Hoo-ah: The Pentagon’s new ‘Media War Plan’ for Iraq

The Pentagon is stepping up its psychological operations program in Iraq over the next three years - spending $300 million to produce news stories, entertainment programs and public service announcements for the Iraqi media. It is being billed as a counterweight to radical Al-Qaeda-style propaganda and a way to “engage and inspire” Iraqis to support U.S. objectives.

The U.S. Defense Department awarded $300 million in contracts last week to four companies to expand the U.S. military’s psychological operations program in Iraq over the next three years, The Washington Post reported on Friday.

The companies – including the most prominent communications contractor in Iraq, Virginia-based SOS international [SOSi] – will continue the U.S. Army’s counterinsurgency strategy of engaging in “critical military activities that don’t involve killing insurgents.”

The money will be used to bolster existing American-produced public service campaigns – on billboards, TV and radio – that have praised improvements in Iraq’s infrastructure and social services, as well as to produce news stories highlighting U.S. reconciliation efforts and the activities of the U.S.- trained Iraqi security services.

SOSi joined Washington DC-based the Lincoln Group, another Virginia-based media company, MPRI, and Los Angeles-based Leonie Industries in winning the DOD contracts. All have done previous work for the DOD.

General David Petraeus is on record as saying that winning the media war is crucial when dealing with a population hostile to U.S. objectives

Counterinsurgency 101

The three-year psy-ops campaign is right out of U.S. Central Command chief General David H. Petraeus’ counterinsurgency playbook. Petraeus, who in 2003 was the commander of the 101st Airborne Division in the northern Iraqi province of Nineveh, was instrumental in making sure that the media continued to operate there in the first months of the U.S. occupation.

Petraeus wrote in a 2006 Army counterinsurgency manual that became a blueprint for the DoD’s Media War Plan for Iraq, that winning the media war was crucial when dealing with a population hostile to U.S. objectives in Iraq.

The plan called for portraying “a new Iraq, offering hope of a prosperous and democratic future which would serve as a model for the Middle East.”
At the heart of the Pentagon campaign is an admittance by U.S. war strategists that they have been losing the propaganda campaign to Al-Qaeda-inspired militants who have put new technology and the Internet to good use – creating anti-western sentiment with professionally produced videos and slick websites in the years since the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002 and 2003.

“We’re being out-communicated by a guy in a cave,” Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates once remarked in reference to Osama bin Laden.

FCC probe

The DOD no doubt sees the 3-year project as a means of reversing what critics of the Bush administration have said was a concerted U.S. military campaign of broadcasting false information during the early stages of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In the new plan, the U.S. Joint Contracting Command in Iraq wrote, “The U.S. needs to communicate effectively with our strategic audiences (i.e. Iraqi, pan-Arabic, International, and U.S. audiences) to gain widespread acceptance of [U.S. and Iraqi government] core themes and messages.”

The announcement of this psy-ops campaign comes at a time when the United States’ media watchdog, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has begun looking into allegations that the Pentagon trained retired military personnel to promote the war policies of the Bush administration in U.S. media outlets.

U.S. law, under the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, prohibits tax money being spent on directing propaganda at U.S. audiences.

The probe follows a May 2008 New York Times investigation which suggested that TV stations and networks in the U.S. may have violated two provisions of the 1934 Communications Act, which compels media outlets to identify any ties between its analysts and the Pentagon.

The Lincoln Group

Meanwhile, a 2006 probe by the Pentagon’s inspector general found that media work completed in Iraq by one of the new contract’s recipients – the Lincoln Group – during 2005 was “improperly supervised but legal.” Part of the contract with Lincoln Group was for placing “faux” news stories in Iraqi newspapers.

According to the inspector general, the Lincoln Group produced news items ignoring anything negative about the U.S. occupation, which they paid to be published in Iraqi media without sourcing.

Then Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters that his initial reaction to the anonymous pay-to-publish program was, “Gee, that’s not what we ought to be doing.”

The U.S. military hid its involvement in the Lincoln Group, which in 2005 – under the name Iraqex – produced pro-U.S. military stories with headlines like “Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism.”

‘Information superiority’

The media group also promoted an aggressive advertising and PR campaign that included a bid to convince the Iraqi and U.S. public that Iraqi troops played a vital role in the 2004 effort to clear the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah.

A strategy document obtained by ABC News revealed the Lincoln Group was seeking to promote the “strength, integrity and reliability of Iraqi forces during the fight for Falujah.”

Military analysts suggest a small number of Iraqi troops present was only minimally involved in the fighting.

At the time of the 2006 probe into the Lincoln Group’s activities in Iraq, one PR consultant with experience in the private intelligence sector told The Independent, “Doctrinally, this is all part of what the military calls information superiority. It is part of the plan for what they call, rather upsettingly, full-spectrum dominance. The truth is that it is just propaganda. And there has always been propaganda in a war. And this is a war, so … thus runs the thinking.”

