Military pays $300 million for advertising and PR that "is just propaganda"
"Bailey also went into business with Paige Craig, 31, a former US Marine who served in Iraq and elsewhere. [Bailey and Craig are flatmates in a fashionable part of Washington, close to U Street. The flat is just yards away from Café Saint- Ex, popular with young professionals.]
In September, Iraqex won a $6m Pentagon contract to design and execute 'an aggressive advertising and PR campaign that will accurately inform the Iraqi people of the Coalition's goals and gain their support'. It appears one project was an attempt to persuade the Iraqi and US public that Iraqi troops played a vital role in last year's effort to clear Fallujah.
A strategy document obtained by ABC News revealed the Lincoln Group was seeking to promote the 'strength, integrity and reliability of Iraqi forces during the fight for Falujah'. In reality, most assessments suggest the small number of Iraqi troops present were minimally involved.
But the real breakthrough came this summer when Bailey's company, having again changed its name to the Lincoln Group, secured a $100m contract for information and psychological operations. Part of the contract was for placing 'faux' news stories in some of the 200 Iraqi-owned newspapers that now exist.
Pentagon officials have said that, while not factually incorrect, these stories only presented one side of the story and would not include anything negative about the occupation. It was reported this week that the $10Om was part of a larger $300m "stealth PR effort" in a number of countries around the world.
One PR consultant with experience of the private-intelligence sector, said: "Doctrinally, this is all part of what the military calls information superiority. It is part of the plan for what they call, rather upsettingly, full-spectrum dominance. The truth is that it is just propaganda. And there has always been propaganda in a war. And this is a war, so ... thus runs the thinking."
According to reports from former Lincoln employees, their main task was to take news dispatches, called storyboards, which had been written by specially trained psy-ops troops, have them translated into Arabic and then distribute them to the newspapers. "
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