[Media-watch] Information Warriors [Rendon Group] - CorpWatch - 4/08/2004

[Julie-ann Davies]

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11486



Information Warriors

Rendon Group Wins Hearts and Minds in Business, Politics and War

by Pratap Chatterjee, Special to Corpwatch
August 4th, 2004

A spectacular fireworks display lit up the night over the Boston harbor on
the eve of the Democratic National Convention, while a crowd of well-dressed
politicians, corporate executives and their friends watched from a private
party at a waterfront restaurant named Tia's.

Rick Rendon, the man in charge of the party, chatted casually with his
clients: the Time Warner executives, including chairman Richard Parsons, who
paid him to stage the event in honor of a powerful Congresswoman from
California: Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader.

Eight hours later, there would be another test of Rendon's
technology-enhanced information management abilities: a live video
conference between 56 Democratic party convention delegations scattered all
over town in 23 locations. "This is important because the Democratic Party
wants to deliver a consistent message from all of its delegates,
particularly when they are interviewed by the media," Rick Rendon,
co-founder and senior partner with the Rendon Group told Information Week.

Perception Management
For the Rendon Group, whose motto is: "information as an element of power,"
the event was just another contract in the field of "perception management"
that the consulting firm provides for clients that include Massachusetts
government agencies, multinational corporate executives, the Democratic
party, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) offices in the
Pentagon, and the Colombian military regime. Services range from creating "a
favorable environment before privatization begins" to helping justify war.

The company, which has offices in Boston and Washington DC, is run by four
senior staff: Rick Rendon, his brother John Rendon, his sister-in-law Sandra
Libby and David Perkins, who formerly worked for the Pentagon.

Rick Rendon's career with the Democratic party dates back at least 24 years
to the 1980 New York convention where his job was keeping track of
delegates. His brother John was executive director and national political
director of the Democratic National Committee. When Jimmy Carter lost the
election to Ronald Reagan, the Rendons set up shop as political consultants.

Almost a quarter century after the New York convention, the two brothers are
still closely linked business and political partners. Like the Rendon
Group's presence on the web, which features two completely different
websites, one domestic and one international, John and Rick appear to work
in two distinct orbits, Boston and Washington. John circles the world
selling war strategies while Rick stays at home selling peace, making
corporate videos and staging events for clients. But the company is in fact
one entity and a careful study suggests that perhaps their neat division is
another case of perception management.

Empowering War
When Reagan won the election, kicking off 12 years of Republican presidents,
the Rendons' consulting practice became more wide-ranging, John Rendon
started doing contract work for the military. During the invasion of Panama
in 1989, he helped direct the information war from a downtown Panama city
high-rise. For the first Gulf war in 1991, his staff worked out of Taif,
Saudi Arabia. For the Afghan war, he took part in a 9:30 a.m. conference
call every morning with top-level Pentagon officials to determine the day's
war message.

One of his most famous messages, planted with the assistance of the Hill &
Knowlton PR firm, was staged during the run up to the 1991 Gulf War. On
October 10, 1990, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus held a hearing on
Capitol Hill. California Democrat Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican John
Porter introduced a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah. Weeping and
shaking, the girl described a horrifying scene in Kuwait City. "I
volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," she testified. "While I was there I
saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns and go into the room
where babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators,
took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die."

Seven pro-war senators brought up the baby-incubator allegations to argue
for an invasion of Iraq, leading to a narrow five-vote win. Later it was
discovered that the Nayirah was a member of the Kuwaiti royal family,
daughter of the ambassador to the United States and that the incubator
incident was fabricated.

Another media triumph Rendon brags about was the manipulation of media
during the actual conflict. "If any of you either participated in the
liberation of Kuwait City ... or if you watched it on television, you would
have seen hundreds of Kuwaitis waving small American flags. Did you ever
stop to wonder how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for
seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American flags?
And for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries? Well, you now
know the answer. That was one of my jobs," he told a National Security
Conference in 1998.

Shortly after the September 11 attacks on Wall Street and Washington, the
Pentagon gave Rendon a $100,000-a-month contract to track anti-U.S. foreign
news reports, offer advice on media strategy and plant pro-U.S. stories in
web, print and television. In 2002 when the Pentagon tried to create the
Office of Strategic Influence to spread misleading stories in foreign
countries, Rendon was the contractor they had in mind. President Bush
ultimately disappeared the Office after a storm of protest from the media
and the public at large, but in retrospect one wonders if the administration
simply renamed the project.

