, a lot of military vehicles, including a radar site. I bring your attention to -- (off mike) -- bring your attention to the open field inside the compound right next to the mosque. Next plate. It's probably a little difficult to see from out there. And here's the airfield. You can see craters where we struck the early-warning sites. And we caught a helicopter -- you can see the blades -- (off mike) -- apart right next to the mosque. Again, this possibly was done for one of two purposes. One, either to draw our fire to that site with the hope of damaging the mosque and creating an embarrassing incident; or, two, sheltering the helicopter there with the hope that we would not take the risk of attacking this target because of its proximity to the religious site. We are seeing an increasing number of these kinds of D&D activities and attempts to conceal or place military equipment in areas where we would be denied the opportunity to attack them obviously, or we would be placed at risk in terms of possibly damaging a civilian or religious building. We call this kind of an asymmetric approach to warfare; that is, obviously the adversary wants to neutralize our military capabilities. They don't have the kind of high-tech equipment to respond to us in kind, so you use asymmetric techniques to seek potential weaknesses in your adversary that puts you at an advantage. We expect to see this denial and deception activity continue through the campaign. It's going to be an important aspect in the campaign, and it will include such things as further staged tours to civilian sites, like we saw just earlier this week. And we will be following it quite closely. Let me open it up to questions at that point -- again, just a very quick review of this concept. Yes, please? Q I'm Greg Taroad (ph) with the South China Morning Post newspaper of Hong Kong. After three weeks of bombing that has gotten heavier, and this week we have had B-52 strikes, cluster bombs and so on, why is there a need to show -- to take journalists to old wreckage and old bomb damage? There should be more than enough damage around Taliban areas for them to show us fresh damage. Is this something that you suspect is going on or that you actually know is going on? SR. DEFENSE DEPT. OFFICIAL: As far as the motivation, again they are -- the Taliban are certainly not going to want to take you to the wreckage of military sites, for a number of reasons. One is it fully would reinforce the point that we are striking military strikes with some success; number two, it affords of the opportunity if there are some visuals of the site to do some battle damage assessment. The desire to take journalists to old sites again depends on the nature of the target itself -- you know, where they want to highlight damage to a civilian site that appears to have occurred in the previous, the overnight campaign, they may bring you to an old site, because that's all they have to show. So that's the whole point behind a D&D campaign, to kind of keep reinforcing certain themes that they want you to pick up on and proliferate. Q I am -- (inaudible) -- South Asia news daily. Regarding the motivation on the part of the Taliban to invite international journalists to the various sites, I cannot understand why they delivered the exposed based on your theory -- why they deliberately exposed or tried to expose international journalists to such a danger, because if that is their motivation, you know, the international journalists would not join any press tour anymore if there's sort of collateral damage on the part of international journalists. That's my first question. My second question is, digressing from the propaganda of Taliban, how are you concerned about the reports that the al Qaeda network might have obtained -- acquired the nuclear weapon technology through Pakistani scientists? SR. DEFENSE DEPT. OFFICIAL: I'm sorry, I can't comment on the second point -- that's outside my particular area of expertise. On the first point, again, we were suspicious of the techniques used in the invitation, the fact that they were going to drive at night in a convoy, et cetera. And our concern was, yeah, this could have been a deliberate attempt to expose a core of journalists that many were previously denied entry, that if there had been a military strike on the convoy obviously it would have caused an incident of great potential embarrassment to the United States and its allies. Again, it's difficult to say whether that was their motivation in doing it. The tour, from my understanding, did not occur. It got postponed till later during the daytime period. So -- Q The accidents -- (inaudible)-- jeopardize their attempt or future plan. So what is the rationale for such a deliberate attempt? SR. DEFENSE DEPT. OFFICIAL: I think they, you know, again in my mind, they weighed the advantages and disadvantages, and said if we could create an international incident where a large number of journalists were killed -- wounded by an airstrike -- that's going to far outweigh the possibility that they would then refuse in the future to go on these tours. Personally I think even if that happened there would still be a lot of interest in getting inside exposure in the country, and working with the Taliban for access. So in their mind I think it was a risk worth taking. Q Lambros Papantoniou, Elettheros Typos, Greek daily. I would like to know with all this fighting and strikes, et cetera, do you face any serious resistance from the Taliban forces? SR. DEFENSE DEPT. OFFICIAL: I don't follow the day-to-day nature of the campaign, so, sorry, I can't answer your question. Q Christiano del Riccio, Italian News Agency. Can you give out more examples besides the media tour deception by the Taliban? SR. DEFENSE DEPT. OFFICIAL: Again, the imagery example we have held up is just one case among several where we have seen military equipment at civilian sites, either near mosques or schools, et cetera. We have also been looking very closely at some of the hospital tours. We have seen this technique again both in Serbia and Iraq. I am reminded of the famous