Pentagon Paid British PR Firm $500mm to Create Fake Al Qaeda Propaganda Videos | Hacker News Reader

Pentagon Paid British PR Firm $500mm to Create Fake Al Qaeda Propaganda Videos

thebureauinvestigates.com

37 pointskyleblarson23 comments

I don't understand how you can spend 500 million dollars on this. How is that even possible? 500 million dollars is an enormous amount of money. You could make 2-5 large budget, full length hollywood movies for that price. Complete with multi-million dollar budgets for A-list celebrities and high quality special effects.

Assuming you're paying people 60k a year, 500 million dollars buys you full-time employment for over eight thousand people for a year. Unless the deliverable was two thousand well produced videos, I have to agree.

I'd say a lot of it was probably airtime costs. Several years of advertisements on multiple channels seems like it would be costly. The personnel costs obviously can't even approach that.

I'd say a lot of it was friends or hush money. $100M to do the job, $400M to keep you quiet and in my backpocket

It wouldn't surprise me if $499 million of that actually got diverted to another undisclosed project.

Bad procurement policies.

I find it interesting that the few comments o here seem to be more about the money spent than in the goals and objectives of the program.

When next you see a report of a terrorist video, did it really come from them or from your favorite govt agency?

It would appear to be $500+ million wasted, fairly typically, by the Pentagon brass.

>Segell maintains that information operations programmes did make a difference on the ground in Iraq. Some experts question this however. A 2015 study by the Rand Corporation, a military think tank, concluded that “generating assessments of efforts to inform, influence, and persuade has proven to be challenging across the government and DoD.”

What the hell though, what's half a billion dollars for something that can't even demonstrate efficacy?

> It would appear to be $500+ million wasted, fairly typically, by the Pentagon brass.

The DoD was chewing through an average of $1 billion a day for about 2 years during the height of the Iraq war. It would be a stretch to say that it was all used to the best efficiency.

Meanwhile, NASA is gutted, our education and mental health systems are downright broken, and healthcare has become the other great waster in our economy. Bad times.

Something like 40% was for fuel. For generators. To air-condition tents.

I think before anyone from the Pentagon is allowed to even think about invading a desert again, we have to make them read the entire Dune saga. I realize only the first one matters in this case, the rest is for punishment.

> I think before anyone from the Pentagon is allowed to even think about invading a desert again, we have to make them read the entire Dune saga. I realize only the first one matters in this case, the rest is for punishment.

AFAICT, the people "from the Pentagon" (and particularly, the career military types, including the senior uniformed leadership) were generally very well locked into what the issues were; the political leadership (much of it outside the Pentagon) far less so.

The choice to invade, sure, the choice to waste a billion a day? Not so much.

Apparently if you build permanent buildings in another country, its politically very different than if they let you camp there. So we camped.

Yeah, because we were so concerned about international opinion that one time...

There's a difference between "Can't demonstrate" and "difficult to gauge efficacy".

They can't gauge the efficacy because they don't get to A/B test the Iraq war. They don't even really know how many insurgents there are, and definitely not with the accuracy and latency required to judge each operation.

That said, the analytical stuff with the tracking videos seems like it surely must have contributed to homeland investigations. You can't tell me they'd ignore a signal like that.

Assuming signal, rather than noise of course. Given that the only real result is that we lost that war, and that the groups we were trying to quash have morphed and taken over whole regions, it's hard to argue for any expenditure related to that endeavor.

That said, even if we won it disturbs me that we're willing to spend so much on something that, at best, "might" be helpful. Worse, something that definitely didn't help in Korea or Vietnam...

I think it's unfair to characterize it as a waste.

If the intent was to strengthen the war on terror, you would have to quantify both the value of profits derived by the military industrial complex as well as the underlying value for the wealthy of a strong petrodollar and weigh the benefit against that.

Calling it a waste is implicitly absolving those responsible of any notion of intent. Accepting that the dissemination of propaganda is primarily intended for "tracking" purposes is a very generous postulation in my opinion.

If they’re raiding a house and they’re going to make a mess of it looking for stuff anyway, they’d just drop an odd CD there.

So that explains how they always seem to find computers with evidence of terrorist activities. Likely also how they found stuff at Osama bin Laden's place; how they found passport of a terrorist who was in a plane that flew into the World Trade Center building; or the one that crashed in PA.

If this turned out to be true, wouldn't that shine a disastrous light on the war and propaganda machine?

500 millimetre dollars? Interesting unit of measure. Is it a bit like torque?

That's a common abbreviation for 'million'.

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