War On You: Breaking Alternative News

August 24, 2009

A public relations firm that organized the opposition to Saddam Hussein during the 1990s and “coerced” journalists during the run-up to the Iraq war could now be placed in charge of vetting embedded journalists in war zones, a new report claims.

“Any reporter seeking to embed with US forces is subject to a background profile by The Rendon Group, which gained notoriety in the run-up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq for its work helping to create the Iraqi National Congress,” the military newspaper Stars & Stripes reports.

The Iraqi National Congress was a dummy parliament composed of opponents of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. It was headed up by Ahmed Chalabi, who would later serve as Iraq’s oil minister after the US invasion.

The Rendon Group was founded by John Rendon, a public-relations expert whose links to government PR efforts date back at least as far as the Reagan administration.

The news that the Rendon Group is now in charge of vetting war reporters is certain to raise concerns about government censorship and propaganda among the media watchdog community, many of whom are familiar with John Rendon’s track record in dealing with journalists.

A 2005 Rolling Stone article says that the Rendon Group was given a government contract three weeks after 9/11 to wage a public relations campaign against media that were perceived as hostile to the Bush administration’s war efforts.

According to the New York Times, Rendon was involved in the development of the Office of Strategic Influence, whose “mission was to conduct covert disinformation and deception operations — planting false news items in the media and hiding their origins,” as the Rolling Stone article put it.

Rolling Stone’s James Bamford reported:

According to the Pentagon documents, the Rendon Group played a major role in the IOTF. The company was charged with creating an “Information War Room” to monitor worldwide news reports at lightning speed and respond almost instantly with counterpropaganda. A key weapon, according to the documents, was Rendon’s “proprietary state-of-the-art news-wire collection system called ‘Livewire,’ which takes real-time news-wire reports, as they are filed, before they are on the Internet, before CNN can read them on the air and twenty-four hours before they appear in the morning newspapers, and sorts them by keyword. The system provides the most current real-time access to news and information available to private or public organizations.”

The top target that the pentagon assigned to Rendon was the Al-Jazeera television network. The contract called for the Rendon Group to undertake a massive “media mapping” campaign against the news organization, which the Pentagon considered “critical to U.S. objectives in the War on Terrorism.” According to the contract, Rendon would provide a “detailed content analysis of the station’s daily broadcast . . . [and] identify the biases of specific journalists and potentially obtain an understanding of their allegiances, including the possibility of specific relationships and sponsorships.”

The Rendon Group denies much of this. In a rebuttal to the Rolling Stone article, it says it had “no role whatsoever in making the case for the Iraq war, here at home or internationally.” The group also contends it had “nothing to do with the Office of Strategic Influence.”

SINISTER PURPOSE

“The secret targeting of foreign journalists may have had a sinister purpose,” Bamford wrote. “Among the missions proposed for the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence was one to ‘coerce’ foreign journalists and plant false information overseas. Secret briefing papers also said the office should find ways to ‘punish’ those who convey the ‘wrong message.’ One senior officer told CNN that the plan would ‘formalize government deception, dishonesty and misinformation’.”

John Rendon himself has reportedly admitted that the purpose of embedding reporters within army units is to control the media.

In an interview with Democracy Now!, Col. Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force officer, described Rendon’s comments at a 2003 conference in London:

John Rendon spoke and gave an assessment of how they had done in the run-up to the war. And he said, “Well, there were three things we tried to do, and we did well on two, but not the third.” The first was to make the news be theirs 24/7, and they did that by the morning briefings from Baghdad—or from Kuwait and then the afternoon press conference from the Pentagon. “We wanted to control the printed media, and that was primarily done by the embedded program.” He said, “The one thing we failed at was we didn’t have people who provided the context. We lost control of the military analysts, and they were giving context.”

So it was about sixty days after that presentation that the Pentagon began this meeting with the military analysts.

Thus it appears it was that inability to “control” what media analysts said that led to the creation of the military analysts program, made infamous by the New York Times last year, which sought to place Pentagon-friendly analysts on TV news broadcasts.

ACCESS DENIED

Stars & Stripes, a newspaper devoted to US military affairs, has already experienced government censorship of war coverage first-hand. In June the paper was barred from embedding a report with the 1st Cavalry Unit in Mosul, Iraq, because it “‘refused to highlight’ good news in Iraq that the US military wanted to emphasize,” the paper reported.

That news was met with condemnation from media watchdogs.

“The Army and its individual commanders should not be in the business of making editorial decisions but that is what appears to have happened here,” said Ron Martz, president of Military Reporters and Editors, in a story at Editor & Publisher. “These actions are both unconscionable and unacceptable and MRE condemns them in the strongest possible terms.”

Some observers have suggested that overt censorship of embedded journalists will lead to the media rebelling against the embedding process altogether.

“If they put these kind of conditions on it, then I’d say the whole program will collapse,” Kelly McBride, Ethics Group Leader at the media think thank Poynter Institute, told Stars & Stripes. “It’s not meant to be a public relations program for the military.”

FAMILY TIES?

According to the Center for Media and Democracy, John Rendon is married to Sandra Libby, the sister of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney who in 2007 was convicted on obstruction of justice charges in the Valerie Plame affair.

In that case, Libby was alleged to have leaked sensitive CIA information about former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, to the media in contravention of secrecy laws. Libby was not convicted on that charge, but rather on charges of obstructing the investigation into the matter.