@@ America's propaganda machine is vast and secretive @@

New York Times
December 11, 2005

Propaganda
Military's Information War Is Vast and Often Secretive

By Jeff Gerth

The media center in Fayetteville, North Carolina, would be the envy of any global
communications company.

In state of the art studios, producers prepare the daily mix of music and news for
the group's radio stations or spots for friendly television outlets. Writers putting
out newspapers and magazines in Baghdad and Kabul converse via teleconferences.
Mobile trailers with high-tech gear are parked outside, ready for the next crisis.

The center is not part of a news organization, but a military operation, and those
writers and producers are soldiers.

The 1200-strong psychological operations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyops) unit
based at Fort Bragg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Bragg%2C_North_Carolina) turns
out what its officers call "truthful messages" to support the United States
government's objectives, though its commander acknowledges that those stories are
one-sided and their American sponsorship is hidden.

"We call our stuff information and the enemy's propaganda", said Colonel Jack N.
Summe, then the commander of the Fourth Psychological Operations Group, during a tour
in June. Even in the Pentagon, "some public affairs professionals see us
unfavorably", and inaccurately, he said, as "lying, dirty tricksters".

The recent disclosures that a Pentagon contractor in Iraq paid newspapers to print
"good news" articles written by American soldiers prompted an outcry in Washington,
where members of Congress said the practice undermined American credibility and top
military and White House officials disavowed any knowledge of it.

President Bush was described by Stephen J. Hadley
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hadley), his national security adviser, as
"very troubled" about the matter. The Pentagon is investigating.

But the work of the contractor, the Lincoln Group
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Group), was not a rogue operation. Hoping to
counter anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world, the Bush administration has been
conducting an information war that is extensive, costly and often hidden, according
to documents and interviews with contractors, government officials and military
personnel.

The campaign was begun by the White House, which set up a secret panel soon after the
September 11 attacks to coordinate information operations by the Pentagon, other
government agencies and private contractors.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the focus of most of the activities, the military operates
radio stations and newspapers, but does not disclose their American ties. Those
outlets produce news material that is at times attributed to the "International
Information Center", an untraceable organization.

Lincoln Group (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Lincoln_Group) says it
planted more than 1000 articles in the Iraqi and Arab press and placed editorials on
an Iraqi Web site, Pentagon documents show. For an expanded stealth persuasion effort
into neighboring countries, Lincoln Group presented plans, since rejected, for an
underground newspaper, television news shows and an anti-terrorist comedy based on
"The Three Stooges".

Like the Lincoln Group, Army psychological operations (PsyOps) units sometimes pay to
deliver their message, offering television stations money to run unattributed
segments or contracting with writers of newspaper opinion pieces, military officials
said.

"We don't want somebody to look at the product and see the U.S. government and tune
out", said Colonel James Treadwell, who ran psychological operations support at the
Special Operations Command in Tampa.

The United States Agency for International Development
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USAID) also masks its role at times. AID finances about
30 radio stations in Afghanistan, but keeps that from listeners. The agency has
distributed tens of thousands of iPod-like audio devices in Iraq and Afghanistan that
play prepackaged civic messages, but it does so through a contractor that promises
"there is no U.S. footprint".

As the Bush administration tries to build democracies overseas and support a free
press, getting out its message is critical. But that is enormously difficult, given
widespread hostility in the Muslim world over the war in Iraq, deep suspicion of
American ambitions and the influence of antagonistic voices. The American message
makers who are wary of identifying their role can cite findings by the Pentagon,
pollsters and others underscoring the United States' fundamental problems of
credibility abroad.

Defenders of influence campaigns argue that they are appropriate and can have impact.
"Psychological operations are an essential part of warfare, more so in the electronic
age than ever", said Lieutenant Colonel Charles A. Krohn, a retired Army spokesman
and journalism professor. "If you're going to invade a country and eject its
government and occupy its territory, you ought to tell people who live there why
you've done it. That requires a well-thought-out communications program".

