David Isenberg of the Asia Times on the massive Pentagon-led ‘information management’ campaign being waged in Iraq by the PR(opaganda) firm The Lincoln Group.

The news of a US military operation that pays Iraqi newspapers to run stories written by “information operations” troops about how wonderfully things are going in the war should not come as a shock.

Even before the Iraq invasion, the Pentagon planned to create its own in-house propaganda and disinformation operation, to be called the Office of Strategic Influence. The program was supposedly killed after critics pointed out how easily the phony news it created could drift back into the domestic media.

Nevertheless, the occupation of Iraq has put the Pentagon in the “strategic influence” business in a big way, with its own TV news operation (the Pentagon Channel), a then-coalition-controlled Iraqi TV and radio network (now nominally in the hands of the Iraqi government, but still powered by Pentagon dollars and run by a US vendor) and millions of dollars to hire public relations firms and consultants to spin the coalition’s propaganda to the Iraqi people.

In fact, paying off the Iraqi media to run good news mirrors what the Bush administration has been doing at home.

For example, in the past year it was revealed that the Bush administration paid nearly a quarter of a million dollars to a prominent conservative commentator, Armstrong Williams, to promote a new education law that had been strongly supported by President George W Bush. The Education Department paid a public relations firm for a video that promoted the law and appeared as a news story, without making clear the reporter was hired as part of the deal.

Similarly, some-time reporter and $200-an-hour gay escort, James Guckert, aka Jeff Gannon, violated a ban on “fake” news stories by reprinting White House news releases verbatim.

The gist of the latest story is that beginning this year as part of an information offensive in Iraq, the US military began secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the US mission in Iraq.

Read the rest of the article on this campaign to gain market share in the hearts and minds department here

You’re tax dollars at work. Not only are the Bush administration policies some of the most horrendously bad in American history, but you get to have your money take to be put towards PR(opaganda) campaigns to advertise to you about how wonderful they are.

The Bush administration spent $1.4 billion in taxpayer dollars on 137 contracts with advertising agencies over the past two-and-a-half years, according to a Government Accountability Office report released by House Democrats Monday.

Read The Article

Stealth sponsorship of talking heads and op-ed columnists is surprisingly common, says Business Week.

In the opinion industry, pundits who present themselves as independent voices sometimes turn out to be quietly financed by powerful interests. The latest example BusinessWeek has unearthed: The Hill, a Washington newspaper read closely in Congress, published an opinion piece last June extolling “payday loans.” Readers weren’t told that the author, Tom Lehman, a professor at Indiana Wesleyan University, had taken money from the industry that pushes these controversial high-interest loans.

In other instances, BusinessWeek Online has recently identified Douglas Bandow and Michael Fumento, two prolific authors of newspaper opinion pieces who received undisclosed payments from business interests they wrote about. Both lost their nationally syndicated columns as a result. Fumento acknowledged just last week that in 1999 he benefited from payments totaling $60,000 from agribusiness giant Monsanto Co. (), a subject of praise in Fumento’s opinion columns and a book. Scripps Howard News Service canceled his column. Bandow resigned last month from Copley News Service after he admitted writing as many as two dozen op-eds for which he was paid $1,000 to $2,000 each by embattled Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Read The Full Article Here

David Sirota elaborates on this phenomenon with this article on The Huffington Post

So, for instance, if you read the newspapers or listen to a congressional hearing, you might think that organizations like the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute are just naturally occurring organizations sprouting up from the a supposed overall extreme conservative economic slant of the American public. These institutions - which D.C. is teeming with - are cited as official-esque sources, described only in ideological terms as “conservative.” They are almost never labeled according to which industries fund them, just as the politicians who spew corporate PR are almost never identified in the media as having taken huge sums of cash from the industry being shilled for. It is as if naming the funders would be to offer the public too much truth about who owns their political debate - a major Establishment taboo.

Read The Full Article Here

Highly recommended expose by writer Dave Zirin, author of “What’s My Name, Fool?” about the history of politics in sport.

