Sam Gardiner

Sam Gardiner is a retired Air Force Colonel and described as "an expert in military strategy and an expert on strategic games." [1] At one time Gardiner taught at the National War College. [2]

Gardiner estimated that that some 50 media stories backing the push for war in Iraq media orignated from what was to be called the Office of Strategic Influence. FAIR noted that Rumsfeld stated that while the Office of Strategic Influence was killed in name, it's activities were going to be carried out. [3]

Some of the stories he identified included that of the 'rescue' of Private Jessica Lynch and one in which defense officials claimed that the "first Iraqi unit marines encountered, the 51st Mechanized Infantry Division, had surrendered four days before it actually did." Gardiner said that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers gave bad or deliberately incomplete info on several topics. "Never before have so many stories been created to sell a war. And they probably didn't need it," he told US News. [4]

Publications by Gardiner

• "An Objectives-Based Approach to MiitaryCampaign Analysis," Bruce Pirnie, Sam B. Gardiner, MR-656-JS, 1996.
• Sam Gardiner, "Truth from These Podia. Summary of a Study of Strategic Influence, Perception Management, Strategic Information Warfare and Strategic Psychological Operations in Gulf II", posted by USNews.com, 8 October 2003.
  • pdf (first 10 pages).
  • pdf (second 10 pages).
  • pdf (third 10 pages).
  • pdf (fourth 10 pages).
  • pdf (fifth 10 pages).
  • pdf (final 6 pages). (Pdf files of all 56 pages are also available from Veterans for Peace here [5] or as html

