Talk:Iraqi National Congress

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This page is copied directly from an article in disinfopedia [1]. They are very careful about documenting their work, so I am not concerned about that. However, their goals are a bit different. Their goal is to create "a directory of public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests." With that in mind, their article conventions and writing style are very different than wikipedia's. So all copies taken from disinfopedia must go through a vigorous editing to fit into wikipedia conventions and styles. Kingturtle 06:57 Apr 16, 2003 (UTC)

I removed some material:

The CIA did not have the mechanisms in place to make that happen, so they hired the Rendon Group, a public relations firm run by John Rendon, to run a covert anti-Saddam propaganda campaign. Rendon's postwar work involved producing videos and radio skits ridiculing Hussein, a traveling photo exhibit of Iraqi atrocities, and radio scripts calling on Iraqi army officers to defect. ClandestineRadio.com, a website that monitors underground and anti-government radio stations in countries throughout the world, also credits the Rendon Group with "designing and supervising" the Iraqi Broadcasting Corporation (IBC) and Radio Hurriah, which began broadcasting Iraqi opposition propaganda in January 1992 from a US government transmitter in Kuwait. According to a September 1996 article in Time magazine, six CIA case officers supervised the IBC's 11 hours of daily programming and Iraqi National Congress activities in the Iraqi Kurdistan city of Arbil.

A February 1998 report by Peter Jennings cited records obtained by ABC News which showed that the Rendon Group spent more than US$23 million dollars in the first year of its contract with the CIA. According to ABC, Rendon came up with the name for the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition coalition of 19 Iraqi and Kurdish organizations whose main tasks were to "gather information, distribute propaganda and recruit dissidents." ABC also reported that the INC received $12 million of covert CIA funding between 1992 and 1996. (Atkinson, 1998)

While this is good material it is not relevant to the INC, as the events described happened before that organization was created. - SimonP 04:50, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)