Pentagon paid PR $540mnto make fake terrorist videos

[Anthea]

Pentagon paid PR firm $540mn to make fake terrorist videos

The Pentagon paid a UK PR firm half a billion dollars to create fake terrorist videos in Iraq in a secret propaganda campaign exposed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

PR firm Bell Pottinger, known for its array of controversial clients including the Saudi government and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s foundation, worked with the US military to create the propaganda in a secretive operation.

The firm reported to the CIA, the National Security Council and the Pentagon on the project with a mandate to portray Al-Qaeda in a negative light and track suspected sympathizers.

Both the White House and General David Petraeus, the former general who shared classified information with his mistress, signed off on the content produced by the agency.

The Bell Pottinger operation started soon after the US invasion of Iraq and was tasked with promoting the “democratic elections” for the administration before moving on to more lucrative psychological and information operations.

Former employee Martin Wells told the Bureau how he found himself working in Iraq after being hired as a video editor by Bell Pottinger. Within 48 hours, he was landing in Baghdad to edit content for secret “psychological operations” at Camp Victory.

The firm created television ads showing Al-Qaeda in a negative light as well as creating content to look as though it had come from “Arabic TV”. Crews were sent out to film bombings with low quality video. The firm would then edit it to make it look like news footage.

They would craft scripts for Arabic soap operas where characters would reject terrorism with happy consequences. The firm also created fake Al-Qaeda propaganda videos, which were then planted by the military in homes they raided.

Employees were given specific instructions to create the videos. “We need to make this style of video and we’ve got to use Al-Qaeda's footage,” Wells 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 videos were created to play on Real Player which needs an internet connection to run. The CDs were embedded with a code linking to Google Analytics which allowed the military to track IP addresses that the videos were played on.

According to Wells, the videos were picked up in Iran, Syria and the US.

"If one, 48 hours or a week later shows up in another part of the world, then that’s the more interesting one,” Wells explained. “And that’s what they’re looking for more, because that gives you a trail.”

The Pentagon confirmed the PR firm did work for them under the Information Operations Task Force (IOTF) creating content they say was “truthful”. The firm also worked under the Joint Psychological Operations Task Force (JPOTF). The Pentagon said it could not comment on JPOTF operations.

US law prohibits the government from using propaganda on its population, hence the use of an outside firm to create the content.

Documents show the Pentagon paid $540 million to Bell Pottinger in contracts between 2007 and 2011, with another contract for $120 million in 2006. The firm ended its work with the Pentagon in 2011.

In 2009, it was reported that the Pentagon had hired controversial PR firm, The Rendon Group, to monitor the reporting of journalists embedded with the U.S. military, to assess whether they were giving "positive" coverage to its missions.

It was also revealed in 2005 that Washington based PR company the Lincoln Group had been placing articles in newspapers in Iraq which were secretly written by the US military. A Pentagon investigation cleared the group of any wrongdoing.

https://www.rt.com/usa/361385-pentagon- ... st-videos/

[Anthea]

Making Al-Qaeda propaganda for Pentagon:
Ex-PR worker describes secret campaign to RT

A former employee of the UK PR firm that was hired by the Pentagon to create fake terrorist videos in Iraq told RT that he arrived thinking he would be working with media agencies, but ended up creating materials for a secret propaganda campaign instead.

Bell Pottinger’s staff was stationed inside a highly secured US military and intelligence HQ at Camp Victory in Baghdad.

“The arrival there [in Camp Victory in Iraq] was quite a shock… very very, I guess, distressing, really… You just felt you as if you didn’t know what was going to happen,” Martin Wells, a former employee of Bell Pottinger who worked for the US military in Iraq from 2006 to 2008, told RT.

The news that the Pentagon had paid Bell Pottinger over half a billion dollars to create fake terrorist videos in Iraq hit the headlines on Sunday when it was divulged by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which had received the information from Wells.

Wells says that he was initially told that he would be working on news.

“As it transpired, it was news, but not news as I expected. I expected it to be doing stuff for news agencies such as yourselves and Reuters. And just providing footage for them,” he said.

However, the reality turned out to be quite different from what the video editor had anticipated. Wells said that when he arrived at his workplace, he was introduced to the American intelligence staff there.

I still at that point had no idea what I was doing, but I knew as soon as I walked through that door I certainly wasn’t doing news… Then, later as I went through… and worked out what I was actually doing, it transpired that it was essentially… a form of propaganda.”

The media was set completely abuzz when it was revealed that the Pentagon had paid Bell Pottinger $540 million for contracts from 2007 to 2011, with another contract for $120 million signed in 2006. The firm ended its work with the Pentagon in 2011.

Bell Pottinger is known for serving an array of controversial clients, including the Saudi government and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s foundation.

The firm reported to the CIA, the National Security Council, and the Pentagon on the project, with a mandate to portray Al-Qaeda in a negative light and track suspected sympathizers. Critics claim, however, that the videos may have actually promoted the terrorists’ agenda instead.

The Bell Pottinger operation, which began soon after the US invasion of Iraq, was tasked with promoting “democratic elections” for the administration before moving on to more lucrative psychological and information operations.

The firm created television ads showing Al-Qaeda in a negative light, as well as content which looked as though it had come from “Arabic TV.” The videos were created to play on Real Player, which needs an internet connection to run. The CDs were embedded with a code linked to Google Analytics that allowed the military to track the IP addresses the videos were played on.

They would also craft scripts for Arabic soap operas in which characters would reject terrorism with favorable consequences. The firm also created fake Al-Qaeda propaganda videos, which were then planted by the military in homes that they raided.

“In terms of the [fake Al-Qaeda] VCDs, I was the only one, who while I was there, cut those. Nobody else was tasked with those because I was running the department. The footage was also given to us, and it was genuine Al-Qaeda footage that they’d shot, and we then repurposed this for our footage to put on the VCDs and then went out and dropped them,” he explained.

