The Empire 245

'Iraq’s Own Pentagon (News)Papers
By Asia Times.

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.'

Lees verder: http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2007/05/11/iraqs-own-pentagon-newspapers/