So, just how much are you being manipulated?

...One of his most famous messages, planted with the assistance of the Hill & Knowlton PR firm, was staged during the run up to the 1991 Gulf War. On October 10, 1990, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus held a hearing on Capitol Hill. California Democrat Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican John Porter introduced a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah. Weeping and shaking, the girl described a horrifying scene in Kuwait City. "I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," she testified. "While I was there I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns and go into the room where babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die."

Seven pro-war senators brought up the baby-incubator allegations to argue for an invasion of Iraq, leading to a narrow five-vote win. Later it was discovered that the Nayirah was a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, daughter of the ambassador to the United States and that the incubator incident was fabricated.

Another media triumph Rendon brags about was the manipulation of media during the actual conflict. "If any of you either participated in the liberation of Kuwait City ... or if you watched it on television, you would have seen hundreds of Kuwaitis waving small American flags. Did you ever stop to wonder how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American flags? And for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries? Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs," he told a National Security Conference in 1998.

Shortly after the September 11 attacks on Wall Street and Washington, the Pentagon gave Rendon a $100,000-a-month contract to track anti-U.S. foreign news reports, offer advice on media strategy and plant pro-U.S. stories in web, print and television. In 2002 when the Pentagon tried to create the Office of Strategic Influence to spread misleading stories in foreign countries, Rendon was the contractor they had in mind. President Bush ultimately disappeared the Office after a storm of protest from the media and the public at large, but in retrospect one wonders if the administration simply renamed the project...