COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Monday, October 03, 2016

But The BIG Problems are Trump on The Phone With Howard Stern and Using Legal US Tax Laws Written By The US Congress

The Pentagon Paid a British Public Relations Firm $500 Million to Produce Iraq Propaganda Films

Posted on Oct 3, 2016
By Crofton Black and Abigail Fielding-Smith / The Bureau of Investigative Journalism


Above, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism interviews Martin Wells, who edited war films for the U.S. government.

The Pentagon gave a controversial UK PR firm over half a billion dollars to run a top secret propaganda program in Iraq, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal.

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 US military officers in their Baghdad Camp Victory headquarters as the insurgency raged outside.
Bell Pottinger’s former chairman Lord Tim Bell confirmed to the Sunday Times, which worked with the Bureau on this story, that his firm had worked on a “covert” military operation “covered by various secrecy agreements.”
Bell Potting reported to the Pentagon, the CIA and the National Security Council on its work in Iraq, he said.

Bell, one of Britain’s most successful public relations executives, is credited with honing Margaret Thatcher’s steely image and helping the Conservative party win three elections. The agency he co-founded has had a roster of clients including repressive regimes and Asthma al-Assad, the wife of the Syrian president.

In the first media interview any Bell Potting employee has given about the work for the US military in Iraq, video editor Martin Wells – who no longer works for the company – told the Bureau his time in Camp Victory was “shocking, eye-opening, life-changing.”

The firm’s output was signed off by former General David Petraeus – then commander of the coalition forces in Iraq – and on occasion by the White House, Wells said.

A huge media operation

Bell Potting produced reams of material for the Pentagon, some of it going far beyond standard communications work.

The Bureau traced the firm’s Iraq work through US army contracting censuses, federal procurement transaction records and reports by the Department of Defense (DoD) Inspector General, as well as Bell Pottinger’s corporate filings and specialist publications on military propaganda. We interviewed half a dozen former officials and contractors involved in information operations in Iraq.
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.”

Bell Pottinger changed ownership after a management buyout in 2012 and its current structure has no connections with the unit that operated in Iraq, which closed in 2011. It is understood the key people who worked in that unit deny any involvement with tracking software as described by Wells.

Bell Pottinger’s work in Iraq was a huge media operation which cost over a hundred million dollars a year on average. A document unearthed by the Bureau shows the company was employing almost 300 British and Iraqi staff at one point.
The London-based PR agency was brought into Iraq soon after the US invasion. In March 2004 it was tasked by the country’s temporary administration with the “promotion of democratic elections” – a “high-profile activity” which it trumpeted in its annual report.

Transactions worth $540 million

The firm soon switched to less high-profile activities, however. The Bureau has identified transactions worth $540 million between the Pentagon and Bell Pottinger for information operations and psychological operations on a series of contracts issued from May 2007 to December 2011. A similar contract at around the same annual rate – $120 million – was in force in 2006, we have been told.
The bulk of the money was for costs such as production and distribution, Lord Bell told the Sunday Times, but the firm would have made around £15 million a year in fees.

Martin Wells, the ex-employee, told the Bureau he had no idea what he was getting into when he was interviewed for the Bell Pottinger job in May 2006.
He had been working as a freelance video editor and got a call from his agency suggesting he go to London for an interview for a potential new gig. “You’ll be doing new stuff that’ll be coming out of the Middle East,” he was told.

“I thought ‘That sounds interesting’,” Wells recalled. “So I go along and go into this building, get escorted up to the sixth floor in a lift, come out and there’s guards up there. I thought what on earth is going on here? And it turns out it was a Navy post, basically. So from what I could work out it was a media intelligence gathering unit.”

After a brief chat Wells asked when he would find out about the job, and was surprised by the response.

“You’ve already got it,” he was told. “We’ve already done our background checks into you.”

He would be flying out on Monday, Wells learned. It was Friday afternoon. He asked where he would be going and got a surprising answer: Baghdad.

“So I literally had 48 hours to gather everything I needed to live in a desert,” Wells said.

Arrival in Baghdad

Days later, Wells’s plane executed a corkscrew landing to avoid insurgent fire at Baghdad airport. He assumed he would be taken to somewhere in the Green Zone, from which coalition officials were administering Iraq. Instead he found himself in Camp Victory, a military base.

It turned out that the British PR firm which had hired him was working at the heart of a US military intelligence operation.

