All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.
—I. F. Stone (1907–1989), muckraking journalist
By 2006, President Bush was presiding over a continuous string of scandals, policy failures, and public relations fiascoes. His pet war had become a bloody quagmire. Hurricane Katrina had laid waste to the Gulf Coast, and laid bare the incompetence of his appointed cronies. Bush’s signature program for his second term—privatizing Social Security—hit a wall of public opposition and sank in a few short months. The economy was in the toilet, his party’s key enforcer—House majority leader Tom “The Hammer” DeLay— was indicted and quit Congress, his vice president’s chief of staff was indicted, as was Republican über-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, White House domestic policy advisor Claude Allen, and the administration’s chief procurement officer, David Safavian. The Abramoff scandal was threatening to bring down a slew of top Republicans. By mid-2006, 70 percent of Americans disapproved of their president.
For Bush, none of this was a problem that propaganda couldn’t solve. Bush had used deception and disinformation to get us into a war; he would do the same to bail himself out of political trouble. The administration that claimed it could not afford Medicare, school lunches, or adequate body armor for its soldiers spared no expense when it came to burnishing the president’s image. For a government based on illusion, carnage could simply vanish with the banning of cameras or the stroke of a pen.
Since coming to power, the Bush administration has engaged in a systematic campaign of covert propaganda aimed at subverting both domestic and foreign media. The Government Accountability Office estimates that between 2003 and 2005, the administration spent $1.6 billion on advertising and public relations to promote its policies.1 The subterfuge against the U.S. media has been remarkable for its breadth—and for how similar the propaganda has been to standard media coverage.
In Iraq, the challenge for the Bush administration was not how to rebuild the country—a task that the United States has largely abandoned. No, the challenge was to get Iraqis to cheer up. Iraqis just needed to believe that the U.S. occupation was a boon to their devastated country, and overlook the fact that in Baghdad, electricity was on for four hours per day, down from sixteen to twenty-four hours per day before the U.S. invasion. And ignore the fact that by 2006, virtually every service sector in Iraq—including oil, electricity, water, and sewerage—had fallen below pre-invasion levels.2 Iraqis just shouldn’t worry that insurgent attacks were spiking to record highs, that thousands of innocent Iraqis were being abused in American-run prisons, and that they risked getting killed by a car bomb each time they went to the market.
All this was wished away. In its place, good news started to appear in Iraqi newspapers in mid-2005. MORE MONEY GOES TO IRAQ’S DEVELOPMENT, blared one headline. THE SANDS ARE BLOWING TOWARD A DEMOCRATIC IRAQ, gushed another. One article reported cheerily, “As the people and the [Iraqi security forces] work together, Iraq will finally drive terrorism out of Iraq for good.”3
The stories, made to appear as if they were written by independent Iraqi journalists, were in fact written by American “information operations” troops as part of a multimillion-dollar covert Pentagon operation to plant propaganda in the Iraqi media. Cash-strapped Iraqi newspapers were paid from $50 to $2,000 to run a story. In addition, Iraqi journalists were paid stipends of up to $500 per month, depending on how many pro-American pieces they published.4
This secret program is run by a relatively unknown defense contractor called the Lincoln Group, which in 2005 landed a multi-year $100 million contract to produce pro-American, anti-insurgent TV, radio, and print messages. The Lincoln Group was founded in 2003 by Paige Craig, a 31-year-old West Point dropout and former Marine who served in Iraq, and Christian Bailey, 30, an Oxford-educated Briton who moved to the United States and headed Lead 21, a networking group for young Republicans. Bailey and Craig realized there was a killing to be made in Iraq—in “reconstruction.” In 2004, they formed Iraqex, which partnered briefly with the Rendon Group, the PR firm that promoted the pro-war Iraqi exiles (more on this later). In mid-2004, Iraqex won a $6 million Pentagon contract to design and execute “an aggressive advertising and PR campaign that will accurately inform the Iraqi people of the Coalition’s goals and gain their support.”5 The Rendon Group dropped out weeks after Iraqex got the contract. One of the Iraqex projects was to persuade people in Iraq and the United States of the “strength, integrity and reliability of Iraqi forces during the fight for Fallujah” in 2004. Most accounts suggest that Iraqi troops played a minor role in Fallujah.
