Iraq Hacks

Now that Jim Wilkinson has hung up his GI Joe costume and is bustling all over Washington smearing Richard Clarke and saying the word “comfort” 437 times per minute, they’ve had to go to the bench for Operation FUBAR’s spin team:

GOP Operatives Lead at Iraq Press Office:

“Inside the marble-floored palace hall that serves as the press office of the U.S.-led coalition, Republican Party operatives lead a team of Americans who promote mostly good news about Iraq.

Dan Senor, a former press secretary for Spencer Abraham, the Michigan Republican who’s now Energy Secretary, heads the office that includes a large number of former Bush campaign workers, political appointees and ex-Capitol Hill staffers.

More than one-third of the U.S. civilian workers in the press office have GOP ties, running an enterprise that critics see as an outpost of Bush’s re-election effort with Iraq a top concern. Senor and others inside the coalition say they follow strict guidelines that steer clear of politics.

One of the main goals of the Office of Strategic Communications — known as stratcom — is to ensure Americans see the positive side of the Bush administration’s invasion, occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, where 600 U.S. soldiers have died and a deadly insurgency thrives. “

(Other than that, everything is going just swimmingly.)

…The U.S. team stands in deep contrast to the British team that works alongside it, almost all of whom are civil or foreign service employees, not political appointees. Many of the British in Iraq display regional knowledge or language skills that most of the Americans lack.

They speak English, for instance.

The drive to re-elect Bush is a sensitive topic. Several coalition officials angered by what they see as CPA politicking — with U.S. accomplishments in Iraq being trumpeted to help Bush — grumbled privately, but would not go on record with complaints.

But Gordon Robison, a former CPA contractor who helped build the Pentagon-funded Al-Iraqiya television station in Baghdad, said Republicans in the press room intensely followed the Democratic presidential primaries as John Kerry emerged as the presumed nominee.

“Iraq is in danger of costing George W. Bush his presidency and the CPA’s media staff are determined to see that does not happen,” Robison said. “I had the impression in dealing with the civilians in the Green Room that they viewed their job as essentially political, promoting what the Coalition Provisional Authority is doing in Iraq as a political arm of the Bush administration,” he added.

Robison, a journalist who said his political affiliation is a private matter, left Baghdad in March after finishing his contract with U.S. defense contractor Science Applications International Corp. A new U.S. contractor, Harris Corp., has taken over the Al-Iraqiya operations.

One CPA staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity said the press office had sent targeted “good news” releases to American television, radio and newspaper outlets that were timed to deflect criticism of Bush during the Democratic primaries.

Stratcom’s schedule of news releases shows that stories were sent to media outlets in Florida, Ohio, Illinois, Tennessee and Virginia and other states in the days before their Democratic primaries. But the schedule also shows releases sent to Virginia, Ohio and Florida after the primaries were over. Senor said any correlation to the vote was a coincidence.

Rich Galen, 57, a well-known Republican strategist, oversees the daily news releases sent directly to media outlets in the United States. Before joining the CPA press operation late last year, Galen wrote a GOP insider column and appeared on Fox News to harpoon liberal critics of Bush.

[…]

Outside political analysts, however, said Galen’s vast expertise lies in political campaigning, not shipping radio and TV spots to local audiences. Putting a sharp strategist like him in the press room is a campaign masterstroke, said Bob Boorstin of the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan political think-tank in Washington.

“You know they’re in trouble if they shipped Rich Galen over there,” said Boorstin, who worked on four presidential campaigns, all Democratic.

“They’re desperate to control the story over there. It’s a very smart thing on their part. He knows what he’s doing.”

Galen was Newtie’s flack. He’s a master spinner. His web site says he is “what you get when you cross a political hack with a philosopher.” No joke. Here’s a little deconstruction of some typical Galen spin by Brendan Nyhan from September of 2001. This guy wrote the book.

Like all Republicans, he had himself photographed in an elaborate costume, leaning on a very butch piece of heavy equipment. He looks a little like a chorus boy in the road show of Kismet.