Where's Winston Smith When You Need Him?

In a story that evokes images of George Orwell's novel, 1984, and its notorious description of information manipulation and language distortion, RAWSTORY reports the specifics behind the Pentagon's worldwide propaganda effort. ...

Describing the statement of work of the $100M contract for these services awarded to The Lincoln Group, a US propaganda company (aka PR and advertising), RAWSTORY explains what psyops means:

In the document, titled "Information Operations Roadmap," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged that information planted by the Pentagon abroad was increasingly returning to American shores and being "consumed by our domestic audience."

And while it calls for "boundaries" between psyops and the American news media, it offers no such restrictions between the potentially fictional campaigns and the foreign press.

According to the military definition of psyops, its goals include manipulating emotional and objective reasoning -- suggesting that the information campaigns are not limited to objective truth.

Psyops are defined as "planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence the emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals."