A US military team conducting psychological operations in Afghanistan was ordered by superiors to illegally target US lawmakers in a bid to get more troops and funding for the war, Rolling Stone magazine reported.
Thursday's explosive new report by the magazine accused the command of General William Caldwell, in charge of training Afghan troops, of pressuring a cell of US soldiers specialising in "psy-ops" that normally influence enemy behaviour to train their sites on senators and congressmen visiting him in Afghanistan, as well as other VIPs and senior foreign officials.
It said the senators included John McCain, the Republican nominee for the 2008 presidential race, as well as Joe Lieberman, Jack Reed, Al Franken and Carl Levin, according to several members of the information operations team and internal documents obtained by the magazine.
Among those the team was repeatedly told to pressure during a four-month period were Representative Steve Israel of the House Appropriations Committee, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, several think-tank analysts, Germany's interior minister, and the Czech ambassador to Kabul. And when an officer sought to bring the operation to a halt, a campaign of retaliation was launched against him, according to the magazine.
"My job in psy-ops is to play with people's heads, to get the enemy to behave the way we want them to behave," Lieutenant Colonel Michael Holmes, leader of the "information operations" unit, told Rolling Stone. "I'm prohibited from doing that to our own people. When you ask me to try to use these skills on senators and congressman, you're crossing a line."
The magazine also said Caldwell's chief of staff asked Holmes how the general could secretly manipulate the US lawmakers. "How do we get these guys to give us more people?" the chief of staff demanded. "What do I have to plant inside their heads?" A Pentagon spokesman could not be immediately reached early Thursday for comment.