Our Own Joseph Goebbels

He has described himself as “an information warrior and a perception manager.” John Rendon currently runs the propaganda war for the Bush administration.

I found John Rendon by chance tonight when I came across “Rumsfeld’s Roadmap to Propaganda” on the website of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. The secret Roadmap was approved by Rumsfeld in October 2003 and obtained by the Archive on 26 January 2006 through the Freedom of Information Act.

The Information Operations Roadmap, “provides the Department with a plan to advance the goal of information operations as a core military competency.” The Roadmap emphasises the importance of psychological operations – “PSYOPS” in the lingo, which are “planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence the emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”

It is, in fact, against the law to target PSYOPS at US citizens, but it is being done – just another law being broken by the government in the post-9/11 free-for-all.

The Archive website cites publications that had referred to the Roadmap even before it was released under the Freedom of Information Act. One of those publications was Rolling Stone magazine, and so I read the article they had published in November 2005: “The Man Who Sold the War: Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war” by James Bamford.

John Rendon and his company, the Rendon Group, have been in the business of wars and clandestine operations for about 16 years. They get paid to do work which is too sketchy for the CIA and they get paid to disseminate false information. They are paid for most of their work by the US taxpayers, but they can hire themselves out to any government for propaganda purposes. In 1990, the government of Kuwait paid John Rendon $100,000 per month + expenses.

What the Kuwaitis wanted was help in selling a war of liberation to the American government -- and the American public. Rendon proposed a massive “perception management” campaign designed to convince the world of the need to join forces to rescue Kuwait.

Most of the Rolling Stone article deals with what John Rendon has been doing since 1990 in relation to Iraq. He was instrumental in creating the anti-Saddam Iraqi National Congress and installing Ahmad Chalabi as its leader. He has created news and twisted reality to serve the purposes of his masters. He “manages perceptions” and manipulates people’s thoughts; he is the Minister for Propaganda. He does all of this for money, and seemingly without a care for the consequences. Please read the article.

Rolling Stone – The Man Who Sold the War:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/8798997/the_man_who_sold_the_war/

Rumsfeld’s Roadmap to Propaganda:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB177/index.htm