Lessons from Miami: information warfare in the age of empire.

• Author: Hogue, Ilyse
• Position: Thinking Economically

The stakes in Miami were very high for the Bush administration. Across the Americas, hundreds of millions of people are expressing their opposition to corporate driven globalization and "free trade." Meanwhile, historic alliances were being forged between domestic movements inside the US. Unions, local community groups and street activists shared a clear, common message: "No FTAA!" Anti-war groups like United for Peace and Justice joined with the more de-centralized, affinity group-based wing of the global justice movement to organize direct action. Local community groups representing immigrants, low-wage workers and communities of color organized marches and popular education events supported by global justice puppeteers and seasoned direct action organizers. Powerful labor groups like the AFL-CIO and the United Steelworkers made clear that despite tactical differences, there was solidarity across all the organizations and events represented in Miami.

Yet this powerful display of solidarity is not the glimpse of the action that most Americans got wedged in between their daily doses of the Michael Jackson surrender. More and more concerned citizens should ask themselves--why?

Two-pronged attack: Control the streets and control the story

What has become clear in the aftermath of the FTAA was that "The Miami Model"--as policing enthusiasts are calling it--had goals far more ambitious than merely controlling the streets. The bigger agenda of the Miami policing was to control the public perception of mass protest and domestic opposition movements. Miami represents the mainstreaming of overt information warfare against non-violent protest movements. Information warfare constitutes "Actions taken to achieve information superiority by affecting adversary information, information based processes, and information systems." [1]

The relevance of information warfare to social movements and political conflicts has been the subject of study by Rand Corporation researchers John J. Arquilla and David F. Ronfeldt. Over the past decade, they have written extensively about an aspect of information warfare they call "netwar" which they define as "trying to disrupt or damage what a target population knows or thinks it knows about itself and the world around it. It may involve public diplomacy measures, propaganda and psychological campaigns, political and cultural subversion, deception of or interference with local media." [2]

Learning from Iraq: Embed to win

A central piece of the information warfare strategy in Miami was to borrow one of the military's latest insights in public relations and "embed" the media in the police operations. As the viewing public learned in Iraq, embedding the media has a deep and powerful impact on reporters' perception of the situation. Appearing on camera in their special issue flak jackets and riot helmets, embedded TV correspondents helped reinforce the perception of the protests as a threat to public safety rather than a free expression of opinion. The story was aggressively defined from long before the FTAA meeting as protesters versus police, masking the reality that people from all walks of life were uniting to protest against "free trade" and unchecked corporate power. The Miami Herald's embedded reporter uncritically documented Police Chief John Timoney's description of protesters as "punks," "trouble makers" and "knuckleheads" as well as Timoney's personal commitment to "hunt them like a hawk picking mice...