“I don’t believe it,” seethed Ann Coulter.

Her contempt was directed at a September 25 San Francisco Chronicle story reporting that former NFL star and Army Ranger war hero Pat Tillman, who was killed in Afghanistan last year, believed the US war on Iraq was “f***ing illegal” and counted Noam Chomsky among his favorite authors. It must have been quite a moment for Coulter, who upon Tillman’s death described him in her inimitably creepy fashion as “an American original–virtuous, pure and masculine like only an American male can be.” She tried to discredit the story as San Francisco agitprop, but this approach ran into a slight problem: The article’s source was Pat Tillman’s mother, Mary.

So why does Mary Tillman hate America?

The very private Tillmans have revealed a picture of Pat profoundly at odds with the GI Joe image created by Pentagon spinmeisters and their media stenographers. As the Chronicle put it, family and friends are now unveiling “a side of Pat Tillman not widely known–a fiercely independent thinker who enlisted, fought and died in service to his country yet was critical of President Bush and opposed the war in Iraq, where he served a tour of duty. He was an avid reader whose interests ranged from history books…to works of leftist Noam Chomsky, a favorite author.” Tillman had very unembedded feelings about the Iraq War. His close friend Army Spec. Russell Baer remembered, “I can see it like a movie screen. We were outside of [an Iraqi city] watching as bombs were dropping on the town…. We were talking. And Pat said, ‘You know, this war is so f***ing illegal.’ And we all said, ‘Yeah.’ That’s who he was. He totally was against Bush.” With these revelations, Pat Tillman the PR icon joins WMD and Al Qaeda connections on the heap of lies used to sell the Iraq War.

Tillman’s transition from one-dimensional caricature to critically thinking human being is a long time coming. The fact is that in death he was far more useful to the armchair warriors than he had ever been in life. When the Pro Bowler joined the Army Rangers, the Pentagon brass needed a loofah to wipe their drool: He was white, handsome and played in the NFL. For a chicken-hawk Administration led by a President who loves the affectations of machismo but runs from protesting military moms, this testosterone cocktail was impossible to resist. The problem was that Tillman wouldn’t play their game. To the Pentagon’s chagrin, he turned down numerous offers to be its recruitment poster child.

Tillman was a *real* American hero because he was about serving an America that was real, not some deluded bull***t neo-con fantasy version of one. One in which founding American principles and constitutional law were the what we strived for, and not for theocracy and empire where might makes right.

The full article can be read here…
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051024/zirin

The Mysterious Death of Pat Tillman
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
November 6th, 2005

    It would be a compelling story,” Patrick Fitzgerald said of the narrative Scooter Libby used to allegedly mislead investigators in the Valerie Wilson leak case, “if only it were true.”

    ”Compelling” is higher praise than any Mr. Libby received for his one work of published fiction, a 1996 novel of “murder, passion and heart-stopping chases through the snow” called “The Apprentice.” If you read the indictment, you’ll see why he merits the critical upgrade. The intricate tale he told the F.B.I. and the grand jury - with its endlessly clever contradictions of his White House colleagues’ testimony - is compelling even without the sex and the snow.

    The medium is the message. This administration just loves to beguile us with a rollicking good story, truth be damned. The propagandistic fable exposed by the leak case - the apocalyptic imminence of Saddam’s mushroom clouds - was only the first of its genre. Given that potboiler’s huge success at selling the war, its authors couldn’t resist providing sequels once we were in Iraq. As the American casualty toll surges past 2,000 and Veterans Day approaches, we need to remember and unmask those scenarios as well. Our troops and their families have too often made the ultimate sacrifice for the official fictions that have corrupted every stage of this war.