Officials maintain that placing news items in Iraqi newspapers are now a minor part of the operation, with public service announcements and media monitoring taing up the bulk of the media activities in the new Media War Plan.

But the Washington Post reported that on Aug. 21, the day before bids on the new contract were closed, the solicitation was reissued to replace repeated references to information and psychological operations with the term “media services.”

A lengthy list of “deliverables” under the new contract proposal includes “print columns, press statements, press releases, response-to-query, speeches and . . . opinion editorials”; radio broadcasts “in excess of 300 news stories” monthly and 150 each on sports and economic themes; and 30- and 60-minute broadcast documentary and entertainment series.
Other media consultants are being contracted to conduct polls and focus groups to monitor Iraqi attitudes under a separate 3-year $45 million contract.

The Iraqi government has little input on U.S. operations, although U.S. officials say they have encouraged Iraqis to be more aggressive in molding public support.

h/t: A PRIORI

Hoo-ah: Iraqis lead final purge of Al-Qaeda

From The Sunday Times
July 6, 2008
Iraqis lead final purge of Al-Qaeda
Marie Colvin in Mosul

American and Iraqi forces are driving Al-Qaeda in Iraq out of its last redoubt in the north of the country in the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror.

After being forced from its strongholds in the west and centre of Iraq in the past two years, Al-Qaeda’s dwindling band of fighters has made a defiant “last stand” in the northern city of Mosul.

A huge operation to crush the 1,200 fighters who remained from a terrorist force once estimated at more than 12,000 began on May 10.

Operation Lion’s Roar, in which the Iraqi army combined forces with the Americans’ 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, has already resulted in the death of Abu Khalaf, the Al-Qaeda leader, and the capture of more than 1,000 suspects.

The group has been reduced to hit-and-run attacks, including one that killed two off-duty policemen yesterday, and sporadic bombings aimed at killing large numbers of officials and civilians.

Last Friday I joined the 2nd Iraqi Division as it supported local police in a house-to-house search for one such bomb after intelligence pointed to a large explosion today.

Even in the district of Zanjali, previously a hotbed of the insurgency, it was possible to accompany an Iraqi colonel on foot through streets of breeze-block houses studded with bullet holes. Hundreds of houses were searched without resistance but no bomb was found, only 60kg of explosives.

American and Iraqi leaders believe that while it would be premature to write off Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni group has lost control of its last urban base in Mosul and its remnants have been largely driven into the countryside to the south.

Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s prime minister, who has also led a crackdown on the Shi’ite Mahdi Army in Basra and Baghdad in recent months, claimed yesterday that his government had “defeated” terrorism.

“They were intending to besiege Baghdad and control it,” Maliki said. “But thanks to the will of the tribes, security forces, army and all Iraqis, we defeated them.”

The number of foreign fighters coming over the border from Syria to bolster Al-Qaeda’s numbers is thought to have declined to as few as 20 a month, compared with 120 a month at its peak.

Brigadier General Abdullah Abdul, a senior Iraqi commander, said: “We’ve limited their movements with check-points. They are doing small attacks and trying big ones, but they’re mostly not succeeding.”

Major-General Mark Hertling, American commander in the north, said: “I think we’re at the irreversible point.”

Smoking Something - War critics are comfortably numb

Smoking Something -
War critics are comfortably numb
By Daniel Clark

The summary of a recent Pentagon report says there was "no 'smoking gun'" connecting Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. One can just imagine how furiously somebody must have lobbied to have that language included, because those are the same three magical words that have been successfully used to convince the public that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction.

Because the "smoking gun" standard is entirely subjective, the existence of such a thing can never be proven, at least not to the satisfaction of a determined contrarian. Thus have the most intransigent critics of the war effort succeeded in granting themselves veto power over the facts. Regardless of the evidence of Saddam's WMD, there cannot be a "smoking gun" until Hans Blix, Cindy Sheehan and the New York Times agree to say that there is.

That's the degree of denial that's necessary to characterize the Pentagon report as anything other than an absolute vindication of the war in Iraq. That study, comprised of information culled from the evidence left behind by Saddam's government, makes it clear to all but the willfully obtuse that removing the Iraqi dictator was essential to any serious effort to combat terrorism.

A Senate Intelligence Committee report issued in 2006 had taken an imprisoned Saddam Hussein's word for it that he had not cooperated with al-Qaeda, although the terror group had met repeatedly with his Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS). This new study, which has received far less media attention, tells another story. "Captured documents reveal that the regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al-Qaeda," it concludes, "as long as that organization's near-term goals supported Saddam's long-term vision."