Iraqex changed its name to the Lincoln Group and, despite the fact that Bailey and Craig had no background in media or communications, bid on a military public affairs contract in 2004 that called for a “full service advertising and public relations firm.” They landed a three-year $18-million contract.6 In 2005, the Lincoln Group scored a $20 million two-month contract to influence public opinion in Iraq’s Al Anbar province, an insurgent hotbed. The big payoff came in the summer of 2005, when Lincoln won a $100 million contract, which was part of a $300 million global stealth PR campaign by the Pentagon.7
By December 2005, the Lincoln Group had placed over one thousand articles in fifteen to seventeen Iraqi and Arab newspapers. It also paid Islamic clerics for advice on how to persuade Sunnis to participate in elections and oppose the Iraqi insurgency. The Lincoln Group also proposed an Arab sitcom based on the Three Stooges, featuring bumbling terrorists as the main characters; the Pentagon rejected the idea.8
Current and former Lincoln Group employees told the Los Angeles Times that the Al Anbar PR campaign “was unnecessarily costly, poorly run and largely ineffective at improving America’s image in Iraq.”
“In my own estimation, this stuff has absolutely no effect, and it’s a total waste of money,” said a former employee. “Every Iraqi can read right through it.”9
But the propaganda was useful—not in Iraq, but in the United States. In the absence of real progress in Iraq, the illusion would do fine for the Bush administration. And so Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld hailed the thriving, independent pro-American Iraqi media as one of the great by-products of the Iraqi invasion. In November 2005, Rumsfeld declared that Iraq’s “free media” offered a “relief valve” for the Iraqi public to debate current issues.
Among the “free media” that ran the U.S.-planted stories was Al Mutamar, a Baghdad daily run by associates of Iraqi deputy prime minister Ahmad Chalabi. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, Chalabi was paid by the United States to head the Iraqi National Congress and was the darling of Pentagon neoconservatives. He was a key source for the bogus stories about Iraq’s alleged WMDs that President Bush invoked to make his case for war.
Now Chalabi is a key source for bogus stories about the U.S. occupation that Bush invokes to make his case for having triumphed. As Luay Baldawi, editor in chief of Al Mutamar, explained about the newspaper’s stringent criteria for publishing a story: “We are pro-American. Everything that supports America we will publish.”10
The Pentagon propaganda campaign is being waged as the State Department is offering programs in basic journalism skills and media ethics to Iraqi journalists. One workshop was titled “The Role of Press in a Democratic Society.”11
“Here we are trying to create the principles of democracy in Iraq,” said a senior Pentagon official who opposes planting stories in the Iraqi media. “Every speech we give in that country is about democracy. And we’re breaking all the first principles of democracy when we’re doing it.”12
Iraq’s Free Fake Media
Creating the illusion of a free Iraqi media was a high priority for President Bush. Shortly after the invasion, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority awarded defense contractor Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) a no-bid $82 million contract to create the Iraqi Media Network.
SAIC hired longtime TV producers such as Don North to set up the network of thirty TV and radio transmitters, three broadcast studios, and twelve bureaus around Iraq. With the ouster of the Iraqi dictator, North thought that he was establishing Iraq’s first independent journalism centers. How naïve of him.
“We immediately started clashing with the Coalition Provisional Authority, who wanted control—they just couldn’t resist controlling the message,” North told Democracy Now! “Our aim [was] to sort of make a PBS, a public broadcast radio and TV for the Iraqis. But instead, it just became a mouthpiece for the Coalition, and the Iraqis didn’t find it credible. They just thought of it as another Voice of America, and turned to other satellite broadcasters like Al Jazeera.”13 The Voice of America is a U.S. government-funded broadcast service that airs in foreign countries; the secretary of state is a member of its oversight board, and it is widely viewed as a U.S. propaganda outlet.
At times it was hard to tell where the Coalition Provisional Authority ended and where the “free” Iraqi Media Network began. One foreign official told the Washington Post in 2003 that Margaret Tutwiler, who was later tapped to head the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy, and CPA spokesman Dan Senor were “effectively acting like the station manager and the news director.” Senor once interviewed his boss, Paul Bremer, on camera after he determined that an inexperienced staff member of the Iraqi Media Network was unprepared.