    If there’s a tragic example that can serve as representative of the rest, it is surely that of Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals defensive back who famously volunteered for the Army in the spring after 9/11, giving up a $3.6 million N.F.L. contract extension. Tillman wanted to pay something back to his country by pursuing the enemy that actually attacked it, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Instead he was sent to fight a war in Iraq that he didn’t see coming when he enlisted because the administration was still hatching it in secret. Only on a second tour of duty was he finally sent into Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan, where, on April 22, 2004, he was killed. On April 30, an official Army press release announcing his Silver Star citation filled in vivid details of his last battle. Tillman, it said, was storming a hill to take out the enemy, even as he “personally provided suppressive fire with an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon machine gun.”

    It would be a compelling story, if only it were true. Five weeks after Tillman’s death, the Army acknowledged abruptly, without providing details, that he had “probably” died from friendly fire. Many months after that, investigative journalists at The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times reported that the Army’s initial portrayal of his death had been not only bogus but also possibly a cover-up of something darker. “The records show that Tillman fought bravely and honorably until his last breath,” Steve Coll wrote in The Post in December 2004. “They also show that his superiors exaggerated his actions and invented details as they burnished his legend in public, at the same time suppressing details that might tarnish Tillman’s commanders.”

    This fall The San Francisco Chronicle uncovered still more details with the help of Tillman’s divorced parents, who have each reluctantly gone public after receiving conflicting and heavily censored official reports on three Army investigations that only added to the mysteries surrounding their son’s death. (Yet another inquiry is under way.) “The administration clearly was using this case for its own political reasons,” said Patrick Tillman, Pat Tillman’s father, who discovered that crucial evidence in the case, including his son’s uniform and gear, had been destroyed almost immediately. “This cover-up started within minutes of Pat’s death, and it started at high levels.”

    His accusations are far from wild. The Chronicle found that Gen. John Abizaid, the top American officer in Iraq, and others in his command had learned by April 29, 2004, that friendly fire had killed their star recruit. That was the day before the Army released its fictitious press release of Tillman’s hillside firefight and four days before a nationally televised memorial service back home enshrined the fake account of his death. Yet Tillman’s parents, his widow, his brother (who served in the same platoon) and politicians like John McCain (who spoke at Tillman’s memorial) were not told the truth for another month.

    Why? It’s here where we find a repeat of the same pattern that drove the Valerie Wilson leak a year earlier. Faced with unwelcome news - from the front, from whistle-blowers, from scandal - this administration will always push back with change-the-subject stunts (like specious terror alerts), fake news or, as with Joseph Wilson, smear campaigns. Much as the White House was out to bring down Mr. Wilson because he threatened to expose its prewar hype of Saddam’s supposed nuclear prowess, so the Pentagon might have been out to delay or rewrite a story that could be trouble when public opinion on the war itself was just starting to plummet.

    It was an election year besides. Tillman’s death came after a month of solid bad news for America and the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign alike: the publication of Richard Clarke’s book about pre-9/11 administration counterterrorism fecklessness, the savage stringing up of the remains of American contractors in Falluja, the eruption of Sunni and Shiite insurgencies in six Iraqi cities, the first publication of illicit photos of flag-draped coffins. In the days just after Tillman’s death, “60 Minutes II” first broadcast the Abu Ghraib photos, Ted Koppel read the names of the war’s fallen on “Nightline,” and the Pentagon’s No. 2, the Iraqi war architect Paul Wolfowitz, understated by more than 200 the number of American casualties to date (722) in an embarrassing televised appearance before Congress.

    Against this backdrop, it would not do to have it known that the most famous volunteer of the war might have been a victim of gross negligence or fratricide. Though Tillman himself was so idealistic that he refused publicity of any kind when in the Army, he was exploited by the war’s cheerleaders as a recruitment lure and was needed to continue in that role after his death. (Even though he was adamantly against the Iraq war, according to friends and relatives interviewed by The Chronicle.)

    ”They blew up their poster boy,” Patrick Tillman told The Post; he is convinced that “all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script” the fake narrative (or, as he puts it, “outright lies”) that followed. Pat Tillman’s mother, Mary Tillman, was offended to discover that even President Bush wanted a cameo role in this screenplay: she told The Post that he had offered to tape a memorial to her son for a Cardinals game that would be televised shortly before Election Day. (She said no.)