Other Related SourceWatch Resources

• Joseph C. Wilson IV
• Valerie Plame
• Valerie Plame/External Links

External links

• Photo of Sam Gardiner.
• Old Wars, New Weapons: The Lessons from Iraq, Center for Defense Information, December 15, 1991. Includes commentary by Sam Gardiner, Dick Cheney, and Richard N. Perle.
• Sam Gardiner, Preparing for the next quarter century: what should the role of the United States Air Force be?, 1993. "Undertakes (1) a general review of the elements of strategy, and of the task of formulating military doctrine by which strategic objectives can be achieved (2) a more specific enumeration of the elements of air power strategy, which essentially involve intellectual flexibility."
• Jamie McIntyre, U.S. military experts: Taiwan would win showdown with China, CNN.com, March 19, 1996. Comments by Sam Gardiner.
• WWW III on the Horizon-Says Generals, American Freedom News, November 2, 2001: "A preemptive action by India to destroy Pakistan's nuclear stockpile could provoke a new war on the subcontinent. The U.S. military has conducted more than 25 war games involving a confrontation between a nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, and each has resulted in nuclear war, said retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner, an expert on strategic games."
• Sam Gardiner, It Doesn't Start in Kashmir, and It Never Ends Well, Washington Post, January 20, 2002.
• On October 11th, 2002 the El Dorado Peace and Justice Community wrote a letter to the Mt. Democrat advocating "No War".: "'It's a violation of the United Nations Charter. It's a violation of the NATO Charter.' 'If preemption as a policy takes hold,' Gardiner asked, 'where does it stop?' Sam Gardiner, retired Air Force Colonel, who has taught strategy at the National War College." From the Washington Post: "New Strategy Courts Unseen Dangers."
• Karen Guttieri, Strategic Insight. Post-Conflict Iraq: Prospects and Problems, Center for Contemporary Conflict, February 20, 2003: Footnote 18: "The UN expects 100,000 direct war casualties and 400,000 non-battle deaths. Elaine M. Grossman, 'Adviser: Humanitarian Crisis in Iraq Could Fast Undercut War Aims,' Inside the Pentagon Feb. 6, 2003. Retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner is a 'former military officer who has informally advised the executive branch over the past month.' According to Gardiner, Bush 'can't be backed up. The military is not prepared to deal with his promises.'"
• Sam Gardiner interview by Linda Mottram, ABC local radio, Australia, March 20, 2003: "War will strain humanitarian relief resources."
• War Strategy: Day 3, PBS Online News Hour, March 21, 2003: "Margaret Warner discusses strategy on day three of the Iraq war with retired Colonel W. Patrick Lang, Middle East analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency during the Gulf War; retired Air Force Colonel Samuel Gardiner, an author on the future of warfare; and Marine Corps Colonel Gary Anderson, who served in Somalia and has focused on urban combat operations."
• NPR Interview: "Restoring Services to Iraq Remains a Challenge", Linda Wertheimer and Samuel Gardiner, May 10, 2003.
• Mark Fineman, Robin Wright and Doyle McManus, Preparing for War, Stumbling to Peace, Iraq Foundation, July 18, 2003: "Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force colonel and longtime professor at military war colleges, prepared an elaborate document spotlighting the fragility of Iraq's electricity and water systems after decades of neglect. In private meetings arranged by former Pentagon spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon, he warned such senior administration officials as Zalmay Khalilzad, President Bush's national security point man on Iraq, that both systems would collapse even if they weren't targeted in the war. ... 'This is a catastrophe waiting to happen,' several senior Defense Department officials said Gardiner told them at the time."
• Fay Bowers and Peter Grier, Intelligence quagmire: How to gauge the new IQ, Christian Science Monitor, July 21, 2003: "'Separate from the formal intelligence community, it appears as if the Pentagon had contractors and former CIA officials doing private collecting for them,' says Sam Gardiner, a retired US Colonel who now does research on intelligence. 'The materials seem to have gone directly to the NSC (National Security Council) and the White House. The State Department INR certainly did not have an opportunity to footnote their disagreement.'"
• Joseph Wilson promoting critique of govt. propaganda by Sam Gardiner, Indymedia, October 14, 2003.
• More From the Enron War, Billmon.org, October 15, 2003: "Col. Sam Gardiner, who was a regular on the NewsHour during 'major combat operations' in Iraq, has written a paper that deconstructs the Anglo-American campaign of strategic deception before, during and after the invasion. ... Working with an L.A. Times reporter (the late Mark Fineman) Gardiner has carefully untangled the seemingly endless stream of official lies - the half-baked intelligence, the deliberately deceptive sales campaign, the phony pre-war propaganda, the phony war propaganda, the phony post-war propaganda, etc. etc. ... Gardiner breaks all this material down into a series of stories -- like the mythical meeting between Mohammad Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent at the Prague airport; the Niger yellowcake; the model airplanes of death; the fictional uprising in Basra; the manufactured surrender of an entire Iraqi divison; the Private Lynch made-for-TV movie, and so on. He then traces the origin of each story, follows it through the propaganda assembly lines at the Pentagon, the White House and 10 Downing Street, and shows how it was injected into public consciousness."
• Stan Goff, Piss On My Leg: Perception Control and the Stage Management of War, CounterPunch, October 17, 2003.
• Today's Hero, PacificViews, October 20, 2003: "Col. Sam Gardiner is incredibly important on two fronts: (1.) Sam Gardiner was asked by the Bush Administration to help with the humanitarian needs before the war, therefore he has credibility that those of us in the hinderlands do not, and (2.) Gardiner has done an excellent job of showing how the Bushies (and their lying friends in the UK at No. 10 Downing Street) have conducted a very powerful propaganda campaign to sell the war."
• "50 Lies To Tell the Public", PR Watch Spin of the Day October 17, 2003.
• Paul Bedard, "Wilson adds ammo to hit war credibility gap", "Washington Whispers", USNews.com, October 20, 2003.
• "MEDIA ADVISORY: The Office of Strategic Influence Is Gone, But Are Its Programs In Place?", FAIR, November 20, 2003.
• Jim Fallows, "Will Iran be Next: Soldiers, spies, and diplomats conduct a classic Pentagon war game—with sobering results", Atlantic Monthly, December 2004. (Fallows describes a war game conducted by Gardiner for the magazine.
• Scott Stoesel, "North Korea: the War Game: Dealing with North Korea could make Iraq look like child's play—and the longer we wait, the harder it will get. That's the message of a Pentagon-style war game involving some of this country's most prominent foreign-policy strategists", Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2005. This describes another war game conducted by Gardiner for the magazine.