Rumsfeld: U.S. lags in the media war

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Friday called for the U.S. military and other government agencies to mount a far more aggressive, faster and nontraditional information campaign to counter messages of extremist and terrorist groups in the world media.

Rumsfeld criticized the absence in the U.S. government of a "strategic communications framework" for fighting terrorism. He also lashed out at the U.S. media, whose coverage he blamed for effectively halting recent military information initiatives, such as paying to place articles in Iraqi newspapers.

Rumsfeld's speech comes on the heels of a top-level review of Pentagon strategy and resources released earlier this month that called for closing gaps in "information operations," an area now being reorganized inside the Pentagon, according to current and former defense officials.

"Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today's media age, but for the most part we, our country, our government, has not," Rumsfeld said in remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

He said while al-Qaida and other "extremist" movements "have successfully ... poisoned the Muslim public's view of the West, we in the government have barely even begun to compete in reaching their audiences."

U.S. public-affairs operations tend to be "reactive rather than proactive," Rumsfeld said, while "our enemies are operating 24/7 across every time zone. That is an unacceptably dangerous deficiency."

To remedy this problem, he called for increased communications training for military public-affairs officials by drawing on private-sector expertise. He also called for creating 24-hour press-operations centers and "multifaceted media campaigns" using the Internet, blogs and satellite television that "will result in much less reliance on the traditional print press."

Rumsfeld criticized the U.S. media for hampering such initiatives, however. He said the press "seems to demand perfection from the government but does not apply the same standard to the enemy or even sometimes to themselves," contrasting coverage of the Abu Ghraib detainee abuse with that of mass graves in Iraq.

Detainee abuse was a major focus of questions Rumsfeld received from the audience, with one person asking whether the defense secretary believed the United States should shut down its detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. "We shouldn't close Guantánamo," Rumsfeld replied, saying that it houses several hundred terrorists who would "try to kill Americans" if released. He cited the case of 15 detainees released who have "gone back to the battlefield" and been killed or captured.

He also ruled out an independent investigation of U.S. military detainee abuse, saying that rehashing the issue would be harmful to the country.