Receiving the Message
A year ago John Rendon was invited to give a talk in London at King's
College, London, to a conference of military officials on "how best to use
military information operations capability, educating politicians and
analysts and selling the case for action at home and abroad."

"I believe that Operation Iraqi Freedom provided for all of us a ringside
seat for a clash of cultures of communication. If you watched US or Western
media you saw the war portrayed one way. If you watched or listened to war
news in the Arab media, you accepted delivery of a different set of news and
information," he said, according to a copy of his talk, obtained by
Corpwatch.

"Elsewhere, coverage provided citizens a combination of viewpoints. In
Indonesia for example, home to the world's largest Muslim population,
television viewers were able to choose between CNN International, BBC World,
and by late March, Al-Jazeera ... Which network do you think was most
watched? Al-Jazeera, of course."

"This brings me to the first critical lesson to be learned. We must do a
better job of increasing our message population ... in an array of
international languages ... and with the cultural context necessary to
ensure the message is received and not just sent."

Empowering Peace
While his brother worked at the helm of "information operations" selling
war, Rick Rendon was handling the PR for the post 9-11 United We Stand
education campaign in Massachusetts which, according to the Rendon Group's
web site, "helped to create a visible sign of hope a 'larger than life'
American flag, measuring 65-by-120-feet and made up of approximately 40,000
individual pieces of six-by-six-inch fabric inscribed with students'
messages of patriotism, peace, love and support for our country. created in
over 675 classrooms by 50,000 students."

More recently, Rick has been touting a project titled "Empower Peace" that
uses the Rendon Group video conferencing technology to sell peace to kids in
the Middle East and in Massachusetts, albeit on a smaller scale than at the
Democratic National Convention.

The first exchange went live on May 20, 2003. The plan was modest but
exciting: El Centro del Cardenal High School in Boston, and students from
Stoneham High School in Stoneham, and Muslim students from Khawla School in
Bahrain, would be hooked up for an hour via the Polycom video technology to
talk about peace. "For older generations, shaping or changing perceptions
and mindsets will be difficult. For future generations, changing or shaping
perceptions and mindsets is essential. We turn to the future generation of
youth for hope,"said Rendon at the time.

Colleen Cull, a teacher El Centro del Cardenal High School, waxed
enthusiastically: "Basically I think they'll take a lot of information that
they learn from this program and share it with friends, family to start that
whole peace process".

Perhaps projects like "Empower Peace" and the "United We Stand" project work
well in television and print to counter Al Jazeera anti-American rhetoric?
Is Rick Rendon helping his brother to communicate" in the language and with
the cultural context necessary to ensure the message is received and not
just sent" using students in Boston and Bahrain as a vehicle to show the
U.S. occupation of Iraq as a sign of U.S. goodwill? If so, he wouldn't say.
Asked if he would discuss the Iraq invasion contract, he snapped: "That's
irrelevant. I'd be happy to discuss Empower Peace but nothing else."

Standing outside the party at Tia's in Boston, Rendon told CorpWatch that
the project was entirely funded by his company. "We did it out of the
goodness of our own hearts. It was based on what has became the world's
largest school-based racial harmony Campaign, which brought together 15,000
youths here in Boston to talk about diversity and promoting mutual respect
with students from Belfast in Northern Ireland (Catholic and Protestant) and
students from South Africa (black and white); they all interacted on ways
they overcame prejudice and misconceptions and learned to live, work and
play together."

War is Peace
But as in most public relations efforts the surface message is not
necessarily the ultimate purpose of a campaign. What makes the work of the
two brothers most intriguing is that they often used the same staff to do
the work: one of whom was discovered when he was unexpectedly killed in
northern Iraq in the first three days of the March 2003 invasion.

Paul Moran, a freelance Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist from
Adelaide, who was living in Bahrain at the time, was working for Rick Rendon
on setting up Empower Peace. But beside being a freelancer who made
corporate videos for cash, he also had a double life, working for John
Rendon, according to the Adelaide Advertiser, who interviewed his family and
friends at his funeral.

Moran used "his experience as a freelance cameraman to train Iraqi
dissidents in the use of hidden cameras to covertly film military
activities. During workshops in Tehran, in Iran, he would show Iraqis
opposed to Saddam how to use everyday items, such as bags of dates, to hide
cameras. worked closely with exiled Iraqi opposition parties in their
campaign to mobilise a popular uprising against Saddam (and) .was involved
in the defection of an Iraqi scientist who provided vital evidence to the US
Government about nuclear, chemical and biological weapon laboratories in
Iraq."

