Military terminates Rendon contract

Source: Kevin Baron, Stars and Stripes

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.

The announcement follows a week of revelations by Stars and Stripes in which military public affairs officers who served in Afghanistan said that as recently as 2008 they had used reporter profiles compiled by The Rendon Group, a private public relations firm in Washington, D.C., to decide whether to grant permission to embed with troops on the battlefield.

“The decision to terminate the Rendon contract was mine and mine alone. As the senior U.S. communicator in Afghanistan, it was clear that the issue of Rendon’s support to US forces in Afghanistan had become a distraction from our main mission,” said Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, in an e-mail sent Sunday to Stars and Stripes.

Read more: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=64481

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Pentagon terminates controversial contract with The Rendon Group.
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/08/30/rendon-terminated/

wouldn't do this. This IS what they do.

How could the Rendon Group ever get close to working on behalf of American foreign adventurism ever again after all we know about them?

The Man Who Sold the War
Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war
JAMES BAMFORD
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/8798997/the_man_who_sold_the_war/

It's hard to believe.

Airc, they were paid over $300,000,000 to sell the war in Iraq. And John Rendon boasted about it. They were also paid to sell the Gulf War. Rendon (or his brother) took 'credit' for thinking up the scheme involving the Kuwaiti princess who went before Congress pretending to be a witness to 'babies being put in ovens'. Her false testimony caused several members of Congress to vote for that invasion.

They also were amused at their own ingenuity at handing out those American flags Kuwaitis were seen waving.

It's not as though anything they were doing was not known, certainly to Congress for years. Not to mention the MEDIA ie, the NYT. Rendon admitted to having 'reporters' he could 'feed information to' such as Judith Miller ~

Good to know they are gone. Maybe the recent articles claiming that this administration was planning on hiring them to sell Afghanistan, had an impact after all. But, as someone above suggested, is there someone else on the payroll now, as Rendon had revealed too much about how our news is manipulated.

:thumbsup: