Russo Marsh & Rogers Flacks for Iraq [1]
Submitted by John Stauber [2] on
Aaron Glantz, author of How America Lost Iraq [3], reports on Free Speech Radio [4] and in Inter Press Service that "Kurdish officials toured the United States last week to launch a massive advertising and public relations campaign [under the slogan Kurdistan - The Other Iraq [5] ] thanking the United States ... . On the screen, Kurdish children wave U.S. flags. 'Thank you America,' one says. ... The ad campaign, as well as a U.S. tour by Kurdish politician Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, was put together by the California PR firm Russo Marsh and Rogers [6]. In addition to representing the Kurdish government [7], the firm founded Move America Forward [8] which has brought parents of dead U.S. soldiers to be counter-protesters at peace demonstrations. The firm has also brought right-wing talk show hosts to Iraq on a 'truth tour' to tell 'the good news that the old-line liberal news media won't tell you about.' All were in attendance at the Kurdish government's press conference in San Francisco with the head of Move America Forward [8], local radio talk show host Melanie Morgan [9], serving as master of ceremonies. 'What's going on here is that Russo Marsh and Rogers [6] ... are engaged in an illegal propaganda campaign aimed at influencing the November elections," said John Stauber, co-author of the book Weapons of Mass Deception [10]. 'They don't have to disclose anything so we may never really know where they got the money to run these campaigns.' " The Center's Diane Farsetta examined Move America Forward [8] in a in a 2004 article [11] for PR Watch quarterly.