In addition he "was contracted to help reactivate a Kuwaiti television
station used to broadcast anti-Saddam messages into Iraq (and to. produce
public service announcements for the Pentagon which were broadcast into Iraq
in preparation for Operation Iraqi Freedom."

Many of these broadcasts were taped in Boston. A Village Voice article
revealed that the Rendon group hired a Harvard graduate student to help them
on the project, although some of the productions were ill conceived. "No one
in-house spoke a word of Arabic. They thought I was mocking Saddam, but for
all they knew I could have been lambasting the US government. Who in Iraq is
going to think it's funny to poke fun at Saddam's mustache when the vast
majority of Iraqi men themselves have mustaches?" said the student, who
requested anonymity.

Chalabi Connection
One may ask is the "perception management" or "information operations" work
of the Rendon group, what might have once been called propaganda or
disinformation? In light of the recent revelations that the evidence
produced by the Bush administration to justify the invasion of Iraq was
wrong, it is worth examining the role of Moran and the Rendon group in
providing that information.

For example Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, an Iraqi civil engineer who
claimed to have seen 20 secret buildings thought to be used for producing
biological and chemical weapons, was smuggled to Thailand to be interviewed
by Moran. Helping al-Haideri was Zaab Sethna, media spokesman for the Iraqi
National Congress (INC) and a long-time colleague of Moran's.

Not surprisingly, the INC (best known for its founder, Ahmed Chalabi, a now
disgraced member of the Iraqi Governing Council) was created by the Rendon
Group, according to a February 1998 report by Peter Jennings of ABC News
which showed that the Rendon Group spent more than $23 million dollars under
contract with the CIA. According to ABC, Rendon invented the name for the
Iraqi National Congress. Indeed Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker magazine
says the Rendon Group was "paid close to a hundred million dollars by the
CIA" for its work with the INC.

Chalabi and the INC were a major "source" for information about Iraq's
mysterious "weapons of mass destruction" for major newspapers like the New
York Times.

Was the Rendon group working with Moran and Chalanbi under some special
government contract to justify the war by manipulating the media, such as
the New York Times? There is no hard evidence of this but plenty of
circumstantial ties that look very suspicious.

According to Australian reporter John Hosking, who interviewed Zaab Sethna
on the Australian news program Dateline, the only other reporter who
interviewed al-Haideri before he was whisked away into a witness protection
program was the infamous Judith Miller of the New York Times.

Miller authored numerous stories promoting the weapons of mass destruction
"threat" posed by Iraq and she cited al-Haideri as a source. Those stories
and similar information were repeatedly cited by Bush administration as the
pretext for the current Iraq war.

In May 2004, the New York Times, ran an editorial to apologize for five
stories-- including several page one articles--written between 2001 and 2003
that had accounts of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq.

"In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems
questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand
unchallenged .Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in
re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged - or failed to emerge,"
wrote the editors.

Event Management
Rick Rendon refused to comment on the role of Moran or any of the Rendon
Group's work in Iraq. As the party at Tia's restaurant drew to a close at
midnight, Rendon walked away from this reporter, abruptly cutting off our
interview.

Meanwhile his paymasters at Time Warner and their guests gathered around him
to thank him for yet another great party and chance to talk to each other.

Jason Steinbaum, chief of staff for Congressman Eliot Engel, a Democrat from
New York, was one of the last guests to leave. He stopped to chat with
CorpWatch: "Those of us who attend these functions are very appreciative to
the sponsoring organization, be they companies or trade associations or
other types of--other types of groups. So we are very appreciative. I work
with some of the folks in Time Warner on issues that are before the
committee that my boss serves on and this gives us a chance to get to know
each other behind the scenes," he said. "They are a company that has a
presence in Washington and we welcome them in (our) offices."

If John Kerry wins the presidency, maybe he will call on the Rendon Group to
help shape the public perception of the war in Iraq. After all the Rendon
brothers are long-standing supporters of the Democratic party who have
managed to present two entirely different faces to the world while working
out of the same corporation: Spin doctoring for the Colombian military's
counter insurgency; encouraging citizens of the Massachusetts to pay their
taxes and recycle their beverage containers; doing public relations for Jean
Bertrand Aristide when he was being re-installed by the Clinton
administration and for the citizen groups advocating the overthrow of
Noriega as the U.S. military invaded. But should Kerry be defeated by the
Cheney-Bush administration, not to worry, the Rendon Group will still be
ready and willing to serve.