A Room Full of Men With Their Hammers a-Bleedin'
I believe the odds are quite good that anyone reading this is (a) already on one or more of the "watch" lists maintained by the friendly federal security community you are paying so dearly for (not as a result of reading this, mind you - just cuz you're so danged cantankerous in general!), and (b) far more likely than the normal schmoe to be already tuned in to the issue of the Pentagon's pro-war propaganda program. (No extra charge for the alliteration. Or, as Danny O'Keefe phrased it: "The money's just for the room babe, The love is free.")
The gray lady broke this story almost a month ago, alerting us to a quite extensive operation seemingly right of "1984." The blackout on mainstream tv is truly astounding. Retired military personnel, either docile, greedy (ya think?), or enraptured with the glory of war-mongering, were spoon-fed what amounted to propaganda of the moonie/up with people/manufactured good news school of broadcasting. ("Hey, these marines here helped re-unite this little girl with what's left of her family, most of whom were assassinated because dad was known to have worked as an interpreter for the US Army.") They would then make appearances as magically independent experts and inject their toxins into the "news" streams at the major television networks, exploiting (and thus, tarnishing and ever from now on diminishing) the esteem we naturally have tended to hold for those who actually in some cases put their lives on the line in national service. (As compared to Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, not to mention swine like Feith and Wolfowitz). Lies and dissembling about the program have been predictably the norm from White House talking asses and the very rare television news "celebrity" even willing to get near the topic.
Glenn Greenwald, posting at Salon, has been doing his usual and by-now expectedly masterful job of keeping the heat on, both via campaigns directed at drawing folks like the sniveling DiRita out of their bunkers and by highlighting and linking to other valuable sources. I.e., just the sort of source a television-limited sort (hence one still convinced that Saddam was behind 9/11) will never learn of.
One of those sources is the renowned military reporter Joe Galloway:
Joe Galloway, now a military columnist for McClatchy, is one of the nation's most accomplished war reporters. He was in Vietnam for years reporting on the war for UPI, and was the only civilian awarded the Bronze Star during that war, awarded for his rescuing wounded American soldiers under heavy enemy fire. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf has called him "the finest combat correspondent of our generation -- a soldier's reporter and a soldier's friend," and Gen. Barry McCaffrey said he "has more time in combat, under fire, than anyone wearing a uniform today."
On Monday, former Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita, as part of the email exchange I had with him over the "military analyst program," denied that the military analyst program excluded critics of the Pentagon (exclusion which is proven by voluminous DoD documents and which, independently, was alleged by Fox News' Col. Bill Cowan, who -- according to Howard Kurtz -- "said that three years ago, after he criticized the war effort on 'The O'Reilly Factor,' he was booted off the group, was never invited to another briefing, never got another telephone call, never got another e-mail"). In the email exchange I had with him, Di Rita claimed: "I simply don't have any recollection of trying to restrict [Col. Cowan] or others from exposure to what was going on."
To support his denials, Di Rita cited Galloway -- along with Gen. McCaffrey -- as examples of what Di Rita called the Pentagon's "reaching out to people who specifically disagreed with us." But yesterday, I received the following email from Galloway (re-printed in its entirety with his permission) which demonstrates that Di Rita's claim about Galloway is yet another false statement from the former Pentagon spokesman about the DoD's propaganda activities (and Galloway's email includes other relevant revelations):
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There are several other developments in the "military analyst" story worth noting. Raw Story's Eric Brewer confirmed what I noted the other day: that Dana Perino, after Brewer asked whether the White House was aware of the military analyst program, did deny any such knowledge. But as Brewer wrote, and as the emails I pointed to strongly suggest: "Uh oh. Dana has denied something that is clearly true."
Yesterday, The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin urged that reporters aggressively demand answers from the White House regarding this clear discrepancy:
Media Matters has conducted a study demonstrating just how pervasive was the commentary from the Pentagon's hand-picked, "water-carrying" military analysts. They "collectively appeared or were quoted as experts more than 4,500 times on ABC, ABC News Now, CBS, CBS Radio Network, NBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, and NPR." If anything, the Media Matters study actually under-counts the appearances, since it only counted "the analysts named in the Times article," and several of the analysts who were most active in the Pentagon's propaganda program weren't mentioned by name in that article.
Finally, Media Bloodhound notes some extremely ironic, and characteristically pompous, comments from Brian Williams this week: "I think you owe it to your democracy to know as much as you can about what's going on." But as MB points out, Williams -- along with virtually every one of his colleagues -- has, 25 days after the NYT exposé first appeared, still failed and refused to inform his viewers about the Pentagon's propaganda program -- notwithstanding the serious criminality questions it raises, the Congressional investigations under way, and his own network's vital role in all of it.
There are updates and no doubt comments worth attending to at Greenwald's post, including link to Galloway's own McClatchy column on the topic yesterday:
Once upon a time, it was widely believed that one of the greatest sins the U.S. government or its temporary political masters could commit was to turn a propaganda machine loose on the American people.
Congress viewed this so seriously that every appropriations bill passed since 1951 has contained language that says no public money “shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States” without the lawmakers’ prior approval.
The Bush administration has been caught violating the propaganda ban before, notably in 2005 in the case of radio host Armstrong Williams, who was paid to endorse President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law.
Particularly abhorrent to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), which oversees compliance with the ban, is an agency’s use of “covert propaganda” or “covert attempts to mold opinion through the undisclosed use of third parties.”
This is why alarm bells should be ringing all over Washington about The New York Times’ disclosure that then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld encouraged a secret Pentagon program to care for and spoon-feed more than 50 retired senior military officers whom the administration deemed reliable friends who could be counted on “to carry our water” on the television and cable networks.
Feeding the military analysts “key and valuable information” in secret briefings by Pentagon and White House officials, the idea went, would make them the go-to guys for the networks and encourage the networks to “weed out the less reliably friendly analysts . . . .”
This 2005 memorandum, addressed to then Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Larry DiRita, added: “This trusted core group will be more than willing to work closely with us because we are their bread and butter.”
Asked about the case of Col. Bill Cowan, who says he was fired as a military analyst for Fox News and cut off from the briefings for criticizing the war effort, DiRita told Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com: “I don’t know anything. I saw that in the story. I’ve heard other assertions to that effect. It was certainly not the intent.”
In a follow-up e-mail exchange between DiRita and Greenwald, Rumsfeld’s former mouthpiece - now Bank of America’s chief spokesman - elaborated on what he said he didn’t remember: “I simply don’t have any recollection of trying to restrict him (Cowan) or others from exposure to what was going on.”
DiRita added: “There are plenty of examples to the contrary - reaching out to people who specifically disagreed with us. One example I recall is Joe Galloway - a persistent critic and apparently popular with military readers. He came in and met Secretary Rumsfeld and we had other interactions.”
Now that’s a real knee-slapper: Me as a poster boy for how Rumsfeld and DiRita “reached out” to their harshest critics even as they stroked and promoted and schemed to embed the old reliables to wax enthusiastic about a war that was going from bad to worse.
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The gray lady broke this story almost a month ago, alerting us to a quite extensive operation seemingly right of "1984." The blackout on mainstream tv is truly astounding. Retired military personnel, either docile, greedy (ya think?), or enraptured with the glory of war-mongering, were spoon-fed what amounted to propaganda of the moonie/up with people/manufactured good news school of broadcasting. ("Hey, these marines here helped re-unite this little girl with what's left of her family, most of whom were assassinated because dad was known to have worked as an interpreter for the US Army.") They would then make appearances as magically independent experts and inject their toxins into the "news" streams at the major television networks, exploiting (and thus, tarnishing and ever from now on diminishing) the esteem we naturally have tended to hold for those who actually in some cases put their lives on the line in national service. (As compared to Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, not to mention swine like Feith and Wolfowitz). Lies and dissembling about the program have been predictably the norm from White House talking asses and the very rare television news "celebrity" even willing to get near the topic.
Glenn Greenwald, posting at Salon, has been doing his usual and by-now expectedly masterful job of keeping the heat on, both via campaigns directed at drawing folks like the sniveling DiRita out of their bunkers and by highlighting and linking to other valuable sources. I.e., just the sort of source a television-limited sort (hence one still convinced that Saddam was behind 9/11) will never learn of.
One of those sources is the renowned military reporter Joe Galloway:
Joe Galloway, now a military columnist for McClatchy, is one of the nation's most accomplished war reporters. He was in Vietnam for years reporting on the war for UPI, and was the only civilian awarded the Bronze Star during that war, awarded for his rescuing wounded American soldiers under heavy enemy fire. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf has called him "the finest combat correspondent of our generation -- a soldier's reporter and a soldier's friend," and Gen. Barry McCaffrey said he "has more time in combat, under fire, than anyone wearing a uniform today."
On Monday, former Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita, as part of the email exchange I had with him over the "military analyst program," denied that the military analyst program excluded critics of the Pentagon (exclusion which is proven by voluminous DoD documents and which, independently, was alleged by Fox News' Col. Bill Cowan, who -- according to Howard Kurtz -- "said that three years ago, after he criticized the war effort on 'The O'Reilly Factor,' he was booted off the group, was never invited to another briefing, never got another telephone call, never got another e-mail"). In the email exchange I had with him, Di Rita claimed: "I simply don't have any recollection of trying to restrict [Col. Cowan] or others from exposure to what was going on."
