05-10-2016, 04:34 PM
Pentagon Paid British PR Firm $500mm To Create Fake Al Qaeda Propaganda Videos - by Tyler Durden - Oct 3, 2016 - http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-03...nda-videos
Per new discoveries revealed by the The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the United States government paid over $500mm to a British public relations firm,Bell Pottinger, between May 2007 and December 2011 to create fake Al Qaeda propaganda films aimed at tracking terrorist viewing locations. According to a Bell Pottinger insider, propaganda films were categorized into three categories with "White" being accurately attributed, "Grey" being unattributed, and "Black" being falsely attributed material. The media firm created various types ofcontent ranging from TV commercials to news items and "fake Al Qaeda propaganda films."
The work consisted of three types of products. The first was television commercials portraying al Qaeda in a negative light. The second was news items which were made to look as if they had been "created by Arabic TV," Wells said. Bell Pottinger would send teams out to film low-definition video of al Qaeda bombings and then edit it like a piece of news footage. It would be voiced in Arabic and distributed to TV stations across the region, according to Wells.
The third and most sensitive program described by Wells was theproduction of fake al Qaeda propaganda films. He told the Bureau how the videos were made. He was given precise instructions: "We need to make this style of video and we've got to use al Qaeda's footage," he was told. "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."
The "Black" propaganda videos included tracking software linked to a Google Analytics account so U.S. military officials could track the location of people watching the content around the globe. The content was distributed by U.S. marines who would drop the videos at various locations during patrols. The whole process was described by one Bell Pottinger employee as a "pretty standard part of the industry toolkit."
U.S. marines would take the CDs on patrol and drop them in the chaos when they raided targets. Wells said: "If they're raiding a house and they're going to make a mess of it looking for stuff anyway, they'd just drop an odd CD there."
The CDs were set up to use Real Player, a popular media streaming application which connects to the internet to run. Wells explained how the team embedded a code into the CDs which linked to a Google Analytics account, giving a list of IP addresses where the CDs had been played.
The tracking account had a very restricted circulation list, according to Wells: The data went to him, a senior member of the Bell Pottinger management team, and one of the U.S. military commanders.
Wells explained their intelligence value. "If one is looked at in the middle of Baghdad… you know there's a hit there," he said. "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."
https://vimeo.com/183694713
Bell Pottinger's work in Iraq was a huge media operation costing roughly $100mm per year and employing almost 300 British and Iraqi staff. The agency's staff worked alongside high-ranking U.S. military officers in their Baghdad Camp Victory headquarters.
The Bureau's investigation identified transactions totaling $540 million between the Pentagon and Bell Pottinger for information operations and psychological operations on a series of contracts issued from May 2007 to December 2011. That said, the bulk of the money was used for production and distribution costs with Bell Pottinger pocketing about £15m a year in fees.
According to video editor Martin Wells, who worked on the project at Camp Victory in Iraq, the production materials from Bell Pottinger were signed off by very high-ranking U.S. military officials, including General Petraeus, and sometimes were even escalated to the White House for approval.
Bell Pottinger's output was signed off by the commander of coalition forces in Iraq. Wells recalled: "We'd get the two colonels in to look at the things we'd done that day, they'd be fine with it, it would then go to General Petraeus."
Some of the projects went even higher up the chain of command. "If [Petraeus] couldn't sign off on it, it would go on up the line to the White House, and it was signed off up there, and the answer would come back down the line."
Seems that reality is even more interesting than any fiction that Hollywood can conjure up.
ENDE
· The 'Psychological operations' campaign was funded by American military
· Covert operation operated out of an office in Baghdad from 2007-2011
· Staff allegedly distributed al-Qaeda videos that could track viewers
· Bell Pottinger was set up by Margaret Thatcher's PR guru Lord Bell in 1989
By AMIE GORDON FOR MAILONLINE - PUBLISHED: 19:17, 2 October 2016 | UPDATED: 22:35, 2 October 2016
A London-based PR firm carried out a $540m covert 'propaganda' operation from an office in Iraq, it has been revealed.
Bell Pottinger, the firm set up by Margaret Thatcher's PR guru Lord Bell in 1989, set up a base in Camp Victory in Baghdad, in what is believed to be one of the most-costly PR contracts in history.
