[Mb-civic] MUST READ: Rolling Stone article on Bush's Propaganda Czar

[Mike Blaxill]

Towards the end of this piece (excerpted below)
the reporter reveals that the Pentagon pays
people to go onto Internet chat rooms, pretend to
be Joe Citizen and argue on the government
sanctioned side of an issue - something that I've
always suspected since I sometimes participate in
chat room discussions.  There's always one really
persistent guy who doesn't agree with anybody,
always wants the last word etc - especially on
the 911 chat room on DemoctraticUnderground.com
<sigh>

Anyways, pls read the whole article - an eye
opener!!


The Man Who Sold the War
Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the
propaganda war

By JAMES BAMFORD

The road to war in Iraq led through many unlikely
places. One of them was a chic hotel nestled
among the strip bars and brothels that cater to
foreigners in the town of Pattaya, on the Gulf of
Thailand.

On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within
the sound of the crashing tide, a CIA officer
attached metal electrodes to the ring and index
fingers of a man sitting pensively in a padded
chair. The officer then stretched a black rubber
tube, pleated like an accordion, around the man's
chest and another across his abdomen. Finally, he
slipped a thick cuff over the man's brachial
artery, on the inside of his upper arm.

Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan
Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi
who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was
now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For
hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced black
lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out
an explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a
series of questions, he insisted repeatedly that
he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam's
men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical
and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according
to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells,
hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath
the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical
facility in Baghdad.

It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence
the Bush administration was looking for. If the
charges were true, they would offer the White
House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and
depose Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had flown
a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question
al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that
Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass
destruction.

There was only one problem: It was all a lie.
After a review of the sharp peaks and deep
valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence
officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the
entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing
a visa.

The fabrication might have ended there, the tale
of another political refugee trying to scheme his
way to a better life. But just because the story
wasn't true didn't mean it couldn't be put to
good use. Al-Haideri, in fact, was the product of
a clandestine operation -- part espionage, part
PR campaign -- that had been set up and funded by
the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose
of selling the world a war. And the man who had
long been in charge of the marketing was a
secretive and mysterious creature of the
Washington establishment named John Rendon....

<snip>

...According to the Pentagon documents, Rendon
would use his media analysis to conduct a
worldwide propaganda campaign, deploying teams of
information warriors to allied nations to assist
them "in developing and delivering specific
messages to the local population, combatants,
front-line states, the media and the
international community." Among the places
Rendon's info-war teams would be sent were
Jakarta, Indonesia; Islamabad, Pakistan; Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia; Cairo; Ankara, Turkey; and
Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The teams would produce and
script television news segments "built around
themes and story lines supportive of U.S. policy
objectives."

Rendon was also charged with engaging in
"military deception" online -- an activity once
assigned to the OSI. The company was contracted
to monitor Internet chat rooms in both English
and Arabic -- and "participate in these chat
rooms when/if tasked." Rendon would also create a
Web site "with regular news summaries and feature
articles. Targeted at the global public, in
English and at least four (4) additional
languages, this activity also will include an
extensive e-mail push operation." These
techniques are commonly used to plant a variety
of propaganda, including false information....

Click the link below for the full article
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/8798997?rnd=1133076013776&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.1348