USA Today pair hit by smear campaign after Pentagon propaganda story
Friday 20 April 2012
Two USA Today journalists investigating private security companies engaging in foreign propaganda wars on behalf of the Pentagon appear to have been subjected themselves to a dirty tricks campaign, the newspaper has revealed.
Reporter Tom Vanden Brook and editor Ray Locker became the subject of a sustained internet campaign to discredit their work just days after they began publishing the results of their investigation into a multi-million dollar Pentagon-funded propaganda mission in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the course of the smear campaign, fake websites, Twitter feeds and Facebook accounts were set up under the journalists' names in which they were accused of being backed by the Taliban.
The source of the smear campaign has not been identified, and the Pentagon itself told USA Today that it was unaware of any such activities, which it stressed it would find unacceptable. But the timing of the shady attempts to drag their names into the journalistic mud is certainly suggestive.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/20/usa-today-smear-campaign
U.S. 'info ops' programs dubious, costly
By Tom Vanden Brook and Ray Locker, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON – As the Pentagon has sought to sell wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to often-hostile populations there, it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on poorly tracked marketing and propaganda campaigns that military leaders like to call "information operations," the modern equivalent of psychological warfare.
From 2005 to 2009, such spending rose from $9 million to $580 million a year mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pentagon and congressional records show. Last year, spending dropped to $202 million as the Iraq War wrapped up. A USA TODAY investigation, based on dozens of interviews and a series of internal military reports, shows that Pentagon officials have little proof the programs work and they won't make public where the money goes. In Iraq alone, more than $173 million was paid to what were identified only as "miscellaneous foreign contractors."
"What we do as I.O. is almost gimmicky," says Army Col. Paul Yingling, who served three tours in Iraq between 2003 and 2009, including as an information operations specialist. "Doing posters, fliers or radio ads. These things are unserious."
(snip)
In Afghanistan, the Pentagon continues to create at least 11 hours a day of what it calls "unattributed" radio and television programming. Information operators seek to tell Afghans who their real enemies are, why Taliban propaganda was wrong, what the Afghan government is accomplishing, how non-governmental organizations are helping them, and why they should serve in the security forces. Whether that's all worthwhile is open to debate.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/story/2012-02-29/afghanistan-iraq-military-information-operations-usa-today-investigation/53295472/1
