Behind the media contractors' veil

By Mark Prendergast, Stars and Stripes

Ombudsman's Note: Congress established this position to conduct “aggressive and objective oversight” of Stars and Stripes' relationship with the military to foster independent, quality journalism and a “free flow of information” to the paper's readers absent censorship, propaganda or other forms of news management. This admittedly lengthy column is offered in support of that mandate.

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When the U.S. military in Afghanistan canceled a media services contract with the Rendon Group last summer, Stars and Stripes, which had assailed Rendon's analyses of journalists' work as an affront to press freedom and a Pentagon effort to skew public perception of the war, saw it as a white flag and moved on.

Had journalists here and elsewhere instead pressed on, they might have found more to report with regard to the untold millions of dollars spent yearly on information services provided by contractors like Rendon.

For one, the identities of large companies are sometimes masked in public records with the designation “miscellaneous foreign contractors” – even when they are prominent, registered American firms, their contracts are unclassified, the companies and Pentagon officials are open about what they do, and the contractors have not asked to be shielded from public view.

One effect of this practice, which has been made harder to penetrate since I began asking about it early this year, is to hamper journalists, watchdog groups and members of the public in following the money trail of who is being paid by the government to inform and influence mass audiences in an ever-shrinking global media environment.

This comes as the Defense Department is reported to be planning to spend up to $1 billion next year on Psychological Operations while also imposing new rules that more tightly control information about the military and the Pentagon.

PsyOp is a component of what are called Information Operations (IO), which are persuasive actions that by law are supposed to be kept overseas and distinct from more neutral activities like public relations/Public Affairs (PA), which are supposed to factually inform audiences, including the American public.

Rendon is one firm in the information field whose identity the military has at times screened from public scrutiny, though an executive told me he was surprised to learn that.

Another is Wall Street-based SOS International Ltd., whose Web site says it provides intelligence and media support services to government and business around the world. Its two listed spokesmen did not respond to e-mail requests for information.

SOSi provided Gen. Stanley McChrystal with the civilian media adviser, Duncan Boothby, who arranged the fateful Rolling Stone “media engagement” that cost the general command of the Afghan war last month.

SOSi's Web site says the company also provided a key aide to McChrystal's successor, Gen. David Petraeus – a translator, Sadi Othman, who SOSi says rose to become a senior adviser while the general, himself a strong proponent of Information Operations, was leading the war effort in Iraq.

Rendon and SOSi contractors worked concurrently in the main military Public Affairs shop in Afghanistan last year, though only Rendon drew journalists' attention. SOSi is still there.

Both are among nine firms I encountered with media-related contracts for Iraq and Afghanistan shrouded in the designation “miscellaneous foreign contractors” – even though the contracts in question for six of those firms did not seem to fit the criteria for masking vendors' identities as laid out in the governing Federal Acquisition Regulation.

Moreover, since the Pentagon was provided with extensive details of this research into “miscellaneous foreign contractors” in the context of a query last month, key contract data that had been publicly accessible before then is now no longer so.

In nearly six months of pestering Pentagon offices, military PAO's on two continents, officials elsewhere in government and contractors themselves, among others, no one was willing or able to explain the “miscellaneous” listings, which were found on usaspending.gov, the open, online government database for contract information.

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