Information War, Cont'd. The Rendon Group issues a very interesting denial to the Bamford Rolling Stone story. I am most intrigued by bullet point two:

... Mr. Bamford incorrectly writes that TRG worked for the controversial Defense Department Office of Strategic Influence. The former director of that office himself has publicly confirmed in the Chicago Tribune that the Rendon Group had nothing to do with the Office of Strategic Influence as Mr. Bamford falsely asserts. ...

In fact, if you read that bolded line closely, you'll see, this is not a denial at all. It is a statement that someone else has issued a denial. (Hey, Rendon doesn't get paid $300 an hour for nothing). It's also worth noting that that someone else who issued a denial, Douglas Feith, no longer works at the Pentagon and his office's activities are now the subject of a DoD Inspector General investigation.

In any case, on the heart of the matter, some of us have been told quite differently. This story is just waiting to come out, not only about Rendon's role in the renamed successor to the Office of Strategic Influence, but the fact that the propaganda project was not shut down for months after lawmakers demanded it be, but just went underground in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Here's the story. Thanks to a mis-sent email by a Rendon Group contractor working on the underground propaganda successor OSI project from the Pentagon basement to "all", there are a lot of people at the Pentagon who know about this. As I was told, Rendon was secretly working on the successor to OSI for months. The project was not shut down but just moved underground, under contract from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Then one day, one of those Rendon contractors accidentally sent an email to practically the whole building that revealed what they were up to, and the project was no longer tenable. And since a lot of the Rendon employees working on this propaganda project were contractors, I was told, they were pretty much all canned on their behind the next day, no benefits.

I hope some Pentagon reporter is on this. So the information war continued (continues?), it would seem. Who's the target? Which is exactly what Congress was worried about when it tried to shut down the propaganda project the first time.

(Thx to Praktike for the heads up to the denial).

Update: Rumsfeld's statement on this November 18, 2002 admitting as much that the Strategic of Influence only lost its name is interesting too:

... [Rumsfeld]: And then there was the office of strategic influence. You may recall that. And "oh my goodness gracious isn't that terrible, Henny Penny the sky is going to fall." I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing fine I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have.

That was intended to be done by that office is being done by that office, NOT by that office in other ways. ...

Doesn't exactly sound like a denial, does it?

Posted by Laura at November 19, 2005 01:29 PM