“Most of the stuff we did went out on local news, on national news, and would be broadcast in different countries in the region. But the VCDs were targeted at Al-Qaeda themselves. That was used by marines – left of raids amongst a bunch of VCDs people had been using anyway. If you watched that when it opened up, it was on a player that was linked to an analytical site, so wherever in the world you watched it, it could be tracked. So you’d know where it was played, and the IP address would flash up, so you’d basically know who had watched it,” he said.

https://www.rt.com/usa/361597-martin-we ... on-videos/

[Anthea]

Pentagon Caught Paying PR Firm $540 Million to Make Fake Terrorist Videos

Any serious person still living on this planet knows that the majority of the news items in the mainstream media is nothing but government and corporate propaganda.

Particularly for government, the situation is worse in Western nations, especially in the United States. When the United States illegally invaded Iraq after 9/11, the country’s government used clandestine tactics to get the media under its control.

In fact, after the invasion, numerous stories emerged from both known and anonymous sources, revealing that the United States government had secretly embedded journalists within the military, who were responsible for dictating how the news of the war was reported back home to the public.

Now, 13 years after the unlawful invasion of Iraq by the United States, more sickening and messy details are emerging. To what end will the United States continue to aggressively invade countries, plundering their resources and leaving behind chaos and bloodshed?

In the latest news, a joint investigation by the Sunday Times and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has revealed that the United States defense headquarters, the Pentagon, paid a Public Relations (PR) firm based in the United Kingdom over half a billion dollars to make fake terrorist videos in Iraq, as part of an enormous propaganda campaign.

The PR firm was identified as Bell Pottinger. According to the investigation, Bell Pottinger fabricated short Television segments designed to imitate Arabic news networks and fake insurgent videos, which could be used to track the people who watched them. In fact, it was a former employee of Bell Pottinger who confirmed this damming act by the Pentagon, to the investigators.

High-ranking military officials from the Pentagon worked with employees of Bell Pottinger in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, at a location known as Camp Victory, creating anti-terrorism propaganda to imitate the real thing.

A central figure in the diabolical plan of the Pentagon was Bell Pottinger’s former chairman, Lord Tim Bell. Lord Bell confirmed to the investigators that he collaborated on a “covert” military operation covered by various secrecy agencies, and reported to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council, all of whom were very instrumental during the invasion.

According to the investigation, Bell Pottinger was brought to Iraq, and began working shortly after the United States first invaded the country. The task given to Bell Pottinger was simple: It should portray Al Qaeda negativly in the videos, and when the videos are distributed, it should track people who watched the propaganda videos.

The investigation revealed how the White House and General David Petraeus, then commander of coalition forces in Iraq, signed off on the program. This means the then president, George W. Bush was well aware of the diabolical program.

“In the first media interview any Bell Pottinger employee has given about the work for the US military in Iraq, video editor Martin Wells – who no longer works for the company – told the Bureau his time in Camp Victory was ‘shocking, eye-opening, life-changing’,” the investigation said.

Investigators tracked the United States Army contracts, records of federal procurement transactions, reports for the Department of Defense (DoD) Office of Inspector General, corporate records from Bell Pottinger, and more. This enabled investigators to discover the extent of the program.

One anonymous military contractor told investigators that there were three types of labels given to media operations, or Ops, used in Iraq during that time. The anonymous military official said: “White is attributed, it says who produced it on the label. Grey is unattributed and black is falsely attributed. These types of black ops, used for tracking who is watching a certain thing, were a pretty standard part of the industry toolkit.”

According to the investigators’ records it reviewed, the operation involving Bell Pottinger cost well over $100 million each year. In total, the investigators identified transactions worth $540 million between the Pentagon and Bell Pottinger for information operations and psychological operations on a series of contracts issued from May 2007 to December 2011.

A former Bell Pottinger employee, Martin Wells told investigators he had no idea what the job was about when he came on board in 2006. He said he was only working under strict instructions from his agent.

“I thought ‘That sounds interesting,’” Wells recalled. “So I go along and go into this building, get escorted up to the sixth floor in a lift, come out and there’s guards up there. I thought what on earth is going on here? And it turns out it was a Navy post, basically. So from what I could work out it was a media intelligence gathering unit.”

For the ‘grey ops’ portion of the work, the employees crafted television commercials showing Al Qaeda in a negative, and others involved making segments designed to look as if they were created by Arabic TV, Wells revealed.

Bell Pottinger film crews went on location to tape low definition bombings by Al Qaeda, which would then be edited appropriately for believability, voiced over in Arabic, and distributed to TV stations in the region – though the outlets weren’t always made aware of the American involvement in such segments.

Investigators said: “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.’ US marines would take the CDs on patrol and drop them in the chaos when they raided targets. Wells said: ‘If they’re raiding a house and they’re going to make a mess of it looking for stuff anyway, they’d just drop an odd CD there.’”

Those CDs were made to play using Real Player, which connects to the Internet to operate, and, as Wells told investigators, the team embedded a code into the CDs , linking to a Google Analytics account, giving a list of IP addresses where the CDs had been played. He explained that only three people had access to who was tracked.

Investigators said when they contacted the Pentagon about the videos, it confirmed that Bell Pottinger did work for the DoD under the Information Operations Task Force, insisting that the videos it distributed were “truthful.”

But of course, the Pentagon will never admit to what it has done. That is how the Pentagon wastes America’s tax payers’ money. The Pentagon is indeed, living the American dream on the world’s behalf!

http://anonhq.com/wicked-pentagon-caugh ... st-videos/

[Anthea]

We can see where they got the money from to make these false videos