One well-placed reconstruction agency advisor said that Tutwiler and Senor had achieved “what the White House has been dreaming of for years: . . . controlling the evening news.”14
The network also tried to cut many corners. Salary for the news anchors started at $60 a month, and the network offered a small clothing allowance—but only for clothes from the waist up. There was money to buy a TelePrompTer—not for the network’s Iraqi anchors, but for Paul Bremer.15
None of this should have come as a surprise. SAIC did not have media experience—just deep ties to the Pentagon. SAIC’s former CEO, Admiral William Owens, served as vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. SAIC board member Wayne Downing is a retired Army general and former lobbyist for the Iraqi National Congress. Downing was also on the board of the pro-war Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.16
The Iraqi Media Network was such a failure that its top Iraqi anchor, Ahmad Rikabi, quit after three months and the United States ended its contract with SAIC after only one year.
But less than two years later, in June 2005, the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command selected SAIC and two other firms— the Lincoln Group and SYColeman—to oversee a new five-year, $300 million media campaign in “areas such as Iraq and Lebanon.” Coordinating the campaign is something called the Joint Psychological Operations Support Element. Under the contract, the three companies will “conduct media campaigns to garner support for U.S. government policies and objectives in foreign countries among foreign audiences.” The San Diego Union-Tribune reported, “The campaign will include radio broadcasts, video programs, news articles, printed material and even novelty items such as T-shirts, balls and bumper stickers.”17
SAIC wasn’t the only U.S. contractor with no journalism experience to win a no-bid Iraqi media contract. In January 2004, the United States handed $96 million to the Florida-based Harris Corporation to pick up where SAIC failed. Months later, the main U.S.-run newspaper, Al-Sabah, nearly fell apart. On April 25, 2004, its editor, Ismail Zaher, and about twenty staffers walked out in protest over its lack of editorial independence under Harris and the United States. In an open letter explaining their walkout, the staff of Al-Sabah accused a Harris subcontractor of “turning the building into a fortress, as if this is going to provide better security than independence of Al-Sabah.”
Iraqi reporters discovered that working for a U.S. propaganda organ was a dangerous business. The newspaper staff wrote: “The battles in Fallujah and other Iraqi cities have changed the situation. The newspaper’s journalists and even drivers and printers cannot cope any longer with the numerous death threats they have been receiving. They fear for their lives. Five times attempts to bomb the newspaper’s building in Al-Qahera have been foiled, but what will happen the next time?” The staffers concluded, “Although we were a patriotic, even-handed newspaper, we have to take into account the reality that Al-Sabah is regarded, rightly, as a U.S.-funded newspaper, and wrongly, as the voice of the CPA and/or the Governing Council.”18
After the staff of Al-Sabah walked out, the U.S.-backed paper continued publication under the editorship of one Maher Faisal. “We don’t need the independence [former editor Ismail] Zayer talks about,” Faisal told the Washington Post. “We only have to publish credible information. These exiles have nothing to teach Iraqis. We can work without them.”
Faisal was well versed in the rules of state media—he used to work for one of Saddam Hussein’s official newspapers, alJumhuriya.
So how did Harris land a huge no-bid media contract with little journalism experience? It’s easy: To the Pentagon, media is just another weapon. “The primary goal of the U.S. government’s media expansion in Iraq always has been a military and political one: to quell unrest, win the minds of the people and combat anti-American propaganda from other sources,” said Sherrie Gossett of the right-wing group Accuracy in Media. “The fact that the U.S. started the job with a defense contractor . . . and then chose Harris—a media technology company with no journalism experience—underscores those priorities.”19
It also helps to have ties to the Pentagon and the Republican Party. During the 2004 election cycle, Harris donated $263,570 to GOP political action committees and candidates—thirty-two times what it gave to Democrats. And the senior vice president of Harris, Robert K. Henry, spent eight years with the U.S. Army Communications Command and the Defense Communications Agency.20
The U.S. propaganda campaign is not only undermining Iraqi democracy. It is undermining U.S. democracy as well. A secret 2003 Pentagon directive on information operations policy prohibits U.S. troops from conducting psychological operations targeting the U.S. media. The order was signed by Rumsfeld.21 Part of the intent of the order was to keep propaganda that was planted in foreign publications from being picked up by U.S. media—which is forbidden by law. But clearly, Americans are part of the target audience for the propaganda.
The military has already been caught planting false stories in the U.S. press. In October 2004, a Marine spokesperson appeared on CNN to declare that U.S. forces had started a major operation to take the Iraqi city of Fallujah. “Troops crossed the line of departure,” said 1st Lt. Lyle Gilbert. “It’s going to be a long night.”
