Samual Adams Light on monitor...........thanks...razzberry head.

So how much of this Iraqi "rebuilding" has been staged?


Questions mount over Iraq rebuilding contracts
Audits reveal only
$1 billion of $18 billion has been spent
By Lisa Myers & the NBC Investigative Unit



Updated: 12:50 p.m. ET Sept. 15, 2004The rolling hills of the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana are a world away from the chaos of Iraq. Yet when NBC News followed the paper trail of U.S. government contracts in Iraq, one led to a tiny information technology company owned by two tribes (the Salish and Kootenai) called S&K Technologies.

"It really feels like an honor to have one of our tribal entities be involved with the rebuilding of Iraq," says Tribal Chairman Fred Matt.

S&K Technologies hired 75 administrators, press officers and aid workers to work for the Coalition Provision Authority (CPA) in Baghdad. The total contract is worth about $20 million over two years.

Why would the Pentagon use a little company, with no track record in a war zone, to hire workers for Baghdad?

"As a tribally-owned company, we have some unique advantages that other companies don't," says S&K Technologies President Greg Dumontier.

As the company's Web site boasts, the law allows the government to award contracts to minority companies without competitive bidding. And there are even fewer restrictions for tribal companies.

The S&K contract, obtained by NBC News, was one of two dozen criticized by government investigators. A Pentagon audit found officials circumvented procedures and failed to ensure taxpayers "paid fair and reasonable prices." The report did not criticize the performance of S&K Technologies, but blamed the process.

"They're using the Indian tribal preference as a subterfuge to avoid open competition," says Charles Tiefer, a federal contracts expert at the University of Baltimore School of Law.

The Pentagon says it had to deploy resources in Iraq quickly and followed the law.

But a series of government reports hammer U.S. officials for how billions of dollars have been spent and not spent.

Of $18 billion set aside for Iraq last year, only $1 billion has been spent. Especially glaring is the failure to repair and build a sewage system.

Raw sewage still saturates the streets of Baghdad and pours into the Tigris River.

"We are seeing an increase in water-borne diseases, everything from cholera to hepatitis and chronic diarrhea," says Bathsheba Crocker, co-director of the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Administration officials say violence has slowed many projects, but that almost half the work has begun. Yet, as of Monday, of 2,300 projects planned, only 12 have been completed.

PR Meets Psy-Ops in War on Terror

U.S. emphasis on using information as military tool sparks debate in the Pentagon. Critics say the practice threatens to undermine credibility.

By Mark Mazzetti, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON -- On the evening of Oct. 14, a young Marine spokesman near Fallujah appeared on CNN and made a dramatic announcement.

"Troops crossed the line of departure," 1st Lt. Lyle Gilbert declared, using a common military expression signaling the start of a major campaign. "It's going to be a long night."

CNN, which had been alerted to expect a major news development, reported that the long-awaited offensive to retake the Iraqi city of Fallujah had begun.

In fact, the Fallujah offensive would not kick off for another three weeks. Gilbert's carefully worded announcement was an elaborate psychological operation -- or "psy-op" -- intended to dupe insurgents in Fallujah and allow U.S. commanders to see how guerrillas would react when they believed U.S. troops were entering the city, according to several Pentagon officials.

In the hours after the initial report, CNN's Pentagon reporters were able to determine that the Fallujah operation had not, in fact, begun.

"As the story developed, we quickly made it clear to our viewers exactly what was going on in and around Fallujah," CNN spokesman Matthew Furman said.

Officials at the Pentagon and other U.S. national security agencies said the CNN incident was not just an isolated feint -- the type used throughout history by armies to deceive their enemies -- but part of a broad effort under way within the Bush administration to use information to its advantage in the war on terrorism.

The Pentagon in 2002 was forced to shutter its controversial Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), which was opened shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, after reports that the office intended to plant false news stories in the international media. But officials say that much of OSI's mission -- using information as a tool of war -- has been assumed by other offices throughout the U.S. government.

Although most of the work remains classified, officials say that some of the ongoing efforts include having U.S. military spokesmen play a greater role in psychological operations in Iraq, as well as planting information with sources used by Arabic TV channels such as Al-Jazeera to help influence the portrayal of the United States.

Other specific examples were not known, although U.S. national security officials said an emphasis had been on influencing how foreign media depict the United States.

These efforts have set off a fight inside the Pentagon over the proper use of information in wartime. Several top officials see a danger of blurring what are supposed to be well-defined lines between the stated mission of military public affairs -- disseminating truthful, accurate information to the media and the American public -- and psychological and information operations, the use of often misleading information and propaganda to influence the outcome of a campaign or battle.

Several of those officials who oppose the use of misleading information spoke out against the practice on the condition of anonymity.

"The movement of information has gone from the public affairs world to the psychological operations world," said one senior defense official. "What's at stake is the credibility of people in uniform."

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said he recognized the concern of many inside the Defense Department, but that "everybody understands that there's a very important distinction between information operations and public affairs. Nobody has offered serious proposals that would blur the distinction between these two functions."

Di Rita said he had asked his staff for more information about how the Oct. 14 incident on CNN came about.

One recent development critics point to is the decision by commanders in Iraq in mid-September to combine public affairs, psychological operations and information operations into a "strategic communications" office. An organizational chart of the newly created office was obtained by The Times. The strategic communications office, which began operations Sept. 15, is run by Air Force Brig. Gen. Erv Lessel, who answers directly to Gen. George W. Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

In part out of concerns about this new office, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, distributed a letter Sept. 27 to the Joint Chiefs and U.S. combatant commanders in the field warning of the dangers of having military public affairs (PA) too closely aligned with information operations (IO).