    In an interview with The Arizona Republic, Mary Tillman added: “They could have told us upfront that they were suspicious that it was a fratricide but they didn’t. They wanted to use him for their purposes. It was good for the administration. It was before the elections. It was during the prison scandal. They needed something that looked good, and it was appalling that they would use him like that.”

    Appalling but consistent. The Pentagon has often failed to give the troops what they need to fight the war in Iraq, from proper support in manpower and planning at the invasion’s outset to effective armor for battle to adequately financed health care for those who make it home. But when it comes to using troops in the duplicitous manner that Mary Tillman describes, the sky’s the limit.

    Pat Tillman’s case is itself a replay of the fake “Rambo” escapades ascribed to Pfc. Jessica Lynch a year earlier, just when Operation Iraqi Freedom showed the first tentative signs of trouble and the Pentagon needed a feel-good distraction. As if to echo Mary Tillman, Ms. Lynch told Time magazine this year, “I was used as a symbol.” But the troops aren’t just used as symbols for the commander in chief’s political purposes. They are also drafted to serve as photo-op props and extras, whether in an extravaganza like “Mission Accomplished” or a throwaway dog-and-pony show like the recent teleconference in which the president held a “conversation” with soldiers who sounded as spontaneous as the brainwashed G.I.’s in “The Manchurian Candidate.”

    As Mr. Bush’s approval rating crashes into the 30’s, he and the vice president are so desperate to wrap themselves in khaki that on the day of the Libby indictment, they took separate day trips to mouth the usual stay-the-course platitudes before military audiences. If this was a ploy to split the focus of cable news networks and the public, it failed. Perhaps Scooter Libby is hoping that a so-called faulty-memory defense will save him from jail, but too many other Americans are now refreshing their memories of what went down in the plotting and execution of the war in Iraq. What they find are harsh truths and buried secrets that even the most compelling administration scenarios can no longer disguise.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Treating policy as product to be marketed to the electorate is no great stretch for a president who fashions himself the CEO of White House Inc. But in its zeal to promote sales of the Bush brand, this administration has crossed the line that separates honest brokers from snake oil salesmen.

Bush and company sold Americans defective goods in clear violation of federal law. Yet Attorney General Alberto Gonzales hasn’t budged. Instead, the man charged with enforcing our laws has tasked his army of lawyers to throw a legal shield around the White House, telling the administration to ignore investigations by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which repeatedly has blasted Team Bush for using taxpayer money to fund “covert propaganda.”

In its latest report, issued on Sept. 30, the GAO’s federal auditors scolded the White House for squandering American tax dollars to hire fake news reporters and unleash a pre-packaged new blitz in advance of the 2004 elections. The GAO found the White House violated the law by hiring pundit Armstrong Williams to shower praise on Bush’s education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act, while interviewing administration officials on the air.

The GAO also uncovered a previously undisclosed case in which the Education Department commissioned an article carried by several newspapers that extolled the administration’s role in promoting science education. Readers were not informed of the government’s role in the writing of the article.

The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 forbids the domestic dissemination of government-authored propaganda or “official news” deliberately designed to influence public opinion or policy. The law singles out materials that serve “a solely partisan purpose.” The GAO has now found on at least four separate occasions that administration agencies violated this and other federal restrictions when they disseminated news written by the government or its contractors without disclosing the conflict of interest.

Read the full article here…
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051011/a_snake_oil_president.php

Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged
The Associated Press
October 14th, 2005

Washingotn - It was billed as a conversation with U.S. troops, but the questions President Bush asked on a teleconference call Thursday were choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and Saturday’s vote on a new Iraqi constitution.
“This is an important time,” Allison Barber, deputy assistant defense secretary, said, coaching the soldiers before Bush arrived. “The president is looking forward to having just a conversation with you.”