In fact, the invasion of Fallujah wouldn’t begin for another three weeks.
The Los Angeles Times reported, “Gilbert’s carefully worded announcement was an elaborate psychological operation—or ‘psyop’—intended to dupe insurgents in Fallujah and allow U.S. commanders to see how guerrillas would react if they believed U.S. troops were entering the city.”22
That isn’t the only time the military has used the domestic press in its psy-ops campaigns. Shortly after September 11, a military officer admitted to the Washington Post, “This is the most information-intensive war you can imagine. . . . We’re going to lie about things.”23
Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress was paid lavishly to deceive Americans. The INC was established after the first Gulf War under a CIA contract with the Rendon Group, the PR firm. The plan was for the INC, with the help of the Rendon Group, to place stories in the British press about atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein. “The aim was for the stories to then be picked up by the American media, thereby bypassing U.S. laws that prevented government funding of domestic propaganda,” wrote Jack Fair-weather, former Baghdad bureau chief for the London Daily Telegraph, in an article for Mother Jones.24 This “legal end run caused some unease” at the CIA, Fairweather reported, but not enough to keep the Agency from backing the effort. Nabeel Musawi, the political liaison of the INC, said of his U.S. patrons, “What did they expect? We were committed to overthrowing Saddam Hussein, not holding a tea party. We had to take some risks to achieve that.”
In 1998, the Republican-led Congress approved the Iraq Liberation Act. The INC received $17.3 million for the “collection and dissemination of information” to the media about Saddam Hussein’s crimes.25 By 2002, the Defense Department was paying the INC $340,000 a month for its “intelligence,” although by that time the CIA had determined that the INC’s information was unreliable.
The INC put the American money to work doing what the group did best—lying and fabricating stories. The INC planted bogus stories about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, and concocted tales of a meeting between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. It planted these stories through a network of credulous American journalists, notably Judith Miller of the New York Times. And its fakery went further: In November 2001, the INC presented a supposed Iraqi general, Jamal al-Ghurairy, to be interviewed by a New York Times reporter. The subsequent front page Times story quoted the general describing how foreign Arab fighters were being trained to hijack planes at Salman Pak, a military facility south of Baghdad. “We were training these people to attack installations important to the United States,” he said. Versions of this remarkable charge were repeated in numerous publications, including the Washington Post, Vanity Fair, and the London Observer. In a final coup de grâce, the White House included the Salman Pak story in the background paper “Decade of Deception and Defiance,” prepared for President Bush’s September 12, 2002, speech to the UN General Assembly.
But it turns out the real Iraqi Lieutenant General al-Ghurairy has never left Iraq. The INC “general” was an imposter, as Jack Fairweather revealed later in Mother Jones.
The circle of deception was complete. The Bush administration bankrolled the preparation and dissemination of bogus stories to the American media, then cited the bogus accounts as a justification to launch a war. With American journalists only too eager to sacrifice truth for access, reality never had a chance.
Even the “experts” are bought off. In a December 2005 article about the covert Iraq propaganda program, the New York Times quoted Michael Rubin, a Middle East expert at the American Enterprise Institute, as saying, “I’m not surprised this goes on. Especially in an atmosphere where terrorists and insurgents—replete with oil boom cash—do the same. We need an even playing field, but cannot fight with both hands tied behind our backs.”26
The Bush administration couldn’t have scripted a better defense—because it was already paying Rubin for his scripting help. A month after this article ran, the Times revealed that Rubin had worked for the Lincoln Group—covertly, of course.27 Rubin refused to reveal how much he had been paid by the group.
And why should he? He’s just another member of the Bush and Rumsfeld “free media” offering his opinions .. . to the highest bidder.
As for results, the Iraq propaganda campaign has failed to win over many Iraqis. In a poll done by the University of Maryland in January 2006, half of Iraqis—including nine out of ten Sunnis— said they approve of attacks on U.S.-led forces. Eighty percent of Iraqis think the United States plans to have permanent bases in Iraq, while 70 percent support a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops. Two-thirds of Iraqis believe their security and the availability of public services will both improve if U.S. forces leave in six months.28
Looks like reality trumps spin in Iraq. But President Bush is determined not to let that happen in the United States.