A tide of violence was engulfing the Iraqi capital as Wells began his contract. The same month he arrived there were five suicide bomb attacks in the city, including a suicide car bomb attack near Camp Victory which killed 14 people and wounded six others.

Describing his first impressions, Wells said he was struck by a working environment very unlike what he was used to. “It was a very secure building,” he recalled, with “signs outside saying ‘Do not come in, it’s a classified area, if you’re not cleared, you can’t come in.’”

Inside were two or three rooms with lots of desks in, said Wells, with one section for Bell Potting staff and the other for the US military.

“I made the mistake of walking into one of the [US military] areas, and having a very stern American military guy basically drag me out saying you are not allowed in here under any circumstances, this is highly classified, get out – whilst his hand was on his gun, which was a nice introduction,” said Wells.

It soon became apparent he would be doing much more than just editing news footage.

CDs that could track the viewer

The work consisted of three types of products. The first was television commercials portraying al Qaeda in a negative light. The second was news items which were made to look as if they had been “created by Arabic TV”, Wells said. Bell Pottinger would send teams out to film low-definition video of al Qaeda bombings and then edit it like a piece of news footage. It would be voiced in Arabic and distributed to TV stations across the region, according to Wells.

The American origins of the news items were sometimes kept hidden. In 2005, revelations that PR contractor the Lincoln Group had helped the Pentagon place articles in Iraqi newspapers – sometimes presented as unbiased news – led to a DoD investigation.

The third and most sensitive programme described by Wells was the production of fake al Qaeda propaganda films. 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.”

US marines would take the CDs on patrol and drop them in the chaos when they raided targets. Wells said: “If they’re raiding a house and they’re going to make a mess of it looking for stuff anyway, they’d just drop an odd CD there.”

The CDs were set up to use Real Player, a popular media streaming application which connects to the internet to run. 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.

The tracking account had a very restricted circulation list, according to Wells: the data went to him, a senior member of the Bell Pottinger management team, and one of the US military commanders.

Wells explained their intelligence value. “If one is looked at in the middle of Baghdad…you know there’s a hit there,” he said. “If one, 48 hours or a week later shows up in another part of the world, then that’s the more interesting one, and that’s what they’re looking for more, because that gives you a trail.”

The CDs turned up in some interesting places, Wells recalled, including Iran, Syria, and even America.

“I would do a print-out for the day and, if anything interesting popped up, hand it over to the bosses and then it would be dealt with from there,” he said.

“Truthful” material

The Pentagon confirmed that Bell Pottinger did work for them as a contractor in Iraq under the Information Operations Task Force (IOTF), producing some material that was openly sourced to coalition forces, and some which was not. They insisted that all material put out by IOTF was “truthful”.

IOTF was not the only mission Bell Pottinger worked on however. Wells said some Bell Pottinger work was carried out under the Joint Psychological Operations Task Force (JPOTF), which a US defence official confirmed.

The official said he could not comment in detail on JPOTF activities, adding: “We do not discuss intelligence gathering methods for operations past and present.”

Lord Bell, who stood down as chairman of Bell Pottinger earlier this year, told the Sunday Times that the deployment of tracking devices described by Wells was “perfectly possible”, but he was personally unaware of it.

Bell Pottinger’s output was signed off by the commander of coalition forces in Iraq, according to Wells. “We’d get the two colonels in to look at the things we’d done that day, they’d be fine with it, it would then go to General Petraeus,” he said.

Some of the projects went even higher up the chain of command. “If [Petraeus] couldn’t sign off on it, it would go on up the line to the White House, and it was signed off up there, and the answer would come back down the line’.”

Petraeus went on to become director of the CIA in 2011 before resigning in the wake of an affair with a journalist.

The awarding of such a large contract to a British company created resentment among the American communications firms jostling for Iraq work, according to a former employee of one of Bell Pottinger’s rivals.

“Nobody could work out how a British company could get hundreds of millions of dollars of US funding when there were equally capable US 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.”

Ian Tunnicliffe, a former British soldier, was the head of a three person panel from the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) – the transitional government in Iraq following the 2003 invasion – which awarded Bell Pottinger their 2004 contract to promote democratic elections.

According to Tunnicliffe, the contract, which totalled $5.8m, was awarded after the CPA realised its own in-house efforts to make people aware of the transitional legal framework ahead of elections were not working.

“We held a relatively hasty but still competitive bid for communications companies to come in,” recalls Tunnicliffe.

Tunnicliffe said that Bell Pottinger’s consortium was one of three bidders for the contract, and simply put in a more convincing proposal than their rivals.

A legal “grey area”

Iraq was a lucrative opportunity for many communications firms. The Bureau has discovered that between 2006 and 2008 more than 40 companies were being paid for services such as TV and radio placement, video production, billboards, advertising and opinion polls. These included US companies like Lincoln Group, Leonie Industries and SOS International as well as Iraq-based firms such as Cradle of New Civilization Media, Babylon Media and Iraqi Dream.

But the largest sums the Bureau was able to trace went to Bell Pottinger.

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”.

In his 2011 article Covert Intelligence Provision in Iraq, Segell notes that US law prevented the government from using propaganda on the domestic population of the US. In a globalised 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.

Segell maintains that information operations programmes did make a difference on the ground in Iraq. Some experts question this however.

A 2015 study by the Rand Corporation, a military think tank, concluded that “generating assessments of efforts to inform, influence, and persuade has proven to be challenging across the government and DoD.”

Bell Pottinger’s operations on behalf of the US government stopped in 2011 as American troops withdrew from Iraq, and its unit that worked there no longer exists.

“Part of the American propaganda machinery”

Wells left Iraq after less than two years, having had enough of the stress of working in a war zone and having to watch graphic videos of atrocities day after day.

Looking back at his time creating propaganda for the US military, Wells is ambivalent. The aim of Bell Pottinger’s work in Iraq was to highlight al Qaeda’s senseless violence, he said – publicity which at the time he thought must be doing some good. “But then, somewhere in my conscience I wondered whether this was the right thing to do,” he added.

Lord Bell told the Sunday Times he was “proud” of Bell Pottinger’s work in Iraq. “We did a lot to help resolve the situation,” he said. “Not enough. We did not stop the mess which emerged, but it was part of the American propaganda machinery.”

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.”

This investigation was published in collaboration with The Sunday Times, and a version was also published by The Daily Beast. It is part of a series by the Bureau looking at the use of military contractors worldwide. If you have any stories or tips please email croftonblack@tbij.com or abigailfielding-smith@tbij.com

Follow Crofton Black on Twitter: @cr0ft0n
Follow Abigail Fielding-Smith on Twitter: @AbbieFS

32 comments:

  1. I wonder if Kim Kardashian is wearing underwear today?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton reportedly wanted to drone Wikileaks founder Julian Assange when she was secretary of state.

    According to True Pundit, Clinton and the state department were under pressure to silence Assange and Wikileaks in the months before the whistleblowing site released a massive dump of 250,000 diplomatic cables from 1966 up to 2010, dubbed CableGate.

    “Can’t we just drone this guy?” Clinton asked, according to unidentified state department sources.

    Published by True Pundit on Sunday, Wikileaks posted a link to the story on their official Twitter account on Monday, along with a screenshot of the article.

    ReplyDelete
  3. ...but Donald Trump did call the big fat pig, Rosie O’Donnel, a “big fat pig”.

    ReplyDelete
  4. But, but, but she is a fat pig. Ugly too.

    ReplyDelete
  5. :)

    Nasty too, she is, a real trash mouth.

    A very poor advertisement for American Women.

    Drudge has something up about a BillyGoat love child arriving on the national scene, but I'm not awake enough yet to handle it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I AM BILL CLINTON'S SON!
      'I AM REAL'
      I WANT TO MEET MY DAD
      THERE WAS NO DNA TEST?....DRUDGE HEADLINES


      I find myself unable to process this yet.

      If I were he I think I might shoot myself.

      Delete
    2. It just crossed my mind that the mysterious "Q" might be a Bill Clinton Love Child.

      I can process that.

      I would shoot myself.

      Delete
  6. Julian Assange may take a leak tomorrow -

    Intrigue Surrounds The WikiLeaks October Surprise For Hillary

    http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/10/intrigue_surrounds_the_wikileaks_october_surprise_for_hillary.html

    Julian Assange is now planning to appear via video link at Wikileak's 10th Anniversary Celebration in Berlin

    Hillary once suggested killing him with a drone strike.

    Which turns my mind to poor Vince, and that young man gunned down in D.C. what was his name.