But covert information battles may backfire, others warn, or prove ineffective. An
Iraqi daily newspaper, Azzaman, complained in an editorial that the paid propaganda
campaign was an American government effort "to humiliate the independent national
press". And the upbeat stories distributed by the Lincoln Group about improved
security, for example, were unlikely to convince Iraqis enduring hardships.

While the United States does not ban the distribution of government propaganda
overseas, as it does domestically, the Government Accountability Office said in a
recent report that lack of attribution could undermine the credibility of news
videos. In finding that video news releases by the Bush administration that appeared
on American television were improper, the GAO said that such articles "are no longer
purely factual" because "the essential fact of attribution is missing."

In an article titled "War of the Words", Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wrote
about the importance of disclosure in America's communications in The Wall Street
Journal in July.

"The American system of openness works", he wrote. The United States must find "new
and better ways to communicate America's mission abroad", including "a healthy
culture of communication and transparency between government and public".

Trying to Make a Case

After the September 11 attacks forced many Americans to recognize the nation's
precarious standing in the Arab world, the Bush administration decided to act to
improve the country's image and promote its values.

"We've got to do a better job of making our case", President Bush told reporters
after the attacks.

Much of the government's information machinery, including the United States
Information Agency and some CIA programs, was dismantled after the cold war. In that
struggle with the Soviet Union, the information warriors benefited from the
perception that the United States was backing victims of tyrannical rule. Many
Muslims today view Washington as too close to what they characterize as authoritarian
regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and elsewhere.

The White House turned to John Rendon, who runs a Washington communications company,
to help influence foreign audiences. Before the war in Afghanistan, he helped set up
centers in Washington, London and Pakistan so the American government could respond
rapidly in the foreign media to Taliban claims. "We were clueless", said Mary
Matalin, then the communications aide to Vice President *** Cheney.

John Rendon's business, the Rendon Group, had a history of government work in trouble
spots, In the 1990's, the CIA hired him to secretly help the nascent Iraqi National
Congress wage a public relations campaign against Saddam.

While advising the White House, John Rendon also signed on with the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, under a $27.6 million contract, to conduct focus groups around the world and
media analysis of outlets like Al-Jazeera, the satellite network based in Qatar.

About the same time, the White House recruited Jeffrey B. Jones, a former Army
colonel who ran the Fort Bragg psychological operations group, to coordinate the new
information war. He led a secret committee, the existence of which has not been
previously reported, that dealt with everything from public diplomacy, which includes
education, aid and exchange programs, to covert information operations.

The group even examined the president's language. Concerned about alienating Muslims
overseas, panel members said, they tried unsuccessfully to stop Bush from ending
speeches with the refrain "God bless America".

The panel, later named the Counter Terrorism Information Strategy Policy Coordinating
Committee (http://www.state.gov/s/ct), included members from the State Department,
the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies. John Rendon advised a subgroup on
counterpropaganda issues.

Colonel Jones's endeavor stalled within months, though, because of furor over a
Pentagon initiative. In February 2002, unnamed officials told The New York Times that
a new Pentagon operation called the Office of Strategic Influence planned "to provide
news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign news organizations". Though the
report was denied and a subsequent Pentagon review found no evidence of plans to use
disinformation, Rumsfeld shut down the office within days.

The incident weakened Colonel Jones's effort to develop a sweeping strategy to win
over the Muslim world. The White House grew skittish, some agencies dropped out, and
panel members soon were distracted by the war in Iraq, said Colonel Jones, who left
his post this year. The White House did not respond to a request to discuss the
committee's work.

What had begun as an ambitious effort to bolster America's image largely devolved
into a secret propaganda war to counter the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. The
Pentagon, which had money to spend and leaders committed to the cause, took the lead.
In late 2002 Rumsfeld told reporters he gave the press a "corpse" by closing the
Office of Strategic Influence
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Strategic_Influence), but he intended to
"keep doing every single thing that needs to be done".

The Pentagon increased spending on its psychological and influence operations and for
the first time outsourced work to contractors. One beneficiary has been the Rendon
Group (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendon_Group), which won additional
multimillion-dollar Pentagon contracts for media analysis and a media operations
center in Baghdad, including "damage control planning". The new Lincoln Group was
another winner.

