"Harry Krause" wrote in message
...
12/03/2005
Kelly: Who’s really paying for the good news from Iraq?
Chris Kelly

You can’t make this stuff up.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was crowing about the scores
of newspapers, television stations and other “free media” now flourishing
in post-Saddam Iraq.

Revisiting remarks he made to a gathering of newspaper editors in April
2004, Mr. Rumsfeld said everyday Iraqis are learning that democracies
depend on government being “challenged internally through the complex
constitutional system of checks and balances, and externally by a free and
energetic press.”

Hours later, America’s free and suddenly energetic press revealed that
some of Iraq’s “free press” has been bought with American tax dollars.

Since early this year, something called the Information Operations Task
Force has been paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories slanted to cast
the U.S. mission in Iraq in a blindingly positive light.

Some of the stories were ghost-written by “information operations”
soldiers and later translated into Arabic. Others were written by Iraqi
“journalists” who were told what to write. So far, it seems most of the
stories were based on factual information, but clearly carried a
pro-American bent.

The stories were passed off as the unbiased reporting of independent
journalists.

Meanwhile, the State Department has been spending millions of dollars
training Iraqi journalists in Western media ethics. Put the two efforts
together, and it’s like paying a carpenter to rebuild a house you keep
burning down.

The operation was driven by Washington, D.C.-based Lincoln Group, which,
according to its Web site, is a “strategic communications and public
relations firm providing insight and influence in challenging and hostile
environments.”

TRANSLATION: “We fake the news for money.”

For planting stories in the Iraqi media and God knows what else, the
Lincoln Group was paid $6 million. The company has another Pentagon
contract worth $100 million over five years to provide “media operations
with video, print and Web-based products,” according to the Special
Operations Command.

Who signed off on the contracts? No one in government seems to know, and
(surprise!) no one at the Lincoln Group is talking.

Pentagon officials, including Mr. Rumsfeld, denied any knowledge of the
program. White House spokesman Scott McClellan expressed his usual
bewilderment, loosing a slew of nondenial denials similar to those bleated
after the Department of Education got busted producing fake TV news
packages and paying “journalists” to hawk the Bush administration’s “No
Child Left Behind” legislation.

The official Washington reaction to the latest news manipulation scandal
is perhaps best characterized by the response of Pentagon spokesman Bryan
Whitman, who said: “I don’t have all the facts. I don’t have a lot of
facts at all. I have very few facts.”

TRANSLATION: “Our plausible-excuse guy is on vacation.”

So, no one at the Pentagon knows who at the Pentagon awarded Pentagon
contracts worth $106 million. Spending $6 billion a month on the war, I
guess a little spare change is bound to get overlooked.

Senators, as they will when confronted by cameras, made showy demands for
hearings and “facts,” punctuated by dramatic declarations of “deep
concern.”

“A free and independent press is critical to the functioning of a
democracy, and I am concerned about any actions which may erode the
independence of the Iraqi media,” said Virginia Republican John Warner,
chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

TRANSLATION: “Dammit! Who let the plausible-excuse guy take a vacation?”

On the Democratic side, Sen. Edward Kennedy said the program “speaks
volumes about the president’s credibility gap.”

TRANSLATION: “Woo-hoo!”

Some commanders on the ground in Iraq defended planting stories in the
Iraqi media, insisting such measures are necessary to combat the lies and
distortions of terrorists like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

“We don’t lie,” said Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch. “Everything we do is based
on fact, not based on fiction.”

It’s not hard to understand the man’s frustration. For three long years,
our soldiers have been sweating, fighting and dying in a struggle to give
an oppressed people the chance for a new start, without much help from
said people or our leaders back home.

We can argue the wisdom of this war, but there is no debate about the
sacrifices of our soldiers and their families.

Good things have been accomplished in Iraq, but all soldiers ever see in
the media is bad news. Insurgents are winning the media war, and it must
be tempting to slip a few positive stories into Iraqi newspapers.

Tempting, but wrong. This kind of chicanery undermines the credibility of
our nation and soldiers on the ground. From now on, any good story that
finds its own way into print can be dismissed as more propaganda. From now
on, many Iraqis will dismiss democracy as just a word, for sale like any
other. That’s why you can’t make this stuff up.

Not if you want to be trusted.

CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, was paid to write this column.
--
Support the troops: Impeach Bush!

It is war and propaganda is part of it. I bet during WWII that they tried
to get pieces reflecting badly on Germany in any European as well as Western
newspapers.