The former head of a group that contracts with the Pentagon to produce propaganda material used oversees has admitted to launching a similar disinformation campaign against two U.S.-based reporters.

In April, two USA Today journalists claimed they were the victims of a deliberate “reputation attack” after they wrote a series of stories about the Pentagon’s contracts with groups that specialize in the production of propaganda. Days after the journalists began speaking with officials at the Pentagon and other sources for the story, fake websites and social media accounts set up in the names of the two reporters were mysteriously registered and began trying to discredit the stories.

Camille Chidiac, the minority owner and former president of Leonie Industries, one of the consulting firms that works with the Pentagon and was featured prominently in USA Today’s reporting, took responsibility for the misinformation campaign. USA Today reports:

“I take full responsibility for having some of the discussion forums opened and reproducing their previously published USA TODAY articles on them,” he said a statement released by his attorney, Lin Wood, of Atlanta.

“I recognize and deeply regret that my actions have caused concerns for Leonie and the U.S. military. This was never my intention. As an immediate corrective action, I am in the process of completely divesting my remaining minority ownership from Leonie,” Chidiac said.

Chidiac says Leonie Industries and the Pentagon had no knowledge of the smear campaign, and no funding from either entity was used in the attack. Leonie Industries has received at least $120 million in Pentagon contracts since 2009.

Earlier this month, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) called on the Pentagon to launch an investigation into the smear campaign against the USA Today journalists and said it should “consider suspending all contracts with Leonie Industries until such investigation is complete.”

Yesterday, a tribal court in Pakistan handed down a 33-year prison term for treason to the doctor who helped the CIA locate Osama Bin Laden in a Pakistani army garrison town. The verdict drew widespread attention in Washington, but Congress and the State Department are having very different reactions.

After Capitol HIll collectively expressed considerable outrage, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted unanimously to cut $33 million from Pakistan’s foreign aid package — $1 million for each year of the sentence against the doctor, Shakeel Afridi. The reduction comes on top of the more than 50 percent of the aid a Senate panel cut earlier this week.

But the U.S. State Department didn’t ramp up its rhetoric so dramatically, maintaining its position that Afridi is detained without basis. A spokesperson said the U.S. will continue to let the Pakistani government know about that position. The softer line might reflect the possibility that Afridi’s verdict could easily be overturned.

Afridi, who ran a vaccination drive to collect data that the U.S. has credited with helping to find Bin Laden, was tried under a British colonial-era law that does not carry a death penalty, according to the New York Times. (The L.A. Times reported that “Afridi could have been given the death penalty.”) Having never approved of his detention, however, the U.S. still objected to the sentence. Asked about the issue yesterday, spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said:

We will – we continue to see no basis for Dr. Afridi to be held….

I think we’ve said that we don’t see any basis for what’s happened here, and so we will continue to make those representations to the Government of Pakistan.

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In February, Clinton said of Afridi: “His work on behalf of the effort to take down Bin Laden was in Pakistan’s interests as well as in America’s.” On CBS’s 60 Minutes in January, Panetta was more outspoken on the matter, calling actions against Afridi a “real mistake on their part” and crediting his help and making a case similar to Clinton’s:

This was an individual who in fact helped provide intelligence that was very helpful with regards to this operation. He was not in any way treasonous towards Pakistan, he was not in any way doing anything that would have undermined Pakistan. As a matter of fact, Pakistan and the United States have a common cause here against terrorism.

A Pakistani lawyer speaking to CNN said it was likely the case could be overturned — something Nuland subtly alluded to in the briefing when she said the legal process wasn’t necessarily complete. The lawyer, Shahzad Akbar, said that the tribal court is not based in Abbottabad, the site of the bin Laden raid. He told CNN: “If this punishment is challenged by Dr. Afridi’s family in the Superior Court of Pakistan, there is a good possibility that the sentence will be turned around.“

Increasing anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. has shown enormous growth in the past two years, leading the Southern Poverty Law Center to mention three notorious Islamophobes on their list of “30 new activists heading up the radical right.” The SPLC finds that “[a]n anti-Muslim movement, almost entirely ginned up by political opportunists and hard-line Islamophobes, has grown enormously since taking off in 2010, when reported anti-Muslim hate crimes went up by 50%.”

The anti-Muslim activists, who all play a prominent role in the Center for American Progress’ report, “Fear Inc.: The Roots Of the Islamophobia Network In America,” play pivotal roles as misinformation experts and online activists, stirring up Islamophobic fears across the country.

The SPLC’s list of “new activists heading up the radical right” include:

Frank Gaffney: Gaffney, the president and founder the Center for Security Policy, has argued that “Shariah-adherent Muslms” are engaged in “civilization jihad” by infiltrating “government, law enforcement, intelligence agencies, the military, penal institutions, media think tanks, political entities, academic institutions. And they are very aggressively targeting non-Muslim religious communities in the name of ecumenicalism.” The SPLC observes that:

As recently as in 2002, a prominent British newspaper listed him with Iraq invasion cheerleaders Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle as one of the men “directing” then-President George W. Bush’s post 9/11 security doctrine.

Sometime between then and now, Gaffney seems to have snapped.

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