Fracking and Psychological Operations: Empire Comes HomeLots of embedded links in the following at truthout:
Thursday 8 March 2012
by: Steve Horn, Truthout | News Analysis snip
Javers revealed that Matt Pitzarella, head of the public relations team at the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based natural gas corporation, Range Resources, openly admitted that his corporation utilizes psychological warfare (psyops) military veterans as community relations professionals, hired to apply the skills gained on the periphery for work to be done here at home.
"We have several former PSYOPs folks that work for us at Range because they're very comfortable dealing with localized issues and local governments," said Pitzarella at the conference.
He continued, "Really all they do is spend most of their time helping folks develop local ordinances and things like that. But very much having that understanding of PSYOPs in the Army and in the Middle East has applied very helpfully here for us in Pennsylvania."
Expanding on the comments made by Pitzarella, DeSmogBlog Executive Director Brendan DeMelle explained further, "Range Resources' Local Government Relations Manager in Pennsylvania is James Cannon, a former Marine and Army Reservist whose unit conducted PSYOPs during Operation Iraqi Freedom ... Range has sent threatening letters to residents of Mount Pleasant, PA, where citizens were concerned about the impacts of natural gas drilling on their community."
At the same conference, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation's Public Relations Chief Matthew Carmichael, a military veteran himself, recommended that all natural gas industry PR professionals read the "Counterinsurgency Field Manual," formerly the official doctrine of the US military.
"Download the US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual because we are dealing with an insurgency. There's a lot of good lessons in there and coming from a military background, I found the insight in that extremely remarkable," remarked Carmichael.
Another presenter at the Houston conference was Aaron Goldwater, CEO of Jurat Software, which describes itself as a company that "ensures effective stakeholder engagement through a comprehensive single source and intuitive software solution. More than just managing data, Jurat facilitates strong relationship building with internal and external stakeholders that results in achieving business objectives."
Goldwater spoke of the importance of data mining and intelligence collection on natural gas company stakeholders, or on those citizens living in communities in which resource extraction will take place.
Goldwater said, "A number of people today have, in my words, have talked about having a battle with stakeholders, a bit of a war with stakeholders. So, if you look at the people who are experts at it, which is the military, the one thing they do is gather intelligence ... The important thing is to get high-quality data because data rules. The military doesn't spend billions of dollars on data-mining for the fun of it. They want to know who knows who."
In many ways, Jurat's corporate model resembles that of the Human Terrain System (HTS) developed by the US Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). HTS consists of highly trained Human Terrain Teams (HTTs), five-person units that enter communities in Iraq and Afghanistan and collect massive amounts of data that they hand to the CIA with the goal of "mapping the human terrain." HTTs utilize the skills of anthropologists, accompanied by four armed agents while they collect data in the field, data that will eventually be used to pacify, or kill dissidents and "insurgents."
Jacob Kipp, historian at the US Army's Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, described HTS, according to anthropologist Roberto Gonzalez, as "'A CORDS for the 21st Century'" - a reference to Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support, a Vietnam War-era counterguerrilla initiative. CORDS gave birth to the infamous Phoenix Program, in which South Vietnamese and US agents used intelligence data to help target some 26,000 suspected communists for assassination, including many civilians."
Data collection to equip well-connected corporations in their "war with stakeholders" is without a doubt troubling, but history demonstrates it is rather unsurprising.
The militarization of public and community relations efforts by the natural gas industry can be seen quite clearly through these alarming excerpts from these three presentations. The reason for militarization is quite clear, though uncomfortable to confront.
By its very nature, the gas industry is in the midst of what can most accurately be described as systematic and well-planned "resource colonialism," invading communities and extracting their resources, often even displacing citizens from their homes and taking over their property. Militarization is but a logical progression in a scheme of this sort.
The common denominator are the tools of "empire coming home," and the true nature of both imperial counterinsurgency warfare and the dark underbelly of the history and original purpose of the public relations industry finally coming to light, thanks to these frank comments thought to have been made solely among friends in Houston.
The origins of the proliferation of the public relations industry and mass propaganda is deeply interconnected with the development of psyops tactics. In fact, in many ways, the two are one in the same.
A brief history lesson is in order to put this all into proper and sobering context.
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http://www.truth-out.org/fracking-and-p ... 1331220971 
