All-New
Terrorist Evil-Doers Trading Card #12 of 55 - H&K/ TRG/ OSI/ OSP/
INC/ INA
| H&K | Hill and Knowlton | The
public relations giant who organized a foreign
lobbying group, Citizens for a Free Kuwait (CFK),
as a
front for the royal government, and sold the Persian
Gulf
War to
the US Congress
and UN with
their emotionally moving but totally falsified story about baby
atrocities. |
| TRG | The Rendon Group | The guerilla marketing and PR firm that brought us Ahmad Chalabi, created the Iraqi National Congress, pushed "bad intelligence" about Iraqi WMDs to the Media, US State Department, and DoD, and staged PR events, like the fall of Hussein's statue, for the US media enclave that was confined at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. |
| OSI | Office of Strategic Influence | A
DoD office created in 2001 to facilitate TRG's overseas PR campaigns,
OSI was suddenly disbanded
after 6 weeks of bad
publicity, but then quickly reorganized,
with all its original functions reassigned to the Office
of Global Communications, IAO, and the
newly reactivated Counter-
Disinformation/ Misinformation Team. |
| OSP | Office
of Special Plans |
Former CIA counter terrorism chief Vince Cannistraro referred to the OSP dismissively as "the bat cave," but the administration favored this small, short-lived Pentagon intelligence office over CIA and all other intel sources, when they went looking for the now-discredited evidence on Iraqi WMDs, and Iraqi links to 9/11 and al-Qaeda. |
| INC | Iraqi National Congress | The
puppet government in waiting that failed. Tasked by the
President in 1991 to "create the conditions for Hussein's removal"
following the Gulf War, the CIA passed the job to TRG. TRG both
created and named the Iraqi National Congress, with Ahmad Chalabi,
convicted bank embezzler, at
its head. |
| INA | Iraqi National Accord | The US client government in waiting that won. With Chalabi's good luck and reputation in decline, right at the same time that the US occupation government was preparing to withdraw from Iraq, Allawi was unanimously appointed by the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), dominated by Washington sponsored INC and INA expatriate Iraqis, to become the Prime Minister in the new interim Iraqi government. |
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| Hard-to-get photo of John Rendon |
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| DARPA and IAO are well satisfied clients of The Rendon Group. |
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| Chalabi gets chummy with the US State Department |
On August 2, 1990, the US allied
nation of Iraq invaded the smaller oil-producing nation of Kuwait,
another US ally. This came during a time when Iraqi dictator
Saddam
Hussein had been a valued US ally for nearly a decade. From 1980
to
1988, the US supplied arms, funding, and training to Hussein during his
prosecution of the Iran-Iraq War. During the war, over 150,000
Iranian
and 13,000 Iraqi deaths were attributed to Hussein. Complaints
had
been filed against Hussein by various international human rights
groups, leading the US Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, to
commiserate with Hussein on July 25, 1990, over what she called a "cheap and unjust" profile by
ABC-TV's Diane Sawyer. Glaspie wanted very much to see Hussein
make "an
appearance in the media, even for five minutes, that would help explain
Iraq to the American people."
It's been speculated that Glaspie's remarks to Hussein might have led him to believe that his support in the US was stronger than it really was, maybe even strong enough to see him through the subsequent attack he was preparing to make on Kuwait, only a few weeks into his future.
Kuwait was then and still remains a dictatorship, under the hereditary Emir, or king, of the al-Sabah royal family. In 1986, the Kuwaiti National Assembly was disbanded by the Emir so that power could be concentrated even more firmly in the hands of what's disparagingly been called the "black gold fiefdom" by its detractors. In 1990, the general population of the US was barely even aware that Kuwait existed, and was unlikely to be too terribly sympathetic to their oppressive monarchy. US President George Herbert Walker Bush was nevertheless keen to repel the Iraqi invaders from Kuwait, at least partly in order to protect considerable and substantial US oil interests in the tiny but oil-rich kingdom.
That was the nature of the PR problem which presented itself to the US and Kuwait governments in their mutual desire to mobilize the US, and other allied Western and Arab nations, for what came to be called the International Coalition for Operation Desert Storm. Kuwait's ruling oligarchy had done very little, prior to this point, that would endear them to the US public. They suppressed their country's democracy movement, intimidated foreign journalists, and censored their own press. Their public image, as presented by the US press during the early days of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, was very poor. They hired foreign workers to do the dirty work in their oil industry, under oppressive conditions of indentured servitude. "The wealthy young men of Kuwait's ruling class", on the other hand, "were known as spoiled party boys in university cities and national capitals from Cairo to Washington." (John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, The Selling of the Gulf War.)
