Pentagon paid UK firm £500m for cheap looking Al-Qaeda propaganda films
Al Qaeda have been a bit quiet of late. We used to see lots of their gurning loons on the TV news. Now nothing. Might this be down to the rise of Islamic State and the apparent fact that a lot of the stuff we watched was made in the Pentagon?
Sputnik News looks at a report by the grandiose Bureau of Investigative Journalism which says the Pentagon “paid at least $540 million to a UK public relations firm to produce fake Al-Qaeda videos as part of a clandestine propaganda campaign”.
The company that won this lucrative contract is Bell Pottinger, which “gave high-ranking military officials information on people who watched the fraudulent segments, which were made to look like insurgent videos and Arabic news programs”.
Got that? 12th Century Wolf, or whatever the big Qaeda film co. is called, made movies as honey traps for would-be enemies of the State. Pop one these films in a player and your details are sent to the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the CIA. (Anyone familiar with those old adverts for TV detector vans will think that’s getting off lightly.)
Crofton Black & Abigail Fielding-Smith of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism tell the Daily Beast:
In the first media interview any Bell Pottinger employee has given about the work for the U.S. military in Iraq, video editor Martin Wells told the Bureau his time in Camp Victory was “shocking, eye-opening, life-changing.”
The firm’s output was signed off by former General David Petraeus—then commander of the coalition forces in Iraq—and on occasion by the White House, he said…
There were three types of media operations commonly used in Iraq at the time, said a military contractor familiar with Bell Pottinger’s work there. “White is attributed, it says who produced it on the label,” the contractor said. “Grey is unattributed, and black is falsely attributed. These types of black ops, used for tracking who is watching a certain thing, were a pretty standard part of the industry toolkit.”
And the films?
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.
That’s £500m to make sub-standard YouTuber videos.
Ker-ching!
Posted: 4th, October 2016 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