"Although both PA and IO conduct planning, message development and media analysis, the efforts differ with respect to audience, scope and intent, and must remain separate," according to a copy of the letter obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

Pentagon officials say Myers is worried that U.S. efforts in Iraq and in the broader campaign against terrorism could suffer if world audiences begin to question the honesty of statements from U.S. commanders and spokespeople.

"While organizations may be inclined to create physically integrated PA/IO offices, such organizational constructs have the potential to compromise the commander's credibility with the media and the public," Myers wrote.

Myers' letter is not being heeded in Iraq, officials said, in part because many top civilians at the Pentagon and National Security Council support an effort that blends public affairs with psy-ops to win Iraqi support -- and Arab support in general -- for the U.S. fight against the insurgency.

Advocates of these programs said that the advent of a 24-hour news cycle and the powerful influence of Arabic satellite television made it essential that U.S. military commanders and civilian officials made the control of information a key part of their battle plans.

"Information is part of the battlefield in a way that it's never been before," one senior Bush administration official said. "We'd be foolish not to try to use it to our advantage."

"The worst outcome would be to lose this war by default. If the smart folks in the psy-op and civil affairs tents can cast a truthful, persuasive message that resonates with the average Iraqi, why not use the public affairs vehicles to transmit it?" asked Charles A. Krohn, a professor at the University of Michigan and former deputy chief of public affairs for the Army. "What harm is done, compared to what is gained? For the first year of the war, we did virtually nothing to tell the Iraqis why we invaded their country and ejected their government. It's about time we got our act together."

Advocates also cite a September report by the Defense Science Board, an outside panel that advises Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, which concluded that a "crisis" in U.S. "strategic communications" has undermined American efforts to fight Islamic extremism worldwide.

The study cited polling in the Arab world that revealed widespread hatred of the United States throughout the Middle East. A poll taken in June by Zogby International revealed that 94 percent of Saudi Arabians have an "unfavorable" view of the United States, compared with 87 percent in April 2002. In Egypt, the second largest recipient of U.S. aid, 98 percent of respondents held an unfavorable view of the United States.

The Defense Science Board recommended a presidential directive to "coordinate all components of strategic communication including public diplomacy, public affairs, international broadcasting, and military information operations."

Di Rita said there is general agreement inside the Bush administration that the U.S. government is ill equipped to communicate its policies and messages abroad in the current media climate.

"As a government, we're not very well organized to do that," he said.

Yet some in the military argue that the efforts at better "strategic communication" sometimes cross the line into propaganda, citing some recent media briefings held in Iraq. During one Nov. 10 briefing by Marine Lt. Gen. John Sattler, reporters were shown a video of Iraqi troops saluting their flag and singing the Iraqi national anthem.

"Pretty soon, we're going to have the 5 o'clock follies all over again and it will take us another 30 years to restore our credibility," said a second senior defense official, referring to the much-ridiculed daily media briefings in Saigon during the Vietnam War.

So, what is the link you are trying to make here? Why would you want people to be able to use images of our honored dead to promote a political view? The dead don't belong as propoganda items. :mad:

Jesus Christ, talk about PsyOps! This puts the DOD news release to shame... :bulb:

Given the above articles and posts, how can one know which one is telling the truth? If the Pentagon now admits that it has purposefully been releasing false press reports, how are we to know when they started doing it? You are starting to get the point of this documentary - that we have entered the Age of Propaganda, and the likelihood of one source telling the truth over another is about the same. Who is to say at this point whether the Indian paper or the DoD is telling the truth, or what percentage of the truth, and what facts in one story are true that are NOT being told in one that is being reported in the other?

Kurt:

We may be in an age of propoganda, but go back to WWII and even WWI and search and you will see that we have always used PysOp to fool the enemy through the press. It was even used to control and shape the news reported to the US during the bad times.... nothing new here

The key word is "the enemy" and that is no longer true. Psy Ops are now being waged on US by the Pentagon. This whole incident of the Saddam statute pretty much proves it.

The question still remains open, however. In a society such as ours, purportedly "free", "by the people, of the people, for the people", "democratic", should we not be outraged by propaganda being fed to us by our own government? I am.

It is actually illegal. The armed forces are prohibited from using propaganda on US citizens, which is why I was so taken aback by this Saddam statute toppling thing. The Bush administration is essentially lawless, answerable to no one.

Except 53% of the electorate.

Who have been propagandized. I wonder what Hitler's margin was when he did the same thing?

Why don't you go ask your favorite Kommisar of Propaganda, comradski.

Let's see here, the government lied about the rationale for war, and now admits to lying about the war itself. If the US government lies to its citizens about matters of consequence on a regular basis, why would another nation trust them to negotiate in good faith or carry out the terms of an agreement? No wonder all those countries are desperately seeking nuclear weapons.

True, the dead should not be a propaganda item, just as the victims of 9/11 should not have been exploited for Bush's election campaign. The RNC had no problem using images from that to promote Bush as the leader who could fight terrorism.

The link I was making was simple: A government that will not allow its citizens to see the caskets of U.S. dead is a government that is afraid of the truth. The war is costing lives. Bush insisted that he expected "no casualties," as reported by Jerry Falwell. Well, there have been thousands of casualties, and the government is doing its best to shield us from this unpleasant truth.

Joe B.