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thedrifter
12-18-05, 08:11 AM
Military was reportedly in on planted stories
Iraqi newspapers were paid to run good-news war reports
- Mark Mazzetti, Kevin Sack, Los Angeles Times
Sunday, December 18, 2005

Washington -- U.S. military officials in Iraq were fully aware that a Pentagon contractor regularly paid Iraqi newspapers to publish positive stories about the war, and made it clear that none of the stories should be traced to the United States, according to several current and former employees of the Lincoln Group, the Washington, D.C., contractor.

In contrast to assertions by military officials in Baghdad and Washington, interviews and Lincoln Group documents show that the information campaign waged over the past year was designed to cloak any connection to the U.S. military.

"In clandestine parlance, Lincoln Group was a 'cut-out' -- a third party -- that would provide the military with plausible deniability," said a former Lincoln Group employee who worked on the operation. "To attribute products to (the military) would defeat the entire purpose. Hence, no product by Lincoln Group ever said 'Made in the USA.' ''

Several workers who carried out the Lincoln Group's offensive, including a $20 million, two-month contract to influence public opinion in Iraq's restive Anbar province, describe a campaign that was unnecessarily costly, poorly run and largely ineffective at improving America's image in Iraq. The current and former employees spoke on condition of anonymity because of confidentiality restrictions.

"In my own estimation, this stuff has absolutely no effect, and it's a total waste of money," said another former employee, echoing the sentiments of several colleagues. "Every Iraqi can read right through it."

Disclosures that the military used a private company to plant stories written by U.S. troops in Iraqi newspapers have drawn widespread criticism.

The Pentagon has ordered an investigation, led by Navy Rear Adm. Scott Van Buskirk. On Friday, Army Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said he expects a report from Van Buskirk "in a week or so." Casey said that a preliminary assessment made shortly after the military's information operations campaign was disclosed in a Los Angeles Times article last month concluded that the Army was "operating within our authorities and the appropriate legal procedures."

Military officials initially distanced themselves from the Lincoln Group's activities, suggesting the company might have violated its contract when it masked the origin of stories placed in the Iraqi media.

On Dec. 2, Pentagon officials told Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., that all of the published materials were supposed to be identified as originating with the U.S. military, but that identification occasionally was omitted by accident.

But Lincoln Group documents obtained by the Times, along with interviews with both military officials and current and former Lincoln Group employees, show that people who worked on the campaign believed the media products would be far more credible if their origins were disguised.

Pentagon officials say that Warner was given the most accurate information the Pentagon had at the time.

"Certainly, nobody was trying to deceive Sen. Warner," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, who declined further comment on the military's role in the information campaign.

With the insurgency in Iraq still flourishing more than two years after the American invasion, U.S. generals have come to believe that the battle for hearts and minds is as vital as the fight against insurgents. But of the handful of companies that have received tens of millions of Pentagon dollars to "level the information playing field," as it were, the Lincoln Group would seem to be a curious case.

The company had had little public relations or communications experience when it won its first psychological operations contract last year. Yet it has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the information war, and now has 20 Pentagon contracts, according to a company spokesman.

Officials in Washington, D.C., have long been frustrated by the clumsiness of U.S. government attempts to explain its policies to a global audience.

While Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network deftly used the Arabic media to inspire a worldwide movement, U.S. agencies fought turf battles over whether the CIA, Pentagon or State Department should take the lead in fighting an information war against Islamic extremists.

A 2004 report by the Defense Science Board, a panel of outside experts that advises U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, concluded that a "crisis" in strategic communications was undermining U.S. efforts.

As the battles raged in Washington, the Pentagon quietly awarded huge contracts to companies such as the Lincoln Group to carry out information warfare around the globe.

The appeal of outside agencies, experts say, is that the companies all promise to carry out a nimbler, more sophisticated communication strategy than the United States can conduct on its own.

According to a Lincoln Group spokesman, the company was founded in 2003 after its two young leaders, Paige Craig and Christian Bailey, were introduced in New York City by a mutual friend. Within a year, the new company became one of many to recognize the immense profit potential in Iraq.

Current and former employees and friends of Craig and Bailey -- both of whom hold the title of executive vice president -- said the men make for a corporate odd couple. Craig, 31, dropped out of West Point, enlisted in the Marines and later graduated from the University of Maryland. Bailey, 30, is a preppy, Oxford-educated Briton described by friends as bright, likable and active in social circles. Both men declined to be interviewed for this article.

In the year after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, the company (then called Lincoln Alliance Corp.) undertook a series of disparate ventures. In April 2004, the company worked with the Marines to distribute water bottles in the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala with custom labels saying that the water was a gift from the Americans. The company also operated a brick factory in northern Iraq and salvaged scrap metal in Basra.

The company's breakthrough came in late 2004, when it submitted a bid on a military public-affairs contract offering millions of dollars for an "aggressive advertising and public relations campaign that will accurately inform the Iraqi people" about U.S. goals.

The announcement called for a "full-service advertising and public relations firm," yet the three-year, nearly $18 million contract eventually went to the Lincoln Group -- a company with just a handful of American employees and little previous communications experience.

The U.S. military in Baghdad "was throwing money at people," said one former Lincoln Group employee. "This is a war where we're getting killed on the information battlefield so (the military) is desperate for anything that will help."

Bailey and Craig went on what many saw as a hiring spree to find staffers willing to work in Iraq. By early 2005, the Lincoln Group had a team working inside the opulent Al Faw palace at Camp Victory in Baghdad.

In the summer, with the October constitutional referendum approaching, U.S. commanders in Iraq decided to ratchet up the information war in western Anbar province, the predominantly Sunni region that has been an insurgent stronghold.

It fell to the Lincoln Group, with the $20 million, two-month contract it had been awarded in July, to discredit the insurgency and burnish the image of the Iraqi government before Iraqis went to the polls on Oct. 15.

According to Lincoln Group documents, the company reported to the Army that more than $16 million was spent on advertisements on Iraqi television over the two-month period.

The so-called Western Mission campaign also included radio advertisements, signs, Internet pop-up advertisements and a "rapid response" cell to produce TV, radio and print messages from Anbar province to counter insurgent propaganda.

The Western Mission contract, along with a multiyear contract worth as much as $100 million that the Lincoln Group signed with Special Operations Command over the summer, were financial turning points for the company.

The Pentagon has yet to comment on whether its investigation into the Lincoln Group's practices in Iraq might affect its contracts.

Ellie

Windle
12-18-05, 04:10 PM
I have been really torn on this whole thing for a while.
On the one hand, it's important to do anything that we can to slow the insurgency not just by force, but by changing anti-American sentiments of those who would become terrorists.
What I feel is more important, however, is that our mission has evolved into bringing democracy and freedom to Iraq. We have to lead by example, as these people don't know the nuances of a successful representative government. A free and independant newsmedia is extremely important to the functioning of an elected government, and if they see that the US is flexing its political muscles in thier press, they are being led to believe that something like that would be acceptable to become the norm.