Barber said the president was interested in three topics: the overall security situation in Iraq, security preparations for the weekend vote and efforts to train Iraqi troops.

As she spoke in Washington, a live shot of 10 soldiers from the Army’s 42nd Infantry Division and one Iraqi soldier was beamed into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building from Tikrit - the birthplace of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

“I’m going to ask somebody to grab those two water bottles against the wall and move them out of the camera shot for me,” Barber said.

A brief rehearsal ensued.

“OK, so let’s just walk through this,” Barber said. “Captain Kennedy, you answer the first question and you hand the mike to whom?”

“Captain Smith,” Kennedy said.

“Captain. Smith? You take the mike and you hand it to whom?” she asked.

“Captain Kennedy,” the soldier replied.

And so it went.

“If the question comes up about partnering - how often do we train with the Iraqi military - who does he go to?” Barber asked.

“That’s going to go to Captain Pratt,” one of the soldiers said.

“And then if we’re going to talk a little bit about the folks in Tikrit - the hometown - and how they’re handling the political process, who are we going to give that to?” she asked.

Before he took questions, Bush thanked the soldiers for serving and reassured them that the U.S. would not pull out of Iraq until the mission was complete.

“So long as I’m the president, we’re never going to back down, we’re never going to give in, we’ll never accept anything less than total victory,” Bush said.

The president told them twice that the American people were behind them.

“You’ve got tremendous support here at home,” Bush said.

Less than 40 percent in an AP-Ipsos poll taken in October said they approved of the way Bush was handling Iraq. Just over half of the public now say the Iraq war was a mistake.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Thursday’s event was coordinated with the Defense Department but that the troops were expressing their own thoughts. With satellite feeds, coordination often is needed to overcome technological challenges, such as delays, he said.

“I think all they were doing was talking to the troops and letting them know what to expect,” he said, adding that the president wanted to talk with troops on the ground who have firsthand knowledge about the situation.

The soldiers all gave Bush an upbeat view of the situation.

The president also got praise from the Iraqi soldier who was part of the chat.

“Thank you very much for everything,” he gushed. “I like you.”

On preparations for the vote, 1st Lt. Gregg Murphy of Tennessee said: “Sir, we are prepared to do whatever it takes to make this thing a success. … Back in January, when we were preparing for that election, we had to lead the way. We set up the coordination, we made the plan. We’re really happy to see, during the preparation for this one, sir, they’re doing everything.”

On the training of Iraqi security forces, Master Sgt. Corine Lombardo from Scotia, N.Y., said to Bush: “I can tell you over the past 10 months, we’ve seen a tremendous increase in the capabilities and the confidences of our Iraqi security force partners. … Over the next month, we anticipate seeing at least one-third of those Iraqi forces conducting independent operations.”

Lombardo told the president that she was in New York City on Nov. 11, 2001, when Bush attended an event recognizing soldiers for their recovery and rescue efforts at Ground Zero. She said the troops began the fight against terrorism in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and were proud to continue it in Iraq.

“I thought you looked familiar,” Bush said, and then joked: “I probably look familiar to you, too.”

Paul Rieckhoff, director of the New York-based Operation Truth, an advocacy group for U.S. veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, denounced the event as a “carefully scripted publicity stunt.” Five of the 10 U.S. troops involved were officers, he said.

“If he wants the real opinions of the troops, he can’t do it in a nationally televised teleconference,” Rieckhoff said. “He needs to be talking to the boots on the ground and that’s not a bunch of captains.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Buying of News by Bush’s Aides Is Ruled Illegal
By Robert Pear
The New York Times

October 1st, 2005

Washington - Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush’s education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.

In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated “covert propaganda” in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.
The contract with Mr. Williams and the general contours of the public relations campaign had been known for months. The report Friday provided the first definitive ruling on the legality of the activities.

Lawyers from the accountability office, an independent nonpartisan arm of Congress, found that the administration systematically analyzed news articles to see if they carried the message, “The Bush administration/the GOP is committed to education.”

