The Military & CNN
by Alexander Cockburn

A handful of military personnel from the 4th Psychological
Operations Group (i.e. PSYOPs) based at Fort Bragg in North
Carolina have until recently been working in CNN's head-
quarters in Atlanta. An enterprising Dutch journalist
named Abe De Vries came up with this important story in
mid-February, and he remains properly astounded that no
mainstream news medium in the United States has evinced
any interest in the story.

I came across translations of De Vries' stories on the
matter, after they had appeared in late February in Trouw,
the foremost quality newspaper in Holland.

De Vries later told me he'd originally come upon the story
via an article in the French Intelligence newsletter
(available on a pay-per-story basis on the Internet)
Feb. 17, which described a military symposium in Arlington,
Va., held at the beginning of that same month, discussing
use of the press in military operations.

Col. Christopher St. John, commander of the U.S. Army's
4th PSYOPs Group, was quoted by a French Intelligence
correspondent, present at the symposium, as (in the
correspondent's words) having "called for greater
cooperation between the armed forces and media giants.
He (St. John) pointed out that some Army PSYOPs personnel
had worked for CNN for several weeks, and helped in the
production of some news stories for the network."

Reading this in Belgrade, where he's Trouw's correspondent,
De Vries saw a good story, picked up the phone, and finally
reached Maj. Thomas Collins of the U.S. Army Information
Service, who duly confirmed the presence of these Army
PSYOPs experts at CNN. "PSYOPs personnel, soldiers and
officers," De Vries quoted Collins as telling him, "have
been working in CNN's headquarters in Atlanta through our
program 'Training with Industry.' They worked as regular
employees of CNN. Conceivably, they would have worked on
stories during the Kosovo war. They helped in the
production of news."

I reported this interesting disclosure in my newsletter,
CounterPunch, and made it the topic of my regular weekly
broadcast to "AM Live," a program of the South Africa
Broadcasting Company in Johannesburg. Among the audience
of this broadcast was CNN's bureau in South Africa, which
lost no time in relaying news of it to CNN headquarters
in Atlanta, and I duly received an angry phone call from
Eason Jordan, who identified himself as CNN's president
of news gathering and international networks.

Jordan was full of indignation that I had somehow
compromised the reputation of CNN. But in the course of
our conversation, it turned out that, yes, CNN had hosted
a total of five interns from U.S. Army PSYOPs, two in
television, two in radio, and one in satellite operations.
Jordan said the program had begun on June 7 (just before
the end of the war against Serbia), and only recently
terminated, I would guess at about the time CNN's higher
management read Abe De Vries' stories.

Naturally enough, Eason Jordan and other executives at CNN
now describe the Army PSYOPs intern tours at CNN as having
been insignificant. Maybe so. Col. St. John, the commanding
officer of the PSYOPs group, certainly thought them of
sufficient significance to mention at that high-level
Pentagon pow-wow in Arlington about propaganda and
psychological warfare. Maybe CNN was the target of a PSYOPs
penetration and is still too naive to figure out what was
going on.

It's hard not to laugh when CNN execs like Eason Jordan
start spouting, as he did to me, high-toned stuff about
CNN's principles of objectivity and refusal to relay
government propaganda.

During the war on Serbia, as with other recent conflicts
involving the United States, CNN's screen was filled with
an interminable procession of U.S. officers. On April 27
of last year, Amy Goodman of the Pacifica Radio network
put the following question to Frank Sesno, who is CNN's
senior vice president for political coverage.

GOODMAN: "If you support the practice of putting ex-
military men -- generals -- on the payroll to share their
opinion during a time of war, would you also support
putting peace activists on the payroll to give a different
opinion during a time of war?

SESNO: "We bring the generals in because of their expertise
in a particular area. We call them analysts. We don't bring
them in as advocates. In fact, we actually talk to them
about that -- they're not there as advocates."

Exactly a week before Sesno said this, CNN had featured as
one of its military analysts, Lt. Gen. Dan Benton, U.S.
Army Retired.

BENTON: "I don't know what our countrymen that are question-
ing why we're involved in this conflict are thinking about.
As I listened to this press conference this morning, with
reports of rapes, villages being burned, and this
particularly incredible report of blood banks, of blood
being harvested from young boys for the use of Yugoslav
forces, I just got madder and madder. The United States has
a responsibility as the only superpower in the world, and
when we learn about these things, somebody has got to stand
up and say, 'That's enough, stop it, we aren't going to put
up with this."

Please note what CNN's supposedly non-advocatory analyst
Benton was ranting about: a particularly preposterous NATO
propaganda item about 700 Albanian boys being used as human
blood banks for Serb fighters.

Let's give the last word to the enterprising Abe De Vries.
"Of course, CNN says these PSYOPs personnel didn't decide
anything, write news reports, etc. What else can they say?
Maybe it's true, maybe not. The point is that these kind
of close ties with the Army are, in my view, completely
unacceptable for any serious news organization. Maybe even
more astonishing is the complete silence about the story
from the big media. To my knowledge, my story was not
mentioned by leading American or British newspapers, nor
by Reuters or AP."

Alexander Cockburn is a syndicated columnist. CounterPunch,
co-edited by Cockburn, is located on the web at
www.counterpunch.org.