From here, nearly 300 staff operated a top-secret 'Psychological operations' task force, which included writing soap operas and allegedly distributing fake al-Qaeda videos which were used to track the people watching them.
An investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed the details of the multi-million pound operation.
Bell Pottinger is understood to have been funded some $540million from the US Department of Defence (DoD) for five contracts from May 2007 to December 2011, according to the Times and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism
Lord Tim Bell, the former spin doctor to Margaret Thatcher, confirmed Bell Pottinger reported to the Pentagon, the CIA and the National Security Council on its work in Iraq.
Lord Bell, who resigned as chairman of the firm this year, told The Sunday Times: 'It was a covert military operation.
'It was covered by various secrecy documents. We were very proud of it.'
The firm is thought to have employed around 300 staff at the heigh of its operation.
Costs were spent on production and distribution, however the company is thought to have made around £15million a year in fees.
Former video editor Martin Wells, 52, from Bath, had been hired by the PR firm and sent to Baghdad to work in the conflict resolution division of Bell Pottinger - but he had no idea what he was getting into.
Speaking to the Times, he described his time at Camp Victory as 'shocking, eye-opening and life-changing.'
He claimed his team was tasked with producing fake al-Qaeda propaganda films, which, when played, would relay the viewers' IP address back to a secure military site.
This could then be used to track potential terrorists.
With work including scripting Arabic soap operas and putting together news bulletins for local stations, Bell Pottinger's initial work had been the high-profile 'promotion of democratic elections'.
It then, reports the Times, 'became engaged in a wider and secret propaganda programme to promote the US agenda covertly across the media'.
A US defence official told The Sunday Times that the work carried out by Bell Pottinger in Iraq included information operations - or psychological operations - in order to protect coalition forces and Iraqi people from terrorist attacks, while helping to support the security services.
Read more:
· Fake News and False Flags
· Soap operas and fakery: selling peace in Iraq | News | The Times & The Sunday Times
Per new discoveries revealed by the The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the United States government paid over $500mm to a British public relations firm,Bell Pottinger, between May 2007 and December 2011 to create fake Al Qaeda propaganda films aimed at tracking terrorist viewing locations. According to a Bell Pottinger insider, propaganda films were categorized into three categories with "White" being accurately attributed, "Grey" being unattributed, and "Black" being falsely attributed material. The media firm created various types ofcontent ranging from TV commercials to news items and "fake Al Qaeda propaganda films."
The work consisted of three types of products. The first was television commercials portraying al Qaeda in a negative light. The second was news items which were made to look as if they had been "created by Arabic TV," Wells said. Bell Pottinger would send teams out to film low-definition video of al Qaeda bombings and then edit it like a piece of news footage. It would be voiced in Arabic and distributed to TV stations across the region, according to Wells.
The third and most sensitive program described by Wells was theproduction of fake al Qaeda propaganda films. He told the Bureau how the videos were made. He was given precise instructions: "We need to make this style of video and we've got to use al Qaeda's footage," he was told. "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."
The "Black" propaganda videos included tracking software linked to a Google Analytics account so U.S. military officials could track the location of people watching the content around the globe. The content was distributed by U.S. marines who would drop the videos at various locations during patrols. The whole process was described by one Bell Pottinger employee as a "pretty standard part of the industry toolkit."
U.S. marines would take the CDs on patrol and drop them in the chaos when they raided targets. Wells said: "If they're raiding a house and they're going to make a mess of it looking for stuff anyway, they'd just drop an odd CD there."
The CDs were set up to use Real Player, a popular media streaming application which connects to the internet to run. Wells explained how the team embedded a code into the CDs which linked to a Google Analytics account, giving a list of IP addresses where the CDs had been played.
The tracking account had a very restricted circulation list, according to Wells: The data went to him, a senior member of the Bell Pottinger management team, and one of the U.S. military commanders.
Wells explained their intelligence value. "If one is looked at in the middle of Baghdad… you know there's a hit there," he said. "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."
https://vimeo.com/183694713
Bell Pottinger's work in Iraq was a huge media operation costing roughly $100mm per year and employing almost 300 British and Iraqi staff. The agency's staff worked alongside high-ranking U.S. military officers in their Baghdad Camp Victory headquarters.
The Bureau's investigation identified transactions totaling $540 million between the Pentagon and Bell Pottinger for information operations and psychological operations on a series of contracts issued from May 2007 to December 2011. That said, the bulk of the money was used for production and distribution costs with Bell Pottinger pocketing about £15m a year in fees.
According to video editor Martin Wells, who worked on the project at Camp Victory in Iraq, the production materials from Bell Pottinger were signed off by very high-ranking U.S. military officials, including General Petraeus, and sometimes were even escalated to the White House for approval.
Bell Pottinger's output was signed off by the commander of coalition forces in Iraq. Wells recalled: "We'd get the two colonels in to look at the things we'd done that day, they'd be fine with it, it would then go to General Petraeus."
Some of the projects went even higher up the chain of command. "If [Petraeus] couldn't sign off on it, it would go on up the line to the White House, and it was signed off up there, and the answer would come back down the line."
Seems that reality is even more interesting than any fiction that Hollywood can conjure up.
ENDE
PR firm set up by Margaret Thatcher's spin doctor ran a 'top-secret' £416m propaganda operation during Iraq war writing soap operas and tracking al-Qaeda terrorists using fake jihad films - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...films.html
· UK PR firm Bell Pottinger ran a top-secret propaganda programme in Iraq· The 'Psychological operations' campaign was funded by American military
· Covert operation operated out of an office in Baghdad from 2007-2011
· Staff allegedly distributed al-Qaeda videos that could track viewers
· Bell Pottinger was set up by Margaret Thatcher's PR guru Lord Bell in 1989
By AMIE GORDON FOR MAILONLINE - PUBLISHED: 19:17, 2 October 2016 | UPDATED: 22:35, 2 October 2016
A London-based PR firm carried out a $540m covert 'propaganda' operation from an office in Iraq, it has been revealed.
Bell Pottinger, the firm set up by Margaret Thatcher's PR guru Lord Bell in 1989, set up a base in Camp Victory in Baghdad, in what is believed to be one of the most-costly PR contracts in history.
From here, nearly 300 staff operated a top-secret 'Psychological operations' task force, which included writing soap operas and allegedly distributing fake al-Qaeda videos which were used to track the people watching them.
An investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed the details of the multi-million pound operation.
Bell Pottinger is understood to have been funded some $540million from the US Department of Defence (DoD) for five contracts from May 2007 to December 2011, according to the Times and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism
Lord Tim Bell, the former spin doctor to Margaret Thatcher, confirmed Bell Pottinger reported to the Pentagon, the CIA and the National Security Council on its work in Iraq.
Lord Bell, who resigned as chairman of the firm this year, told The Sunday Times: 'It was a covert military operation.
'It was covered by various secrecy documents. We were very proud of it.'
The firm is thought to have employed around 300 staff at the heigh of its operation.
Costs were spent on production and distribution, however the company is thought to have made around £15million a year in fees.
Former video editor Martin Wells, 52, from Bath, had been hired by the PR firm and sent to Baghdad to work in the conflict resolution division of Bell Pottinger - but he had no idea what he was getting into.
Speaking to the Times, he described his time at Camp Victory as 'shocking, eye-opening and life-changing.'
He claimed his team was tasked with producing fake al-Qaeda propaganda films, which, when played, would relay the viewers' IP address back to a secure military site.
This could then be used to track potential terrorists.
With work including scripting Arabic soap operas and putting together news bulletins for local stations, Bell Pottinger's initial work had been the high-profile 'promotion of democratic elections'.
It then, reports the Times, 'became engaged in a wider and secret propaganda programme to promote the US agenda covertly across the media'.
A US defence official told The Sunday Times that the work carried out by Bell Pottinger in Iraq included information operations - or psychological operations - in order to protect coalition forces and Iraqi people from terrorist attacks, while helping to support the security services.
Read more:
· Fake News and False Flags
· Soap operas and fakery: selling peace in Iraq | News | The Times & The Sunday Times
Martin Luther King - "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
Albert Camus - "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion".
Douglas MacArthur — "Whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword obviously never encountered automatic weapons."
Albert Camus - "Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear."
Albert Camus - "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion".
Douglas MacArthur — "Whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword obviously never encountered automatic weapons."
Albert Camus - "Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear."