Benjamin Barber had been advisor to Gaddafi until last month. He was part of Monitor's PR campaign. (Creative Commons)

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi paid $3 million to an American public relations firm to spin a positive image of the country in the American media.

The public relations firm sent leading academics from places such as Harvard, MIT and Rutgers to Libya to meet with Gaddafi on many occassions. In turn, these professors, fellows and scholars spoke postively of Libya's re-make in the newspaper editorials, articles and television interviews, according to Mother Jones.

The public relations campaign had two goals: increase the "appreciation of Libya and the contribution it has made and may continue to make to its region and to the world" and "introduce Gaddafi as a thinker and intellectual, independent of his more widely-known and very public persona as the Leader of the Revolution in Libya."

How did the accomplish this goal? Introduce to Libya "important international figures that will influence other nations' policies towards the country."

One of those important figures was British educator Anthony Giddens, who wrote in the Guardian in 2007 after meeting with Gaddafi:

Will real progress be possible only when Gadafy leaves the scene? I tend to think the opposite. If he is sincere in wanting change, as I think he is, he could play a role in muting conflict that might otherwise arise as modernisation takes hold.

Another member of the envoys, former USC School of Public Diplomacy Fellow and Rutgers Professor Emeritus Benjamin Barber wrote:

Unlike almost any other Arab ruler, he has exhibited an extraordinary capacity to rethink his country's role in a changed and changing world.

This isn't mere bluster.

While it may or may not have not been "bluster" at the time, the recent spike in anti-Gaddafi protests have shown the Libyan people's assessment of Gaddafi's promises four years ago isn't positive.

One blogger last week questioned the entanglement of academics and the Libyan regime during the 2000s.

"Is the more or less grudging involvement of social theorists with the Libyan regime in the 2000s now shown to be an index of naivety, or stupidity, or venality?" wrote British professor Clive Barnett.

Harvard professor Robert Putnam explained his decision to travel to Libya in a Wall Street Journal editorial last week:

Several months earlier a former student of mine, working for an international consulting firm that was advising the Libyan government on economic and political reform, had called to see whether I might be interested in traveling to Libya to discuss my research on civil society and democracy, particularly "Making Democracy Work," my book on why democracy functions well in northern Italy but not in the country's south. My hosts were willing to pay my standard consulting fee, and to be honest, I was curious. Col. Gadhafi fancied himself an intellectual, I was told, and considered his own "Green Book" an original contribution to political philosophy....Two months later I was invited back to a public roundtable in Libya, but by then I had concluded that the whole exercise was a public-relations stunt, and I declined.

UPDATE:  Benjamin Barber resigned his position with the Qaddafi Foundation board in late February but in this BBC interview he defends the record of the dictator's son, Saif.