Rumsfeld: Ramp up information warfare

[sabra]

Source: AirForce Times

The U.S. military can’t fight the war on terrorism alone. It needs help from a host of other U.S. government agencies, including a new one that should be created to use the Internet to wage an information offensive against Muslim extremists, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Jan. 23.

In an address to an information warfare conference, Rumsfeld said the United States is “sitting on the sidelines” in a global battle of ideas. “We’re barely competing,” and for that reason we are losing, he said.

Islamic radicals are winning despite the fact that they blow up mosques, kill women and children and publicly behead their foes, Rumsfeld said.

The United States needs a “21st-century agency for global communications” to use modern methods to spread the United States’ message about the importance of democracy and freedom, much as the U.S. Information Agency spread that message during the Cold War, he said.

The USIA was folded into the State Department in 1999 and the United States “lost a valued tool to help tell the story of a nation that was carved from the wilderness and conceived in freedom,” Rumsfeld told an audience of military members and defense contractors.

Read more: http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2008/01/defense_rumsfeld_080123/

[TwilightGardener]

1. The little brown people must be using our propaganda leaflets

as fishwrap and toilet paper. Time to go high-tech!

[Maine-i-acs]

2. How is Rummy even relevant?

Using a canned audience to keep catapaultin' the propaganda. Lame...

[apnu]

3. Wait a second... didn't Rummy leave his office in disgrace?

I'm left to wonder why he gets any press time. Iraq was his pooch to screw and boy did he screw it. So why are people asking him anything about international terror efforts.

Hey Rummy! I'll pay attention to you when you find some relevance... otherwise, get back in your hole!

[NanceGreggs]

4. And they've already got the perfect guy ...

... to head up this 'new agency' - Ted Stevens.

[louis-t]

5. Still fighting for a "Propaganda ministry"

Oh, and by the way dumbass, you wouldn't know freedom if it bit you on your little winky. To the rest of the world, your vision of "freedom and democracy" looks like slavery. Asshole.

[tanyev]

6. Get back under your rock, Rummy.

[yellowcanine]

7. Why is that war criminal sticking his oar back in? You are yesterday's news, Rummy.

[Joanne98]

8. Someday Rumsfeld will be in a nursing home...

waging war against the nurses..That's the thought I use whenever he opens his mouth!

[dbt]

9. Well, THERE'S an expert opinion!

Hey, Rummy! How many troops does it take to occupy Iraq?

:rofl:

[pattmarty]

10. Call it the Dept of Propaganda, and have Rumsfield run it.

[damntexdem]

11. I guess we just have to go to war with the information we have.

;-)

[Jack Rabbit]

12. Rummy and his pals were fighting a war on information from day 1.

!!