    Never had thought they had gone so far as murder but what do I know....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. jeez I see Deuce mentioned the drone strike above....I'm getting coffee

      Delete
  7. Blacks Boycotting Hillary's Campaign Events

    http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/10/blacks_boycotting_hillarys_campaign_events.html

    By not showing up......check out the pics.

    ReplyDelete
  8. It would be interesting to see Trumps other years of Tax filings. Wouldn't you have to show you 'earned' a billion before you could 'lose' it?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Idiot.

      His Atlantic City casinos collapsed.

      He lost his investment, all the costs, etc.

      You would do better attacking Trump from the Buddhist point of view.....that Casinos lead people away from Enlightenment, they do not conduce to Enlightenment, like gun running, or boozing, or drugs.....

      Delete
    2. Ash, even I, little itsy bitsy I, have carried forward loses, when I began farming.

      Ash, do you think BillyGoat has a half black love child ?

      That's the Question of the Day.

      Delete
    3. Ash, as a SuperLib, certainly very high on women's rights, what do you think of all the testimony by Oh! so many women that they were abused by BillyGoat, and threatened, even with death, by Hillary and her enforcers if they didn't shut the fuck up ?

      Delete
    4. Why did the US Congress create tax legislation for real estate that any US resident or Citizen is to comply with?

      Delete
    5. Trump did the smart thing. He obeyed the law.

      Delete
    6. Was Congress wrong to pass that law?

      Delete
    7. Who was the sitting president that signed the bill?

      Delete
    8. Without seeing his other tax returns one doesn't really know whether he stayed within the law. You can't just go 'oh my, I just lost 900 million' and carry the loss forward without having had 900 million + that, presumably, the tax was paid on.

      Delete
    9. Further, if he stiffed a bunch of contractors then that would reduce his loss which would need to be added back in, unless, of course, he forgot.

      Delete
    10. How do you know he stiffed contractors ?

      His company filed bankruptcy.

      Do you know the details ?

      I appreciate his attitude with the bankers though.

      "I'm worth more to you alive than dead"

      heh

      :)

      Ash, it's really hard to play outside the rules when you have loads of lawyers and accountants doing the work.

      Lawyers like to keep their law licenses, and accountants like that 'certified' label.

      I just want to know whether or not he deducted his used underwear, like BillyGoat.

      If it's legal, it's legal.

      Delete
    11. Minor correction.

      Though knowing nothing of the details, I doubt The Donald personally filed bankruptcy.

      That particular corporation doing the Casino business did, and, I just heard, three others over the years.

      It's tough out there in the capitalist world, Ash.

      Sometimes things work out, often they don't.

      It's even tougher in Venezuela, where they now all want to come to the USA, so I read, if for nothing else than we have toilet paper to sell.

      A corporation is its own person.

      You're doing business with Jersey Shores Casino or whatever it was called, so look them up, be careful.....

      The contractors know all this.



      Delete
    12. If The Donald didn't deduct his used underwear like BillyGoat, he needs some new accountants !

      YOU'RE FIRED !

      Delete
    13. Ash, Clinton is likely to win, so don't lose any sleep worrying about it.

      Delete
  9. You'd do better criticizing Trump along these lines, Ash -

    Does Donald Trump Really Want To Be President ?

    http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440638/donald-trump-does-he-really-want-presidency

    ReplyDelete
  10. I'm just trying to point you in the proper direction of what to criticize, and what not to criticize, Ash.

    Trump’s tax loss carry forward is so despicable that the New York Times and Hillary Clinton both used the same provision

    October 3, 2016

    A New York Times investigative report designed for morons. More


    http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/10/trumps_tax_loss_carry_forward_is_so_despicable_that_the_new_york_times_and_hillary_clinton_both_used_the_same_provision.html

    Stay away from this sort of stuff.

    I don't want you to look like a dumb shit.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Wikileaks boss WILL release 'damaging information' about Hillary tomorrow after initially cancelling 'October Surprise' speech from embassy balcony
    Julian Assange had originally planned to address the world from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy in London on Monday
    He was due to speak at the tenth anniversary of the founding of WikiLeaks 
    Assange will instead speak video link to an event in Berlin on Tuesday
    The organisation earlier released information hacked from the Democrats 
    It came as a new report claimed Clinton had proposed a drone strike to take out Assange in 2010


    By Darren Boyle for MailOnline and Khaleda Rahman For Dailymail.com

    Published: 03:07 EST, 3 October 2016 | Updated: 14:19 EST, 3 October 2016

    WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange cancelled a planned appearance to mark the 10th anniversary of his organization from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy in London over security fears on Monday.
    He had been planning to give a speech - amid claims he was about to release damaging information about Clinton which some claimed could be an 'October Surprise' which would swing the presidential election.
    However, Assange, who is wanted by Swedish authorities for questioning in connection with an alleged rape, will make an announcement via video link to an event in Berlin on Tuesday morning.

