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Kurdish "Thank You" a Republican Stunt?
1.8.2006 |
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SAN FRANCISCO,
California, Jul 31 (IPS) - Kurdish officials toured
the United States last week to launch a massive
advertising and public relations campaign thanking
the United States for overthrowing Saddam Hussein
and urging U.S. companies to invest in the region.
The campaign looks suspicious to some observers,
however, since it is run by an A-list Republican
public relations firm which refuses to divulge how
much money it is spending.
"The Kurds of Northern Iraq just want to say 'thank
you for helping us win our freedom'," says the
voiceover in one of the commercials currently
showing nationally on the MSNBC and Fox television
channels and in Washington, DC, Portland, and the
San Francisco Bay area.
On the screen, Kurdish children wave U.S. flags.
"Thank you America," one says. "Thank you for
democracy," says another.
The ad campaign, as well as a U.S. tour by Kurdish
politician Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, was put together
by the California PR firm Russo, Marsh and Rogers.
In addition to representing the Kurdish government,
the firm founded the "Stop Michael Moore" campaign
to discredit the film "Fahrenheit 9/11" and a group
called "Move America Forward," which has brought
parents of dead U.S. soldiers to be
counter-protesters at peace demonstrations.
The firm has also brought right-wing talk show hosts
to Iraq on a "truth tour" to tell "the good news
that the old-line liberal news media won't tell you
about".
All were in attendance at the Kurdish government's
press conference in San Francisco with the head of
"Move America Forward," local radio talk show host
Melanie Morgan, serving as master of ceremonies.
"I believe the mission needs to be completed," Mark
Crowley told reporters at the event, sporting a
t-shirt with a U.S. Marine holding two machine guns
with a U.S. flag in the background. His son, Lance
Corporal Kyle Crowley, was killed in an ambush in
Iraq on Apr. 6, 2004. For the last year, Russo,
Marsh and Rogers has been flying Crowley around the
country as part of its "Move America Forward"
campaign.
Like other speakers at the press conference, he
didn't know much about the Kurds, but wanted to
support the war. "I believe the world is in trouble
and that those who would do harm to the innocent
will continue until they've wiped us off the
planet," he explained.
Another father of a fallen Marine, flown up from San
Diego for the event, started to cry as the
television cameras rolled. While he cried, talk show
host Melanie Morgan walked across the room, and
delivered a hug.
"We won't ever give up on the mission," she said.
""Your son did not die in vain."
Despite appearances, the head of Russo, Marsh and
Rogers, Sal Russo, maintains that the Kurd's media
campaign has nothing to do with "Move America
Forward" or any of his other work for Republican
clients or the Republican Party.
"There's not a relationship," he tells IPS. "Other
than we have a lot of clients and those are two of
them."
But some observers don't buy that assertion.
"What's going on here is that Russo, Marsh and
Rogers -- the PR firm that organised Move America
Forward and so-called media tours of Iraq to show
how smashingly well the war is going -- are engaged
in an illegal propaganda campaign aimed at
influencing the November (U.S. congressional)
elections," said John Stauber, co-director of the
Centre for Media and Democracy and co-author of the
book "Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of
Propoganda in Bush's War on Iraq".
Stauber believes the Kurdish government is using
U.S. government money to hire the Russo firm, which
is then using the money to lobby for a continuation
of the war. It's a case that is difficult to prove
since neither Russo nor the Kurdish government will
disclose where they got their money from or how much
they are spending.
"It's a very shadowy business," Stauber says of the
public relations industry. "They don't have to
disclose anything so we may never really know where
they got the money to run these campaigns."
If the allegations are true, it wouldn't be the
first such incident. In 1991, prior to the first
Gulf War, George Bush Sr. signed an executive order
directing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to
create the conditions for Saddam Hussein's removal.
So the CIA hired a public relations firm called the
Rendon Group to run an anti-Hussein propaganda
campaign.
As part of that campaign, the group founded the
Iraqi National Congress headed by exile Ahmed
Chalabi. Writing in the New Yorker magazine,
investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said the
Rendon Group paid "close to a hundred million
dollars" of CIA money to the INC.
Then, using U.S. tax dollars, Chalabi fabricated
evidence of weapons of mass destruction which George
W. Bush used to make the case for war in 2003.
IPS
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