
Pentagon Paid British PR Firm $500mm to Create Fake Al Qaeda Propaganda Videos - kyleblarson
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2016/10/02/fake-news-and-false-flags-how-the-pentagon-paid-a-british-pr-firm-500m-for-top-secret-iraq-propaganda/
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darawk
I don't understand how you can spend 500 million dollars on this. How is that
even possible? 500 million dollars is an _enormous_ amount of money. You could
make 2-5 large budget, full length hollywood movies for that price. Complete
with multi-million dollar budgets for A-list celebrities and high quality
special effects.

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sfeng
Assuming you're paying people 60k a year, 500 million dollars buys you full-
time employment for over eight thousand people for a year. Unless the
deliverable was two thousand well produced videos, I have to agree.

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finid
I find it interesting that the few comments o here seem to be more about the
money spent than in the goals and objectives of the program.

When next you see a report of a terrorist video, did it really come from them
or from your favorite govt agency?

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M_Grey
It would appear to be $500+ million wasted, fairly typically, by the Pentagon
brass.

>Segell maintains that information operations programmes did make a difference
on the ground in Iraq. Some experts question this however. A 2015 study by the
Rand Corporation, a military think tank, concluded that “generating
assessments of efforts to inform, influence, and persuade has proven to be
challenging across the government and DoD.”

What the hell though, what's half a billion dollars for something that can't
even demonstrate efficacy?

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theandrewbailey
> It would appear to be $500+ million wasted, fairly typically, by the
> Pentagon brass.

The DoD was chewing through an average of $1 billion a day for about 2 years
during the height of the Iraq war. It would be a stretch to say that it was
all used to the best efficiency.

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JoeAltmaier
Something like 40% was for fuel. For generators. To air-condition tents.

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M_Grey
I think before anyone from the Pentagon is allowed to even think about
invading a desert again, we have to make them read the entire Dune saga. I
realize only the first one matters in this case, the rest is for punishment.

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dragonwriter
> I think before anyone from the Pentagon is allowed to even think about
> invading a desert again, we have to make them read the entire Dune saga. I
> realize only the first one matters in this case, the rest is for punishment.

AFAICT, the people "from the Pentagon" (and particularly, the career military
types, including the senior uniformed leadership) were generally very well
locked into what the issues were; the political leadership (much of it outside
the Pentagon) far less so.

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M_Grey
The choice to invade, sure, the choice to waste a billion a day? Not so much.

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JoeAltmaier
Apparently if you build permanent buildings in another country, its
politically very different than if they let you camp there. So we camped.

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M_Grey
Yeah, because we were so concerned about international opinion that one
time...

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finid
_If they’re raiding a house and they’re going to make a mess of it looking for
stuff anyway, they’d just drop an odd CD there._

So that explains how they always seem to find computers with evidence of
terrorist activities. Likely also how they found stuff at Osama bin Laden's
place; how they found passport of a terrorist who was in a plane that flew
into the World Trade Center building; or the one that crashed in PA.

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singularity2001
If this turned out to be true, wouldn't that shine a disastrous light on the
war and propaganda machine?

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kristianp
500 millimetre dollars? Interesting unit of measure. Is it a bit like torque?

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dnadler
That's a common abbreviation for 'million'.

