Obama Campaign's Multi-Million Dollar Propaganda Firm Deployed in Iraq to Advise on "New Media"

By Jeremy Scahill, AlterNet. Posted April 21, 2009.

The U.S. State Department has announced it is sponsoring a "New Media Technology" delegation to Iraq to "explore new opportunities to support Iraqi government and non-government stakeholders in Iraq's emerging new media industry." Of all of the areas in Iraq in desperate need of attention, its "emerging new media industry" is not the one that pops to mind. Things like clean water, electricity, right of safe return for refugees and an end to the occupation seem more pressing than increasing Nouri al Maliki's Twitter followers. But unfortunately, that's how U.S. priorities in Iraq seem to work.

Anyway, the super star tech delegation, according to the State Department press release, includes "a mix of CEOs, Vice-Presidents and senior representatives" from "AT&T, Google, Twitter, Howcast, Meetup, You Tube and Automattic/Wordpress."

But the final company listed as participating in the delegation begs for some sort of special review: Blue State Digital, a firm which boasts its services were "Critically important to President Obama's victory" in the November election. Indeed, federal campaign spending records indicate that the Obama campaign paid the firm at least $2,864,138 in 2007-2008, including more than $700,000 on election day.

Blue State Digital (BSD) is a technology company founded by four former staffers from Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign: Clay A. Johnson, Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Joe Rospars and Ben Self. BSD, in large part, specializes in building Democratic Party campaign websites and online fundraising mechanisms, including the creation of Barack Obama's web presence for the 2008 presidential campaign and developing the my.barackobama.com concept. It has also worked for the Democratic National Committee, Bill Richardson for President, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Senate Majority Leader Senator Harry Reid and Senator John Kerry, now chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The firm has also worked for billionaire George Soros. The BSD website features a quote from Sen. Ted Kennedy praising the firm's work for him and prominently displays the Obama campaign as a test case. Blue State Digital describes the work it did for Obama as such:

Obama retained BSD to manage the online fundraising, constituency-building, issue advocacy, and peer-to-peer online networking aspects of his 2008 Presidential primary campaign. Critically important to President Obama's victory in November 2008 was his campaign's use of the BSD Online Tools Suite. The campaign utilized BSD's tools to mobilize over 3 million individual donors to contribute over $500 million online, to motivate over 2 million social networking participants, and to create and promote more than 200,000 offline events across the country.

Press reports about BSD during the campaign indicated that the firm was likely to get contract work with the Obama White House. According to the State Department's opaque description of the Iraq trip, Blue State Digital and the other firms:

See more stories tagged with: iraq, democrats, obama, web 2.0, new media, fundraising, blue state digital, contracts

Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. His writing and reporting is available at RebelReports.com.

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