in the LA Times yesterday one of their reporters broke a story about the US military passing off covert propaganda in the Iraqi press as news. I wrote about it on WNY Media
and I needed a nice picture to go with it, so I googled "Propaganda" and found some great pictures allong with the
(WIKIPEDIA - propaganda) entry for propiganda. and since I work with photoshop every day it only took me about 30 minutes to whip up this hysterical graphic.
I chuckle every time I look at it. I know it's disrespectful to our commander in chief, and I know some people will be offended by it, but I don't mind inciting political discussion with a provocative saterical image. and besides, it's freaking hysterical. and it represents this administeration beyond this specific news story. this is one of the most secerative presidents in history, and his reign has been completely stagemanaged. from the fact that he almost never holds press conferances or has any type of dialogue in public, to the fact that he doesn't allow the ceremony of bringing home soldiers caskets from war to be filmed or photographed. and what about embedded american reporting from Iraq and the intentional targeting of countless unembedded journalists... I could go on but I'll let others add to the list if they want to, and I'll get to the picture I'm talking about.
here's the full story...
[size=l] US Military Propaganda Masquerading as News[/size]
Wednesday, 30 November 2005
As part of the American "information offensive" in Iraq, the US military is authoring pro-America propaganda and slipping it into the Iraqi Press as legitimate unbiased news. Without letting anyone know that the US military, not Iraqi journalists, wrote the articles.
We are paying The Lincoln Group to translate them into Arabic, and pass them off to Iraqi newspapers as freelance journalism. Contractors posing as journalists pay $15,000 - $50,000 to Iraqi newspapers that typically publish these articles in their newspaper as a regular unbiased news story. According to a story in the LA Times released today.
The US has also purchased at least one newspaper and 'taken control' of one radio station which are used to channel more pro-American news to the Iraqi public. Nobody has been notified that these outlets are run by the US.
In other words, we have propaganda masquerading as Iraq's new free democratic press. Apparently the US can not depend on the facts, so we manufacture our own subjective truth, and depend on the almighty dollar to convince people to agree with us, and say what we want them to.
Hurray for democracy!!
Full article "U.S. Military Covertly Pays to Run Stories in Iraqi Press" from LA Times staff reporters Mark Mazzetti and Borzou. Daragahi below.
U.S. Military Covertly Pays to Run Stories in Iraqi Press
Troops write articles presented as news reports. Some officers object
to the practice.
By Mark Mazzetti and Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON - As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S.
military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories
written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the
U.S. mission in Iraq.
The articles, written by U.S. military "information operations"
troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers
with the help of a defense contractor, according to U.S. military
officials and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
Many of the articles are presented in the Iraqi press as unbiased news
accounts written and reported by independent journalists. The stories
trumpet the work of U.S. and Iraqi troops, denounce insurgents and
tout U.S.-led efforts to rebuild the country.
Though the articles are basically factual, they present only one side
of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S.
or Iraqi governments, officials said. Records and interviews indicate
that the U.S. has paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of such
articles, with headlines such as "Iraqis Insist on Living Despite
Terrorism," since the effort began this year.
The operation is designed to mask any connection with the U.S.
military. The Pentagon has a contract with a small Washington-based
firm called Lincoln Group, which helps translate and place the
stories. The Lincoln Group's Iraqi staff, or its subcontractors,
sometimes pose as freelance reporters or advertising executives when
they deliver the stories to Baghdad media outlets.
The military's effort to disseminate propaganda in the Iraqi media is
taking place even as U.S. officials are pledging to promote democratic
principles, political transparency and freedom of speech in a country
emerging from decades of dictatorship and corruption.
It comes as the State Department is training Iraqi reporters in basic
journalism skills and Western media ethics, including one workshop
titled "The Role of Press in a Democratic Society." Standards vary
widely at Iraqi newspapers, many of which are shoestring operations.
Underscoring the importance U.S. officials place on development of a
Western-style media, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday
cited the proliferation of news organizations in Iraq as one of the
country's great successes since the ouster of President Saddam
Hussein. The hundreds of newspapers, television stations and other
"free media" offer a "relief valve" for the Iraqi public to debate the
issues of their burgeoning democracy, Rumsfeld said.
