Pentagon: $1.5 MILLION Contract With Rendon Group to Profile Reporters on Afghanistan War

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Pentagon: $1.5 MILLION Contract With Rendon Group to Profile Reporters on Afghanistan War
By: acquarius74 Friday August 28, 2009 9:36 am	Tweet

Below is the brief on www.democracynow.org
in which Amy Goodman introduces today’s (08/28/2009) interviews with two well known reporters, Charlie Reed and James Bamford (author of The Shadow Factory).

IMO, it reveals the extreme degree of contempt with which the Pentagon views the taxpaying American public. How do you feel about DOD contracting to pay The Rendon Group $1.5 MILLION to "manage our perception" of the Afghanistan War??

Pentagon Hires Rendon Group to Profile and Rate Journalists Covering Afghanistan War
Rendon-group-web

The US Army in Afghanistan has admitted it pays a private company to produce background profiles on journalists covering the war. The Pentagon has been on the defensive ever since the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes revealed this week that journalists were being screened by the Washington-based public relations firm, the Rendon Group, under a $1.5 million contract with the military. Documents obtained by the paper reveal journalists were evaluated with pie charts breaking down their coverage into percentages of “positive,” “neutral” or “negative.”

The Rendon Group investigates the reporter’s biography and work product and rates each as to the advisability of embedding them with the Army in Afghanistan. Not hard to figure out which will be selected.

James Bamford tells of this Rendon Group’s being hired by the CIA to promote the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi back in the 1990s. We all know how that turned out.

Sure looks to me like only those "reporters" who write what the military brass wants told will be embedded. Both reporters interviewed by Amy and Juan indicate that there will be much more coming out on this story.

[emphasis mine]

19 Comments Recommend

19 Responses to Pentagon: $1.5 MILLION Contract With Rendon Group to Profile Reporters on Afghanistan War

Jason Rosenbaum August 28th, 2009 at 12:11 pm «

They’re clearly wasting their money, given public opinion on the issue:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..03066.html

acquarius74 August 28th, 2009 at 12:17 pm «

They’re clearly wasting ~~their~~ taxpayers’ money

Fixed it for you, Jason.

Jason Rosenbaum August 28th, 2009 at 12:40 pm «

Ah, much obliged.

acquarius74 August 28th, 2009 at 2:06 pm «

Spencer (Attackerman here at FDL) has a post up today on the Rendon profiles. He tried to get his Rendon Group profile. No Way. He gives some interesting info on Rendon.
john in sacramento August 28th, 2009 at 4:04 pm «

Rendon?

I’ve got more links and videos for you

acquarius74 August 28th, 2009 at 6:12 pm «

Well, John, I’ll say your little sentence sure packs a wallop! I finally made myself leave that site to come back and reply to you. Thanks so much.

If anyone who visits here has any doubt left about how the main stream media has misled and lied to the American people, just go to John’s link @ 5.

I’m serious when I say the Bush Gang, the PR BS firms who ’sold’ those wars, the intel forgers and liars, and the rest of that scum should be sent to GITMO. They are traitors. I don’t even want them on American soil.

I’m so thankful for our true journalists such as Amy Goodman and Bill Moyers, probably Gellman, all those at McClatchey… and the dedicated film makers who produce the documentaries that tell us the truth.

I hope someday the Truthers shall overcome.
flyarm August 28th, 2009 at 9:01 pm «

John, I remember that story , but I also remember that Judith Miller was sent there to either watch that polygraph..or something to that effect…it is a vague memory..but do look into that fact..I believe Judith Miller was flown in for the reasoning of watching or seeing the results of that polygraph…and her being able to sell the war in the NYT…in your link The Man Who Sold War and Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri’s polygraph.

acquarius74 August 29th, 2009 at 7:41 am «

flyarm616, the seduction of the press began at least in the 1950s by then Director of CIA, Allen Dulles. Here is an excerpt from page 181 of the book, The Secret Team written @ 1973 by L. Fletcher Prouty. He was certainly in a position to know; just Google his name.

…Allen Dulles had twelve or thirteen regular members of the news media who would be invited to join him frequently for lunch in the beautiful old dining room he maintained in East Building across from his office. Many an agent [intel] or military officer who had been invited to his offices to meet with him or with his deputy General Cabell, to discuss matters of utmost secrecy would be astounded at lunch with them to find the room filled with those well known writers and commentators. And then, as lunch proceeded, the same subjects that on the other side of the hall had been so carefully shrouded in secrecy would become table gossip, with these men of the press. Dulles believed that if he kept these men well informed, they would then be able to draw that line between the CIA party line and its security limits.

….He fed them the CIA point of view all the time, just as he fed so many others, from Presidents on down, and as he has fed the readers of his book.

[Allen Dulles’ book, The Craft of Intelligence, was written in 1961 after he was fired by President John F. Kennedy.]

