US spent $500M on propaganda

Should we believe what we're being told about war given the US' history of lies about them?

Does this behavior also shed light on possible intentions behind the deception during the COVID era?

The US Spent $500M on Propaganda & Why It's Relevant Now

Joe Martino
The Time, 23 Sept 2023

I wanted to bring attention to this piece I wrote back in 2016 (below) when our work was being done through our brand Collective Evolution.

It’s a piece about the time the US spent about half a billion dollars creating propaganda during the Iraq war. At the time, I found this piece to be incredibly powerful because it illustrated how far governments will go to shape domestic and global opinion.

How do we know propaganda or carefully shaped narratives aren’t used on the domestic public to mislead them into supporting senseless wars? *Rhetorical question.*

In my view, a misinformed public plus the lack of ability for citizens to directly vote on key issues means you do not have democracy. In most countries, the idea of democracy is merely an illusion, a pacifier placed into the mouths of citizens to make them feel they are in control of the direction of their country.

Here in 2023, we are being told a great deal about the Ukraine and Russia war. but should we truly believe the Western perspective on this war given the history of lies about previous wars? Remember the weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist?

How should we make sense of what we’re being told about war by our governments given we must bring these examples (and many more) into the picture?

My feeling is that mainstream analysis is often naive in real time, and only becomes wiser 10 - 15 years later when the truth becomes completely undeniable. Perhaps it’s time we stop buying into mainstream claims in real time, and instead be more curious about what really might be going on. An expanded and holistic perspective is necessary to understand why these wars, and false flags, happen.

Pentagon Paid PR Firm Over $500 Million to Create Fake Terrorist Videos
Published Oct 3, 2016

    “We need to make this style of video and we’ve got to use Al-Qaeda's footage . . . We need it to be 10 minutes long, and it needs to be in this file format, and we need to encode it in this manner.”

These were the specific instructions given to employees of a UK PR firm responsible for creating fake terrorist videos as part of a top secret propaganda mission paid for by the Pentagon — a mission that cost over half a billion dollars.

This story came to light thanks to a former employee of the firm, Martin Wells, who came forward to talk about his time working on the project.

Buying Propaganda

PR firm Bell Pottinger, well-known for having many controversial clients, worked with the U.S. military to create propaganda in a secretive operation. The firm reported to the CIA, the National Security Council, and the Pentagon during the project.

Since the U.S. is prohibited by law from using propaganda on its population, they had to hire an outside firm to create it for them.

Their mandate was to portray Al-Qaeda in a negative light and track suspected sympathizers.

Both the White House and General David Petraeus, the former general who shared classified information with his mistress, signed off on the content produced by the agency.

The Bell Pottinger operation began not long after the U.S. invaded Iraq following 9/11. It was at this point that promoting the “democratic elections” became the focus of the mission. Not long after, the priority shifted to shooting and editing video content for psychological and information operations.

Martin Wells, who found himself working in Iraq after being hired as a video editor by Bell Pottinger, told The Bureau of Investigative Journalism that within 48 hours of being hired, he landed in Baghdad to edit content for secret “psychological operations” at Camp Victory.

The firm created television ads showing Al-Qaeda in a negative light and created content to look as though it had come from unbias “Arabic TV.” Film crews were sent out to film bombings with low quality video and edited to look like news reports.

According to the US, the videos were meant to show the atrocities of Al-Qaeda to hopefully convince people of their senseless violence. Further, the US would track the location of viewers of the videos to determine if they might be Al-Qaeda sympathizers.

When the US would raid houses of citizens and make a mess of them, crews would go in a drop CDs with the video footage onto the floor. When citizens would watch them the US could track the behavior.

According to Wells, the videos made their way out of Iraq and to places like Iran, Syria, and the U.S.

    "If one, 48 hours or a week later shows up in another part of the world, then that’s the more interesting one, and that’s what they’re looking for more, because that gives you a trail.”

Whether the material achieved its goals, no one would ever really know, Wells said.

But are we asking all the right questions here?

We are assuming here that the only ‘bad people’ are Al-Qaeda, but what could be said about the US military? Are they truly innocent in all this? Was this war necessary or were there other motives?