It's been speculated that Glaspie's remarks to Hussein might have led him to believe that his support in the US was stronger than it really was, maybe even strong enough to see him through the subsequent attack he was preparing to make on Kuwait, only a few weeks into his future.
Kuwait was then and still remains a dictatorship, under the hereditary Emir, or king, of the al-Sabah royal family. In 1986, the Kuwaiti National Assembly was disbanded by the Emir so that power could be concentrated even more firmly in the hands of what's disparagingly been called the "black gold fiefdom" by its detractors. In 1990, the general population of the US was barely even aware that Kuwait existed, and was unlikely to be too terribly sympathetic to their oppressive monarchy. US President George Herbert Walker Bush was nevertheless keen to repel the Iraqi invaders from Kuwait, at least partly in order to protect considerable and substantial US oil interests in the tiny but oil-rich kingdom.
That was the nature of the PR problem which presented itself to the US and Kuwait governments in their mutual desire to mobilize the US, and other allied Western and Arab nations, for what came to be called the International Coalition for Operation Desert Storm. Kuwait's ruling oligarchy had done very little, prior to this point, that would endear them to the US public. They suppressed their country's democracy movement, intimidated foreign journalists, and censored their own press. Their public image, as presented by the US press during the early days of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, was very poor. They hired foreign workers to do the dirty work in their oil industry, under oppressive conditions of indentured servitude. "The wealthy young men of Kuwait's ruling class", on the other hand, "were known as spoiled party boys in university cities and national capitals from Cairo to Washington." (John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, The Selling of the Gulf War.)
Enter Hill
& Knowlton (H&K). Enter The
Rendon Group (TRG). Enter over 20 different US based
public
relations
(PR) firms, law firms, and lobbying firms, hired by the Kuwaiti
government and supported by the US government, to spin their cause to
the US Public, the US Congress, and then to the United Nations.
Hal
Steward, a retired US Army PR official, had noted early that "If
and when a shooting war starts, reporters will begin to wonder why
American solders are dying for oil-rich sheiks. The US military
had
better get cracking to come up with a public relations plan that will
supply the answer the public can accept." But the Kuwaiti royals
had
their own PR plan. Kuwait would be recast as a
struggling
young democracy. According to the Wirthlin Group, a research department
of H&K, who conducted daily polls on the public's responses to
H&K's early PR efforts, the most effective way to publicly villainize our old ally Saddam Hussein, even after
we had supported his image for so long, as a lesser evil, and even as a
hero, in the war against Iran, lied in a retrofit, to reinforce his
well-earned image
as "a madman who ( 1.) had committed atrocities even against his own
people, ( 2.) had tremendous power to do further damage, and ( 3.)
needed to be stopped."
TRG initially received a $100,000 per month retainer for media work from the Kuwaitis. Neill & Company got $50,000 per month for lobbying Congress. Sam Zakhem, former US Ambassador to Bahrain, funneled $7.7 million in advertising and lobbying dollars through two front groups, the "Coalition for Americans at Risk" and the "Freedom Task Force." H&K, the world's largest PR firm at the time, represented "Citizens for a Free Kuwait" (CFK), which was a front group for the Kuwaiti government. Over 6 months, the Kuwaiti royal government channeled $11.9 million to the CFK. This was an unprecedented amount of foreign money to be used for manipulating US public opinion. Following US law, the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) was employed by US Attorneys to expose the Kuwaiti propaganda campaign to the Department of Justice, but the DOJ chose to ignore it. We can only speculate as to their reasons.
TRG initially received a $100,000 per month retainer for media work from the Kuwaitis. Neill & Company got $50,000 per month for lobbying Congress. Sam Zakhem, former US Ambassador to Bahrain, funneled $7.7 million in advertising and lobbying dollars through two front groups, the "Coalition for Americans at Risk" and the "Freedom Task Force." H&K, the world's largest PR firm at the time, represented "Citizens for a Free Kuwait" (CFK), which was a front group for the Kuwaiti government. Over 6 months, the Kuwaiti royal government channeled $11.9 million to the CFK. This was an unprecedented amount of foreign money to be used for manipulating US public opinion. Following US law, the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) was employed by US Attorneys to expose the Kuwaiti propaganda campaign to the Department of Justice, but the DOJ chose to ignore it. We can only speculate as to their reasons.
Her story was never corroborated. It was later proved false, but not until after it had successfully been used to argue the case for the first Persian Gulf War to the US Public, the US Congress, and the UN. Nayirah declined to reveal her last name, allegedly out of fear of Iraqi reprisals. She, as it turned out, was no ordinary Kuwaiti hospital volunteer. Nayirah was actually the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the US, and a member of the al-Sabah royal family. Later investigations by Amnesty International proved that she had never worked at the al-Addan hospital at all, and there were no accounts to corroborate her story. The royal family spurned all subsequent attempts by the media to interview her.
