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October 3, 2016

Report: Pentagon Paid PR Firm for Phony al-Qaeda Videos in Iraq
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And a new report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism says the
Pentagon gave the controversial U.K. PR firm Bell Pottinger over a
half-billion dollars to run a top-secret propaganda program in Iraq.
Former Bell Pottinger video editor Martin Wells says the company would
produce phony al-Qaeda videos, and then U.S. marines would plant the
videos on compact discs during house raids, and anyone watching the
videos later would have their IP address logged and their location
recorded. Wells says Bell Pottinger employees also produced fake TV news
reports that were designed to look as though they were made by Arab
reporters rather than by a British PR firm.

Martin Wells: "The kind of stories: A bomb would go off. A car bomb
would go off. People would die. We would have people out there filming
it. It would come back. We would then edit it into stories that would
then go out on various channels within the region. And we were to make
it, as best we could, look as if it was made locally, which it is shot
locally and is edited locally. It was more to make it look like it was
Arabic."

Wells said his Bell Pottinger's content was signed off on by David
Petraeus, then commander of the coalition forces in Iraq, and
occasionally by the White House.


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