Buried among the 92,000 classified documents released Sunday by WikiLeaks is some intriguing evidence that the U.S. military in Afghanistan has adopted a PR strategy that got it into trouble in Iraq: paying local media outlets to run friendly stories.
Several reports from Army psychological operations units and provincial reconstruction teams (also known as PRTs, civilian-military hybrids tasked with rebuilding Afghanistan) show that local Afghan radio stations were under contract to air content produced by the United States. Other reports show U.S. military personnel apparently referring to Afghan reporters as “our journalists” and directing them in how to do their jobs.
Such close collaboration between local media and U.S. forces has been a headache for the Pentagon in the past: In 2005, Pentagon contractor the Lincoln Group was caught paying Iraqi newspapers to run stories written by American soldiers, causing the United States considerable embarrassment.
In one of the WikiLeaks documents, a PRT member reports delivering “12 hours of PSYOP Radio Content Programming” to two radio stations in the province of Ghazni in 2008, and paying one of them “$3,900 for Radio Content Programming air time for the month of October”:
“The PRT provided 12 hours of PSYOP Radio Content Programming to Radio Ghaznwyan FM Station and Radio Ghazni AM/FM Station for week of 6-12 Nov. Topics included Afghanistan History, Law, and Human Rights in both Dari and Pashto, and a spreadsheet with the specific radio content programming for the week of 6-12 Nov will be forward sepcor to SPARTAN. Additionally, PRT paid Radio Ghaznwyan $3,900 for Radio Content Programming air time for the month of October.”
Anchors Kyra Phillips and John Roberts discussed the “mixed blessing of the internet,” and agreed that there should be a crackdown on anonymous bloggers who disparage, discredit and basically put down others on the internet, who the hell do they think they are, they are ” supposed” to be pillars of free speech, can you say “Hypocrisy”
On Issues of Domestic Terrorism and Cyber Security we have seen a rash of blatant over the top Pentagon fed news pieces and headlines into the main stream media with in this last week.
For example on Monday Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Janet Napolitano said that “She is afraid of Americans” announcing that Domestic Terrorism is the Homelands Chief threat to the security of the United States.
Every major news outlet and the local networks in the nation ran unthinkingly with the Headline:
“The government is just starting to confront this reality and does not have a good handle on how to prevent someone from becoming a violent extremist, she said.
In the last year, Napolitano said, she’s witnessed a movement from international extremism to domestic extremism – cases in which Americans radicalized and decided to plot attacks against the country.
“What really is it that draws a young person being raised in the United States to want to go and be at a camp in Yemen and then come back to the United States with the idea of committing harm within the United States?” Napolitano asked without citing specific cases. “Where in that person’s formulation is there an opportunity to break that cycle?”
“Patrick F. Kennedy, an undersecretary for management at the State Department, said Abdulmutallab’s visa wasn’t taken away because intelligence officials asked his agency not to deny a visa to the suspected terrorist over concerns that a denial would’ve foiled a larger investigation into Al-Qaeda threats against the United States.
“Revocation action would’ve disclosed what they were doing,” Kennedy said in testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Allowing Adbulmutallab to keep the visa increased chances federal investigators would be able to get closer to apprehending the terror network he is accused of working with, “rather than simply knocking out one solider in that effort.”
Underwear Bomber
Yet despite this statement on record from Mr. Kennedy before the House Committee on Homeland Security, DHS upgrades their threat assessment on the American public over that of the international threat of Al-Qaeda.
It shows that DHS is intent on demonizing Americans in a fear campaign rather than a fact campaign, and the headlines reflect it. Most Americans are to busy working 2-3 jobs and have their hands around the remote control of their T.V. rather than a finger on an AR-15 or a detonator.
The obvious incident to cite would be the airplane Joe Stack piloted into the IRS building in Austin, Texas this last week. This is strangely absent from Napolitano’s list of examples during this meeting even after Mr. Stack’s own daughter called him a Hero, for this desperate act that caused his death and one other.
Maybe they foresee Joe 6-pack angrily getting off the couch due to economic fall out in the near future is the real cause for DHS alarm.
CNN Fakes Media Cyber-War
Another example of the Pentagon take over of the media, would be the fake cyber-terror broadcast done by CNN recently in which they acted out the scenario of hackers taking down the entire electrical grid of the nation on live television.
It has been reported that bloggers and media pieces have been purchased by the U.S. government to help shape our perspectives in regards to domestic terrorism. This time taking it one step further they simply bought out an entire network news broadcast from CNN to fear-monger the Nation with.
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh is best known for breaking the shocking My Lai massacre story during the Vietnam war, in which hundreds of unarmed civilians in a Vietnamese village were slaughtered by U.S. soldiers in March 1968. His courageous reporting on this sad chapter in history won him a Pulitzer Prize. In recent years, his incisive coverage of the Abu Ghraib abuses and torture has also been widely followed and respected.
So when Mr. Hersh spilled the beans earlier this month about an executive assassination ring which reported directly to Dick Cheney, why did the major media give this so little coverage? The news spread widely through alternative news websites, yet leading newspapers and other major media (with a few exceptions) gave little to no coverage. Could it be that there are powerful people who don’t want the public to know about such things?
Below are key excerpts of an article on the revelations of Mr. Hersh in the Minnesota Post, one of the few newspapers to publish the story.
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.” [Hersh said] “after 9/11 … the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state, without any legal authority for it. Today, there was a story in the New York Times that … mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC. They reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to [Cheney]. Congress has no oversight of it.”
“It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on. They’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them. That’s been going on in the name of all of us.”
He added that both the press and the public let down their guard in the aftermath of 9/11. “The major newspapers joined the [Bush] team.” Top editors passed the message to investigative reporters not to ‘pick holes’ in what Bush was doing.
MSNBC was one of the few to give good coverage to the revelations of Seymour Hersh. You can watch that coverage right here.
While we can be thankful for the exceptions like MSNBC in this case, all too often the major media are failing at their responsibility to educate the public and expose gross and illegal manipulations on the part of government and industry.
So it is increasingly up to us to spread the news. Using the powerful capabilities of the Internet, we can insist that corruption be rooted out and illegal assassinations and associated assassination squads be stopped.
China is about to embark on a multibillion dollar media expansion overseas, including the establishment of a 24-hour English language all-news channel modeled after CNN. These are only the most recent steps in a methodical strategy for Chinese state media to “go global” and make “the voice of China better heard in international affairs” — a plan set in motion by President Hu Jintao immediately after his accession to power in 2002. Since then, Chinese state broadcasters have considerably strengthened their foreign news operations, enhanced foreign language services and established the supporting bureaucracy to get the government’s message out swiftly when news breaks. … Continue Reading
China is about to embark on a multibillion dollar media expansion overseas, including the establishment of a 24-hour English language all-news channel modeled after CNN. These are only the most recent steps in a methodical strategy for Chinese state media to “go global” and make “the voice of China better heard in international affairs” — a plan set in motion by President Hu Jintao immediately after his accession to power in 2002. Since then, Chinese state broadcasters have considerably strengthened their foreign news operations, enhanced foreign language services and established the supporting bureaucracy to get the government’s message out swiftly when news breaks.
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