Are We Lovin' It Yet?
What foul beast gave birth to Ahmed Chalabi and the INR? Rolling Stone says that in some sort of horrible cross-pollination of Buck Turgidson and Jerry Della-Femina, it's a guy named John Rendon:
Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists. Two months before al-Haideri took the lie-detector test, the Pentagon had secretly awarded him a $16 million contract to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda. One of the most powerful people in Washington, Rendon is a leader in the strategic field known as "perception management," manipulating information -- and, by extension, the news media -- to achieve the desired result. His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help "create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power." Working under this extraordinary transfer of secret authority, Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name -- the Iraqi National Congress -- and served as their media guru and "senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam.You gotta read this. Truly, it makes Wag the Dog look like amateur night in Dixieland. And it only gets better:
The INC's choice for the worldwide print exclusive was equally easy: Chalabi contacted Judith Miller of The New York Times. Miller, who was close to I. Lewis Libby and other neoconservatives in the Bush administration, had been a trusted outlet for the INC's anti-Saddam propaganda for years. Not long after the CIA polygraph expert slipped the straps and electrodes off al-Haideri and declared him a liar, Miller flew to Bangkok to interview him under the watchful supervision of his INC handlers. Miller later made perfunctory calls to the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, but despite her vaunted intelligence sources, she claimed not to know about the results of al-Haideri's lie-detector test. Instead, she reported that unnamed "government experts" called his information "reliable and significant" -- thus adding a veneer of truth to the lies.My but doesn't she just keep turning up like the original bad penny?
One would think that if this country had a responsible Congress with some notion of oversight more than just providing a warm place for Jean Schmidt to forget to take her thorazine at, somebody might be looking into this.
One would think, anyway.
posted by Jane Hamsher @ 11/18/2005 05:01:00 PM
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