The Pentagon is warning the media and the public not to be fooled by Taliban claims of civilian causalities.

A senior Defense official briefed reporters on how to recognize what the Pentagon terms “denial and deception,” the fabrication of damage designed to influence the enemy.

“The idea of denying information to an adversary or deceiving an adversary, of course, is nothing new. It has a long, long history in the history of military warfare,” the senior Defense official said. “It has a long history in the history of politics, and a very important, growing history, I would say, in the current age – if you’ll indulge me, in the Information Age, where I think denial and deception techniques, and manipulation, is becoming very important in the world media arena, and something we all want to be aware of.”

The official, who did not identify himself, explained that eliciting sympathy for the enemy was a common tactic when fighting in the Middle East.

“During Desert Storm and Desert Shield we saw some classic examples of enemy denial and deception and, if you like the term, disinformation. The United States, for example, was accused by the Iraqis of desecrating Muslim holy sites,” the official said. “They frequently tried to show that the U.S. bombing campaign was ineffective, that it was deliberately destroying civilian sites; that there were children who were being killed and maimed and affected by the embargo.”

To do this, the official said, photos and videos are released to sympathetic media outlets, and are in turn picked up by the mainstream press.

“Perhaps one of the classic examples, for those of you who may not be aware, but there’s the famous parade of children that’s held in Baghdad quite frequently where they bring out, on top of cars, coffins of children that they claim have been killed as a result of the embargo, or the presence of depleted uranium, et cetera, et cetera,” the official said. “We’ve seen on several occasions the same picture of the same child reappearing in some of these parades. It’s a classic technique of playing to public sympathy for purposes that suit the government.”

Damage to buildings can also be fabricated, the Pentagon said.

“Often the environment is manipulated to simulate or fake an incident. And there are numerous historical cases of this. A classic one occurred in Iraq at a Mosque where the Iraqis brought the media in to show them some damage to a wall around a mosque that had been knocked down, according to them, by a U.S. cruise missile,” the Defense official said. “On close examination, it was pretty obvious from the bulldozer tracks and the fact that the wall fell in a straight line that they had deliberately knocked the wall down. It didn’t demonstrate the classic circular pattern of a warhead explosion.”

The Taliban is doing the same thing, the Pentagon said, but it is also trying to protect its military equipment by placing it near targets that it knows the U.S. planes won’t normally attack.

“We’ve got an example here of a photograph of an early warning and radar and aircraft-control facility near the Herat airfield. You see the airfield up in the upper-left-hand corner, and this is a residential area down in the lower-right-hand corner, and a mosque near the center of the picture and the military vehicles stationed around that area,” the Defense official said. “Now, initially, in looking at this, this is a military base. Our military bases have churches, et cetera, on base, and one could argue, ‘Well, so what?’ But if you look at the next photo, it’s a post- strike photo after we’ve struck this facility.

“I want to draw your attention to the arrow in the center near the mosque; it’s probably a little difficult for you to see – right in here. But there was a helicopter there. You can see the helicopter blades that got destroyed in the strike,” the Defense official went on. “And it was deliberately positioned directly next to the mosque, we think – you know, with the purpose of either tempting us to cause some collateral damage or preserve the helicopter from strike. Well, in that case, neither worked. The helicopter was destroyed, and the mosque was not damaged.”

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