A Time for Change

Donald Rumsfeld Shaking Saddam’s hand in 1983

Paid Popagandists

David Barstow of the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for his work in uncovering Donald Rumsfeld’s dirty little propaganda war to “shape” public opinion about the “War of Terror.”  According to Mr. Barstow, Rumsfeld flew some retired military officers on jet usually used by Dick Cheney to a carefully orchestrated view of Guantanamo at a time when Amnesty international had branded it “the gulag of our times” and new abuse allegations had surfaced from the United Nations human rights experts. There was increasing pressure to close Guantanamo.  So Rumsfeld decided to “shape” public opinion through these retired army officers who appear as talking heads in News shows.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”

If that was not bad enough, Frank Rich reported on Sunday that when this went public more than 45 members of Congress demanded an inquiry. The Pentagon’s inspector general went to work, and its Jan. 14 report was the result. It found no wrongdoing by the Pentagon.”  Rumsfeld, in fact, used the DoD’s findings to attack Barstow’s reporting, but after the Pentagon took another look, the report was withdrawn because it was riddled with factual errors and had little investigation of the facts that Narstow has to support his investigation.  The inspector general’s office had barely glanced at the 8,000 pages of e-mail that Barstow had used as evidence, and interviewed only seven of the 70 disputed analysts. In other words, the report was a whitewash. The Obama Pentagon officially rescinded it — an almost unprecedented step — and even removed it from its Web site.”  This report was one last last minute attempt by the Bush administration to cover up more wrongdoing before President Obama was sworn into office.

The talking heads weren’t the only ones who were hosed.  I agree with Frank Rich the greed, corruption and criminal activity of the former administration will come out.  It is a matter of time.  isn’t it better for our dignity to set up a non-partisian commission to let the truth come out so that we can learn from the mistakes that were made in the wake of 9/11.  

We can never again let a president get so close to absolute power because, as the John Emerich Edward Dahlberg said, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

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