"I Was a Propaganda Intern in Iraq" - Fmr. Lincoln Group Intern Describes Paying Iraqi

Press to Plant Pro-American Articles Secretly Written by U.S. Military
Democracy Now!

...Well, I arrived in Baghdad airport and was taken to a villa in the Green Zone via Camp Victory. After about a week of twiddling my thumbs and not really doing a lot, I became rather impatient and emailed people back in D.C., saying, you know, "What am I doing here? I thought I was going to be doing some work." And within a day or two, I was taken to lunch by another employee, and he explained to me in detail what exactly it was the Lincoln Group was doing. And I was going to take over his position, because he was going on holiday, so -- on vacation, I should say. And what he was doing was receiving English-written articles by soldiers in a certain unit inside Camp Victory, the major U.S. base just south of Baghdad. He was choosing which of those articles would be published in Iraqi newspapers. He was sending them to Iraqi employees, getting them translated into Arabic, getting them okayed by the command back at Camp Victory and then having other Iraqi employees run them down to Iraqi newspapers, where they would pay editors, sub-editors, commissioning editors to run them as news stories in the Iraqi newspapers. And that was the role, you know, after about a week or ten days of me being there, that I took over...

continua / continued