Is the Pentagon sponsoring the GOP machine?
Billmon may have found something important:
So to sum up: We have a tiny start-up venture, controlled by persons unknown, that suddenly materializes in late 2003 doing “private equity” deals in the middle of a war zone, and then obtains a huge PR contract from the Pentagon, and then hires a bunch of unemployed GOP campaign operatives to execute that contract, and then is absorbed by a shadowy DC company that specializes in corporate and political detective work and that may have close ties to both the Republican Party and the intelligence community, which then is awarded an even bigger contract to produce even more Pentagon propaganda.
Now maybe that’s just the way business is done in George Bush’s government, but it doesn’t make me any less creeped out by what I was able to dig up with a few online searches. You don’t have to have too much of a taste for paranoid conspiracy theories to imagine scenarios in which such contracting relationships could prove very useful for the Bush administration and the GOP machine.
If I were still a real reporter — that is, if someone were paying me to do this kind of work — there are many other things I would try to find out about Lincoln Alliance, the Lincoln Group and Iraqex. Things like incorporation records or doing-business-as registrations, UCC filings, lists of corporate officers, disbursements from political campaigns, court records (if any) and a complete list of all federal government contracts awarded to all three entities.
Maybe we should start paying Billmon to go after this…