If a population doesn't want a war, the government is going to have a hard time waging it. This is the basis of propaganda.

Since the beginning of time, persuasion has stood at the root of choice. Beside the necessities of food, water and shelter, people are relatively aimless and are heavily guided by their society. Why do we speak English? Why do we drive on the right side of the road? Who says a red light means to stop?

In a sense, being brainwashed is an important part of keeping order. As long as we all agree on what we're told to do, we can do it seamlessly.

This same concept reigns with negative brainwashing. If we all think we're supposed to attack and kill someone, we will seamlessly attack and kill him.

So, since the beginning of societies, people have thrived on propaganda. Governments and leaders have done what they needed to persuade populations to follow them, whether honest or false. In this case, the Pentagon's use of a British PR firm to doctor fake videos falls on the dishonest side.

Documents have been revealed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that show between 2007 and 2011, the Pentagon paid UK company Bell Pottinger $540 million in contracts to make fake videos. They would take shitty video cameras into areas that were being bombed to get rough footage that they would sell as news. They would create TV commercials that showed Al-Qaeda in a negative light, that they would, then, sell to us as actual Arab commercials. The list goes on as the "psychological operations" continued.

Employees received specific instructions when creating propaganda videos. “We need to make this style of video and we’ve got to use Al-Qaeda's footage,” Martin Wells, videographer working for the firm, was told. “We need it to be 10 minutes long, and it needs to be in this file format, and we need to encode it in this manner.”

The Pentagon admits it has been working with the PR firm, though it contends the content was "truthful."

It is illegal, under US law, for the government to create and use propaganda against its own citizens. This is why they hired a foreign firm to do it.

The Pentagon has been hiring foreign firms to create illegal propaganda, which it has been using against US citizens.