Russo Marsh & Rogers Flacks for Iraq

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Aaron Glantz, author of How America Lost Iraq, reports on Free Speech Radio 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 ] 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. In addition to representing the Kurdish government, the firm founded Move America Forward 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, local radio talk show host Melanie Morgan, serving as master of ceremonies. 'What's going on here is that Russo Marsh and Rogers ... 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. '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 in a in a 2004 article for PR Watch quarterly.