Think Progress.org
The Kurdish public relations campaign thanking America for overthrowing Saddam Hussein is run by a top conservative public relations firm that also founded the “Stop Michael Moore” campaign and “Move America Forward,” which brought together parents of dead U.S. soldiers to be counter-protesters at peace demonstrations.
From their link:
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.
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