Pentagon Contracts

It is something of a mystery how the company came to land more than $25 million in
Pentagon contracts in a war zone.

The two men who ran the small business had no background in public relations or the
media, according to associates and a résumé. Before coming to Washington and setting
up Lincoln Group in 2004, Christian Bailey, born in Britain and now 30, had worked
briefly in California and New York. Paige Craig, now 31, was a former Marine
intelligence officer.

When the company was incorporated last year, using the name Iraqex, its stated
purpose was to provide support services for business development, trade and
investment in Iraq. The company's earliest ventures there included providing security
to the military and renovating buildings. Iraqex also started a short-lived online
business publication.

In mid-2004, the company formed a partnership with the Rendon Group and later won a
$5 million Pentagon contract for an advertising and public relations campaign to
"accurately inform the Iraqi people of the Coalition's goals and gain their support."
Soon, the company changed its name to Lincoln Group. It is not clear how the
partnership with Rendon was formed; Rendon Group dropped out weeks after the contract
was awarded.

Within a few months, Lincoln Group shifted to information operations and
psychological operations, two former employees said. The company was awarded three
new Pentagon contracts, worth tens of millions of dollars, they added. A Lincoln
Group spokeswoman referred a reporter's inquiry about its military contracts to
Pentagon officials.

The company's work was part of an effort to counter disinformation in the Iraqi
press. With nearly $100 million in United States aid, the Iraqi media has sharply
expanded since the fall of Saddam. About 200 Iraq-owned newspapers and 15 to 17
Iraq-owned television stations operate in the country. Many, though, are affiliated
with political parties, and are fiercely partisan, with fixed pro- or anti-American
stances, and some publish rumors, half-truths and outright lies.

>From quarters at Camp Victory, the American base, the Lincoln Group works to get out
the military's message.

Lincoln's employees work virtually side by side with soldiers. Army officers
supervise Lincoln Group's work and demand to see details of article placements and
costs, said one of the former employees, speaking on condition of anonymity because
Lincoln Group's Pentagon contract prohibits workers from discussing their activities.

"Almost nothing we did did not have the command's approval", he said.

The employees would take news dispatches, called storyboards, written by the troops,
translate them into Arabic and distribute them to newspapers. Lincoln Group hired
former Arab journalists and paid advertising agencies to place the material.

Typically, Lincoln Group paid newspapers from $40 to $2,000 to run the articles as
news articles or advertisements, documents provided to The New York Times by a former
employee show. More than 1,000 articles appeared in 12 to 15 Iraqi and Arab
newspapers, according to Pentagon documents. The publications did not disclose that
the articles were generated by the military.

A company worker also often visited the Baghdad convention center, where the Iraqi
press corps hung out, to recruit journalists who would write and place opinion
pieces, paying them $400 to $500 as a monthly stipend, the employees said.

Like the dispatches produced at Fort Bragg, those storyboards were one-sided and
upbeat. Each had a target audience, "Iraq General" or "Shia" for example; an
underlying theme like "Anti-intimidation" or "Success and Legitimacy of the ISF", or
Iraqi Security Forces; and a target newspaper.

Articles written by the soldiers at Camp Victory often assumed the voice of Iraqis.
"We, all Iraqis, are the government. It is our country", noted one article. Another
said, "The time has come for the ordinary Iraqi, you, me, our neighbors, family and
friends to come together".

While some were plodding accounts filled with military jargon and bureaucratese,
others favored the language of tabloids: "blood-thirsty apostates", "crawled on their
bellies like dogs in the mud", "dim-witted fanatics", and "terror kingpin".

A former Lincoln Group employee said the ploy of making the articles appear to be
written by Iraqis by removing any American fingerprints was not very effective. "Many
Iraqis know it's from Americans", he said.

