WASHINGTON - In the run-up to the March
2003 invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon planned to
create a "Rapid Reaction Media Team" (RRMT)
designed to ensure control over major Iraqi media
while providing an Iraqi "face" for its efforts,
according to a report obtained by the independent
National Security Archive (NSA), which released it
on Tuesday.
The partially redacted
three-page document was accompanied by a longer
PowerPoint presentation that included a proposed
six-month, US$51 million budget for the operation,
apparently the first
phase
in a one-to-two-year "strategic information
campaign".
Among other items, the budget
called for the hiring of two US "media
consultants" who were to be paid $140,000 each for
six months' work. A further $800,000 was to be
paid for six Iraqi media consultants over the same
period.
Both the paper and the slide
presentation were prepared by two Pentagon offices
- Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict,
which, among other things, specialize in
psychological warfare, and the Office of Special
Plans under then under secretary of defense for
policy Douglas Feith - in mid-January 2003, two
months before the invasion, according to NSA
analyst Joyce Battle.
"The RRMT concept
focuses on USG [government]-UK pre- and
post-hostilities efforts to develop programing,
train talent and rapidly deploy a team of US/UK
media experts with a team of 'hand-selected' Iraqi
media experts to communicate immediately with the
Iraqi public opinion upon liberation of Iraq,"
said the paper.
The "hand-picked" Iraqi
experts, according to the paper, would provide
planning and program guidance for the US experts
and help "select and train the Iraqi broadcasters
and publishers [the 'face'] for the
USG/coalition-sponsored information effort".
"It will be as if, after another day of
deadly agitprop, the North Korean people turned
off their TVs at night, and turned them on in the
morning to find the rich fare of South Korean TV
spread before them as their very own," the paper
enthused, adding that "reconstituted free Iraqi
domestic media can serve as a model in the Middle
East where so much Arab hate-media are themselves
equivalent to weapons of mass destruction".
Whether the plan was implemented as
described in the paper is not clear, although the
NSA on Tuesday also released an audit by the
Pentagon's inspector general regarding two dozen
mostly non-competitive contracts totaling $122.5
million awarded by the Defense Department to three
defense contractors that carried out media-related
activities in Iraq after the invasion.
The
contractors included the Rendon Group and
Scientific Applications International Corp (SAIC),
which received a $25 million contract to create an
Iraqi Media Network whose aims appear to be
roughly consistent with those laid out in the
report, but which largely fell apart after about
six months as a result of alleged incompetence and
infighting.
SAIC is the same company that
hired World Bank communications staffer Shaha Ali
Riza at the reported behest of then deputy defense
secretary (now World Bank president) Paul
Wolfowitz, with whom she was romantically
involved. Riza worked for SAIC from March to May
2003 as part of a "democracy and governance" team.
The third company covered by the audit is
the five-year-old Lincoln Group, which, among
other activities, has reportedly paid millions of
dollars to Iraqi newspapers to publish pro-US
articles since the invasion.
The RRMT was
conceived as a "quick-start bridge" between Iraq's
state-controlled media network and "Iraqi free
media", which the White Paper's authors described
as the long-term goal of the program.
"After the cessation of hostilities,
having professional US-trained Iraqi media teams
immediately in place to portray a new Iraq (by
Iraqis for Iraqis) with hopes for a prosperous,
democratic future will have a profound
psychological and political impact on the Iraqi
people," said the paper.
"The mission will
be to inform the Iraqi public about USG/coalition
intent and operations, to stabilize Iraq
(especially preventing the trifurcation of Iraq
after hostilities) and to provide Iraqis hope for
their future," it went on, noting that the team
will immediately "collocate and interface with the
designated Centcom commander in Baghdad, and begin
broadcasting and printing approved USG information
to the Iraqi public." Centcom stands for US
Central Command.
The paper lays out a
number of "major tasks" needed to set up the RRMT
and its operations and to "translate USG policy
and thematic guidance into an information campaign
(news and entertainment)".
Among the
"themes and messages" to be communicated, the
paper ranked first "the de-Ba'athification
program", followed by "recent history-telling (eg,
Uncle Saddam, History Channel's Saddam's
Bomb-Maker, Killing Fields, etc.);
USG-approved 'Democracy Series'"; "environmental
(marshlands rehydration)"; "mine awareness";
"restarting the oil"; "justice and rule-of-law
topics"; and "War Criminals/Truth Commission".
The plan also listed several related
themes to be stressed in programing, including
"political prisoners and atrocity interviews",
"Saddam's palaces and opulence", and "WMD [weapons
of mass destruction] disarmament".
As for
"Entertainment and News Magazine programming", the
plan listed at the top "Hollywood", followed by
"News networks", "Arab country donations", and
"Sports".
The plan also called for the
production of "on-the-shelf programming" during
the first month of the occupation, a process that
included obtaining the rights to pre-existing
programs, producing new programs, securing
translations if produced in another language; and
preparing print products, including the "first
edition of the new Iraq weekly newspaper (with
section for missing persons, Shi'a news, Kurd
news, and Sunni news)".
All but $2 million
of the total budget was to be devoted to media
infrastructure and operating costs, including
transmitters and studios for both radio and
television and microwave links and repeaters.
The PowerPoint presentation called for the
RRMT to identify and vet Iraqi media experts and
"anchors", and train a group of Iraqi journalists
to staff the new networks.
The RRMT should
also "identify the media infrastructure that we
need left intact, and work with CENTCOM targeteers
to find alternative ways of disabling key sites",
including, presumably, those media outlets whose
messages were not consistent with the themes the
Pentagon wished to convey.
"Evidently, the
Baghdad headquarters of the Arab satellite network
Al-Jazeera was not part of 'the media
infrastructure that we need left intact'," noted
the NSA's Battle, who pointed to the April 8,
2003, US missile attack that hit the network's
Baghdad bureau, killing reporter Tariq Ayoub. The
Pentagon had been extensively briefed on the
bureau's location before the invasion, and the
offices were well marked as a TV facility.
Al-Jazeera's Kabul bureau, which was in a
downtown office building, was also destroyed by
two "smart bombs" during the US air campaign in
Afghanistan in late 2001. In April 2004, during an
extended battle covered by Al-Jazeera - for
Fallujah, Iraq - President George W Bush suggested
attacking the network's headquarters in Qatar
during a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony
Blair, according to leaked notes of the talks.
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