children's parade in Baghdad that is held where children's coffins are brought out. And we noticed that some of the different grades of the same pictures were being shown. So we're -- a very difficult task to look at the casualties and the people to detect again whether there has been some deliberate effort here to deceive in terms of who has been killed or not. There was another example where they publicized some footage of a young couple that was found in the rubble. And that's not to say they weren't killed by the attack, but the rubble had been manipulated so that their hands and their wedding rings were showing, and their faces and stuff. So, again, it's just one way of underscoring certain points they are trying to make. So they are clearly -- you know, they are willing to manipulate or stage some sites. Q Yes, my name is Gabriel Uriarte (ph). I'm from Bachinals (ph) from Argentina. I want to ask you how would you rate Taliban's denial capabilities in purely military terms? That is particularly with the antecedent of the Kosovo campaign, at least according to some of the informal reports, damage to the Serb forces, even though they have been engaged in a counterinsurgency campaign in Kosovo was much lower than imagined. And now when we are hearing about this Northern Alliance offensive against the -- to take Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, do you think that the Taliban will be able to, by dispersal and so on, avoid significant damage to their ground forces? SR. DEFENSE DEPT. OFFICIAL: No. That's a good question. In Kosovo, with the Serbs, and even with the Iraqis, we saw a far more sophisticated denial and deception capability -- certainly more technologically sophisticated use of mock-ups, radar reflectors, special nets, et cetera -- and their tactics were fairly sophisticated. We are seeing a much more low-tech approach by the Taliban, and you have kind of highlighted it -- you know, dispersal, use of caves. You know, it's very different. Second, they face a slightly different problem than the Serbs did. The Serbs, although mountainous like Afghanistan, had a lot of tree cover and forest in which to hide their equipment. The Afghanis don't have that luxury. In that regard they are more like Iraq, being a more desert-like environment. So what we have seen is certainly not as sophisticated as what we came up against in Serbia. But they are clearly demonstrating some knowledge of D&D techniques, both at a strategic and a tactical level. Q One follow up. Do you have a serious problem with battle damage assessment with ground forces and attacks on Taliban front lines? It's another thing that has been reported, that one reason you are not issuing any specific casualty figures or estimates is because you can't know the effect of the bombing against such targets that are not buildings and tanks and so on and so forth. SR. DEFENSE DEPT. OFFICIAL: From a denial and deception perspective, yeah, that is a problem, where you are bombing caves and cave entrances. It can be very difficult, unless you have a significant secondary explosion which you have probably seen in some of the cockpit videos. It's very difficult to estimate the extent of damage, unless you have vehicle debris, like in the case of the helicopter here where we see the helicopter blade and got confirmation from the pilot. So, yes, it is difficult. MODERATOR: Let's go to Thomas. Q Thomas Gorguissian, Al Wafd, Egypt. Taking into consideration the D&D activities or the perception of D&D activities -- and excuse me if I use the word "obsessively" linked with D&D activities, you don't think that this is like not helpful in the literal term to make a real assessment of the damage? Especially I have in mind as a counterpoint to the point is for example the Red Cross storage, which was bombed two times in 10 days -- do you think that having into consideration or being, quote/unquote "obsessed" with D&D activity doesn't give you a capability or the knowledge of real assessment of the damage? SR. DEFENSE DEPT. OFFICIAL: If I understand your question correctly, it can be extremely difficult -- you know, for example, looking back on the baby milk factory incident in Iraq -- you know, there was a big hue and cry and debate about that, and it can be difficult to discuss that in public, when there are sources and methods, intelligence sources and methods that you are concerned about compromising. Denial and deception is a deliberate military strategy. We expect them to use it, because it makes sense. Again, it's deliberately there to confuse -- and, as you pointed out, complicate doing battle damage assessment is one area, to hide forces, et cetera. So I expect this to continue in the campaign. Q My second question, somewhat related to it, it's when you make the denial and deception concept, and it's definitely an asymmetric war, whether we like it -- from the beginning it was asymmetric -- New York and Washington was asymmetric. Do you think that when -- why are you worried about this? Because of public opinion, or because of what? SR. DEFENSE DEPT. OFFICIAL: There are several reasons. Number one, it certainly is designed to counter our targeting strategy, trying to neutralize or attempt to neutralize our ability to attack Taliban forces, find out data elements, et cetera. Two, yes, there is a deliberate aspect of this aimed, we feel, at the media and the public opinion and world opinion at large that is a significant aspect of the campaign. Where you have military vehicles near mosques or civilian facilities being used for military purposes, it complicates our ability to conduct the campaign on one hand yet, at the other hand, places us in a difficult position of, you know, in the public arena. So we need to expose that activity for what it is in terms of those two contexts. MODERATOR: Let's come up off here, if you don't mind. Q Thank you. (Inaudible) -- the Nikkei newspaper, Japanese daily newspaper. Sort of a follow-up question. I'm curious to know how can you, USA, effectively make a counterargument for those denials or deceptions? SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: I'm sorry -- Q How can you make counterargument for those denials of deception effectively? Because this is, you know -- an aspect of this war is the wars of the public affairs. SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Yes, it is difficult in some cases, in particular with staged tours, say, in a hospital, if we don't have firsthand knowledge. Yeah, it can be very difficult to counter what is being presented to the media, and we understand that. As you've seen this morning, we tend to focus on physical evidence, but that doesn't always provide the answer. You know, it doesn't always expose the deception and, in some cases, it can be almost impossible to discredit a story unless we have, you know, insider information that would allow us to present you with convincing evidence that a story is false. Q Hiroshi Fuse from Japanese paper the Mainichi. I think we were told that you have press briefing by DOD, I think two days ago, that communications system of Taliban were disrupted and heavily damaged; but on the other hand, I think they are making propaganda so actively. So is there any contradiction about the two incidents? SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: You know, I think that the Taliban has access to the international media. I can't comment on the success or failure of the attacks on their communications network, but it does not take much to communicate internationally. It can be done very simply with couriers across the border. We saw Iraq do that and, in fact, Iraq, towards the end of the war conducted a lot of their negotiations by using a courier running across the border and then plugging into communications there. So you have to make a definite distinction between military command-and-control and internal communications in the country and their ability to reach out and touch the international media and conduct that campaign. And, of course, it's not just the Taliban themselves that are participating in that media campaign. There are other agents at work in pushing their opinion. Thank you. Q Hi. Khaled Abdur Kareem (ph) with Middle East News Agency of Egypt. In your assessment, how far have the Taliban succeeded in winning rounds in this campaign of denial and deceit, and is the U.S. having a problem in countering this campaign and conveying its message that the Taliban are lying? And one more point about the strategy itself. How far have this campaign on the part of the Taliban led the U.S. military to change or make a revision of its targeting policy in Afghanistan? SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: I can't comment on those the last question you had. I don't work the targeting and don't have access to that information. I view the denial-and-deception campaign and the information war, if you want to call it that, it's just like any military campaign. There are going to be victories and defeats for both sides. There will be small successes, big successes, and we think that this will mark the nature of the campaign over the days and weeks to come; that in some cases we'll have successes, in other cases the Taliban will have some success against us. We think we are obviously fighting on the side of truth and that the truth ultimately will win out in this campaign. Sometimes it's difficult to find the truth and bring it to the surface, but we think ultimately that will be the mark of success. MODERATOR: (Off mike.) Q It's very interesting to hear you mention truth, because it strikes me that that's your best defense here. You said that they are unsophisticated, compared to other denial-and-deception campaigns. You say that you expect it and it's a part of warfare. So what strikes me is why can't you better -- why can't you better defeat it at an early stage, because nobody has sympathy for the Taliban? Is there really that big a problem with getting information from the ground, say? It doesn't seem that you can come out and say, well, we had no civilians killed there, but there were some accidentally killed here, or there were large numbers of enemy troops killed in such-and- such an area? It seems to be that there's a big vacuum somewhere here. SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: First of all, let me clarify again, when I said "unsophisticated," I meant in a military/technical sense; that their level of sophistication on the battlefield is not like what we saw with the Serbs, where there was a fairly good level of technical and military sophistication that the Serbs learned from the Soviets, who are -- of course, were masters of D and D. I think your second question is far more complicated. My job is basically to provide advice to the secretary of Defense on the nature of denial and deception. It is not my job to measure our success or failure, so it's a little difficult for me to answer your question in that regard. Q Perhaps I could ask it in a more simple way. SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Ah, you're not going to let me off easy. (Laughter.) Q Basically, it seems in the Gulf War you had a lot more information about what was happening on the ground. Here there seems to be very little. We have not -- there are very few statistics coming out about enemy losses and that sort of thing from the Pentagon. Essentially, is there a lack of information that is frustrating your efforts to counter their low-level D and D campaign? SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: I don't think it's a lack of information. Again, we're in a very different battlefield. You know, Iraq had an extremely robust infrastructure, a fairly modern military force, a large military force -- you know, 1970s, 1980s military technology; extensive order of battle in terms of equipment, et cetera; urban environment. Downtown Baghdad is a hub of a military state with a lot of command-and-control. Afghanistan is quite different in that regard, and I think that's why there is a marked difference in the nature of the campaign. It's also one of the reasons why we are talking today on denial and deception, because we feel that D and D