Democracy Now! had some guests expand on the story I posted earlier this week about the Lincoln Group's public opinion manipulation efforts in Iraq on behalf of the Pentagon.

Some excerpts, but first, here's a link to a speech that U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave in February to the Council on Foreign Relations titled New realities in the media age. Oddly enough, he found fault with the media's coverage of the Iraq war and defended the practice of planting stories.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on this story, we're joined by Andrew Buncombe, Washington correspondent for the London Independent, who has covered the Lincoln Group and the military practice of planting news stories. He's joining us in Washington, D.C. And on the phone from Virginia, we're joined by Sam Gardiner, retired Air Force colonel. He has taught strategy in military operations at the National War College, Air War College, and Naval War College. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Andrew Buncombe, we begin with you. Tell us about the Lincoln Group. Who started it? Who pays for it?

ANDREW BUNCOMBE: The Lincoln Group remains to this day a somewhat mysterious and hidden group based here in Washington. They were set up five or six years ago, essentially, by a young British guy called Christian Bailey. That wasn't his first name; his first name was Christian Jozefowicz. He changed his name whilst he was at university at Oxford, and since then, it seems his career has been one of shifting and moving and perhaps not being as forthcoming about the truth as one would hope.

He's only a young chap; he’s 30, 31. He’s got no experience in public relations, and yet last summer he landed a $100 million contract for planting faux news stories, should we say, within the Iraqi media. These weren’t technically false stories; they were technically true, but they portrayed an inaccurate and unbalanced picture of what's going in Iraq, essentially bribes, because the Iraqi journalists were being paid vast amounts of money, relatively vast amounts of money, to put these stories in, essentially out of the control of their editors.

JUAN GONZALEZ: So, how does a young person with no experience, even in the public relations field, manage to land a $100 million contract?

ANDREW BUNCOMBE: I think they call it “networking,” and as you probably know, Washington is the prime city for networking. What Mr. Bailey assiduously did since arriving in the U.S. in the late 1990s, first in San Francisco, then in New York, then in D.C., he very meticulously developed a network of contacts, up-and-coming young professionals, mostly linked to the Republican Party. He courted them assiduously. He's a very charming young man from all accounts, and he saw an opportunity. He made a partnership with a former Marine, a guy called Paige Craig, who took care of the Iraqi end of the business, and in the aftermath of the invasion back in the spring of 2003, they leapt on an opportunity to go and make their fortune, as many other companies across the U.S. and Britain have done, you know, on the spoils of the war.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, he also claims to have as a partner in his company a group called WCV3 Security. Could you tell us about them?

ANDREW BUNCOMBE: Well, if you look on their website, they list a number of groups and people and individuals who they say have been partners with them and have helped them over the years. A lot of those people have since pointed out that their partnership with Mr. Bailey and the Lincoln Group have been all but fleeting. They have since ceased and never really amounted to much. The one group that you mentioned, from memory, is a consulting firm out in northern Virginia. One of their senior executives was involved in the attempt during the last election – you’ll remember back in October -- sorry, the summer of 2004, I think it was August, -- the swift boat affair that was one of the things that severely damaged John Kerry's campaign. That was the group of veterans, which essentially portrayed a false picture of John Kerry's war record and questioned his claims about his service in Vietnam and the Cambodian border. That involved one of this group's chief executives, who took unpaid leave to go work on that project.

AMY GOODMAN: And that project, of course, was Stolen Honor, the famous film that was aired around the country.

ANDREW BUNCOMBE: That’s absolutely right.

AMY GOODMAN: Aimed at discrediting John Kerry. Andrew Buncombe with us, Washington correspondent for the London Independent. Also Colonel Sam Gardiner on the line with us, retired U.S. Air Force colonel, who is very familiar with PsyOps, with psychological operations. Can you respond to the Pentagon saying the Lincoln Group is doing a good job, even if right now General Peter Pace is saying they're going to review further what the Pentagon is doing, the whole issue of planting stories?

COL. SAM GARDINER: Sure, Amy. What -- if I had to sort of -- I would say they're doing some good things, but they’re doing bad things, and it may be the bad things come from their lack of experience or this attitude that seems to exist within the Department of Defense that it's better – it’s ‘the story is more important than what you do,’ which seems to dominate it.

The good things -- I mean, they're doing sort of typical psychological operations stuff. For example, they printed for the Marine Corps labels that went on water bottles that they handed to pilgrims in Iraq, and the label said, "If you see a terrorist, please call this phone number." Now, that's not bad, that's good psychological operations. It doesn't destroy democracy. It doesn't destroy the faith of the people. That's the kind of thing that they ought to be doing.

But when you begin to -- gosh, when I hear the Secretary of Defense talk about this, I worry that he doesn't really -- doesn't really want to defend democracy, because he doesn't trust it. And that is, when you have to make up stories to sell the thing that you're trying to defend, you've gone down a bad road. And that seems to be what he talks about, and that seems to be what – part of what we're seeing from the Lincoln Group.

Now, the good news is, that you've mentioned, is I think General Pace, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said and probably upset the Secretary of Defense, that ‘I'm not’ -- I'm sort of paraphrasing him now -- ‘I'm not sure this makes sense when we do this kind of thing.’ Good on him. This is the second or third time that he's stood up to the Secretary of Defense.

The other thing that Rumsfeld said in that piece that you quoted, he sort of, in his mind, he mixed public affairs and psychological operations. “Public affairs” is what the Pentagon tells us. “Psychological operations” is what they tell the enemy. The former chief of staff, General Myers, was very concerned that these were coming together, like it sounded as if Secretary Rumsfeld wanted them to. They have to be separated, or we end up with a situation where the people who are supposed to be making democracy work don't have the truth to deal with, and then we've got real problems.