"The Man Who Sold the War" (ROLLING STONE)

The Man Who Sold the War
Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war
By JAMES BAMFORD

The road to war in Iraq led through many unlikely places. One of them was a chic hotel nestled among the strip bars and brothels that cater to foreigners in the town of Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand.
On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within the sound of the crashing tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to the ring and index fingers of a man sitting pensively in a padded chair. The officer then stretched a black rubber tube, pleated like an accordion, around the man's chest and another across his abdomen. Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the man's brachial artery, on the inside of his upper arm.

Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced black lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a series of questions, he insisted repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam's men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad...http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/8798997?pageid=rs.Home&pageregion=single7&rnd=1132253345109&has-player=false

Thanks for posting.

i'm curious about the timing...weird, huh?

Is she any relation to Scooter?

From Google: other people have asked that same question, but there appears to be no answer.

Here are a couple of related stories that I picked up along the way:

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/politics/whispers/documents/truth_6.pdf

http://www.dkosopedia.com/index.php/50_False_Stories#Truth_from_These_Podia

The Best War Money Can Buy: John Rendon and Iraq

The Rendon Group (TRG) is an American public relations firm with connections at the highest levels within the U.S. intelligence community and the Demcratic Party. Over the past decade, it's received more than $100 million in U.S. government funds, both to provoke instability within Iraq and to prepare the American public for war.

Of special note:

In 1991-1992, TRG vigorously "spun" news to downplay humanitarian concerns over sanctions. TRG was influential in the formation of the Iraq National Congress. TRG most recently surfaced as a key player in the "Office of Strategic Influence", the Pentagon's planned (dis-)information initialtive following 9/11.

The history of TRG and Iraq reads like the children's rhyme where an old woman swallows a fly (and next swallows a fly-eating-spider, bird, cat etc.).

Beginning with the Gulf War ...

(1) The demonization of Saddam Hussein by TRG and others was so successful, that post-war diplomatic progress became politically impossible.

(2) Therefore, containing Iraq through sanctions became the most politically expedient solution, and here TRG led the initiative to forestall any question of humanitarian impact.

(3) Through TRG's efforts, Iraqi opposition coalesced around the Iraqi National Congress (... though the INC had no credibility within Iraq. The INC is the first proxy army in history that requires a proxy army.)

(4) Today TRG retains close ties with the INC and has strong ties with Pentagon conservatives per the 'War on Terror'. Thus, TRG becomes a driver behind the frequent Iraq scare stories that have nudged the American public toward war (anthrax/Prague/al-Qaida in Kurdistan/defector al-Haderi).

(5) And now America is fighting a war with no pretext, with no credible post-war plan (save an occupying army), with no discussion of the impact on Iraq's society, and with little thought to regional stability and global economics.

The children's rhyme ends: "There was an old woman Who swallowed a fly. Perhaps she’ll die."

Following are The Rendon Group's highlights:

LEADERSHIP:

John Rendon is CEO of TRG. He was formerly Executive Director and National Political Director for the Democratic Party of the United States, Director of Scheduling for President Jimmy Carter, and Analyst for American Political System for BBC World TV.

TRG FUNDING RELATED TO IRAQ:
>> 1991-1996:
TRG was "paid close to a hundred million dollars by the C.I.A." for press issues related to the Iraqi opposition, according to an INC official quoted by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker (Issue of 2002-03-11, http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?020311fa_FACT ).

Rendon's own records show he spent $23M during the first post-war year alone, according to ABC News (quoted in TNR (http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20020520&s=foer052002)).

A source of journalist Jeff Stein (familiar to many as Khidir Hamza's co-author) calls it 'a $150 million rip-off'."
(http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/5188/view/print)

>> 1998 Onward: Congress authorizes expenditure of $97-million under the terms of the Iraq Liberation Act (though much of the money remains unspent amid questions of INC accounting practices).

>> Post 9/11/2002:
Citing two Pentagon sources, Franklin Foer in the right-wing New Republic says, "The Rendon Group has billed the government at least $7.5 million for its post-9/11 services."
(http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20020520&s=foer052002).