Adding another, less obvious layer to the overall deception, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus was not a real Congressional committee, either. It was only a name that was given to an association of politicians, chaired by California Democrat Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican John Porter, who were both members of the Congressional Human Rights Foundation. Employing the sort of double blind twist one might expect to find only in classical CIA-type foreign government front organizations, the Congressional Human Rights Foundation itself was not a real Congressional body, either. It was a legally separate entity from the US Congress, occupying free office space, valued at $3,000 per year, at Hill & Knowlton's Washington DC office. H&K created the entire fiction of Nayirah's testimony for a fee of $11.5 million from the Kuwaiti government, laundered through CFK.
"Of all the accusations made against the dictator, none had more impact on American public opinion than the one about Iraqi soldiers removing 312 babies for their incubators and leaving them to die on the cold hospital floors of Kuwait City." --- John McArthur, author of The Second Front.
While H&K was passing out millions of dollars in T-Shirts, bumper stickers, and biased and falsified VNRs (video news releases) which were given to the stateside US media, who then passed them on, undigested, to the stateside public as "real" news, and, even as the Pentagon was making false statements about satellite photos of non-existent Iraqi troops and planes on the Iraqi-Saudi border, the Rendon Group was handling most of the Kuwaiti PR overseas.
At the end
of the first Gulf War, President George H.
W. Bush chose not to
overthrow Hussein militarily, but instead signed a presidential
directive ordering a CIA covert operation to unseat him
indirectly.
The CIA, for reasons which are still unclear, reportedly handed this
assignment over to the Rendon Group. In 1992, TRG helped Ahmad
Chalabi
to organize
the Iraqi National Congress (INC).According to a 1998 ABC news report, The Rendon Group even came up with the name for INC, and channeled $12 million to it in covert CIA funding between 1992 and 1996, having already spent $23 million prior to this time. INC drew its membership from Kurds, Islamic fundamentalists, secular Sunni and Shiite Arabs, democrats, nationalists, and ex-military officers. In October 1992, Ahmad Chalabi was appointed to head the group. Chalabi, a Rendon protégé, had left Iraq and moved to the US with his parents at the age of 13. He held a US passport, and was virtually unknown to the Iraqi public at large.
The INC was never very cohesive, and virtually collapsed during the 1990s due to internal differences and rivalries. Chalabi gradually lost the trust of both the CIA and President Clinton, who abandoned INC in favor of funding a rival group, the Iraqi National Accord (INA). Both INC and INA members were later rounded up and killed by Hussein's forces in Iraq, but throughout it all, Chalabi remained in good standing with the pro-Israel hawks and so-called "neocons," or neo-conservatives, who remained in the Washington background, left over from the previous Reagan and Bush administrations. In 2001, the neocons were brought back into government service again, this time, working for the second Bush administration.
In 1997, some prominent neocons formed the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), to lobby for increased military spending and a hard line on Iraq. Some of the PNAC founders, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Elliot Abrams would come to hold very prominent positions in the second Bush administration. Not all neo-conservatives are Republicans, however, and former CIA Director James Woolsey, a long-time, card-carrying Democrat, who now spends his time in a lot of the same Washington NGO think-tanks as other neocons and PNAC members, has become one of their biggest proponents and supporters. The 9/11 attacks gave neocons an unprecedented opportunity to assert their foreign policy ideas, in a rapidly evolving new climate of fear and retribution. At the onset of the 2nd war on Iraq, the Rendon Group received a new, fresh $100,000 per month contract.
House of Representatives
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| The Great Seal of the United
States of America |
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Even prior to this, Chalabi had been calling for the early withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. He said US officials disliked him for various reasons, because he opposed letting former members of the Baath Party join the new government, and because he had started his own investigation into graft and corruption in the UN oil-for-food program. In spite of all these turnarounds, however, some, like American Prospect author Robert Dreyfuss, have speculated that Chalabi still enjoys the good graces of the neocons at the Pentagon, and that it's all a big con game, in which they're hoping that they can boost Chalabi's sagging image with other Iraqis in the long run, by pretending to sever all ties with him now. Superseding him comes Ayad Allawi, a wealthy Shiite exile who headed the INA and was inaugurated as Iraqi interim Prime Minister with limited powers on May 29, 2004, about a month before the limited hand over of power by the Coalition Provisional Authority, which dissolved itself a few days prior to the scheduled date of June 30, 2004.
But on February 20, 2002, the Pentagon announced the existence of a heretofore unheard-of new Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), which "was quietly set up after September 11." The role of the office was to plant false stories in the foreign press, send phony e-mails from disguised addresses, and manipulate public opinion through covert activities. The office provoked such a storm of public controversy that it was closed six days following this announcement, but Rumsfeld has stated that it's activities have continued under the cover of various other government cover groups. "I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing fine I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have." --- Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, DoD news transcript, November 18, 2002.
A few of PNAC's founders: Richard Cheney, Vice
President, Jeb Bush, Florida Governor, Donald
Rumsfeld, Defense Secy., Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy
Defense Secy., I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's Chief of
Staff, John Bolton, Under Secy. of State for Arms
Control and International Security, & two others.
By May 28, 2004, it had become increasingly clear that the planned Iraqi elections were not going to be held as planned, and the Iraqi National Congress (INC) unanimously nominated Ayad Allawi, (sometimes spelled Iyad Allawi), to become the new interim Prime Minister when the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) led by Paul Bremer dissolved at the end of June.
After years of competition in Washington, and one year of bitter arguments and stonewalling in Baghdad between Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC), and Allawi's Iraqi National Accord, Allawi finally won out in the end.
The INA consists mainly of military and security officers who defected from Iraq. Making use of old contacts still living and working in Iraq, they maintained a true intelligence network, at least up until June 1996, when about 100 INA-connected Iraqi officers were arrested, and at least 30 were killed, by the Hussein government.
"Bad Intelligence" on Weapons of Mass Destruction. As they had done so well for the Kuwaitis, the Rendon Group served their INC clients by running PR campaigns for them, for the dual purposes of winning Congressional funding approval and favorably influencing US public opinion. Judith Miller of the New York Times (NYT) had interviewed Ahmad Chalabi many times during the 10-11 years he was prominent in Washington. Chalabi arranged an interview for her in 2001, with an Iraqi defector named Adnan Ishan Saeed al-Haideri, who had traveled from Iraq to meet with her in Thailand. The informant al-Haideri claimed to be a personal witness to vast stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Miller, anxious to scoop other papers, and apparently trusting Chalabi and al-Haideri as reliable and credible sources, sometimes published her exclusive interviews and stories without taking time to check facts or seek prior editorial approval.
Miller's
frequent stories about Iraqi defectors, Iraqi WMDs, and the alleged
connection
between al Qaeda and Iraq helped to make the case for the
second Iraq War, much as the phony Nayirah baby atrocity story had
been a powerful catalyst
for the first one.
The Miller interviews with Chalabi and al-Haideri, along with other
stories she authored on
biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, helped to provide the sense
of
urgency that the administration was seeking in order to gain public and
Congressional approval for a preemptive war against Iraq.President George W. Bush cited Miller's stories several times while making his case for the war, in press conferences, addresses before the US Congress, and before the UN. Vice president Dick Cheney, though no longer supporting the 9/11-Iraq connection theory he once wholeheartedly endorsed, still claims to believe in the now thoroughly discredited theory that Iraq sponsored al-Qaeda prior to 9/11. Like the elusive Iraqi WMDs, the supposed 9/11 - Iraq - Al-Qaeda connections were never given much shrift by State Department, CIA, or DIA sources. They were largely derived from the misleading and unsupported assertions of expatriate Iraqis and defectors, like Chalabi, the INC, Allawi, and the INA. These unproved theories were ramrodded throughout government, and past the objections of traditional intelligence sources, by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Abram Shulsky, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis Libby, and other PNAC neocons, even over the reservations of intel lifers, like George Tenet and Richard Clarke, and military professionals, like Richard Myers and Colin Powell. Even Condaleeza Rice had some serious doubts about trusting these unverified sources.
W. Patrick Lang, the former chief of Middle East intelligence at the DIA., said, "The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government’s foreign policy, and they’ve pulled it off. They’re running Chalabi. The DIA has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there’s no guts at all in the CIA."
The OSP, like OSI, later had it's name changed, and was reorganizing as the "Northern Gulf Affairs" office. Some say that the Northern Gulf Affairs, officially a State Department office, and no longer under the DoD, really isn't the OSP anymore at all. Some say that OSP just vanished after the Iraq War officially ended, it's purpose fulfilled. It was no longer needed, and just like that, it was gone.
Chalabi returned to Iraq, after 45 years in exile, to Kurdish held Northern Iraq in February, 2003. It eventually became apparent to all concerned that Chalabi and the INC had exaggerated their personal importance to their Washington hosts, and never really had any active network inside Iraq which would have ever made it possible to gather intelligence on WMDs. Nevertheless, their Washington connections relied heavily, at first on Chalabi and the INC, then, later, on Allawi and the INA, to help them make their case that Hussein was a preeminent danger so great as to warrant a pre-emptive, proactive war against the Hussein regime.
