And quite possibly quite a bit else.
Even before the Iraq invasion, you may recall, Rummy and the gang were scheming to create their own in-house propaganda and disinformation operation, to be called the Office of Strategic Influence. The program was nominally killed after the critics pointed out how easily the phony news it created could drift back into the domestic media. (This was back when the Democrats still had a foot in the door of power, and Rumsfeld had to back down every once in awhile.)
But the Donald soon made it clear he intended to push through the budgetary back door what he couldn't get through the front door. And after the Dems lost the Senate, he didn't even try too hard to conceal what he was doing. The occupation of Iraq -- and the money and lack of accountability it spawned -- put the Pentagon in the "strategic influence" business in a big way, with its own TV news operation (the Pentagon Channel), a Coalition-controlled Iraqi TV and radio network (now nominally in the hands of the Iraqi government, I presume, but still powered by Pentagon dollars and run by a U.S. vendor) and a millions of dollars to hire PR firms and consultants to spin the coalition's propaganda to the Iraqi people.
The net benefit of all this in terms of strategically influencing the Iraqis -- or the rest of the Islamic world -- has been roughly zero, or maybe even a negative number. But the benefit to the Bush administration and the Republican Party is a different sum, harder to measure. For some time now, one of my pet suspicions has been that the Pentagon's psywar budget is also a hidden piggy bank and an R&D laboratory for the GOP's own political propaganda operations.
I have no proof of this. I didn't even have anything that could reasonably called evidence, until today, when I came across this story:
Pentagon Funds Diplomacy Effort
"The Pentagon awarded three contracts this week, potentially worth up to $300 million over five years, to companies it hopes will inject more creativity into its psychological operations efforts to improve foreign public opinion about the United States, particularly the military.
' "We would like to be able to use cutting-edge types of media," said Col. James A. Treadwell, director of the Joint Psychological Operations Support Element, a part of Tampa-based U.S. Special Operations Command. "If you want to influence someone, you have to touch their emotions."
"He said SYColeman Inc. of Arlington, Lincoln Group of the District, and Science Applications International Corp. will help develop ideas and prototypes for radio and television spots, documentaries, or even text messages, pop-up ads on the Internet, podcasting, billboards or novelty items."
You got that right, folks. The Pentagon is going to spend $300 million a year on, among other things, internet spam for the war and pop-up window for all of you unfortunates who must use Explorer instead of Firefox. I wonder if the pop-ups will also scan your memory cache to determine if you've been visiting any unPatriotic sites like this?
Xan and Billmon penetrate the first layer of smoke to find the real psyops behind the photogenic young faces is run by a group known as the Lincoln Alliance.
Billmon again:
Lincoln Alliance apparently doesn't just serve the business community; it also has provided it's "oppo" capabilities to political candidates and campaigns -- or to certain ones, anyway:
Lincoln has developed a unique service which provides campaign managers and their staff with concise actionable information in order to understand their candidate's time and events, media planning, voter interest, issue positions and several other factors . . . This service is restricted and available only to select clients. (emphasis added).
It would be interesting to know more about those "other factors" that Lincoln provides "actionable information" on, and even more interesting to know which political campaigns in the past have qualified as "select clients." Considering what I've learned about the company -- although it's admittedly not much -- I'm going to bet the inhabitants of that charmed circle have a rather Republican coloration.
Lincoln also appears to have its fingers in several projects that have a strong intelligence community coloration to them. These include techniques for allowing analysts to process distributed bits of classified data -- without ever seeing the whole picture, as well as (shades of Admiral Poindexter) something called: Role Based Online Gaming for Unconventional Environments (ROGUE)
In essence, ROGUE is a massive multiplayer game that allows private individuals to compete against government and military forces in unconventional scenarios. ROGUE incorporates a motivation and e-commerce system that rewards successful gamers with money and fame.
(If Lincoln really is part of some Pentagon-funded political black op, at least someone has a sense of humor about it.)
So to sum up: We have a tiny start-up venture, controlled by persons unknown, that suddenly materializes in late 2003 doing "private equity" deals in the middle of a war zone, and then obtains a huge PR contract from the Pentagon, and then hires a bunch of unemployed GOP campaign operatives to execute that contract, and then is absorbed by a shadowy DC company that specializes in corporate and political detective work and that may have close ties to both the Republican Party and the intelligence community, which then is awarded an even bigger contract to produce even more Pentagon propaganda.
Now maybe that's just the way business is done in George Bush's government, but it doesn't make me any less creeped out by what I was able to dig up with a few online searches. You don't have to have too much of a taste for paranoid conspiracy theories to imagine scenarios in which such contracting relationships could prove very useful for the Bush administration and the GOP machine.
Comments on Billmon's piece of work here
An end-of-the-day Update by the farmer here.
Interesting how Christian Bailey's funds are capped at $300 million- precisely the number the
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