Regarding the "Office of Strategic Influence", although it's now disavowed note that TRG's contract with the Pentagon remains in place
(http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?020311fa_FACT).


TRG HISTORY RELATIVE TO IRAQ:

>> Most relevant to CASI, TRG worked to downplay press reports of the
humanitarian effects of sanctions following the Gulf War. According to journalists Andrew Cockburn & Patrick Cockburn ("Out of the Ashes",
HarperCollins, 1999):

"Sanctions were at the center of U.S. policy as it had evolved in the first few months after the war. It was, therefore, imperative to maintain international support for what casual readers of the Harvard team's findings and other reports might conclude was an indefensibly cruel policy. That was where the CIA operation, as deployed through Rendon's public relations exercise in Europe and elsewhere, came in useful. 'Every two months or so there would be a report about
starving Iraqi babies,' explains one veteran of Rendon's propaganda campaign.

'We'd be on hand to counter that. The photo exhibition of atrocities and the video that we had went around two dozen countries. It was all part of a concerted campaign to maintain pressure for sanctions'" (p 56)

"Unbeknownst to most of those involved in the INC (apart from Chalabi) the organization's funding came from the CIA. Much of the money--over $23 million in the first year alone--was invested in an anti-Saddam propaganda campaign directed at audiences both inside and outside Iraq and partly designed to deflect international concern over the suffering caused by sanctions. This campaign was subcontracted to John Rendon, a Washington PR specialist with excellent agency connections" (p 165)

>> For other annecdotes, review the sources below. Of note: Flags waved by Kuwaiti citizens at the end of the Gulf War to welcome American troops were made available by TRG. And - thinking it would play well in Iraq - TRG once scripted a pirate radio program so anti-Semitic, that TRG was upbraided by the Mossad.

OTHER CLIENTS:

At the time of the Kosovo campaign, TRG claimed it had worked in 79 countries. TRG worked for the Royal Family of Kuwait during the Gulf war and after, and the governments of Indonesia, Panama, and and Uzbekistan.


See

"Out of the Ashes"
Andrew and Patrick Cockburn
HarperCollins, 1999
...
http://www.protectchild.org/research.htm
(Various clips and links)
...
http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20020520&s=foer052002
JOHN REDON'S SHALLOW P.R. WAR ON TERRORISM.
Flacks Americana
by Franklin Foer
...
http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/5188/view/print
When Things Turn Weird, The Weird Turn Pro
Propaganda, The Pentagon And The Rendon Group
by Jeff Stein
...
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?020311fa_FACT
THE DEBATE WITHIN
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
The objective is clear—topple Saddam. But how?
Issue of 2002-03-11
...
February 19, 2002
Pentagon Readies Efforts to Sway Sentiment Abroad
By JAMES DAO and ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/19/international/19PENT.html?pagewanted=print
...
http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2001Q4/rendon.html
The Pentagon's Information Warrior: Rendon to the Rescue
by Laura Miller and Sheldon Rampton
...
http://www.odwyerpr.com/0306cia.htm
March 6, 2002
TRG GOT $100M FROM CIA
...
http://www.odwyerpr.com/0508rendon.htm
May 8, 2002
RENDON GROUP GOES ‘UNDERCOVER'
...
http://www.msnbc.com/news/714946.asp
He Has Saddam in His Sights
The Bush agenda is nothing less than the re-assertion of American power in the
world, and Iraq is the next target
By Evan Thomas
NEWSWEEK March 4, 2002 issue
...
http://www.observer.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4375878,00.html
Should we go to war against Saddam?
Peter Beaumont, Kamal Ahmed and Edward Helmore in New York
Sunday March 17, 2002
The Observer

Rendon's reaction to the Rolling Stone Story... (to be fair).

Life's a carnival and everything's for sale. It's very hard to adhere to simple, ethical certainties anymore. It's been f'd up pretty good. Nothing to do but try to understand how f'd up it is and by whom.