James Bamford's
Rolling Stone article "The Man Who Sold the War: Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war" has already been diaried by
Unforgiven. I want to focus on what it tells us about the way information and disinformation is used by what is effectively a private US intelligence agency. The Rendon Group were not only authorized to operate in Iraq before the war, and given multimillion dollar contracts to manipulate the press and plant disinformation, but were given access to the highest levels of US government intelligence. The article is somewhat measured, but what the author clearly hints at, without directly saying it, is mindblowing. I want to tease out three points, and if they don't make you go out and buy some tin foil, then it is because you already have a closet full of it.
- How WMD claims were the victory of Rendon over the CIA
- How reporters were paid or punished by Rendon
- How the CIA pays Rendon to sabotage the internet
1. How the WMD claims were the victory of Rendon over the CIA
The article details Rendon's role in creating and funding the Iraqi National Congress (INC), and then in promoting al-Haideri's false claims about underground WMD facilities by funneling them to Judy Miller, among others. After the CIA gave him a polygraph on December 17, 2001 that showed he was making it all up, Rendon employees flew Miller to interview al-Haideri and this resulted in her infamous report of December 20th, 2001, about Iraq's secret WMD facilities that played a major role in the buildup to the war.
This was the old money (CIA) losing out to the new money (Rendon). While the CIA's brief was to collect accurate intelligence, Bamford's brief was simple: "pressure the United States to attack Iraq." As a result, they were an intelligence operation and a public relations firm rolled into one, a hybrid that was able to outmaneouvre the old, inefficient model. How?
The first answer is by manufacturing disinformation. For example, Newsweek reported that Rendon was responsible for "a rumor campaign after the gulf war to convince Iraqis that Saddam is sexually impotent. (The Rendon Group denies feeding any falsehoods to the media.)" But it gets much, much, worse. Read on.
2. How reporters were paid or punished by Rendon (alternate title: "Employ some reporters, kill others")
Two names: Paul Moran and Tareq Ayyoub. Rendon would employ some reporters. Paul Moran, a journalist for the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) was given an exclusive television interview with Al-Haideri. After his death in Iraq, a small furor was created in Australia when the Adelaide Advertiser reported that he had been working for Rendon on CIA contracts (4/5/03):
Mr Moran regularly told Mr Buchan about his work with the Rendon Group, which started soon after the Gulf War ended in 1991 when he was contracted to help reactivate a Kuwaiti television station used to broadcast anti-Saddam messages into Iraq. The Rendon Group also produced videos and radio messages encouraging defection by the Iraqi military in a campaign which reportedly cost the CIA $38 million in its first year.
Bamford writes that Moran had been on Rendon's payroll for years in "information operations." This was confirmed by his family, according to the Herald Sun in Melbourne (10/1303):
The Adelaide Advertiser later reported that Mr Moran had spent more than 10 years assisting the CIA to destabilise the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. However, Mr Moran's family and friends have told ABC television's Australian Story that his work for a Washington-based public relations company in the 1990s was misconstrued. He had been hired by the Rendon Group to help Kurds and Iraqis opposed to Saddam establish a television station, and only later learned that the client was the CIA, they said.
But the Advertiser's source, Buchan, paints a less positive picture of Moran's contacts with Rendon. The point is that he was ON THEIR PAYROLL while he was reporting, and a result was the al-Haideri fiction. Suddenly, the notion that Miller was actually on someone's payroll is no longer far-fetched. Bamford says Moran "had trained Iraqi opposition forces in photographic espionage, showing them how to covertly document Iraqi military activities, and had produced pro-war announcements for the Pentagon."
On the other hand, there is the case of Tareq Ayyoub. Bamford is careful here, but read this carefully:
The top target that the pentagon assigned to Rendon was the Al-Jazeera television network. The contract called for the Rendon Group to undertake a massive "media mapping" campaign against the news organization, which the Pentagon considered "critical to U.S. objectives in the War on Terrorism." According to the contract, Rendon would provide a "detailed content analysis of the station's daily broadcast . . . [and] identify the biases of specific journalists and potentially obtain an understanding of their allegiances, including the possibility of specific relationships and sponsorships."