Are we really to believe everything we were told by the US about this war is true? There are still major questions that need to be answered about 9/11, we were told lies about weapons of mass destruction, and there is a clear history of the military-industrial complex profiting from senseless war.

From a different perspective, Iraq war veteran Mike Prysner claimed the US military was the true terrorist in the Iraq occupation.

Why do we not hear about these perspectives? Are we really going to ignore the vast profits wars make for the military industrial complex? If billionaires and elites can create propaganda and mislead the public into supporting war, would they not do it for their own profits and power? How would we know they are not?

Can we truly believe the US was creating this propaganda for good? If so, why would the US military do the things Prysner points out in the press conference below?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90OYp2hdTMU

The Pentagon did confirm that the PR firm worked for them under the Information Operations Task Force (IOTF), and said they were creating content that was “truthful.” The firm also worked under the Joint Psychological Operations Task Force (JPOTF). When asked for a response, the Pentagon said it could not comment on JPOTF operations.

Why the Need for PR?

As I touched on above, given these events one must begin to ask why there was a need for propaganda and PR in the first place.

Does it seem unsettling that government and military operations have to go to such lengths to get the public on their side? Or to manipulate another population? What gives them to right to shape and manipulate public opinion with false ideas?

We can dive further, can we really say that what the media chooses to leave out of the domestic narratives in the US is not a form of propaganda itself?

This reminds me of a great quote from Edward Bernays, otherwise known as the father of public relations. The quote is taken from his book Propaganda, which was written in 1928:

    The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

    We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.

It was reported in 2009 that the Pentagon had hired controversial PR firm The Rendon Group to monitor the reporting of journalists embedded with the U.S. military. The goal was to assess whether they were giving "positive" coverage to its missions. This is a clear effort to control the media and what it portrays to the public.

In 2005, an article by Democracy Now revealed that the PR company the Lincoln Group had been hired to produce articles printed in Iraqi newspapers which had been secretly written by the U.S. military. Surprisingly (or not), a Pentagon investigation cleared the group of any wrongdoing.

I believe if the people knew what their governments were doing and if they were truly informed about their actions they might have a different perspective about what's going on.

The reality of this story brings into question how real the threat of terror truly is and why the U.S. is trying so hard to convince the world that this threat is imminent.

We are all too familiar with how the Iraq war began - after planes were flown into the World Trade Centre towers in New York. This event was monumental in not only reshaping U.S. security tactics but also political policy that impacted the American people and world greatly.

It also spurred major division and debate, with many people disagreeing over what really happened, and for good reason. The facts don’t add up.

Within moments of the crashes, the media was already claiming that Osama Bin Laden had ordered the attacks and the word terrorist was used thousands of times over the next 24 hours. But as the weeks and months passed, it started to become clear that something wasn't quite right with the official story.

We can’t suggest terrorism at all doesn’t exist as I simply don’t believe that is true. But we must be more nuanced about what it means, how it happens and what might be driving it. For example, are terrorists a symptom of the US’ world policing and purposeful destabilization of other countries? Are they created and trained by the US and their allies in some cases?

These questions are becoming more persistent as time goes on and were a major focus of the International Conference on the New World Order, organized and sponsored by the Perdana Global Peace Foundation.

Below is a statement from that conference given by prominent author and Canadian economist Dr. Michel Chossudovsky, who is the University of Ottawa’s Emeritus Professor of Economics, which further emphasizes this viewpoint:

    The global war on terrorism is a US undertaking, which is fake, it’s based on fake premises. It tells us that somehow America and the Western world are going after a fictitious enemy, the Islamic state, when in fact the Islamic state is fully supported and financed by the Western military alliance and America’s allies in the Persian Gulf. . . . They say Muslims are terrorists, but it just so happens that terrorists are Made in America. They’re not the product of Muslim society, and that should be abundantly clear to everyone on this floor. . . . The global war on terrorism is a fabrication, a big lie and a crime against humanity. (source) (source)

From Chossudovsky’s perspective, the very fact that Western governments arm and support ‘terrorist’ efforts means the idea that all of their actions are happening from solely their own ideologies is false.

In the end, profit, control, and power grow during moments of crisis whether real or manipulated. We must consider that to powerful people, nothing to gain more power is off limits.