WASHINGTON, Feb. 29 (UPI) -- The U.S. Defense Department has spent millions of dollars on propaganda in Iraq and Afghanistan with little measurement of its effectiveness, USA Today reports.
The "information operations" budget rose from $9 million in 2005 to $580 million in 2009 before dropping to $202 million last year, the newspaper said. The decline came as U.S. involvement in Iraq wound down.
While the Pentagon has released few details about how the money is spent, most of it appears to go to radio and TV programming not attributed to the U.S. government, leaflets, posters and billboards and cultural events like concerts, USA Today said. In Iraq, about $173 million was paid to "unidentified foreign contractors."
Leonie Industries, a company that has been paid about $90 million by the Army, was started in 2004 by a brother and sister with experience in video production and advertising. Camille Chidiac and Rema Dupont have liens on their homes because of unpaid income taxes.
Some current and former military officers have doubts about the value of the program.
Karl Eikenberry, a retired three-star general and former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, told the State Department in 2009 that propaganda about the Taliban might actually be making the group look successful and suggesting to local people that the United States and their own government could not protect them.
"There has been such a desperate need to address communications vacuums that sometimes there has not been the proper coordination between thinking ahead what the mission is and the money that you apply to it," a senior Pentagon official told USA Today.
