June 10, 2002	Monday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 28,1423

PARIS, June 9: The word from Washington is that the White House is preparing to unveil a new communications weapon as part of its “war” against terrorism, a war that apparently will include many more countries than are presently listed on President Bush’s “Axis of evil.”

The weapon will be aimed largely at news reports coming out of the Middle East and South Asia that are considered to be either unfair to US anti-terrorism efforts, or categorically anti-American.

According to US government sources, the new weapon will take the form of a special crack communications team that will be set up to provide permanent and rapid real-time responses to any news attacks aimed at the United States.

Says the special Washington source, the communications team will have as its objective, the sending out of “good news” about the US, regularly mixed with information — some would call it propaganda — destined to support George W. Bush’s policy objectives, but, for dissemination overseas.

The domestic dissemination of any kind of slanted information is expressly forbidden by existing Federal statutes. But, says the source, that doesn’t forbid any of the information from making its way back from foreign targets — say, those in Ottawa, London or Mexico City — where it would find its way into local US newspapers and magazines.

The person charged with setting up the new crisis communications team — which should have, at least in its first phase, some 12 staffers — is Karen Hughes, one of Bush’s principal communications counsellors, who is leaving her White House job at the end of the summer.

The person who seems most likely, says the source, to be placed in charge of the new team is a little-known US official by the name of Tucker Eskew.

According to the source, Eskew has the edge for the new post largely because of work he performed several months earlier this year in London, where he was sent by Bush to oversee the creation of the Coalition Information Centre (CIC), a rapid-response unit formed jointly by the US and UK after Sept 11, to respond to anti-American news reports emanating from the Middle East.

Although the CIC was originally formed as a short-term solution to a long-term problem — as the source puts it — the CIC will be absorbed into the new White House communications team, which Hughes says she hopes will henceforth become a permanent part of the White House special operations departments.

Also to be involved in the new team will be Charlotte Beers, who is presently State Department Undersecretary for Public Affairs, who has repeatedly called for better coordination between the White House and the State Department with regard to the information aspects of the US “war against terrorism.”