Nart Villeneuve

AP reports:

The U.S. command in Baghdad is seeking bidders for a two-year, $20 million public relations contract that calls for monitoring the tone of Iraq news stories filed by U.S. and foreign media…

The military last year was criticized for a public relations program in Iraq that included hiring a consulting firm that paid Iraqi news media to carry news stories written by American troops.

Pentagon officials have defended the program as a necessary tool in the war on terror. But critics have said it contradicts American values of freedom of the press.

A related article in Rolling Stone details Rendon’s involvement in similar info-ops:

According to the Pentagon documents, the Rendon Group played a major role in the IOTF. The company was charged with creating an “Information War Room” to monitor worldwide news reports at lightning speed and respond almost instantly with counterpropaganda.

Bomb’s couldn’t take out Al-Manar, so Israel hacked their signal.

In the middle of newscasts and programming from Hezbollah’s Al-Manar station, Israeli technicians are hacking the signal and replacing it with a 90-second spot that begins with a gun site superimposed on a crude drawing of Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, looking at the ground.

The image is punctuated by the sound of three gunshots and framed on the top with the words, “Your day is coming, coming, coming.” On the bottom of the image of Sheik Nasrallah are the words: “The state of Israel.” For the next 90 seconds, the message is clear: Give up. Resistance is futile.

More from Zone-H.

And the defacement war has also been underway.

AP reports:

The government concluded its “Cyber Storm” wargame Friday, its biggest-ever exercise to test how it would respond to devastating attacks over the Internet from anti-globalization activists, underground hackers and bloggers.

mock cyberterrorism = “no impact on the real Internet”. :)

Oh, and the Internet “survived”.

Information Warfare is certainly not a recent phenomenon. InfoWar-Monitor’s timeline shows the evolution of the doctrine over time. The use of such tactics as psychological warfare operations , or PSYOPS, in the context of the war in Iraq is also not new. About a year ago the U.S. military used CNN to execute such an operation in the lead up to the assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah.

Now, new stories are emerging about the fact that U.S. Military’s Information Operations Task Force is writing propaganda that is laundered through a defense contractor, Lincoln Group, and placed in Iraqi newspapers. The L.A. Times reported that the U.S. Military is actually paying newspapers to run the stories blurring the lines between a free press and information operations:

The arrangement with Lincoln Group is evidence of how far the Pentagon has moved to blur the traditional boundaries between military public affairs — the dissemination of factual information to the media — and psychological and information operations, which use propaganda and sometimes misleading information to advance the objectives of a military campaign.

The L.A. Times further reveals that:

…as part of a psychological operations campaign that has intensified over the last year, the task force also had purchased an Iraqi newspaper and taken control of a radio station, and was using them to channel pro-American messages to the Iraqi public. Neither is identified as a military mouthpiece.

The New York Times reports that these practices are even more wide spread extending in several Arab countries as well as Afghanistan. The New York Times reports that The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) does not locally disclose its ivolvemnt with media in Afghanistan:

Similarly, AID does not locally disclose that dozens of Afghanistan radio stations get its support, through grants to a London-based nonprofit group, Internews. (AID discloses its support in public documents in Washington, most of which can be found globally on the Internet.)

USAID explains the that reason for the lack of disclosure is “to maintain the perception (if not the reality) that these radio stations are in fact fully independent.”

* The New York Times also reports that there was a plan by the Lincoln Group to create a publication based on The Onion that was rejected :)