plays an important role in a very different way than we saw in Serbia and Iraq. It is not a technical denial and deception. Again, on the military battlefield, it's fairly simple but effective techniques; you know, hiding in caves, et cetera. On the political/diplomatic battlefield, again, 10 years later, a very different campaign than we saw in Iraq. Q Dimitri -- (inaudible) -- of Russian News Agency TASS. Is the United States satisfied with the level of support it is getting from NATO in its propaganda, counterpropaganda warfare with the Taliban? Because it seems to me that basically Russian President Vladimir Putin recently made more supportive remarks on this topic than Secretary-General George Robertson. SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: I'm sorry, I can't comment on the aid from NATO. That's just not part of my job. Again, forgive me. MODERATOR: (Off mike.) Q Yes, please. I'm not sure if this question is going to be part of your job or not. (Laughter.) Anyway, yesterday, most of the talk was about establishment of this Islamabad office in order to coordinate effort with London and Washington, and all the idea was that -- the whole idea of this denial-and-deception activity, part of it, is that the Taliban or Afghanistan or that part of the world wake up earlier than us and they make these things. Is the time factor playing a role in these denial-and-deception activities? SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: No, not from my job's perspective. Right? No, we're accustomed to dealing with the time differences. You know, it's complicated for us -- Q But I mean -- SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Yeah. Q -- they say something and then you comment the opposite -- (off mike). SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Yeah, I understand and, you know, it relates to when we hold news conferences here, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think it's complicated. I think, you know, we got fairly accustomed to dealing with the 24-hour world back in the early 1990s, and I don't see that as a factor. MODERATOR: (Off mike.) Q I'm curious about the allegation of the human field. MODERATOR: Human shield. Q Yes, human shield. There is some allegation the Taliban may have put the -- I mean, there are some -- (inaudible). And then later on they claim the U.S. actually killed 70 or 80 civilians. Unless you have the proof, can you make argument it's the Taliban's fault, not the U.S. fault? SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Again, the nature of the proof -- I can only talk about some historical examples. And that is where we had actual photographs of people being placed in facilities at risk. You know, we've heard these stories and we're looking at them quite closely, and again, attempting to verify whether or not people are brought into areas that are potential targets. But right now I can't offer you any definitive proof on that. MODERATOR: More questions? SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: The pool of sweat down here is still pretty small. (Laughter.) MODERATOR: Let's let Tom get another one, then Greg still -- oh, Gregory. Q Gregory Yasinsky (ph) RMF FM Radio, Poland. I wonder if there was an effort from the Department of Defense to train journalists to be aware of those kind of techniques which Taliban may use. SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: That's an excellent question. And we actually saw this briefing as a first step in reaching to the media corps to expose some of these techniques. I don't know how far we'll go in terms of formal training, but the desire was to do just that -- again, to highlight for you some of the kinds of techniques that you may be exposed to and we want to sensitize you to. MODERATOR: We have time for one or two more. Q Yes, please. I don't know if -- I'd be interested to know if your job is to locate and figure out what is denial-and-deception activities among the enemies, quote/unquote. You don't play a role in making similar activities on your side? SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: No. (Laughter.) No, I'm not involved -- Q (Off mike.) SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Yeah. I'm not involved in U.S. or coalition activities. I analyze potential advocates. Q (Off mike.) SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Yeah. Q I apologize if I've asked this in another way, but I want to have another crack at it. (Laughter.) It actually takes some strands of what other people have been asking as well. It seems that we have a very unpopular enemy here, relatively unsophisticated. They're nobody's public-relations experts. In fact, it could be argued they're a public-relations nightmare. So why is this sort of thing proving so difficult for you to apparently to quell or to control? I mean, this seems a war for you to -- it's not a war for them to win. This is a propaganda war for you to lose. Why is it proving so difficult? I mean, some of their claims just should be laughed off the map, but they're not -- that doesn't seem to be happening. SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: I think any, again, information campaign is going to wax and wane. You know, there's been a lot of attention on just certain aspects of the propaganda battlefield. I do believe it's going to take some time for us to adapt to this environment, but I do feel we've had both successes and tactical successes, strategic and tactical successes. And we need to build on those. MODERATOR: This gentleman will have the last question. Q (Inaudible) -- Korea Economic Daily. What is the big mistake you have made because Taliban steering this strategy after you started bombing? Could you give me some example of that? SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Of a mistake? Q You don't talk about -- SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: No. (Laughter.) I don't think I could. MODERATOR: I want to thank you very much. (Laughter.) SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Thank you. Thank you very much; appreciate it. |