The U.S. Hired British PR Firm to Produce Fake Al-Qaeda Videos and Plant Stories in Arab Press

This is a must read for anyone who is truly interested to see how deep the rabbit hole goes, as it pertains to US sponsored propaganda.

The Pentagon gave a controversial UK PR firm over half a billion dollars to run a top secret propaganda programme in Iraq, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal. Bell Pottinger’s output included short TV segments made in the style of Arabic news networks and fake insurgent videos which could be used to track the people who watched them, according to a former employee. The agency’s staff worked alongside high-ranking US military officers in their Baghdad Camp Victory headquarters as the insurgency raged outside. Bell Pottinger’s former chairman Lord Tim Bell confirmed to the Sunday Times, which worked with the Bureau on this story, that his firm had worked on a “covert” military operation “covered by various secrecy agreements.” Bell Pottinger reported to the Pentagon, the CIA and the National Security Council on its work in Iraq, he said.

Unbelievably, the U.S. paid upwards of $500m to a Brtish firm, in order to produce propaganda. Perhaps this was a small concession to the UK for their ardent support of our efforts in Iraq and throughout the middle east.

The third and most sensitive programme described by Wells was the production of fake al Qaeda propaganda films. He told the Bureau how the videos were made. He was given precise instructions: “We need to make this style of video and we’ve got to use al Qaeda’s footage,” he was told. “We need it to be 10 minutes long, and it needs to be in this file format, and we need to encode it in this manner. The American origins of the news items were sometimes kept hidden. In 2005, revelations that PR contractor the Lincoln Group had helped the Pentagon place articles in Iraqi newspapers – sometimes presented as unbiased news – led to a DoD investigation.

Here is an interview with Bell Pottinger, regarding his work there.

A firsthand account of Bell Pottinger’s top secret work in Iraq from The Bureau on Vimeo.

I wonder if the Pentagon is softly suggesting some articles to be placed at the NY Times or Washington Post? Nah, they wouldn’t impune on our great experiment in democracy.

Remember those wonderful Jihad John beheadings, acted out by an English citizen? What wonderful HD footage that was. I always found the cinematography to be first rate, in spite of its dreadful content.

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