The military's information operations campaign has sparked a backlash
among some senior military officers in Iraq and at the Pentagon who
argue that attempts to subvert the news media could destroy the U.S.
military's credibility in other nations and with the American public.
"Here we are trying to create the principles of democracy in Iraq.
Every speech we give in that country is about democracy. And we're
breaking all the first principles of democracy when we're doing it,"
said a senior Pentagon official who opposes the practice of planting
stories in the Iraqi media.
The arrangement with Lincoln Group is evidence of how far the Pentagon
has moved to blur the traditional boundaries between military public
affairs - the dissemination of factual information to the media - and
psychological and information operations, which use propaganda and
sometimes misleading information to advance the objectives of a
military campaign.
The Bush administration has come under criticism for distributing
video and news stories in the United States without identifying the
federal government as their source and for paying American journalists
to promote administration policies, practices the Government
Accountability Office has labeled "covert propaganda."
Military officials familiar with the effort in Iraq said much of it
was being directed by the "Information Operations Task Force" in
Baghdad, part of the multinational corps headquarters commanded by
Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines. The officials spoke on condition of
anonymity because they were critical of the effort and were not
authorized to speak publicly about it.
A spokesman for Vines declined to comment for this article. A Lincoln
Group spokesman also declined to comment.
One of the military officials said that, as part of a psychological
operations campaign that has intensified over the last year, the task
force also had purchased an Iraqi newspaper and taken control of a
radio station, and was using them to channel pro-American messages to
the Iraqi public. Neither is identified as a military mouthpiece.
The official would not disclose which newspaper and radio station are
under U.S. control, saying that naming them would put their employees
at risk of insurgent attacks.
U.S. law forbids the military from carrying out psychological
operations or planting propaganda through American media outlets. Yet
several officials said that given the globalization of media driven by
the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle, the Pentagon's efforts were
carried out with the knowledge that coverage in the foreign press
inevitably "bleeds" into the Western media and influences coverage in
U.S. news outlets.
"There is no longer any way to separate foreign media from domestic
media. Those neat lines don't exist anymore," said one private
contractor who does information operations work for the Pentagon.
Daniel Kuehl, an information operations expert at National Defense
University at Ft. McNair in Washington, said that he did not believe
that planting stories in Iraqi media was wrong. But he questioned
whether the practice would help turn the Iraqi public against the
insurgency.
"I don't think that there's anything evil or morally wrong with it,"
he said. "I just question whether it's effective."
One senior military official who spent this year in Iraq said it was
the strong pro-U.S. message in some news stories in Baghdad that first
made him suspect that the American military was planting articles.
"Stuff would show up in the Iraqi press, and I would ask, 'Where the
hell did that come from?' It was clearly not something that indigenous
Iraqi press would have conceived of on their own," the official said.
Iraqi newspaper editors reacted with a mixture of shock and shrugs
when told they were targets of a U.S. military psychological
operation.
Some of the newspapers, such as Al Mutamar, a Baghdad-based daily run
by associates of Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi, ran the articles
as news stories, indistinguishable from other news reports. Before the
war, Chalabi was the Iraqi exile favored by senior Pentagon officials
to lead post-Hussein Iraq.
Others labeled the stories as "advertising," shaded them in gray boxes
or used a special typeface to distinguish them from standard editorial
content. But none mentioned any connection to the U.S. military.
One Aug. 6 piece, published prominently on Al Mutamar's second page,
ran as a news story with the headline "Iraqis Insist on Living Despite
Terrorism." Documents obtained by The Times indicated that Al Mutamar
was paid about $50 to run the story, though the editor of the paper
said he ran such articles for free.
Nearly $1,500 was paid to the independent Addustour newspaper to run
an Aug. 2 article titled "More Money Goes to Iraq's Development," the
records indicated. The newspaper's editor, Bassem Sheikh, said he had
"no idea" where the piece came from but added the note "media
services" on top of the article to distinguish it from other editorial
content.
The U.S. military-written articles come in to Al Mutamar, the
newspaper run by Chalabi's associates, via the Internet and are often
unsigned, said Luay Baldawi, the paper's editor in chief.
