Democracy Now! talks with investigative journalist James Bamford about his Rolling Stone article on the Rendon Group, headed by John Rendon, and its role in selling the Iraq War.

Some excerpts:

AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. Well, this piece in Rolling Stone is quite a read. Why don't you start off by talking about a man in the Gulf of Thailand who was taking a lie detector test?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, this took place in December of 2001. This was really the sort of opening shot of the propaganda war to get the United States into war. And the person being polygraphed was an Iraqi defector by the name of al-Haideri, and the Iraqi National Congress, the I.N.C., had brought him out of Iraq and brought him to Thailand primarily to expose him to the media and to try to get his story told. And what his story was was that Saddam Hussein had not only chemical and biological weapons but even nuclear weapons and precursors to nuclear weapons hidden in Iraq in various places. Some of the biological weapons were supposedly hidden under the main hospital in Baghdad, for example. So it was an amazing story.

And this was the -- up until this time there was a lot of speculation in the press and in Congress and other places about what Saddam may have, what might have been left over from the Gulf War and so forth. But this was going to be the very first time that somebody could actually point to information as proof, having seen where these things were buried and so forth. So, the I.N.C., the Iraqi National Congress, which was led by Ahmed Chalabi, decided to call in two journalists to broadcast this information to the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Wait. First, the lie detector proved what?

JAMES BAMFORD: Exactly. Before he actually called these people in to broadcast this information, obviously the C.I.A. had a big interest in this and the Pentagon had a big interest in this, so the C.I.A. flew a polygraph operator with his machine all the way over to Thailand, Pattaya, Thailand, which is south of Bangkok, and they went into a hotel room, they strapped up al-Haideri, and they asked him all these questions. And they went over and over for hours his allegations regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and they came away with charts that indicated he was deceptive, that he was lying, that this was not true. And they flew back to Washington and, presumably, assuming this was going to be the end of it. But that was information that was never made public. They didn't broadcast that information. So what happened was the I.N.C. and Chalabi decided to take that bogus information that al-Haideri was giving and broadcast it around the world. So, they called in two journalists. One of the journalists was Judy Miller, who was given the worldwide print exclusive rights to the story.

AMY GOODMAN: And who called her in?

JAMES BAMFORD: Chalabi called her in. Chalabi asked her if she wanted to do the story, and she flew from Washington all the way over to Bangkok to interview al-Haideri.

AMY GOODMAN: Chalabi on the payroll of the C.I.A.?

JAMES BAMFORD: At this time, Chalabi was -- he had been getting money from the C.I.A. up until the mid-1990s, and then he started getting money from the Pentagon after the C.I.A. failed to trust him any more. So, the other journalist that they called in was Paul Moran, who was a journalist working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. And what makes this very interesting was how this came about. The people setting this up were members of the I.N.C. whose main goal all along from the very beginning was overthrowing Saddam Hussein anyway possible. And ironically, one of the people they called in, Paul Moran, had formerly worked for the I.N.C., and he had also worked for another company called the Rendon Group. ...

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the I.O.T.F., what it stands for and the Information War Room?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, the Information Operation Task Force was set up by the Pentagon, because, if you read some of the Pentagon documents that are coming out in the last few years, they wanted to turn information into a major weapon to use during a war. They realized with the internet and with the explosion of information technology around the world that getting a message out is extremely important. It’s especially important in a case like this where we weren't attacked by Iraq. This wasn't a case of the United States defending itself against an attack. So, we had to – the United States had to go on a propaganda war in order to convince the world that this preemptive invasion had legitimacy. So, in order to do that the Pentagon created a number of organizations to help promote this information around the world, and the Information Operation Task Force was one of those, and the Rendon Group played an extremely important role in that. And one of the key objectives of the Rendon Group in this aspect was to analyze media all over the world. John Rendon, in my interview with him, and it was the first interview I think he’s ever granted, or at least within probably twenty years –

AMY GOODMAN: And why did he grant it to you?

JAMES BAMFORD: You’re going to have to ask him. I don’t ask questions. I just am very happy when somebody does agree to be interviewed. So he – and one of the ironic aspects of John Rendon is you have somebody here who started out as basically an anti-war activist. He went to work for the George McGovern campaign, actually ran the Maine operation, the operation up in Maine, for George McGovern. So you have a person who started out as an anti-war activist and a lifelong Democrat, head of the Democratic National Committee, Executive Director of the D.N.C., and here he is the chief of propaganda for the Bush administration in their war with Iraq. So it was a very interesting progression, and when I interviewed him, he said he’s still never voted for a Republican, he still votes Democratic, and he donated money to the Democratic Party not long ago.

So now what his role is, is as chief of propaganda and as that, the Pentagon has been using him a great deal to analyze information around the world. Rendon told me that they analyze something like 143 newspapers and a lot of broadcast media around the world and that he prides himself on being able to get to policy makers information on what news organizations all over the world are going to do six hours before they actually do it. And that way, the Pentagon can prepare a response or some kind of rebuttal to whatever may be coming on a news organization hours in advance.

AMY GOODMAN: You write, James Bamford, “A key weapon, according to the documents, was Rendon's proprietary state-of-the-art news-wire collection system called ‘Livewire,’ which takes real-time news-wire services as they’re filed, before they’re on the internet, before CNN can read them on the air, and 24 hours before they appear in the morning papers, and sorts them by key word. The system provides the most current real time access to news and information available to private or public organizations. The top target that the Pentagon assigned to Rendon was the Al-Jazeera television network. The contract called for the Rendon Group to undertake a massive media mapping campaign against the news organization.” Why, what did they do?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, it’s a very interesting area, this media mapping. And basically, what it is, is they were directed to take a close look at the actual reporters who were reporting the news and analyze them. What is their slant? What is their bias? What is the background for these people? What makes that very worrisome is that there was another group that was set up by the Pentagon, Office of Strategic Influence, and that was eventually closed down, but one of the things –

AMY GOODMAN: Forced to because it became public?

JAMES BAMFORD: That's right, when it became knowledge, and one of the aspects was that they were going to plant phony stories in news organizations around the world, and when you plant a phony story in a news organization anywhere in the world today, I mean, it’s immediately accessible to people in the United States. So, it would have had a very bad blowback effect.

Bamford also has a book out: A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies.