The Burston Marsteller/Chalabi Connection (The Nation)

[bicentennial_baby]

With the invasion of Iraq still three years in the future, Ahmad Chalabi would step into the lobby of the modern granite office building at 1801 K Street in Washington--the heart of the nation's lobbying corridor. He would walk past the security guard and ride the elevator up to the ninth floor. The ride was, in some sense, one small vertical leg of Chalabi's journey back to Iraq. This particular way point was the office belonging to Black, Kelly, Scruggs & Healey (BKSH), one of the most powerful lobbying firms in the United States, owned by public relations powerhouse Burson-Marsteller.

No one could have guessed, back in 2000, what would come of Chalabi's efforts in Washington. Few people knew who "neoconservatives" were, and even those who did could not have grasped their remarkable affection for and loyalty to Chalabi, a shrewd Iraqi Arab from a family of Shiite bankers. No one could have predicted that Chalabi's group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), would go on to push false stories about terror and weapons of mass destruction with such great success as the group campaigned against Saddam Hussein's quite sadistic regime. Nor, certainly, was it possible to foresee that the massive propaganda campaign run by Chalabi to encourage the United States to invade Iraq would be fully paid for with US taxpayer funds.

One thing people did know, even in 2000, was that Ahmad Chalabi, whose thickly accented English seemed only to enhance his charisma, had lots and lots of friends on Capitol Hill. Congress had passed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, written largely to achieve Chalabi's vision for toppling Saddam. And every year Congress was earmarking money for him. But he had opponents, too, in the government: American diplomats who were skeptical of him, despite his charm and his claims of inside knowledge about Iraq. These Americans knew all about his murky past: a bank embezzlement conviction in absentia in the Kingdom of Jordan years earlier. They knew that the Central Intelligence Agency considered him a phony and a liability and, after working with him for years, had cut all ties with him.

So it is important, when considering Chalabi's relationship with BKSH, to ponder that this elite firm was hired in part as a result of a feud in the American government. It was in the late 1990s, when Congress was earmarking funds for Chalabi's INC and charging the State Department with spending all the cash, that State enlisted BKSH's services. The State Department diplomats, under veteran Frank Ricciardone, were among the skeptics on the subject of Ahmad Chalabi and were concerned about the accounting challenges posed by their obligation to dole out the earmarked funds. They figured that through BKSH, they could funnel support to the INC while complying with Congressional intentions and normal accounting procedures, and moreover that an American firm could be controlled and monitored and would have the expertise in PR and organizing that was necessary. They put a contract out for bid; PR giant Burson-Marsteller won the award and quickly handed the work over to its subsidiary BKSH.

More here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080421/roston

:puke:

[Zueda]

1. So this is why she voted for it!

[Catherina]

2. Another skeleton tumbles out of Hillary's closet

Bones are rattling all over the place now

[democrattotheend]

11. I thought she was fully vetted

[Catherina]

16. Hillary's so well vetted they NEED her to run. They spent 8 years

digging up dirt on her and then the skies opened up, celestial choirs started singing and the Gods throw them a curveball by sending Obama in.

I love it.

[Ilsa]

3. Ugh. I googled Burson-Marsteller and ended up reading a Dick Morris

column on FOX news online. No problem with "fair and balanced" there.

Too bad we can't just clear out the all of the consulting firms and lobbyists. Seems like they all get around to everyone eventually.

BTW, I am not a Hillary supporter.

[bicentennial_baby]

4. Oh, I agree with you...

100%

[Ilsa]

7. I think this is one big reason why so many intelligent

people stay away from following politics or even voting. They are so tired of all the muck, not just nasty campaigning, but money flying around companies who do nothing but try to persuafe us to their client's POV. I feel like taking a bath after reading any of this stuff. I've had to take periodic hiatus-es from political threads because of this. CNN's Blitzer, Morning Joe, Race for the Ehite House, all of those shows are dull and depressing.

[bicentennial_baby]

9. I know how you feel....I just subscribed to The Nation, and

this article was in my first issue. I was reading it before class and The Burston Marsteller thing just jumped out at me. I don't think this is what our Founding Fathers had in mind, oh so many years ago. It sucks. x(

[stillcool]

5. yuck...

DISBURSEMENTS BY PAYEE
HILLARY CLINTON FOR PRESIDENT
PO Box 101436
Arlington, Virginia 22210
FEC Committee ID #: C00431569
This report contains activity for a Primary Election
Report type: March Monthly
Filed 03/20/2008

Penn, Schoen & Berland Assoc. LLC 3,147,990.00

Colombia to honor Bill Clinton amid growing Democrat scrutiny
The Associated Press
Published: May 24, 2007

BOGOTA, Colombia: Colombia will honor former U.S. President Bill Clinton for his efforts to reverse the country's image for violence and drugs at a gala event next month in New York City.
-------------------------
Prominent Democrats on the guest list include former Clinton strategists Dick Morris and Vernon Jordan, former Clinton Cabinet members Lawrence Summers and Madeleine Albright, and several Democratic congressmen, Montoya said.

The Colombian government is trying to counter its negative image among Washington Democrats and secure congressional passage of a free trade agreement signed by Uribe and the Bush administration last year, a deal Uribe considers his biggest foreign policy achievement.

Colombia agreed this month to pay US$300,000 (€223,000) to public relations firm Burson-Marsteller to help "educate members of the U.S. Congress and other audiences" about the trade deal and secure continued funding for Plan Colombia, the U.S.-backed counter-narcotics program that has cost American taxpayers more than US$5 billion (€3.72 billion) since 2000.

And last month, Uribe's government put The Glover Park Group, a lobbying firm that includes former Clinton spokesman Joe Lockhart, on a US$40,000 (€29,744) a month retainer.

Montoya said the idea to honor Bill Clinton came last year, "before President Uribe was re-elected and all of Colombia thought the free trade agreement was a fact, not an issue."

"Clinton is Colombia's best tourism minister because everytime he opens his mouth to talk about the country he's helping to improve our country's image without even realizing it," she said.

Clinton was responsible for pushing Plan Colombia through Congress when he was president, and for years he said he wore a bracelet honoring a Colombian culture minister, Consuelo Araujo, who was kidnapped by leftist rebels and killed during a botched military rescue attempt shortly after they met at the White House in 2000.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/05/25/america/LA-GEN-Colombia-Clinton.php

[bicentennial_baby]

6. Pretty fugly, no?

x(

[1776Forever]

8. BKSH & Associates played big role in selling the war by promoting Chalabi

Our Man in Iraq: The Rise and Fall of Ahmed Chalabi

by Laura Miller

http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2004Q2/chalabi.html

Between 1999-2003, the INC retained PR giant Burson-Marsteller's Washington lobbying arm, BKSH & Associates. Despite restrictions on taxpayer money being spent on to influence public and Congressional opinion, K. Riva Levinson, a managing director at BKSH, did media work and lobbying for the group. According to Brooke, BKSH received $25,000 a month from the State Department.

Some would say the money was well spent. Burson-Marsteller and the INC won PR Week's 2003 public affairs division award for getting the INC's message out and building the its "profile with key political decision makers in the US, Europe and the Middle East. Of particular importance was positioning INC founder Dr Ahmad Chalabi and other Iraqi opposition spokespeople as authoritative political leaders. With teams working in Washington, New York, London and Europe, B-M compiled intelligence reports, defector briefings, conferences and seminars on the transition of Iraqi society post-Saddam," PR Week wrote.
Same Old Dog, Same Old Tricks

While Chalabi may have failed as an Iraqi opposition leader, he succeeded at spearheading a "sophisticated marketing operation" to topple Saddam. Brooke told the New Yorker, "This war would not have been fought if it had not been for Ahmad."

Brooke may not have been overstating the success of Chalabi. Without his neoconservative supporters in the Pentagon and White House, the INC and Chalabi would not have had an eager, war-hungry audience for the fruits of the group's Information Collection Program. Receiving $340,000 per month - first from the State Department, then from the Pentagon - until May 2004, the program was the source of much of the key intelligence used by the White House to make its case for the Iraq invasion.

The INC's influence, however, remained mostly below the radar until March 2004, when Democratic Senators John Kerry and Carl Levin requested the General Accounting Office investigate the group's use of State Department money between 2001 and 2002. The Senators were concerned about a June 2002 letter from the INC to the Senate Appropriations Committee that took credit for placing a 108 news stories based on information provided by the INC's Information Collection Program. "The assertions in the articles reinforced President Bush's claims that Saddam Hussein should be ousted because he was in league with Osama bin Laden, was developing nuclear weapons and was hiding biological and chemical weapons," Knight Ridder reported.

(snip)

"According to multiple sources, Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress sent a steady stream of misleading and often faked intelligence reports into U.S. intelligence channels," Dreyfuss and Vest wrote. Vincent Cannistraro called INC intelligence "propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice presidential speeches."

After the Iraq invasion, the DIA leaked a report that concluded that nearly all of the informants produced by the INC were worthless. Knight Ridder reported that Haideri had returned to Iraq with American officials after the invasion and was unable to locate any weapons production facilities.

Whether it was spoken or unspoken, Chalabi and Brookes came to understand the kind of intelligence their contacts in Washington wanted. "I'm a smart man," Brooke told the New Yorker. "I saw what they wanted, and I adapted my strategy. . . . I sent out an all-points bulletin to our network, saying, 'Look, guys, get me a terrorist, or someone who works with terrorists. And, if you can get stuff on WMD, send it!'"

The critical examinations of Chalabi and the INC come too late. What started out as covert propaganda operation, a decade later was still functioning as covert propaganda operation. The patronage, the agendas and the audiences may have changed, but the anti-Saddam message was the same and Ahmed Chalabi was there to get what he could from it.

....................

Sick to think a PR firm had influence in giving Chalabi and Brookes to start a war with Iraq.

[starroute]

10. Also a continuing role after the war began

BKSH worked with the Iraqi National Congress (Chalabi) before the war. (And Charlie Black also participated personally in the so-called "Rumsfeld Group," set up to sell the war.)

BKSH worked with Francis Brooke of the Rendon Group -- the principal Chalabi propaganda outlet -- in the spring of 2004 and with the Lincoln Group, which was issuing Iraq propaganda for the US, in 2005.

BKSH even lobbied directly for the Republic of Iraq in early 2006.

In addition, Burson-Marsteller's grassroots marketing arm, Direct Impact, represented a firm that produced an astroturf Iraq "good news" blog during the 2004 elections.

And the director of Burston-Marsteller's DC office is Robert Tappan, a former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs who was sent to Iraq during the first half of 2004 to serve as director of strategic communications for the Coalition Provisional Authority.

So it's not only propaganda all the way down, but pro-administration, pro-Iraq War propaganda at that -- much of it churned out during the first half of 2004, when the war was starting to spin out of control and the administration was busily inventing things like "Al Qaeda in Iraq" to cover the cracks.

If we're still having to beat our way through a false narrative about the war today, it's largely thanks to these guys.

[1776Forever]

14. I cannot believe how this was "sold" by so many - Bush, Cheney, Rummy now a PR Firm!

:argh:

[Shakespeare]

12. Thanks for posting this.

x(

It's an important article.

[bicentennial_baby]

15. You're welcome babe

I read it this morning before class and had to post it. Nasty stuff. x(

[newmajority]

13. Do Burson Marsteller have any clients who are NOT vile pieces of shit?

Geezus.... look at this list:

Ahmed Chalabi
Union Carbide
Blackwater
Phillip Morris
The Right Wing government of Colombia
Monsanto
Eli Lilly

and that's just a few of their "esteemed" clients. How does any "Democrat" associate herself with such shitbags?

:puke: