Rendon = The Key?
From Today's Hotline: A deeper reading of this profile of Rendon leads some to wonder if he is actually the "source of the Nile" on the selling of questionable intel which led to the Iraq War.
Rolling Stone's Bamford profiles Rendon Group CEO John Rendon. From McGovern staffer to DNC Exec. Dir. to powerful gov't consultant, Rendon "has been secretly involved in nearly every American shooting conflict in the past two decades." Some highlights:
The Rendon Group, operating on more than $100M in Pentagon contracts, now "enjoys access to the most secret information from all three forms of intelligence collection: eavesdropping, imaging satellites and human spies."
Rendon started by helping install a successor to Panama Pres. Manuel Noriega, and afterwards was hired by the Kuwaiti gov't for "help in selling a war of liberation to the American" gov't -- "and the American public." For his services, he was paid $100K per month. After news accounts pointed out that Kuwaiti royals were living well in other countries, Rendon organized 20K Kuwaitis to mail "personally signed valentines" to American troops, which generated "a wave of" positive coverage. As American troops marched into Kuwait City, Rendon's team made sure grateful Kuwaitis had hand-held American flags to wave at their liberators.
After the first Gulf War, ex-CIA officials credit Rendon "with virtually creating" the Iraqi Nat'l Congress. "Aided by truckloads of CIA dollars," Rendon organized a conference in Vienna to bring together the first meeting of the INC and begin their operations to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Three weeks after 9/11/01, the DoD "awarded a large contract" to Rendon's company to help organize and operate a Pentagon department dedicated to "planting false news items in the media and hiding their origins." The contract called for Rendon to deploy teams to various friendly nations, tasked with "developing and delivering specific messages to the local population, combatants, front-line states, the media and the" int'l community.
Rendon's office "also worked closely with the" WH "Iraq Group, whose high-level members," including ex-VP CoS Scooter Libby, "were responsible for selling the war to the American public."
After Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, an Iraqi defector, told his tale of WMDs under the Hussein Hospital in Baghdad, Rendon needed a reporter to feed the story to. He chose New York Times reporter Judy Miller, who wrote a 12/20/01 cover story on al-Haideri's claims. The only problem: A CIA polygraph expert had already "declared him a liar." Despite Miller's "vaunted intelligence sources, she claimed not to know about the results" of the lie-detector test (12/'05 issue).
What about the fact that the DNC paid the Rendon Group upwards of 1 million dollars to help with the '04 Convention in Boston. (OK, someone will have to research whether it was the DNC's "Host Committee" or the DNC itself, but the fact is the Dems are doing business with the Liar in Chief.
interesting info