sad sally
sad sally's JournalUSA 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
How to Trump a Superpower - Taking Uncle Sam for a Ride
Chalk it up to the genuine strangeness of our second Afghan War. Americans, according to the latest polls, are turning against the conflict in ever greater numbers, yet it’s remarkable how little -- beyond a few obvious, sensational events -- they know about what’s actually going on there in their name.
Take as an example the cost of the war and a startling development of the last four-plus months that has driven it significantly higher. Keep in mind that the Afghan War is being fought by a fuel-guzzling U.S. military in a landlocked, impoverished South Asian country with almost no resources of any sort. Just about everything it needs or wants -- from fuel, ammunition, and weaponry to hamburgers and pizzas -- has to be shipped in by tortuous routes over thousands of exceedingly expensive miles.
(snip)
Soon after this happened, there were brief reports indicating that the costs of shipping some items had gone up by a factor of six, depending on the route chosen. Back in 2009, it was estimated that a gallon of fuel cost $400 or more by the time it reached the U.S. military in Afghanistan, and that was by the cheaper Pakistani route. How much is it now? $600, $800, $2,400?
We don’t know, largely because coverage of the Afghan war has been so patchy and evidently no reporter bothered to check for months. Only in the last week have we gotten a Pentagon estimate: a rise in shipping costs of about 2½ times the Pakistani price. (And even such estimates are buried in wire service stories on other topics.) In other words, for months no reporter considered the border-closing story important enough to make it a feature piece or to follow it seriously.
In an America where financing is increasingly unavailable to fire departments, police departments, schools, and the like, is it really of no significance what money we pour into our wars? Is no one curious about what the Pakistani decision has meant to the American taxpayer?
http://www.tomdispatch.com/
Uranium Double Standard: The U.S., Kazakhstan and Iran
Allen Ruff and Steve Horn
Published: Thursday 12 April 2012
Iran’s alleged "nuclear threat" has taken center stage among diplomats, military men, and politicians in Washington, Tel Aviv, and the West at-large.
Despite the fact that investigative journalists Seymour Hersh, Gareth Porter and others have meticulously documented the fact that Iran, in fact, poses no nuclear threat at all, the Obama Administration and the U.S. Congress have laid down multiple rounds of harsh sanctions as a means to "deter" Iran from reaching its "nuclear capacity."
The most recent round featured a call to boycott Iran’s oil industry by President Obama.
While rhetorical attention remains focused on Iran’s "threat", there is an "elephant in the room": Kazakhstan’s booming uranium mining and expanding nuclear industry -- a massive effort involving U.S. multinational corporations and an authoritarian regime increasingly tied to Washington.
http://www.nationofchange.org/uranium-double-standard-us-kazakhstan-and-iran-1334236438
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