The Department of State and the Department of Defense have a new tool of propaganda

The Department of Defense has just transferred 40 million US dollars to the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) to gag those outside the US providing a commentary on its actions.

It was President Obama that established the GEC in 2016, to fight the emergence of information which brought to light the support his administration had provided to the jihadists [1].
At the time it was established, the budget of Global Engagement Centre was officially 35 million US dollars. However, in actual fact it was 140 million US dollars. The Centre had been directed by Michael Lumpkin, Assistant to the Defense Secretary for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflicts.

The Global Engagement Centre has just doubled its official budget, which now stands at 75 million dollars. For now, we do not know what its actual budget is, but it is probably in the region of 250 million dollars.

The funds allocated to the Global Engagement Centre are dedicated to achieving four tasks:
– producing studies and research on news that is circulating and which can put the US administration in a bad light;
– drafting for government agencies briefings (modelled on the briefings that Joseph Goebbels distributed to everyday to the German administrators), to instruct them on the “sound-bites” that they should use in public;
– conceiving campaigns of key communication (read propaganda) ready to be used by mass media;
– finally, making “contributions” (sic) to blogs which take up the issues raised in these campaigns.

It is particularly to this last task that the 40 million from the Pentagon is allocated. The fact that this money is transferred by the State Department is meant to mask the military origin of these “pledges” (sic) and make them easier for the happy recipients to accept.

Now the controlling mind of the GEC is Daniel Kimmage (former head of the transmission of Radio Free Europe from Russia) and its activities will be directed against information coming from Russia. This is why in January, the Senate Commission for Foreign Affairs had drafted the report: Putin’s asymmetric assault on democracy in Russia and Europe: implications for U.S. national security.

Among the studies that the US Defence Department funded last year (2017) first by the GEC, then a George Soros foundation and finally a French company, let us mention the one produced by the journalist Pierre Haski and twenty of his collaborators on fake news during French Presidential Campaign.

Pierre Haski is the head of the site Rue89.com and President of Reporters sans frontières.