"We publish anything," he said. "The paper's policy is to publish
everything, especially if it praises causes we believe in. We are
pro-American. Everything that supports America we will publish."
Yet other Al Mutamar employees were much less supportive of their
paper's connection with the U.S. military. "This is not right," said
Faleh Hassan, an editor. "It reflects the tragic condition of
journalists in Iraq. Journalism in Iraq is in very bad shape."
Ultimately, Baldawi acknowledged that he, too, was concerned about the
origin of the articles and pledged to be "more careful about stuff we
get by e-mail."
After he learned of the source of three paid stories that ran in Al
Mada in July, that newspaper's managing editor, Abdul Zahra Zaki, was
outraged, immediately summoning a manager of the advertising
department to his office.
"I'm very sad," he said. "We have to investigate."
The Iraqis who delivered the articles also reaped modest profits from
the arrangements, according to sources and records.
Employees at Al Mada said that a low-key man arrived at the
newspaper's offices in downtown Baghdad on July 30 with a large wad of
U.S. dollars. He told the editors that he wanted to publish an article
titled "Terrorists Attack Sunni Volunteers" in the newspaper.
He paid cash and left no calling card, employees said. He did not want
a receipt. The name he gave employees was the same as that of a
Lincoln Group worker in the records obtained by The Times. Although
editors at Al Mada said he paid $900 to place the article, records
show that the man told Lincoln Group that he gave more than $1,200 to
the paper.
Al Mada is widely considered the most cerebral and professional of
Iraqi newspapers, publishing investigative reports as well as poetry.
Zaki said that if his cash-strapped paper had known that these stories
were from the U.S. government, he would have "charged much, much more"
to publish them.
According to several sources, the process for placing the stories
begins when soldiers write "storyboards" of events in Iraq, such as a
joint U.S.-Iraqi raid on a suspected insurgent hide-out, or a suicide
bomb that killed Iraqi civilians.
The storyboards, several of which were obtained by The Times, read
more like press releases than news stories. They often contain
anonymous quotes from U.S. military officials; it is unclear whether
the quotes are authentic.
"Absolute truth was not an essential element of these stories," said
the senior military official who spent this year in Iraq.
One of the storyboards, dated Nov. 12, describes a U.S.-Iraqi
offensive in the western Iraqi towns of Karabilah and Husaybah.
"Both cities are stopping points for foreign fighters entering Iraq to
wage their unjust war," the storyboard reads.
It continues with a quote from an anonymous U.S. military official: "
'Iraqi army soldiers and U.S. forces have begun clear-and-hold
operations in the city of Karabilah near Husaybah town, close to the
Syrian border,' said a military official once operations began."
Another storyboard, written on the same date, describes the capture of
an insurgent bomb-maker in Baghdad. "As the people and the [Iraqi
security forces] work together, Iraq will finally drive terrorism out
of Iraq for good," it concludes.
It was unclear whether those two storyboards have made their way into
Iraqi newspapers.
A debate over the Pentagon's handling of information has raged since
shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.
In 2002, the Pentagon was forced to shut down its Office of Strategic
Influence, which had been created the previous year, after reports
surfaced that it intended to plant false news stories in the
international media.
For much of 2005, a Defense Department working group has been trying
to forge a policy about the proper role of information operations in
wartime. Pentagon officials say the group has yet to resolve the
often-contentious debate in the department about the boundaries
between military public affairs and information operations.
Lincoln Group, formerly known as Iraqex, is one of several companies
hired by the U.S. military to carry out "strategic communications" in
countries where large numbers of U.S. troops are based.
Some of Lincoln Group's work in Iraq is very public, such as an
animated public service campaign on Iraqi television that spotlights
the Iraqi civilians killed by roadside bombs planted by insurgents.
Besides its contract with the military in Iraq, Lincoln Group this
year won a major contract with U.S. Special Operations Command, based
in Tampa, to develop a strategic communications campaign in concert
with special operations troops stationed around the globe. The
contract is worth up to $100 million over five years, although U.S.
military officials said they doubted the Pentagon would spend the full
amount of the contract.
Mazzetti reported from Washington and Daragahi reported from Baghdad
Don't get your hopes up.