"By Miller's own account, she verified her Chalabi scoops by checking with senior administration officials. And the OSP, in turn, backed up their Chalabi fiction by citing reliable media sources like the 'unimpeachable' New York Times. So, the only way that Chalabi could get away with his scheme was if the OSP and Miller were unaware that they were getting their information from the same source. How likely is that?" --- Ahmed Amr, NileMedia.com editor, Will The Times Pay For Its Crimes?
On October 7, 2004, Judith Miller of the NYT was held in contempt of court by US District Judge Thomas Hogan, for allegedly refusing to reveal confidential CIA sources, in U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the CIA leak in which Valerie Plame's name and identity as a CIA operative dealing with WMDs was outed by syndicated columnist and TV news personality Robert Novak on July 14, 2003. Fitzgerald has also subpoenaed reporters from NBC, Time Magazine, and the Washington Post. The President has asked his staff to release journalists from their promises of confidentiality, and some, such as I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, have released specific reporters, but others have been advised by their attorneys not to do so. Both Novak and Miller claim they have not been released from their own confidentiality oaths.
This marked a major turning point in the administration's PR strategies for the war, which had to be shifted from the prewar justifications.
The war had originally been sold on the basis of the certainty of ( 1.) Iraqi WMD proliferation in large quantities, ( 2.) the al Qaeda-Iraq linkage, and ( 3.) the "real and imminent threat" of "state sponsored terrorism," alluding to the possibility that rogue states like Iraq might provide terrorists like al-Qaeda with biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, which they could use against the US homeland. At first, the President switched from talking about WMDs in large quantities to talking about WMD "programs" for awhile, gradually moving towards his present position, of justifying the war in retrospect based on Hussein's villainy, and his mission to spread freedom and democracy abroad (particularly in countries with strategic land, mineral, or oil resources judged vital to our national security).
PR, Propaganda, Psyops, Disinformation, Misinformation, and Lying
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| A
Saddam Hussein
statue in Baghdad, prior to being pulled over by a US Marine armored
recovery vehicle in a PR event reminiscent of Lenin's statues coming
down after the fall of the Soviet Union. |
Aerial view of the Hussein statue across from the Palestine Hotel. (click here for a larger image, or here for additional images) shows media trucks off-camera, and a smaller crowd than the footage seen on CNN and other news outlets was intended to suggest. |
None. There is no difference.
Then why do we have six different terms that all mean the same thing? The difference lies mainly in the subtle and subliminal implications of meaning and disposition the terms imply. It all depends on your point of view.
If I stretch the truth a little for my own selfish purposes, or lie a little for a cause I consider to be worthy, why, then, that's just good PR. It's all for a good cause! Of course I need good PR and good press, so I can get my important message across!
But if the other guy does it for his own selfish purposes, or for a cause which I consider to be unworthy or evil, why, that's propaganda! He's lying and deceitful!
Nazis were so fond of their lying, racist, and nationalistic "propaganda!" Our "intelligence agencies" might use a little "psyops," all for a good cause, but their "spies" are all into "disinformation," and "misinformation!" It's a bunch of gross lies! They do it deliberately!
Our language is full of flavored words that mean the same things. They have a war department, but we have a defense department. They have indiscriminate bombing runs, but we have surgical strikes. They killed everyone, but we sterilized the area. And so on.
On a similar note, one of the Curmudgeonly Fussbudget's scorching flamers once wrote in to tell him that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." It makes a person wonder. Why did President Ronald Reagan refer to the Mujahadeen as "freedom fighters," when we all know now that those were the same groups that we now call "terrorists?" Was Reagan's world view back then really all that vastly different than George W. Bush's world view is now? Consider for a minute that many of the same neo-conservatives that were in Reagan's cabinet and White House staff are now working for Bush.
Maybe it's because back then, when the Soviets still occupied Afghanistan, and we all had the USSR as our common enemy, we thought that the Mujahadeen were on our side. But here in reality, just like us, it turns out that they were only on their own side all along.
It's not even a matter of degrees, it's only a matter of flavor.
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The Curmudgeonly Old Fussbudget
is in way over his head and doesn't even know the half of it.
Unfortunately, neither does anyone else. Or, if they do, they
ain't
tellin'! "It's ALIVE" and it's "out of control."
"Chickens coming home to roost" to be sure, an "institutionalized
mess" if there ever was one. Get up, get into it, and get
involved.
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