[infowar.de] AT 03.12.05 (Iraq Press Scandal)

[Georg Schoefbaenker <schoefbaenker -! - aon - at>]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GL03Ak02.html

Middle East
Dec 3, 2005

It's propaganda (shock, horror)!
By David Isenberg

The news of a US military operation that pays Iraqi newspapers to run 
stories written by "information operations" troops about how wonderfully 
things are going in the war should not come as a shock.

Even before the Iraq invasion, the Pentagon planned to create its own 
in-house propaganda and disinformation operation, to be called the Office 
of Strategic Influence. The program was supposedly killed after critics 
pointed out how easily the phony news it created could drift back into the 
domestic media.

Nevertheless, the occupation of Iraq has put the Pentagon in the



"strategic influence" business in a big way, with its own TV news operation 
(the Pentagon Channel), a then-coalition-controlled Iraqi TV and radio 
network (now nominally in the hands of the Iraqi government, but still 
powered by Pentagon dollars and run by a US vendor) and millions of dollars 
to hire public relations firms and consultants to spin the coalition's 
propaganda to the Iraqi people.

In fact, paying off the Iraqi media to run good news mirrors what the Bush 
administration has been doing at home.

For example, in the past year it was revealed that the Bush administration 
paid nearly a quarter of a million dollars to a prominent conservative 
commentator, Armstrong Williams, to promote a new education law that had 
been strongly supported by President George W Bush. The Education 
Department paid a public relations firm for a video that promoted the law 
and appeared as a news story, without making clear the reporter was hired 
as part of the deal.

Similarly, some-time reporter and $200-an-hour gay escort, James Guckert, 
aka Jeff Gannon, violated a ban on "fake" news stories by reprinting White 
House news releases verbatim.

The gist of the latest story is that beginning this year as part of an 
information offensive in Iraq, the US military began secretly paying Iraqi 
newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to 
burnish the image of the US mission in Iraq.

Responding to the growing furor over the disclosure, the Senate Armed 
Services Committee has summoned Defense Department officials for a briefing 
on the issue. "I am concerned about any actions that may undermine the 
credibility of the United States as we help the Iraqi people stand up a 
democracy," said the committee's chairman, John Warner.

The White House, too, says it is very concerned and is seeking more 
information.

The articles, written by the US military troops, are translated into Arabic 
and placed in Baghdad newspapers as unbiased news accounts with the help of 
the Lincoln Group, a Washington-based public relations firm located on 
legendary consultant central, K St, paid by the Pentagon. Lincoln's 
contract is with the Pentagon's special ops propaganda machine - JPOSE 
(Joint Psychological Operations Support Element).

In addition to paying newspapers to print government propaganda, Lincoln 
has paid about a dozen Iraqi journalists each several hundred dollars a 
month. Those journalists were chosen because their past coverage had not 
been antagonistic to the United States,

US officials in Washington said the payments were made through the Baghdad 
Press Club; an organization they said was created more than a year ago by 
US Army officers. Members of the Press Club are paid as much as $200 a 
month, depending on how many positive pieces they produce.

A spokesman for the US military in Baghdad, Major General Rick Lynch, 
responded that "a propaganda war is under way in Iraq" as militants were 
also using the media. "Conducting these kidnappings, these beheadings, 
these explosions so that he gets international coverage to look like he has 
more capability than he truly has," Lynch said.

"He is lying to the Iraqi people. We don't lie. We don't need to lie," 
Lynch added.

Ironically, according to the reports, the Lincoln Group has also been 
paying Ahmad Chalabi's newspaper, al-Mutamar, to reprint pro-American 
propaganda. Hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies were lavished on 
Iraqi exile Chalabi and his surrogates in the run-up to the invasion of 
Iraq. Chalabi is now a deputy prime minister. Chalabi was influential in 
helping boost the Bush administration's "case" that Saddam Hussein had a 
weapons of mass destruction program.

What is worth noting is the lack of substance in the stories. One of them 
was titled "Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism". That ranks up there 
with the sun sets in the West and the tide rolls in and out. It also 
explains why the paper was only paid $50 for it.

Also, in some cases the military articles placed in the Iraqi press had 
copied verbatim text from copyrighted publications and passed it on to be 
printed without attribution.

These stories, however, are part of a continuing and longstanding effort to 
shape public opinion; more accurately described as psychological operations 
(psyops) in Iraq.

An article in the American Prospect blog notes that in February a couple of 
local staffers of President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney 
headed to Iraq to work with Iraqex, the company that in March rebranded 
itself as The Lincoln Group to match that of its corporate parent, the 
Lincoln Alliance Corporation, a DC-based "business intelligence" firm.

Also, famed New York ad man, Jerry Della Femina, is on The Lincoln Group's 
advisory board.

But in late 2003 or early 2004 the Lincoln Alliance Corp became Iraqex. In 
October 2004, it won a $6 million contract from the Multi-National 
Corps-Iraq (formerly known as Combined Joint Task Force-7, which had 
operational control of all troops in Iraq) to design and execute an 
"aggressive advertising and public relations campaign that will accurately 
inform the Iraqi people of the coalition's goals and gain their support", 
according to the contract's August 2004 request for proposal.

Lincoln Group executive vice president Christian Bailey, a British venture 
capitalist, was involved with Lead21, a Republican business organization 
registered with the Internal Revenue Service as a 527 committee, which is a 
tax-exempt organization that engages in political activities

After graduating from Oxford University in England in the 1990s, Bailey 
moved to the San Francisco area about 1998, and in 1999, founded Express 
Action, an e-commerce company he apparently later sold. In 2002, Bailey was 
identified as the founder and chairman of a New York-based hedge fund 
called Lincoln Asset Management. On March 1, 2003, it was reported that 
Lincoln Asset Management had an initial $100 million in commitments to 
underwrite a leveraged buyout fund to acquire defense and intelligence 
companies.

The Lincoln Group is not the only firm engaged in psyops. In June, the 
Washington Post reported that the Pentagon had awarded three contracts, 
potentially worth up to $300 million over five years, to companies it hoped 
would inject more creativity into its psychological operations efforts to 
improve foreign public opinion about the US, particularly the military.

SYColeman Inc of Arlington, Lincoln Group and Science Applications 
International Corp were to help develop ideas and prototypes for radio and 
television spots, documentaries, or even text messages, pop-up ads on the 
Internet, podcasting, billboards and novelty items.

It is worth emphasizing that because of the security situation, US 
correspondents in Iraq are rarely able to leave the Green Zone in Baghdad 
or other US military bases to engage in on-the-ground reporting, and thus 
must rely, in part, on reports by Iraqis in the Iraqi press to assess the 
situation on the ground.

But the news that some of this media are simply US military propaganda 
undermines even this source of information.

Reportedly, the US military's top commanders, including General Peter Pace, 
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did not know about the Lincoln 
Group contract until it was first described by The Los Angeles Times. 
Pentagon officials said Pace and other top officials were disturbed and 
demanded explanations from senior officers in Iraq.

The bottom line is the Iraqi press is neither free, nor even Iraqi.

David Isenberg, a senior analyst with the Washington-based British American 
Security Information Council (BASIC), has a wide background in arms control 
and national security issues. The views expressed are his own.


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