I’ve thrown my hands up in the air so much I can’t get my stories typed, and my jaw is so sore from hittin’ the table I need to eat with a straw … so now I’ll try knitting my brow. Over this. From our eagle-eyed pals at PR Watch:
My Country Was Invaded and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt
“The U.S. Special Operations Command has hired three firms to produce newspaper stories, television broadcasts and Web sites to spread American propaganda overseas.” The contract may run $100 million over the next five years. The work was likely outsourced because there are “only one active-duty and two reserve psyops units remaining” in the U.S. military. The lucky firms are … plus, a POLL BELOW …
The lucky firms are Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), SYColeman and Lincoln Group. SAIC previously ran the Iraqi Media Network, but “was criticized for problems and exorbitant costs.” SYColeman “created the Army’s Web site honoring the only Medal of Honor winner so far from the Iraq war.” Lincoln Group, formerly known as Iraqex, has done PR work for the Multi-National Corps-Iraq. The firms will produce “print articles, video and audio broadcasts, Internet sites and novelty items, like T-shirts and bumper stickers, for foreign audiences. Video products will include newscasts, hour-long TV shows and commercials.”
Copping, who’s copping?
Chocolate and alchohol, not necessarily in that order.
Definitely not together. Well, it depends …
A dark nut-brown English ale, with a hint of ginger (home-brewed, of course), and a 250gr block of Cadbury’s OLD GOLD dark chocolate, makes a fine meal.
Dark Side of the Moon Ginger Ale
For 6 gallons (22.7 litres)
1.5kg Coopers Premium Amber Malt Extract syrup
1.5kg Coopers Premium Dark Malt Extract syrup
1kg Dark Dry Malt Extract
250g Crystal Malt
120g Black Patent Malt
200g Grated Ginger Root
70g Fuggles Hops (boiling): 10 HBU
15g Fuggles Hops (finishing)
1pkg Safale S-04 (7g)
1 cup Dextrose for bottling
OG: 1.066 (9.5%)
FG: 1.015 (2%)
Alcohol: 7%
Add cracked Crystal and Black Patent malts to 6 litres water and bring to a boil. When boiling commences, remove grain. Add malt extracts, boiling hops, and ginger and boil for 45-60 minutes. During the final 5-10 minutes of the boil add finishing hops. Sparge, and pitch yeast when cool.
Comments: Excellent taste, very gingery.
I did a porter once with ginger and chocolate, and it turned out quite nicely.
I’ll give your recipe a turn as I move towards brewing my winter beers…
Relax. Enjoy yourself. Have a homebrew.
a nice colheita port and a bag full of Joseph Schmidt truffles goes a long way.
and/or if you are not dyslexic.
My own dyslexia gets worse under greater stress. 😀
So the above should actually read.
Coinpg, hoos coipng?
I know that word gets tossed around a lot, especially with the present group of thugs in power. But still. Why does this department of the Armed Services that we pay for, that employs 49,000 people, need to hire other people to do their work? Why does there even need to be such a “Command”? Couldn’t they spend the $100 million on the body armor.
Susan, I read about this the other day in the Times Dispatch article entitled, Psychological warfare effort to be outsourced.
Some choice bits from the article include:
The height of arrogance. I think Americans should be pretty concerned with the content these messages contain. I mean, this is how the rest of the world will view your country.
More:
As long as it doesn’t contaminate the homeland, can it be used?
And then this:
Now I’m not sure what kind of choice that leaves us with: guns and bullets or mass deception?
::hysterical laugh/sob::
And the finale:
How the hell do we even know what is real anymore?!?!
Olivia, you’ve got some great material there. Do a diary! I think we’d all be interested.
“Blowback” at the Whiskey Bar
has a good page on Lincoln Group.
which is a partner of PRWatch … what a great bunch they are.
is that propaganda has worked so very, very well at home (and very cost effectively at that – with the MSM footing most of the bill), that all the US has to do to forward it’s agenda in Iraq is to tell the Iraqis what to think.
The “slight” discrepancy between Iraq and the US being that it’s hard to keep your head in the sand when it’s being regularly bombed.
American propaganda took a quantum leap under Reagan. Outsourcing psy-ops has been a constant ever since. The line on the Smith-Mundt Act against fleecing the American mind is now a joke with modern communication.
Much worse are clandestine psy-ops apparently run through groups or people in think tanks and press agencies. The heavy handed promotion of the Iraqi menace came out of London. That’s INC, ladeling the bull to European reporters so the States would pick it up, a tried and true mechanism.
Then there are the false Niger docs.
I’ld suggest “Warriors of Disinformation” by Alvin A. Snyder. An Insider’s Account.
…then you know something fishy is going on.
I had my own encounter with these folks 10 years ago, in the context of a subcontract to their boondogle of an information system they wrote for the hospitals within the DoD (Walter Reed, Bethesda Naval, etc.)
The FY94 DoD authorization specifically identified $10M as the sum to be spent for commercial, off-the-shelf software (COTS – a direct response to the kind of never-complete custom jobs that SAIC was known for) for departments of pathology.
I won the subcontract for my company, and it was a fun beltway world experience.
But long story short – SAIC siphoned off $8.5M of the authorization. We got $1.5 for actually supplying the product.
When I told my beltway buddy, who was a real mentor to me, he just laughed. “Hey, be glad they only took 85% of the appropriation. They’re sure not happy that they got less than 100% of it.”
It was a small lesson, to be sure, but it told me that all of these bandits feel entitled to any money that is to be made from the feds.
So don’t say that Bush isn’t making an effort to get those unemployment numbers down.
or you could say
$100 million to produce bullshit!?
Coping mechanism: watching good movies. Life as a movie is stranger than fiction.
Let’s see now…in this order, my reactions are:
be a profit center?