Pentagon Propaganda 'Fiasco' Gets Scrutiny in House

Pentagon Propaganda ‘Fiasco’ Gets Scrutiny in House

news.antiwar.com

A member of the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday threatened an amendment to block funding for Pentagon propaganda efforts, citing reports critical of their management and others exposing the Pentagon’s contractor for tax evasion.

Recent reports published by USA Today exposed the dubious nature and exorbitant costs of the Pentagon’s “Information Operations,” (IO) which the newspaper described as “the modern equivalent of psychological warfare,” or war propaganda.

(visit the link for the full news article)


Related News Links:
gawker.com

Trolling by the Pentagon is out of control. In this story the contractor : Leonie Industries, was said to setup attack websites which targeted the reporters. Then, after a formal inquiry by the Defence Dept.. these vanished.. When MSM is being attacked by contractors which then triggers House Amendments to protect the MSM... We are entering a strange new world... Check out the Gawker story below to piece together the missing threads..

news.antiwar.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

This whole story is quite mind-boggling. As far as I can tell, the websites used to smear these journalists have now disappeared from the Google archive and archive.org has no record of them.

Interesting, because the Gawker article which links to them is only a month old, so they've disappeared in the last month.

The Chinese call them "water armies." They exploit the 'open' nature of the Internet by creating 'content' according to client specifications; and are, pretty much, what you would expect of such outfits.

For example... the internationally acclaimed, politically-well-connected company "Leonie".... which apparently engaged in a smear campaign about the two reporters who authored articles about the Pentagon propaganda efforts...

Leonie is an international, woman-owned professional services company specializing in cultural advisory, strategic communication, and mission support services. We help our clients overcome the social-cultural challenges of engaging groups at the neighborhood level in hard to reach locations around the world.

Sounds pretty 'professional' and upscale, no? Notice the all -important taxation-relevant "woman-owned" identifier... why would that matter to the Pentagon? Because contracting a "woman" or "minority-owned" business is a feather in their cap.

Corporate Overview

Founded: 2001
Experience: National and international experience in multi-media communications and production. (Learn more about our Proven Experience)
Offices: Washington, VA; Los Angeles, CA; Tampa, FL; Baghdad, Iraq; Kabul, Afghanistan
Global Media Alliance: 200+ communication companies in 106 countries; Access to 91,000+ employees in 2,000 offices worldwide
Core Solutions: Research and Planning, Media Production and Distribution, Digital Media and Creative Services, Cultural Advisory Services
Awards: Excellent customer ratings and recommendations
Associations: USO, World Affairs Council, US Chamber of Commerce
Regional Expertise: Middle East, North Africa, South America, Southeast Asia

Remember the days when the Pentagon would hire any former military command officer to be 'advisory correspondents' and "military consultants" to main stream media around the world to 'educate' the world about the Iraq war?....

Does anyone else wonder about their "access to 91,000 employees" and what that really means?

The association with the US Chamber of Commerce and the "World Affairs" council should speak volumes....

Leonie Industries, which the Vanden Brook and Locker investigation called the U.S.'s top contractor in Afghanistan, is an interesting company. It was founded in 2004 by a Lebanese-American brother and sister, Camille Chidiac and Rema Dupont, and has cobbled together $130 million in Pentagon contracts for, as Vanden Brook and Locker put it, "plant[ing] unattributed broadcasts, plaster[ing] the countryside in war zones with billboards, stag[ing] concerts and drop[ping] leaflets" in Afghanistan. An Army colonel told the USA Today reporters that the stuff the Pentagon was paying Leonie to was "gimmicky" and "unserious." The Pentagon has cited Leonie for failing to adequately heat its facilities in Afghanistan.

According to a 2010 lawsuit filed against Leonie, Chidiac, and Dupont—by none other than their father—the brother and sister had no experience at all in Middle East affairs when they founded the company, and in fact stole Leonie from their father after he asked them to establish it to house a family business. Chidiac, the lawsuit claims, left Boston University under a cloud in 2002 after accusations of "serious academic misconduct and/or plagiarism," which Chidiac blamed on a "Jew professor." Prior to his involvement in Leonie, USA Today reported, Chidiac "worked as an assistant director on a series of low-budget, direct-to-video movies."

After wresting Leonie from his father, the lawsuit says, Chidiac began paying himself $95,000 per month. Chidiac and his sister both own multi-million dollar homes in Los Angeles; according to USA Today, they both have been slapped with more than $4 million in federal tax liens.

One must wonder how the woman-owned foreign company was so well regarded in the Pentagon's estimation...

Look a little closer and you will find ... what? ... graft? war-profiteering? treason? Who knows? I guaranteee it's all classified. Just like all those wikileaks cables that embarrassed the minions of the corporate owners of the political system....

Honor.... it's what's missing ....

reply to post by Maxmars


Thanks Mod for value adding on the content... Agree 100 pct... nice

reply to post by R_Clark


Isn't Pentagon already doing that?

I'd really like to see what these smear pages looked like. If anyone finds a cached copy of them somewhere that would be great.

I'd also like to know what justification Google cache used for removing them.

I can't say it really suprises me, it just proves what hundreds of ATS members have been saying all along....that there are many disinfo agents here! I know several people that got banned cause they took these traitors too seriously.

The government does NOT misinform ON ITS OWN. It does so by contracting public relations firms and/or think tanks. Most of these think tanks are center at best and the rest waaaaayyyy right on the political scale. The left is a joke in america afterall that was what vietnam and south korea was all about...to stop communism! It does not mean I endorse communism, it simply means as a progressive I feel closer to communism then to capitalism.

Croney capitalism and state capitalism are nearly identical. Companies need to make money and the government needs donations, thus it is a marriage made in hell! Americans have been severly duped.

Not to mention all the ufo related denials.