JOE BIDEN’S attempt to get a state-run “anti-disinformation” unit flying has crashed into the ground.

Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board has been “paused” — probably permanently — thanks to criticism from the right.

Sadly, I don’t think the right is wrong here, because in my personal experience, as well as our historic experience, these attempts at state-sponsored “anti-disinformation” units usually end up spreading disinformation themselves.

They battle “enemy propaganda” with their own propaganda.

Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board was set up in the Department of Homeland Security, focusing on exposing and opposing online Russian disinformation.

The US right attacked the Board as Biden’s “ministry of truth.” Its task was made easier because Biden’s pick for head of his board, Nina Jankowicz, had claimed the Hunter Biden “laptop scandal” was Russian disinformation, when it was true.

Biden’s son Hunter took jobs with Ukranian oligarchs in 2014. Files from a laptop that Hunter left in a repair shop suggested he had used his connections with his dad to get work from foreign oligarchs. Jankowicz was wrong — the story was not disinformation, it was accurate.

Out of office, Republicans will argue about government propaganda. But when they are in office, they use it.

Republican president George W Bush tried to make a lot of use of the US State Department’s Counter-Misinformation Team, a unit set up during the cold war to counter “misinformation” spreading during the war on terror.

There really were conspiracy theories and lies spreading during the war on terror that needed to be debunked — like the idea that the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers was an “inside job” or fake — just as there really is Russian propaganda to try justify its brutal Ukraine invasion.

But the problem was the US had its own lies and propaganda. The Counter-Misinformation Team tried to “counter” the “misinformation” that US troops used white phosphorus as an attack weapon when besieging the Iraqi town of Fallujah in 2004 during the post-war occupation.

Many saw white phosphorus as an inhumane chemical weapon, so this was a sensitive subject given that Saddam Hussein’s non-existent stockpile of chemical weapons was used as a justification for the Iraq invasion.

Bush’s Counter-Misinformation Team claimed white phosphorus was only used “very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes. They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters.”

I managed to get the telephone number of Todd Leventhal, the head of the Counter-Misinformation Team, and called him with the bad news.

White phosphorus shells cannot be used for “illumination” and the US artillery’s own journal described how the shells had been used to attack “the enemy” in Fallujah.

Leventhal was forced to admit he had been spreading misinformation and withdraw his claim.

The best place to uncover “propaganda” is a “free” press. It’s an imperfect tool, because the newspapers can swallow state propaganda as soon as anyone else, or create their own propagandist stories to pump up their favourite right-wing politicians — we saw plenty of that in the “war on terror” and have seem plenty more of that recently — but there is at least a model of free inquiry, of questioning authority even if it is too often more of a promise than a reality.

The “counter-misinformation” industry also has a second strand, of supposedly “independent” players who actually rely on the state.

We saw this during the war on terror, when Quilliam, supposedly an independent, anti-Islamist propaganda think tank, was actually heavily dependent on state funding.

Or more recently when the Integrity Initiative, a supposedly independent anti-Russian propaganda scheme was also exposed as a state-funded, secretive group stuffed with people linked to intelligence officials.

The Integrity Initiative did what these secret propaganda groups do, and went beyond countering “Russian propaganda” and got involved in political attacks on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

These semi-covert “counter-misinformation” schemes also generally end badly.

Quilliam is now dissolved, its former leader peddling pro-Trump and anti-vax conspiracy theories, and the Integrity Initiative was closed down when its lack of integrity was revealed.

These semi-clandestine “counter-misinformation” units attract the worst kind of people, acting as a magnet for those who like “secret” campaigns and see themselves as soldiers in “information wars.”

That doesn’t mean we have heard the last of “counter-misinformation” shenanigans.

The British government is running a cross-departmental Counter-Misinformation Cell, resting heavily on the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence, aimed at countering Russian propaganda.

An “ally” of Liz Truss told the Telegraph that “Liz thinks ditching our cold war anti-propaganda capability was a mistake and has restored it with this new information unit.

“It’s part of our strategy to tackle Russian disinformation and fake news and call out Kremlin lies and subterfuge. This is doubly important in the social media age.”

But cold war “counter-propaganda” is the worst possible model.

The Observer, basing a story on recently released documents, says the Foreign Office cold war Information Research Department ran “black propaganda” for decades, with stories from “fake sources aimed at destabilising cold war enemies by encouraging racial tensions, sowing chaos, inciting violence and reinforcing anti-communist ideas.”

These were justified as “counter-propaganda” and used fake, non-independent fronts like the International Committee for the Investigation of Communist Front Organisations.

In 1961 satirical comic Mad magazine started a strip called Spy vs Spy, where two “undercover agents” with beak-like faces are engaged in ever more absurd and pointless battles with each other. One is dressed in black, the other white, but the bird-like “spies” are otherwise identical.

It was an absurdist satire of the undercover battles of the cold war. Spy vs Spy was created by Antonio Prohias, an anti-Castro Cuban. Prohias was not in favour of what he saw as the “communist” enemy, but his cartoon showed you could easily become like your enemy if you used any means to fight them.

By grappling in the same secretive way, the two “spies” from different sides became identical and identically ridiculous. The same is true of the government-run “counter-misinformation” schemes.