The auditors declared: “We see no use for such information except for partisan political purposes. Engaging in a purely political activity such as this is not a proper use of appropriated funds.”

The report also sharply criticized the Education Department for telling Ketchum Inc., a public relations company, to pay Mr. Williams for newspaper columns and television appearances praising Mr. Bush’s education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act.

When that arrangement became public, it set off widespread criticism. At a news conference in January, Mr. Bush said: “We will not be paying commentators to advance our agenda. Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet.”

But the Education Department has since defended its payments to Mr. Williams, saying his commentaries were “no more than the legitimate dissemination of information to the public.”

The GAO said the Education Department had no money or authority to “procure favorable commentary in violation of the publicity or propaganda prohibition” in federal law.

The ruling comes with no penalty, but under federal law the department is supposed to report the violations to the White House and Congress.

In the course of its work, the accountability office discovered a previously undisclosed instance in which the Education Department had commissioned a newspaper article. The article, on the “declining science literacy of students,” was distributed by the North American Precis Syndicate and appeared in numerous small newspapers around the country. Readers were not informed of the government’s role in the writing of the article, which praised the department’s role in promoting science education.

The auditors denounced a prepackaged television story disseminated by the Education Department. The segment, a “video news release” narrated by a woman named Karen Ryan, said that President Bush’s program for providing remedial instruction and tutoring to children “gets an A-plus.”

Ms. Ryan also narrated two videos praising the new Medicare drug benefit last year. In those segments, as in the education video, the narrator ended by saying, “In Washington, I’m Karen Ryan reporting.”

The television news segments on education and on Medicare did not state that they had been prepared and distributed by the government. The GAO did not say how many stations carried the reports.

The public relations efforts came to light weeks before Margaret Spellings became education secretary in January. Susan Aspey, a spokeswoman for the secretary, said on Friday that Ms. Spellings regarded the efforts as “stupid, wrong and ill-advised.” She said Ms. Spellings had taken steps “to ensure these types of missteps don’t happen again.”

The investigation by the accountability office was requested by Senators Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, both Democrats. Mr. Lautenberg expressed concern about a section of the report in which investigators said they could not find records to confirm that Mr. Williams had performed all the activities for which he billed the government.

The Education Department said it had paid Ketchum $186,000 for services performed by Mr. Williams’s company. But it could not provide transcripts of speeches, articles or records of other services invoiced by Mr. Williams, the report said.

In March, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel said that federal agencies did not have to acknowledge their role in producing television news segments if they were factual. The inspector general of the Education Department recently reiterated that position.

But the accountability office said on Friday: “The failure of an agency to identify itself as the source of a prepackaged news story misleads the viewing public by encouraging the audience to believe that the broadcasting news organization developed the information. The prepackaged news stories are purposefully designed to be indistinguishable from news segments broadcast to the public. When the television viewing public does not know that the stories they watched on television news programs about the government were in fact prepared by the government, the stories are, in this sense, no longer purely factual. The essential fact of attribution is missing.”

The office said Mr. Williams’s work for the government resulted from a written proposal that he submitted to the Education Department in March 2003. The department directed Ketchum to use Mr. Williams as a regular commentator on Mr. Bush’s education policies. Ketchum had a federal contract to help publicize those policies, signed by Mr. Bush in 2002.

The Education Department flouted the law by telling Ketchum to use Mr. Williams to “convey a message to the public on behalf of the government, without disclosing to the public that the messengers were acting on the government’s behalf and in return for the payment of public funds,” the GAO said.

The Education Department spent $38,421 for production and distribution of the video news release and $96,850 for the evaluation of newspaper articles and radio and television programs. Ketchum assigned a score to each article, indicating how often and favorably it mentioned features of the new education law.

