'NYT' Reveals Military's Role in Phony Iraqi Press Reports

By: E&P Staff In a lengthy front-page story in Sunday's New York Times, reporter Jeff Gerth provides numerous revelations spilling out in the wake of the scandal involving American payoffs to the Iraqi press to carry pro-U.S. articles.

Gerth reports that the work of the Pentagon-backed outfit at the center of that, the Lincoln Group, which has contracts in the tens of millions, "was not a rogue operation. Hoping to counter anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world, the Bush administration has been conducting an information war that is extensive, costly and often hidden, according to documents and interviews with contractors, government officials and military personnel."

The article, available on the newspaper's Web site, is much too extensive to summarize, and also focuses on propaganda efforts in Afghanistan, but here are a few highlights:

--"Lincoln's employees work virtually side by side with soldiers. Army officers supervise Lincoln's work and demand to see details of article placements and costs, said one of the former employees, speaking on condition of anonymity because Lincoln's Pentagon contract prohibits workers from discussing their activities. 'Almost nothing we did did not have the command's approval,' he said."

--"Typically, Lincoln paid newspapers from $40 to $2,000 to run the articles as news articles or advertisements, documents provided to The New York Times by a former employee show. More than 1,000 articles appeared in 12 to 15 Iraqi and Arab newspapers, according to Pentagon documents. The publications did not disclose that the articles were generated by the military.

--"A company worker also often visited the Baghdad convention center, where the Iraqi press corps hung out, to recruit journalists who would write and place opinion pieces, paying them $400 to $500 as a monthly stipend, the employees said."

--"Articles written by the soldiers at Camp Victory often assumed the voice of Iraqis. 'We, all Iraqis, are the government. It is our country,' noted one article. Another said, 'The time has come for the ordinary Iraqi, you, me, our neighbors, family and friends to come together.'" But most Iraqis saw right through this.

--The military has sought to expand its media influence efforts beyond Iraq to neighboring states, including Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan, Pentagon documents say. The article concludes with a visit by radio announcer Rush Limbaugh and GOP insider Mary Matalin to Afghanistsan.