To support his denials, Di Rita cited Galloway -- along with Gen. McCaffrey -- as examples of what Di Rita called the Pentagon's "reaching out to people who specifically disagreed with us." But yesterday, I received the following email from Galloway (re-printed in its entirety with his permission) which demonstrates that Di Rita's claim about Galloway is yet another false statement from the former Pentagon spokesman about the DoD's propaganda activities (and Galloway's email includes other relevant revelations):
Mr. Greenwald:
I read with great interest your exchange of emails with Larry Di Rita and howled with laughter at his attempt to cite me as proof that DOD did so reach out to military analysts who were anything but friendly to Rumsfeld & Co. I was never invited to any of those hush-hush briefings of the favored military analysts/retired generals and colonels.
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There are several other developments in the "military analyst" story worth noting. Raw Story's Eric Brewer confirmed what I noted the other day: that Dana Perino, after Brewer asked whether the White House was aware of the military analyst program, did deny any such knowledge. But as Brewer wrote, and as the emails I pointed to strongly suggest: "Uh oh. Dana has denied something that is clearly true."
Yesterday, The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin urged that reporters aggressively demand answers from the White House regarding this clear discrepancy:
Olney, Md.: It looks like the Pentagon may have been behind "planting" retired officers as analysts for news outlets. Do you think this can be tied to the White House? Is their any evidence of White House involvement?Actually, the evidence that is available is rather compelling, if not conclusive, that the White House was at least aware of and likely involved in the program, and Perino's denial of White House knowledge and involvement was thus false.
Dan Froomkin: There's no question at all the Pentagon organized it. As for White House involvement, that's a very good question. There's no hard evidence thus far, but I'm not sure anyone's really digging for it -- and it's hard to imagine they weren't plugged in to some extent.
Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald lays out the case for journalists to aggressively enquire: "Was Karl Rove involved in the military analyst program?"
Media Matters has conducted a study demonstrating just how pervasive was the commentary from the Pentagon's hand-picked, "water-carrying" military analysts. They "collectively appeared or were quoted as experts more than 4,500 times on ABC, ABC News Now, CBS, CBS Radio Network, NBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, and NPR." If anything, the Media Matters study actually under-counts the appearances, since it only counted "the analysts named in the Times article," and several of the analysts who were most active in the Pentagon's propaganda program weren't mentioned by name in that article.
Finally, Media Bloodhound notes some extremely ironic, and characteristically pompous, comments from Brian Williams this week: "I think you owe it to your democracy to know as much as you can about what's going on." But as MB points out, Williams -- along with virtually every one of his colleagues -- has, 25 days after the NYT exposé first appeared, still failed and refused to inform his viewers about the Pentagon's propaganda program -- notwithstanding the serious criminality questions it raises, the Congressional investigations under way, and his own network's vital role in all of it.
There are updates and no doubt comments worth attending to at Greenwald's post, including link to Galloway's own McClatchy column on the topic yesterday:
Once upon a time, it was widely believed that one of the greatest sins the U.S. government or its temporary political masters could commit was to turn a propaganda machine loose on the American people.
Congress viewed this so seriously that every appropriations bill passed since 1951 has contained language that says no public money “shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States” without the lawmakers’ prior approval.
The Bush administration has been caught violating the propaganda ban before, notably in 2005 in the case of radio host Armstrong Williams, who was paid to endorse President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law.
Particularly abhorrent to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), which oversees compliance with the ban, is an agency’s use of “covert propaganda” or “covert attempts to mold opinion through the undisclosed use of third parties.”
This is why alarm bells should be ringing all over Washington about The New York Times’ disclosure that then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld encouraged a secret Pentagon program to care for and spoon-feed more than 50 retired senior military officers whom the administration deemed reliable friends who could be counted on “to carry our water” on the television and cable networks.
Feeding the military analysts “key and valuable information” in secret briefings by Pentagon and White House officials, the idea went, would make them the go-to guys for the networks and encourage the networks to “weed out the less reliably friendly analysts . . . .”
This 2005 memorandum, addressed to then Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Larry DiRita, added: “This trusted core group will be more than willing to work closely with us because we are their bread and butter.”
Asked about the case of Col. Bill Cowan, who says he was fired as a military analyst for Fox News and cut off from the briefings for criticizing the war effort, DiRita told Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com: “I don’t know anything. I saw that in the story. I’ve heard other assertions to that effect. It was certainly not the intent.”
In a follow-up e-mail exchange between DiRita and Greenwald, Rumsfeld’s former mouthpiece - now Bank of America’s chief spokesman - elaborated on what he said he didn’t remember: “I simply don’t have any recollection of trying to restrict him (Cowan) or others from exposure to what was going on.”
DiRita added: “There are plenty of examples to the contrary - reaching out to people who specifically disagreed with us. One example I recall is Joe Galloway - a persistent critic and apparently popular with military readers. He came in and met Secretary Rumsfeld and we had other interactions.”
Now that’s a real knee-slapper: Me as a poster boy for how Rumsfeld and DiRita “reached out” to their harshest critics even as they stroked and promoted and schemed to embed the old reliables to wax enthusiastic about a war that was going from bad to worse.
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posted by Sir Gumbo at 10:56 PM
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