Congress tried to clarify the ban on “covert propaganda” in a bill signed by Mr. Bush in May. The law says that no federal money may be used to produce or distribute a news story unless the government’s role is openly acknowledged.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Mas Payola
The Stakeholder (DCCC)
September 6th, 2005

From George Miller…

DEPT. OF EDUCATION PAYS FOR OP-EDS, ADS THAT PROMOTE BUSH POLICIES, DO NOT REVEAL FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AS FUNDING SOURCE

Rep. Miller Calls for Recovery of Funds and for More Information in Response to Report Showing Irresponsible Use of Taxpayer Dollars, Systemic Covert Propaganda

WASHINGTON, D.C. The Department of Education has paid education advocacy groups to produce newspaper opinion pieces, advertisements, and other public materials that reached audiences all over the country without revealing that the government paid for their production and distribution, according to a report issued late last week by the Department’s Inspector General that concluded that such practices were improper.
Rep. George Miller (D-CA), the senior Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, requested the report in January. Miller said the report raises two key concerns: first, that it describes the consistent use of covert propaganda by the Department of Education over a period of years; and second, that it shows a disturbing pattern of neglect on the part of the Department when it comes to properly overseeing its grants and contracts.

For example, opinion articles appearing in an untold number of newspapers all over the country were written and placed by authors paid by the federal government who failed to disclose this relationship in their columns. These writers offered opinions ˆ sometimes strident ones ˆ about controversial areas of federal education policy.

The IG report names the Dallas Morning News, Sacramento Bee, Mobile Register, Grand Island (NE) Independent, Al Dia, and En USA as publications that published government-funded op-eds whose authors failed to disclose the government’s financial sponsorship. Separately, Miller’s office also determined that additional opinion articles ran in the New York Sun and the Charleston Gazette.

Out of 11 relevant grants made by the Department to different groups and reviewed by the Inspector General, only one of them was made to a grantee that identified the federal government as its funding source on all materials it developed and disseminated. The other ten either always failed to disclose the governments role or only did so inconsistently.

Miller disagreed with the Inspector General’s conclusion that these failures do not constitute covert propaganda. The Inspector General said that the Department would have to intend for these organizations and individuals to mislead the public for its actions to constitute covert propaganda.

“The Department is trying to define itself out of trouble by setting the bar very high for what constitutes covert propaganda,” said Miller. “But on multiple occasions, education groups used taxpayer money — unbeknownst to taxpayers — to promote controversial federal policies.

“The Department allowed this egregious use of taxpayer dollars to continue with such consistency that it cannot now claim that it was ignorant of the practice. Either the Department is grossly incompetent when it comes to awarding grants and contracts, or it is misleading investigators and engaging in a cover up,” Miller said.

The Inspector General did conclude that it was improper for organizations to use Department of Education grant money to produce and disseminate public materials without including a disclaimer about funding, and said that the appropriate course of action is to recover grant monies paid to the organizations.

Miller also said that the Department has displayed near-total incompetence when it comes to managing its grants and contracts. The Department was unable to produce a number of the deliverables that it was promised under two grants and four contracts. At best, Miller said, this means that the Department has taken no care to see that it got what it paid for; at the worst, Miller said, it raises the possibility that the Department is trying to hide information.

“This was an irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars, and the taxpayers ought to be made whole again,” said Miller. “But that’s only part of the story. People looking at advertisements or reading their local newspapers would have had no idea that what they were reading was bought and paid for with their tax dollars. No matter which way you slice it, that is propaganda.”

In response, Miller plans to demand the Department recoup tax dollars unlawfully spent by venders; insist the Department of Education provide to Congress the information it refused to provide to the Inspector General’s office; and demand that the Department report to Congress on how it is revamping its shoddy contracting and grant-making processes.

Miller asked for the report in January 2005 after it was revealed that the Department of Education had paid $240,000 to Armstrong Williams, a media commentator, to promote the No Child Left Behind Act on his and other television programs without indicating that he was being paid by the government to do so.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Frustrated: Fire Crews To Hand Out Fliers For FEMA
By Lisa Rosetta
The Salt Lake Tribune

September 6th, 2005

ATLANTA - Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: “What are we doing here?”

