And not just to propagandize, but to track anyone tuning in.The Pentagon gave a controversial UK PR firm [Bell Pottinger] over half a billion dollars to run a top secret propaganda program in Iraq.
Daily Beast
Funny you only hear people saying that about war.Bell Pottinger’s output included short TV segments made in the style of Arabic news networks and fake insurgent videos which could be used to track the people who watched them, according to a former employee.
The agency’s staff worked alongside high-ranking U.S. military officers in their Baghdad Camp Victory headquarters.Bell Pottinger reported to the Pentagon, the CIA and the National Security Council on its work in Iraq, he said.
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Bell Pottinger’s work in Iraq was a huge media operation which cost over a hundred million dollars a year on average.
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The firm’s output was signed off by former General David Petraeus [...] and on occasion by the White House.
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There were three types of media operations commonly used in Iraq at the time, said a military contractor familiar with Bell Pottinger’s work there.
“White is attributed, it says who produced it on the label,” the contractor said. “Grey is unattributed and black is falsely attributed. These types of black ops, used for tracking who is watching a certain thing, were a pretty standard part of the industry toolkit.”
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[The] most sensitive program described by [video editor Martin] Wells was the production of fake al Qaeda propaganda films and record them on CDs]. He told the Bureau how the videos were made. He was given precise instructions: “We need to make this style of video and we’ve got to use al Qaeda’s footage,” he was told. “We need it to be 10 minutes long, and it needs to be in this file format, and we need to encode it in this manner.”
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Wells explained how the team embedded a code into the CDs which linked to a Google Analytics account, giving a list of IP addresses where the CDs had been played.
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Wells explained how the team embedded a code into the CDs which linked to a Google Analytics account, giving a list of IP addresses where the CDs had been played.
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“Nobody could work out how a British company could get hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. funding when there were equally capable U.S. companies who could have done it,” said Andrew Garfield, an ex-employee of the Lincoln Group who is now a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “The American companies were pissed.”
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According to Glen Segell, who worked in an information operations task force in Iraq in 2006, contractors were used partly because the military didn’t have the in-house expertise, and partly because they were operating in a legal “grey area”.
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In a globalized media environment, the Iraq operations could theoretically have been seen back home, therefore “it was prudent legally for the military not to undertake all the…activities,” Segell wrote.
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Bell Pottinger’s consortium was one of three bidders for the contract, and simply put in a more convincing proposal than their rivals.
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Whether the material achieved its goals, no one would ever really know, said Wells. “I mean if you look at the situation now, it wouldn’t appear to have worked. But at the time, who knows, if it saved one life it [was] a good thing to do.”
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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