John Rendon said that and more in a speech to cadets at the Air Force academy in 1996. Imagine the nerve of the man...admitting to propagandizing during the first Gulf war.
“Did you ever stop to wonder,” Rendon asked, “how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American, and for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries?” He paused for effect. “Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then.” Rendon Group Rendon sounded proud of how well he did his job.
When I watched James Bamford on the Rachel Maddow show recently, I remembered when we first started hearing about the Rendon Group, and how they spread the Iraq War propaganda around the US and Europe. It was almost like the previous administration hired themselves a public relations firm to convince the world about Bush's Iraq invasion and occupation.
From James Bamford in Rolling Stone, 2005.
The Man Who Sold the WarThis was an award winning piece.
James Bamford's November 17th, 2005 profile of John Rendon, "The Man Who Sold the War," (RS988) won the 2006 National Magazine Award in the reporting categoryThe article starts with the polygraph of Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein.
It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.
This was actually a "marketing" scheme set up by John Rendon.
Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists. Two months before al-Haideri took the lie-detector test, the Pentagon had secretly awarded him a $16 million contract to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda. One of the most powerful people in Washington, Rendon is a leader in the strategic field known as "perception management," manipulating information -- and, by extension, the news media -- to achieve the desired result. His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help "create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power." Working under this extraordinary transfer of secret authority, Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name -- the Iraqi National Congress -- and served as their media guru and "senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam. It was as if President John F. Kennedy had outsourced the Bay of Pigs operation to the advertising and public-relations firm of J. Walter Thompson.
He was also apparently responsible for Ahmad Chalabi.
And then Judith Miller comes into the picture.
The INC's choice for the worldwide print exclusive was equally easy: Chalabi contacted Judith Miller of The New York Times. Miller, who was close to I. Lewis Libby and other neoconservatives in the Bush administration, had been a trusted outlet for the INC's anti-Saddam propaganda for years. Not long after the CIA polygraph expert slipped the straps and electrodes off al-Haideri and declared him a liar, Miller flew to Bangkok to interview him under the watchful supervision of his INC handlers. Miller later made perfunctory calls to the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, but despite her vaunted intelligence sources, she claimed not to know about the results of al-Haideri's lie-detector test. Instead, she reported that unnamed "government experts" called his information "reliable and significant" -- thus adding a veneer of truth to the lies.
Her front-page story, which hit the stands on December 20th, 2001, was exactly the kind of exposure Rendon had been hired to provide. AN IRAQI DEFECTOR TELLS OF WORK ON AT LEAST 20 HIDDEN WEAPONS SITES, declared the headline. "An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer," Miller wrote, "said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago." If verified, she noted, "his allegations would provide ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction, despite his pledges to do so."
Very long article, read the rest at the link.
There was another article about Rendon at the Asia Times way back in 2002.
This war brought to you by Rendon GroupWASHINGTON - "Word got around the department that I was a good Arabic translator who did a great Saddam imitation," recalls the Harvard grad student. "Eventually, someone phoned me, asking if I wanted to help change the course of Iraq policy."
So twice a week, for US$3,000 a month, the Iraqi student says, under condition of anonymity, that he took a taxi from his campus apartment to a Boston-area recording studio rented by the Rendon Group, a DC-based public relations firm with close ties to the US government. His job: translate and dub spoofed Saddam Hussein speeches and tongue-in-cheek newscasts for broadcast throughout Iraq.
"I never got a straight answer on whether the Iraqi resistance, the CIA or policy makers on the Hill were actually the ones calling the shots," says the student, "but ultimately I realized that the guys doing spin were very well and completely cut loose." And that's how Baghdad's best-known opposition radio personality was born six years ago - during the Clinton administration. It was one of many disinformation schemes cooked up by the Rendon Group, which has worked for both Democratic and Republican administrations fighting the psy-op war in the Middle East.
And it's not that group's first war.
....."As Franklin Foer reported in the New Republic, during the campaign against Panama's Manuel Noriega in 1989, Rendon's command post sat downtown in a high-rise. In 1991, during the Gulf War, Rendon operatives hunkered down in Taif, Saudi Arabia, clocking billable hours on a Kuwaiti emir's dole. In Afghanistan, group founder John Rendon joined a 9:30am conference call every morning with top-level Pentagon officials to set the day's war message. Rendon operatives haven't missed a trip yet - Haiti, Kosovo, Zimbabwe, Colombia.
I remembered an article at In These Times about how to sell a war. I did find it at a blog. From 2003.
How To Sell a War: The Rendon Group deploys ‘perception management’ in the war on IraqIn this article are some words of John Rendon in 1996...before cadets at the US Air Force Academy. He talked about his role in the first Gulf war.
Consider, for example, the remarks that public relations consultant John Rendon—who, during the past decade, has worked extensively on Iraq for the Pentagon and the CIA—made on February 29, 1996, before an audience of cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy.
“I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician,” Rendon said. “I am a politician, and a person who uses communication to meet public policy or corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager.” He reminded the Air Force cadets that when victorious troops rolled into Kuwait City at the end of the first war in the Persian Gulf, they were greeted by hundreds of Kuwaitis waving small American flags. The scene, flashed around the world on television screens, sent the message that U.S. Marines were being welcomed in Kuwait as liberating heroes.
“Did you ever stop to wonder,” Rendon asked, “how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American, and for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries?” He paused for effect. “Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then.”
Of course, we have no way of knowing whether Rendon or any other PR specialist helped influence the toppling of Saddam’s statue or other specific images that the public saw during the war in Iraq. Public relations firms often do their work behind the scenes, and Rendon—with whom the Pentagon signed a new agreement in February 2002—is usually reticent about his work. But his description of himself as a “perception manager” echoes the language of Pentagon planners, who define “perception management” as “actions to convey and (or) deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning. … In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover, and deception, and psyops (psychological operations).”
The death of a TV cameraman brought out more about Rendon's role in the Iraq war.
John Rendon’s refusal to discuss his activities makes it difficult to do more than speculate about the full scope and extent of his firm’s involvement in Iraq, but an incident during the war itself provided a rare breach in the wall of secrecy. On March 23, TV cameraman Paul Moran was killed in northern Iraq by a suicide bomber while on assignment for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. His obituary, published in his home town of Adelaide, Australia, noted that Moran’s activities “included working for an American public relations company contracted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to run propaganda campaigns against the dictatorship. … Company founder John Rendon flew from the United States to attend Mr. Moran’s funeral in Adelaide on Wednesday. A close friend, Rob Buchan, said the presence of Mr. Rendon—an adviser to the U.S. National Security Council—illustrated the regard in which Mr. Moran was held in U.S. political circles, including the Congress.”
Propaganda wars, really and truly. That propaganda was preached from the pulpits here in our area, and some churches gave out yard signs of support for Bush and his war. The flags were everywhere, on cars, on houses. There were flag shirts, caps, everywhere.
During this healing time in our country, I compare today's mood to the nationalistic fervor of 2003. I don't ever want us to have days like that again.
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