I’m surprised this hasn’t made it to the blogs yet (I checked) but it’s pretty amazing. An in depth expose of one of the key contractors who openly admits to manipulating intelligence. This is a long but fascinating story of someone hired to spread dis-information, plant information and in his own words “I am a politician, a person who uses communication to meet public-policy or corporate-policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager.”
What has he done? Lots. He set up Chalibi and even named the Iraqi National Congress. He trained so called ‘defectors’ and fabricated their stories of WMD and then got the stories printed through conduits like, you guessed it, Judy Miller. Read on, it’s fascinating and he’s exactly the type John Conyers as head of the Judiciary Committee would go after.
Go straight to the article here http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/8798997?rnd=1132620310812&has-player=true&ve
rsion=6.0.8.1024
or go below the fold for more quotes. One last thing. This guy got his start in politics as a state coordinator for none other than staunch anti-war candidate George McGovern. Just goes to show, power corrupts.
More choice quotes from the article:
“According to one senior administration official involved in intelligence-budget decisions, half of the CIA’s work is now performed by private contractors — people completely unaccountable to Congress.”
….he boasted openly of the sweep and importance of his firm’s efforts as a for-profit spy. “We’ve worked in ninety-one countries,” he said. “Going all the way back to Panama, we’ve been involved in every war, with the exception of Somalia.”
“Rendon, who went on to serve as executive director of the Democratic National Committee, quickly mastered the combination of political skulduggery and media manipulation that would become his hallmark.”
NOTE: I am not a member of the conspiracy ring that believes Dems and Repubs are the same and we’re all going to hell and so forth. This guy got sucked into power is everything.
The key element of Rendon’s INC operation was a worldwide media blitz designed to turn Hussein, a once dangerous but now contained regional leader, into the greatest threat to world peace. Each month, $326,000 was passed from the CIA to the Rendon Group and the INC via various front organizations. Rendon profited handsomely, receiving a “management fee” of ten percent above what it spent on the project. According to some reports, the company made nearly $100 million on the contract during the five years following the Gulf War.
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.”
NOTE: Feeling paranoid yet? Makes me wonder. And to think we are on the verge of collapsing their house of lies and sending their butts packing.
“Still another newly formed propaganda operation in which Rendon played a major part was the Office of Global Communications, which operated out of the White House and was charged with spreading the administration’s message on the War in Iraq. Every morning at 9:30, Rendon took part in the White House OGC conference call, where officials would discuss the theme of the day and who would deliver it. The office also worked closely with the White House Iraq Group, whose high-level members, including recently indicted Cheney chief of staff Lewis Libby, were responsible for selling the war to the American public.
…”If you do this correctly, I can tell you what’s on the evening news tonight in a country before it happens. I can give you, as a policymaker, a six-hour break on how you can affect what’s going to be on the news. They’ll take that in a heartbeat.”
…”But Rendon also cautioned that individual news organizations were often able to “take control of the story,” shaping the news before the Pentagon asserted its spin on the day’s events.”We lost control of the context,” Rendon warned. “That has to be fixed for the next war.”
Gee, I wonder just how they are going to control blogs. Bet he has a plan for that as well. Again, the whole article is at:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/8798997?rnd=1132620310812&has-player=true&ve
rsion=6.0.8.1024
We have a lot of work ahead of us but we can do it, we just need to be aware at all times.