    In a tweet on Monday afternoon, WikiLeaks said Assange's speech in London was moved to Berlin due to 'specific information' but did not elaborate further.

    Donald Trump's former right-hand man Roger Stone claimed the new WikiLeaks revelations would destroy Clinton's campaign. 
    In August this year, Assange told Fox News that he was holding information on Clinton which yielded 'some quite unexpected angles, that are quite interesting, some even entertaining'.
    He said he would release the information before the November 8 election.


    Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3819237/Is-October-Surprise-cancelled-WikiLeaks-scraps-event-Julian-Assange-release-damaging-information-Hillary-Clinton.html#ixzz4M4EhmoRd


    I think too many of our politicians are calling for unwarranted drone strikes.

    First Rand Paul was calling for drone strikes on our domestic liquor store robbers, and now Hillary suggested a drone strike on poor Julian.

    It's too much.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Infowars will be providing live coverage and analysis of the Julian Assange WikiLeaks press conference at infowars.com/show beginning at 2AM CT Tuesday, October 4, 2016.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Hey, Ash, it sounds like Atlantic City itself may 'stiff' its bondholders and contractors.....

    What do you suggest they do ????


    Atlantic City Risks Default After Another Missed Deadline
    Katherine Greifeld

    October 3, 2016 — 11:25 AM PDT
    Updated on October 3, 2016 — 1:06 PM PDT

    City had until Monday to comply with breached loan terms

    State would need to approve proposed sale of close airfield

    Atlantic City is on the verge of another missed deadline that risks pushing the troubled New Jersey resort town into default and closer to a state takeover.

    The distressed gambling hub has until the end of Monday to comply with the terms of a $73 million state loan that required the city council to disband the local water utility that serves as collateral for the agreement. Instead, city officials announced their own plan last week that would have the utility buy a closed airfield from the city for about $100 million and asked state officials to wave the terms of the loan.

    Moody’s Investor Service is not as optimistic. The credit-ratings company said in a report last week that Atlantic City’s "impending technical default" is credit negative, and indicates "a disconnection between the city, mayor, and state." The political gridlock puts the city’s next bond payment at risk -- $9.4 million due Nov. 4.

    "Even if the city were to have market access, borrowing $100 million would increase debt by a factor of seven, raising the question of how the authority would pay for this debt -- assuming the plan went through, which is far from certain," wrote Moody’s analyst Doug Goldmacher. He wasn’t immediately available for an interview Monday.

    Atlantic City originally missed a Sept. 15 deadline to adopt a resolution to dissolve the Municipal Utilities Authority. The state gave the city until Oct 3. to comply or risk default, in which the state could demand immediate repayment of the $62 million already advanced.
    The plan needs approval from the city council and the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs. DCA spokeswoman Tammori Petty declined Monday to comment on the state’s plans. The state hasn’t been in touch yet Monday with Atlantic City, according to Chris Filiciello, chief of staff for Mayor Don Guardian.

    Should the state reject the Bader Field sale, the mayor’s office hopes the DCA will grant Atlantic City the "reprieve" on terms Guardian asked for prior to the Sept. 15 deadline.

    "We’re not necessarily going to default on Oct. 3," said Filiciello in a phone interview last week. Filiciello said Monday the city remains hopeful.
    The deadline comes a month before Atlantic City is scheduled to submit a satisfactory five-year fiscal stability plan to the state, or risk state takeover. New Jersey could sell its assets and void or change labor contracts through expansive powers awarded by the legislation and signed by Governor Chris Christie when the state provided the loan.

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-03/atlantic-city-risks-default-after-another-missed-deadline

    ReplyDelete
  14. ....The political gridlock puts the City's next bond payment at risk - $9.4 million due November 4.....

    New Jersey could sell its assets and void or change labor contracts.....


    :)

    ReplyDelete
  15. Trump in Loveland, Colorado -

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrwPYqDrKPI

    ReplyDelete