I have read that back before both WWI and WWII, the news media was used to convince the American public to enter those wars. Perhaps the finest speech by JFK was his address to the Press on secrecy and honesty in the news presented to the people. There are several clips on YouTube of this speech; just Google: JFK,secrecy speech

john in sacramento August 29th, 2009 at 12:11 pm «

Col. Fletcher Prouty was an unsung hero and he was JFK’s closest military aide

The Dulles Bros. were snakes

Have you read Plausible Denial by Mark Lane? It’s another eye opener

Plausible Denial is the result of documents made available by the Freedom of Information Act and by sworn depositions Lane was able to take from former CIA operatives and officials for a little-publicized libel trial in the US District Court of Miami.

[…]

The forewoman of the jury, Leslie Armstrong, stated that “Mr. Lane was asking us to do something very difficult. He was asking us to believe that John Kennedy had been killed by our own government. Yet when we examined the evidence, we were compelled to conclude that the CIA had indeed killed President Kennedy.” In the end, the jury found in favor of Lane and his client.

JFK’s Secret Society Speech

The Creel Committee

And thanks flyarm, I’ll have to look into that

acquarius74 August 29th, 2009 at 1:22 pm «

John, you just made # 1 on my list of Most Admired Persons!!! You’re the first person I’ve seen here at the Lake that admits to knowing who Lt. Col Prouty was.

I’ve seen all (I think) of the video clips featuring him and read his 2 books, The Secret Team and JFK…..

I’ve read Garrison’s book, and am mid-way into Mark Lane’s book, Rush To Judgment. Page after page he exposes the “fix” that the august members of the Warren Commission were hell-bent to establish, thus the traitorous conclusions they published.

Thanks for your recommend of his book Plausible Denial, it’ll be next up.
bluebutterfly August 30th, 2009 at 9:38 pm «

Are you sure you don’t recall someone else?
acquarius74 August 31st, 2009 at 6:55 am «

Blue, my daughter put me onto Prouty. If there was someone else, it would have been you, I’m sure. If so, I apologize! My comments about him have been mostly (all ?) at EmptyWheel, so I should have limited my statement to that area.

Hugh August 28th, 2009 at 6:26 pm «

Hi, thanks for the info. I just made this item 74 of my Obama scandals list. Here is the link to the original story in the Stars and Stripes: http://www.stripes.com/article…..icle=64348

Apparently they came across the story when one of their own reporters was denied an embed a couple of months ago because he refused to report the way the Pentagon wanted him to.

acquarius74 August 28th, 2009 at 8:21 pm «

Thanks, Hugh. Good for that Stars & Stripes reporter. That’s really a gold star for him not a put-down. Wish we could make an honor roll of all those journalists who got a negative rating from the Rendon Flim-Flam Corp.

Did you see Bill Moyers tonight? If Obama’s campaign promise to end the big pharma = big money game is not on your list, you might think about adding it. He is now big buddies with the biggest name in phrma and has promised him not to come out for limiting drug costs or allowing medicine from Mexico. I was so angry by the middle part of Bill’s statement that I missed parts of it.

bluebutterfly August 28th, 2009 at 10:49 pm «

Obama is a golfing buddy of the CEO of UBS. The whistle blower that exposed the US tax dodgers got a prison sentence of 40 months.

http://www.democracynow.org/20…..h_ubs_exec

acquarius74 August 29th, 2009 at 7:07 am «

Saw that, bluebutterfly. Are we in Orwellia yet?

bluebutterfly August 30th, 2009 at 9:31 pm «

Yes..for a long time now..’g’. Here is some unexpected news.
**********
“The U.S. military is canceling its contract with a controversial private firm that was producing background profiles of journalists seeking to cover the war that graded their past work as “positive,” “negative” or “neutral,” Stars and Stripes has learned.

“The Bagram Regional Contracting Center intends to execute a termination of the Media Analyst contract,” belonging to The Rendon Group, said Col. Wayne Shanks, chief of public affairs for International Security Assistance Forces–Afghanistan. “
http://www.stripes.com/article…..icle=64481

fatster August 29th, 2009 at 4:45 pm «

I like the quote from Admiral Mullen said in the article by Reed and Baron:

“Meanwhile, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Friday published an essay in a military journal that was sharply critical of the U.S. government’s attempts to use “strategic communications” to shape messages directed at the Muslim world.

‘”To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate,” Mullen wrote in the essay in Joint Force Quarterly.

‘”I would argue that most strategic communication problems are not communication problems at all,” he wrote. “They are policy and execution problems. Each time we fail to live up to our values or don’t follow up on a promise, we look more and more like the arrogant Americans the enemy claims we are.”‘

We need many more like him.

acquarius74 August 30th, 2009 at 7:14 am «

Thanks, fatster. I’m applying Adm. Mullen’s statement to Obama’s replacing him (an intelligent, humane man courageous enough to openly state that the war in Afghanistan cannot be won militarily, but must be resolved diplomatically) with a master of deception who is an inhuman brute in disguise. McCrystal gets the job and another star; the good guy gets the boot.

So, that action by Obama tells me a lot, just as do all his other actions in direct reverse of his campaign promises.

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