The secret targeting of foreign journalists may have had a sinister purpose. Among the missions proposed for the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence was one to "coerce" foreign journalists and plant false information overseas. Secret briefing papers also said the office should find ways to "punish" those who convey the "wrong message."
If you remember, CNN's Eason Jordan lost his job after remarks at a Jan. 27, 2005 panel in Davos, Switzerland. It was reported that he said that 12 journalists who were killed by coalition forces in Iraq had been targeted. Later he claimed he only meant that they had been targetted because they looked Iraqi. He was fired anyway. Some reports said Jordan had also told a story about an Al-Jazeera columnist that had been tortured at Abu Ghraib prison (See AP's Bauder, "CNN executive says he doesn't believe military intended to kill journalists").
No doubt he was refering to, among others, the death of the Jordanian Al-Jazeera reproter who was killed when network's Baghdad office hit in U.S. bombing campaign on April 8, 2003. Now, am I asserting that Rendon killed the al-Jazeera reporters and cameramen who died as a result of bombings or car accidents? No. Did Rendon effectively compile an "enemies list" of reporters that others might have acted on? The article sure implies this.
3. How the CIA pays Rendon to sabotage the internet
Here are three more excerpts from Bamford's piece that show how Rendon's media manipulation works. First, they troll internet forums. Second, they plant false information on the internet and in other media. Third, they monitor stories before they reach the internet, so that they may be neutralized before and as they are actually posted:
The company was contracted to monitor Internet chat rooms in both English and Arabic -- and "participate in these chat rooms when/if tasked."
According to a secret Pentagon report personally approved by Rumsfeld in October 2003 and obtained by Rolling Stone, the Strategic Command is authorized to engage in "military deception" -- defined as "presenting false information, images or statements." The seventy-four-page document, titled "Information Operations Roadmap," also calls for psychological operations to be launched over radio, television, cell phones and "emerging technologies" such as the Internet. In addition to being classified secret, the road map is also stamped noforn, meaning it cannot be shared even with our allies.
A key weapon, according to the documents, was Rendon's "proprietary state-of-the-art news-wire collection system called 'Livewire,' which takes real-time news-wire reports, as they are filed, before they are on the Internet, before CNN can read them on the air and twenty-four hours before they appear in the morning newspapers, and sorts them by keyword. The system provides the most current real-time access to news and information available to private or public organizations."
Finally, a note about other links to the war. I wrote in July about possible links between the Niger documents and the private intelligence networks, and this certainly fits into that possibility. The AP reported that "The Office of Strategic Influence, set up after the Sept. 11 attacks, has come up with proposals including the placing of news items - false if need be - with foreign news organizations, a defense official said Tuesday on condition of anonymity. The office is considering having an outside organization distribute the information so it would not be apparent it came from the Defense Department, the official said." (AP's Buzbee, "Pentagon would try to sway opinion in hostile, friendly nations" 2/19/02). While Rendon denies this in Bamford's article, The AP reports:
The Office of Strategic Influence is headed by an Air Force brigadier general, Simon P. Worden, and coordinates with a new White House counterterrorism office run by a retired general, Wayne Downing, who once headed the military's Special Operations command. The Pentagon office already has hired the Washington-based Rendon Group consulting firm, which has done extensive work for the CIA, The New York Times said in Feb. 19 editions.
Say what you want about this administration, but by removing spywork and clandestine warfare from oversight, they certainly have gained latitude of which previous administrations could only dream. SPOILER ALERT: The following sentence may induce nightmares:
According to one senior administration official involved in intelligence-budget decisions, half of the CIA's work is now performed by private contractors -- people completely unaccountable to Congress. .
So read Bamford's article. This is at least as serious as anything else we're upset about here.