As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.
Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.

Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA.

On Monday, some firefighters stuck in the staging area at the Sheraton peeled off their FEMA-issued shirts and stuffed them in backpacks, saying they refuse to represent the federal agency.

Federal officials are unapologetic.

“I would go back and ask the firefighter to revisit his commitment to FEMA, to firefighting and to the citizens of this country,” said FEMA spokeswoman Mary Hudak.

The firefighters - or at least the fire chiefs who assigned them to come to Atlanta - knew what the assignment would be, Hudak said.

“The initial call to action very specifically says we’re looking for two-person fire teams to do community relations,” she said. “So if there is a breakdown [in communication], it was likely in their own departments.”

One fire chief from Texas agreed that the call was clear to work as community-relations officers. But he wonders why the 1,400 firefighters FEMA attracted to Atlanta aren’t being put to better use. He also questioned why the U.S. Department of Homeland Security - of which FEMA is a part - has not responded better to the disaster.

The firefighters, several of whom are from Utah, were told to bring backpacks, sleeping bags, first-aid kits and Meals Ready to Eat. They were told to prepare for “austere conditions.” Many of them came with awkward fire gear and expected to wade in floodwaters, sift through rubble and save lives.

“They’ve got people here who are search-and-rescue certified, paramedics, haz-mat certified,” said a Texas firefighter. “We’re sitting in here having a sexual-harassment class while there are still [victims] in Louisiana who haven’t been contacted yet.”

The firefighter, who has encouraged his superiors back home not to send any more volunteers for now, declined to give his name because FEMA has warned them not to talk to reporters.

On Monday, two firefighters from South Jordan and two from Layton headed for San Antonio to help hurricane evacuees there. Four firefighters from Roy awaited their marching orders, crossing their fingers that they would get to do rescue and recovery work, rather than paperwork.

“A lot of people are bickering because there are rumors they’ll just be handing out fliers,” said Roy firefighter Logan Layne, adding that his squad hopes to be in the thick of the action. “But we’ll do anything. We’ll do whatever they need us to do.”

While FEMA’s community-relations job may be an important one - displaced hurricane victims need basic services and a variety of resources - it may be a job best suited for someone else, say firefighters assembled at the Sheraton.

“It’s a misallocation of resources. Completely,” said the Texas firefighter.

“It’s just an under-utilization of very talented people,” said South Salt Lake Fire Chief Steve Foote, who sent a team of firefighters to Atlanta. “I was hoping once they saw the level of people . . . they would shift gears a little bit.”

Foote said his crews would be better used doing the jobs they are trained to do.

But Louis H. Botta, a coordinating officer for FEMA, said sending out firefighters on community relations makes sense. They already have had background checks and meet the qualifications to be sworn as a federal employee. They have medical training that will prove invaluable as they come across hurricane victims in the field.

A firefighter from California said he feels ill prepared to even carry out the job FEMA has assigned him. In the field, Hurricane Katrina victims will approach him with questions about everything from insurance claims to financial assistance.

“My only answer to them is, ‘1-800-621-FEMA,’ ” he said. “I’m not used to not being in the know.”

Roy Fire Chief Jon Ritchie said his crews would be a “little frustrated” if they were assigned to hand out phone numbers at an evacuee center in Texas rather than find and treat victims of the disaster.

Also of concern to some of the firefighters is the cost borne by their municipalities in the wake of their absence. Cities are picking up the tab to fill the firefighters’ vacancies while they work 30 days for the federal government.

“There are all of these guys with all of this training and we’re sending them out to hand out a phone number,” an Oregon firefighter said. “They [the hurricane victims] are screaming for help and this day [of FEMA training] was a waste.”

Firefighters say they want to brave the heat, the debris-littered roads, the poisonous cottonmouth snakes and fire ants and travel into pockets of Louisiana where many people have yet to receive emergency aid.

But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew’s first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.

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