The US Army in Afghanistan has admitted it pays a private company to produce background profiles on journalists covering the war. The Pentagon has been on the defensive ever since the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes revealed this week that journalists were being screened by the Washington-based public relations firm, the Rendon Group, under a $1.5 million contract with the military. Documents obtained by the paper reveal journalists were evaluated with pie charts breaking down their coverage into percentages of “positive,” “neutral” or “negative.”
The Army insists reporters have never been denied access on the basis of past reporting. An Army spokesman told the Associated Press the military gets information on journalists, including biographical details and recent topics they’ve covered, to prepare commanders for interviews. A sample profile released Thursday included information on reporters under the headings “Background,” “Coverage” and also “Perspective, Style and Tone.” The Rendon Group gave an example of how they classify reporting saying, quote, “Neutral to Negative coverage could indicate that content in stories were negative in relation to mission objectives,” which it said could include kidnappings or suicide bombings.
A number of reporters in the Pentagon and elsewhere are now demanding to view their profiles. The International Federation of Journalists has also complained about the policy, saying the profiling of journalists, quote, “Strips away any pretense that the Army is interested in helping journalists to work freely.”
The Rendon Group was investigated by the Pentagon after some members of Congress said it was hired to create an information campaign to sway the public to support the Iraq war. The company helped form the Iraqi National Congress, the Iraqi exile group that provided much of the false intelligence to help justify the US invasion of Iraq. Rendon was also involved in an effort to have Iraqi publications print articles written by military personnel.
The Rendon Group goes back a long way. It started out as basically just a public relations company, and then the CIA hired them to do a covert operation, basically, in the Noriega case, where they wanted Noriega out of Panama. They hired the Rendon Group to sort of pave the way. They found a person they wanted to take the place of Noriega after they ousted him, and the Rendon Group was hired to take this person who was going to the next leader of Panama and turn him into a very powerful person by helping his public relations view around the world. So that’s how it started with the Rendon Group.
And then Rendon was hired after that, his quote was, “Going back to Panama, we’ve been involved in every war except Somalia.” And he was involved in helping promote the Kuwait government during the US involvement with Kuwait in the early Gulf War.
After that, then the CIA hired Rendon to do what was really extraordinary, to lead a covert operation, basically, against the Iraqi government, against Saddam Hussein. And what happened was that the CIA paid Rendon about $350,000 a month, and he would take his cut out of that, and then he’d turn it over to Ahmed Chalabi, who was head of the Iraqi National Congress. And that’s a group that Rendon actually created when he was originally sent to Iraq to help formulate this covert operation against Saddam Hussein. Rendon pulled together all the sort of disparate groups in northern Iraq that were the anti-Hussein people, pulled them together and then had a sort of a conference with all those people. And he came up with the name Iraqi National Congress. It sounded very democratic. And then he took this really charismatic character, Ahmed Chalabi, and pretty much made him the guy in charge. And throughout the 1990s, Rendon and Chalabi were pushing for the war in Iraq.
Eventually, in the mid-’90s, the CIA discovered that Chalabi couldn’t be trusted. They got a good accounting of the money that was going to him and so forth, and they basically declared him a fraudster in the middle of 1990s and warned anybody else against having anything to do with him. But that really didn’t deter the Pentagon, who went on to—despite the CIA’s warning about Chalabi, went on to basically use Chalabi as their key man inside Iraq.
So, that’s sort of the background of how John Rendon got into this whole world of covert operations.
One of the other things he used to say quite a bit was that “I am an information warrior and a perception manager.” And that was pretty much what he tried to specialize in during most of his career and what he currently—according to the most recent reports, what he’s still doing is this perception management.
What makes John Rendon and the Rendon Group really different from any other type of private organization or private company is that he’s been used, and he could still be used in covert operations areas. In other words, he played a major role in overthrowing the Saddam—or trying to overthrow the Saddam government. It’s sort of like if John Kennedy had hired a public relations firm to overthrow Castro and the Cuban government during the Bay of Pigs operation. So that’s what really is extraordinary about the Rendon Group, was the fact that the CIA began using them regularly in a covert operations capacity.
The whole idea of this judging journalists and deciding who’s a good journalist or who’s a favorable journalist and who’s not a favorable journalist, That happens all the time. And I’ve been writing on CIA and NSA and all these other agencies for many years. And when I was writing on the CIA, for example, it was very hard for me to get up on the seventh floor to interview senior officials, because they knew I was a very critical writer of the CIA. Yet if there was somebody from one of the major newspapers that was writing very favorable stories about the CIA, they would have no problem getting into George Tenet’s office, to interview the director. This sort of Pavlovian approach, if you want to get up to the seventh floor, you want to get up to the more senior officials, then, the way to do that is to write positive stories. What this latest story, the very good reporting from Stars and Stripes, indicates is that it’s becoming, it’s not just informal now, it’s becoming sort of a formalized report card system. , James Bamford said.
Discussion: Charlie Reed, James Bamford
Charlie Reed, Reporter with the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. Her recent articles include ‘Journalists’ Recent Work Examined Before Embeds’ and ‘Files Prove Pentagon is Profiling Reporters‘
James Bamford, investigative journalist. In 2005 he published a major piece on the Rendon Group in Rolling Stone called “The Man Who Sold the War.”
– from democracynow.org