This is an interesting side by side comparison of events from the DOD’s information stylists, The Lincoln Group, and a different version of the same events/timeline.

As if we didn’t already know the general gist, but here’s some detail.

A week after the US Defence Secretary criticised the media for “exaggerating” reports of violence in Iraq, The Independent has obtained examples of newspaper reports the Bush administration want Iraqis to read.

They were prepared by specially trained American “psy-ops” troops who paid thousands of dollars to Iraqi newspaper editors to run these unattributed reports in their publications. In order to hide its involvement, the Pentagon hired the Lincoln Group to act as a liaison between troops and journalists. The Lincoln Group was at the centre of controversy last year when it was revealed the company was being paid more than $100m (£58m) for various contracts, including the planting of such stories.

Read The Full Article Here

Shocking! Shocking, I say!

Old news to some of the more observant citizens, but glad to see outfits like The New York Times start to pay attention to this stuff.

Many television news stations, including some from the nation’s largest markets, are continuing to broadcast reports as news without disclosing that the segments were produced by corporations pitching new products, according to a report to be released today by a group that monitors the news media.

Television news directors have said that the segments, known as video news releases, are almost never broadcast, but the group assembled television videotape from 69 stations that it said had broadcast fake news segments in the past 10 months.

Democracy Now! did a good feature on this report prepared by the Center for Media and Democracy, as well, including a good interview with one of America’s finest public servants today, FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein. The fact he is not a majority member on the commission is yet another one of those sad indictments of the ‘victory’ of George W. Bush in the 2004 auction, uh, er, I mean election.

Read the full report Here

This may be one of the more pathetically disturbing aspects of the Bush administration.

Media reform groups are calling for a deeper investigation of Bush administration advertising and propaganda efforts following the release of a report that concludes the White House has spun a web of public relations (PR) contracts larger than previously thought.

At issue are agreements to produce everything from advertisements to video news releases - government-vetted spots designed to air alongside and to be indistinguishable from regular televised news reports.

Critics of the state-sponsored content said it constitutes part of a broader government attack on press freedom and that it amounts to a subversion of democracy.

“When elected public servants use taxpayer dollars to manipulate or deceive the very people whose consent they require for their legitimacy, our public servants then become our masters,” said Sanho Tree, a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies.

Here’s a money shot line…

Conservative media watchdog Accuracy in Media faulted the report as based on an incomplete accounting of Clinton PR spending. The GAO would never undertake a more thorough study because the three-year statute of limitations governing such reviews has passed, the group said, adding that the democratic legislators had this fact in mind when they commissioned their study.

AIM, trotting out Clinton again. Never mind the incontrovertible facts about the Bush administration spending billions of tax dollars on funding covert propaganda, both overseas as well as domestically, they are upset cause this study didn’t want to compare the amount of bullshit being spun by the Busheviks with PR pushed by the Clinton administration. One would think that if they were really concerned about ‘accuracy in media’, and dedicated to pursuit of those principles, they would be livid that the Bush administration has spent so much money on poisoning our information system with deceptive and often misleading information in order to generate support for their policies. But once again, its party and ideology over principles.

It seems that according to this report from The Independent U.K. that Tony Blair and his clique have learned a thing or two from their masters Cheney and Rove.

Sad to see the U.K. succumbing to this same disease. But as Nazi leader Herman Goering said….

“Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’t want war, but after all it is the leaders who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice,, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”

Read The Report Here

If there are doubts that the Reich Wing of our nation is truly hell bent on establishing dictatorial corporate fascism in this nation, perhaps this might further dispel them.

Pure devotee like cult status being bestowed on our King George. Wake up fellow Americans. The whole purpose of being an American is that we don’t have leaders, we have representatives.

One Orlando resident penned a concerned letter to the (registration-restricted) Orlando Sentinel on Saturday about the billboard. As the site is restricted to members, the letter appears below.

“The first thing I thought was, when was the last time I have seen a president on a billboard?” wrote Orlando resident Dianna Lawson. “Didn’t Saddam Hussein have his picture up everywhere? What next, a statue?”

As the sign says, a ‘political public service message brought to you by Clear Channel” (and corporate oligopolies everywhere).

Clear Channel - clearing the channels of any opposition and dissent.

The Government Accountability Office reports finding that the Bush Administration spent more than $1.6 billion in public relations and media contracts in a two and a half year span.

“The government is spending over a billion dollars per year on PR and advertising,” said Rep. Waxman. “Careful oversight of this spending is essential given the track record of the Bush Administration, which has used taxpayer dollars to fund covert propaganda within the United States.”

The Bush/Cheney cabal has been working its own Ministry of Enlightenment and Truth overtime (and over budget it seems). As Howard Beale in ‘Network’ proclaimed, “When the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome, god-damned propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network.”

We seem to be getting some answers to that question these days.

Read the complete Raw Story Report Here

Its gets more surreal by the day. Does Condoleezza Rice really think she is honoring Edward R. Murrow, or is this yet a new, heretofore unplumbed depth of craven cynical manipulation of history and principle for propaganda exploitation by this regime. What’s next, George Bush giving out George Orwell Integrity In Journalism Awards to Fox, or Donald Rumsfeld bestowing the Gen. Smedley Butler Award for achievements in selfless military and government service?

Amid undenied charges that the Pentagon is paying Iraqi journalists to write “good news” stories about the country’s progress, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has announced a new international exchange program for journalists named for famed broadcaster Edward R. Murrow and emphasizing “the democratic principles that guided Mr. Murrow’s practice of his craft - integrity and ethics and courage and social responsibility”.

“We all know that the bedrock pillar of a free society is a free press and that it is crucial for the foundation of any democracy,” Rice said.

The new initiative - The Edward R. Murrow Journalism Program - is a partnership of the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the non-partisan Aspen Institute, and the journalism schools of six US universities.

Read The Article

Rolling Stone has actually been publishing some pretty good articles these days. This one by Matt Taibbi on George Bush’s propaganda tour in promotion of his non-existent Iraq policy is no exception.

Matt Taibbi, who followed Bush’s national tour for more than a week, concludes that while Iraq burns, the president keeps playing the same old song. “This is how President Bush takes his message to the people these days: in furtive sneak-attack addresses to closed audiences of elite friendlies at weird early-morning hours.”

Recommended. Blunt and to the point, with some colorful descriptions of this rather pathetic and pitiful exercise in spin. Read it Here.

The Man Who Sold The War
By James Bamford
Rolling Stone

Excellent, well researched piece on a little-known but highly influential figure in the Bush administration’s propaganda machine.

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.

Read The Article

Calling Lord Haw Haw.

A $300 million Pentagon psychological warfare operation includes plans for placing pro-American messages in foreign media outlets without disclosing the US government as the source, one of the military officials in charge of the program says.

Run by psychological warfare experts at the U.S. Special Operations Command, the media campaign is being designed to counter terrorist ideology and sway foreign audiences to support American policies. The military wants to fight the information war against al-Qaeda through newspapers, websites, radio, television and “novelty items” such as T-shirts and bumper stickers.

Read the article in USA Today