The identities of two of Saddam's beneficiaries ought to be enough to cause the Senate to rescind, and apologize for, its attempted exoneration of the deposed Iraqi government. One of those groups is Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Ayman al-Zawahiri's organization that became the nucleus of al-Qaeda. The other is the Afghani Islamic Party, which Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard tells us controlled that part of Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden established his training camps in the early 90s.

In addition, Saddam has funded Ansar al-Islam, which has become the core of al-Qaeda in Iraq, as well as Filipino al-Qaeda affiliate Abu Sayyaf, and a Bahrainian group called the Army of Muhammad, which an IIS document describes as an "offshoot of bin Laden" whose use of a different title "can be a way of camouflaging the organization."

This tells us not only that Iraq was collaborating with al-Qaeda, but that it was doing so surreptitiously. That's why we're learning that Saddam assisted many affiliates of, and precursors to, bin Laden's organization, but we're not likely to find a picture of the Butcher of Baghdad directly handing Osama an enormous check, as if he'd just won the Dinah Shore Classic.

Not that it would make any difference, as long as we are operating under the "smoking gun" standard. Even if we had a video of the two men's lips meeting as they nibbled their way from opposite ends of a long strand of spaghetti, the Democrats and therefore the news media would forcefully deny any relation between them. They'd probably even argue that if the two villains were really in cahoots, they'd never be careless enough to be seen together.

Perhaps because of our gullibility regarding dual-use materials related to Saddam's WMD programs, he seems to have understood that all he needed was a modicum of deniability in order to placate the West. If an al-Qaeda terror cell wanted to be eligible for Iraqi funding, all it needed to do was change its name to al-Cougar Mellencamp, and it could count on the rest of the world to play dumb

By swiftly dismissing the evidence as it arises, the three magic words have spared the "Bush lied" chorus responsibility for everything about which it has been proven wrong. Critics of inaccurate prewar intelligence have themselves been far less accurate in their anti-war intelligence, such as their certainty that Islamic terrorists would never cooperate with an infidel like Saddam. As long as they maintain that there's "no smoking gun" to the contrary, however, they need never admit fault.

By refusing to accept unwanted realities, they've relegated themselves to the land of the anti-war lotus-eaters, where they remain comfortably numb to the impact of the emerging facts. The tragedy is that most American news consumers have become unwittingly trapped in that haze-filled netherworld with them.

About the author
Daniel Clark is a Staff Writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. (www.thenma.org).

New book details Chinese spy effort ahead of Olympics

New book details Chinese spy
effort ahead of Olympics

Feb 26, 2008

As athletes train for the summer Olympics in China, a new book claims that the country's vast spy network is gearing up for a different challenge - keeping an eye on journalists and potential troublemakers.

French writer Roger Faligot, author of some 40 intelligence-related books, has penned 'The Chinese Secret Services from Mao to the Olympic Games', due out February 29.

His findings claim that special teams are being formed at the country's embassies abroad "to identify sports journalists ... and to define if they have an 'antagonistic' or 'friendly' attitude in regards to China."

Potential foreign spies who may seek to enter China by posing as journalists or visitors will be subject to special surveillance.

The same goes for human rights activists who could use the event to demonstrate in favour of causes such as Tibet, where China has violently crushed protests against its rule, it says.

That's not to mention the long list of other issues preoccupying Chinese authorities, including the possibility of an Al-Qaeda attack and protests from the Falun Gong spiritual movement. China has outlawed Falun Gong, which combines meditation with Buddhist-inspired teachings.

"The watchword for the Chinese is 'no problems at the Olympics,'" Faligot says.

Faligot, who is fluent in Mandarin, says he spoke with numerous Chinese officials.

According to him, two million Chinese work directly or indirectly for the intelligence services through the state security agency.

In a chapter titled 'China: Gold Medal for Espionage', the author says the director of the group coordinating Olympic security, Qiang Wei, has a 1.3-billion-dollar (885-million-euro) budget.

An Olympic security command centre has been created "in order to assure a response to all risks in real time".

Olympic organisers admitted last year to budget overruns caused by extra expenditure on security at the Games, the biggest international event ever staged in communist China.

Last September, China's then-police chief Zhou Yongkang said that "terrorist" and "extremist" groups posed the biggest threat to the success of the Olympics.

He did not elaborate, but China has previously accused some members of the ethnic Muslim Uighur community in the nation's far western region of Xinjiang of terror-related activities.

In the year leading up to the August 8-24 Games, the Chinese army will have organised 25 exercises on how to respond to crises, including a chemical attack on the subway.

The teams being formed in foreign embassies will work in conjunction with "different Chinese intelligence services under diplomatic cover".

Those intelligence services will include the secretive 610 office, set up in 1999 to target the Falun Gong movement and which operates worldwide.

But the intelligence services won't only be deployed during the Olympics to keep an eye out, Faligot says. They'll also be recruiting among the two million visitors expected for the event.