The military has sought to expand its media influence efforts beyond Iraq to
neighboring states, like Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan, Pentagon documents say.
Lincoln Group submitted a plan that was subsequently rejected, a Pentagon spokesman
said. The company proposed placing editorials in magazines, newspapers and Web sites.
In Iraq, the company posted editorials on a Web site, but military commanders stopped
the operation for fear that the site's global accessibility might violate the federal
ban on distributing propaganda to American audiences, according to Pentagon documents
and a former Lincoln Group employee.

In its rejected plan, the company offered some creative concepts adapted from
American culture, including comedies modeled after "Cheers" and the Three Stooges.
Documents show Lincoln Group also proposed a version of The Onion, the satirical
newspaper.


The Pentagon's media effort in Afghanistan began soon after the ouster of the
Taliban. In what had been a barren media environment, 350 magazines and newspapers
and 68 television and radio stations now operate. Most are independent; the rest are
run by the government. The United States has provided money to support the media, as
well as training for journalists and government spokesmen.

But much of the American role remains hidden from local readers and audiences.

The Pentagon, for example, took over the Taliban's radio station, renamed it Peace
radio and began powerful shortwave broadcasts in local dialects, defense officials
said. Its programs include music as well as 9 daily news scripts and 16 daily public
service messages, according to Colonel James Yonts, a United States military
spokesman in Afghanistan. Its news accounts, which sometimes are attributed to the
International Information Center, often put a positive spin on events or serve
government needs.

The United States Army publishes a sister paper in Afghanistan, also called Peace. An
examination of issues from last spring found no bad news.

"We have no requirements to adhere to journalistic principles of objectivity",
Colonel Summe, the Army psychological operations specialist, said. "We tell the U.S.
side of the story to approved targeted audiences" using truthful information. Neither
the radio station nor the paper discloses its ties to the American military.

Similarly, AID does not locally disclose that dozens of Afghanistan radio stations
get its support, through grants to a London-based nonprofit group, Internews. (AID
discloses its support in public documents in Washington, most of which can be found
globally on the Internet.)

The AID representative in Afghanistan, in an email
(http://www.usaid.gov/press/mediaadvisories/2004/ma041019.html) message relayed by
Peggy O'Ban (http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/pix/b/sa/55913.htm), an agency spokeswoman,
explained the nondisclosure: "We want to maintain the perception (if not the reality)
that these radio stations are in fact fully independent".

Recipients are required to adhere to standards. If a news organization produced "a
daily drumbeat of criticism of the American military, it would become an issue", said
James Kunder (http://www.cdmha.org/interhands/speaker_pages/kunder.htm), an AID
assistant administrator, He added that in combat zones, the issue of disclosure was a
balancing act between security and assuring credibility.

The American role is also not revealed by another recipient of AID grants, Voice for
Humanity (http://www.voiceforhumanity.org), a nonprofit organization (NGO) in
Lexington, Kentucky. It supplied tens of thousands of audio devices in Iraq and
Afghanistan with messages intended to encourage people to vote. Rick Ifland, the
group's director, said the messages were locally produced, culturally appropriate and
part of the "positive developments in democracy, freedom and human rights in the
Middle East".

It is not clear how effective the messages were or what recipients did with iPod-like
devices, pink for women and silver for men, that could not be altered to play music
or other recordings. Rick Ifland said they were designed that way so "only a
consistent, secure official message can be disseminated".

To show off the new media in Afghanistan, AID officials invited Mary Matalin
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Matalin), the former Cheney aide and conservative
commentator, and the talk show host Rush Limbaugh
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_Limbaugh) to visit in February.
http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/cross-cutting_programs/transition_initiatives/country/afghan/rpt0205.html
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/eibessential/rush_reports_back_from_afghanistan/afghanistan.guest.html

They visited a journalism school. Rush Limbaugh told his listeners, the students
asked him "some of the best questions about journalism and about America that I've
ever been asked".

One of the first queries, Rush Limbaugh said, was "How do you balance justice and
truth and objectivity?"

His reply: report the truth, don't hide any opinions or "interest in the outcome of
events". Tell "people who you are", he said, and "they'll respect your credibility".

Carlotta Gall and Ruhullah Khapalwak contributed reporting from Afghanistan for this
article.
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/nyt135.html

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