Pentagon Sock Puppets: Then and Now

The Sunday New York Times runs a major new investigation of the Pentagon's propaganda operation to lie to the public about Iraq:

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

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....

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.

Some splendid quotes. From retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst Robert S. Bevelacqua:

It was them saying, "We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you."

From Kenneth Allard at the National Defense University:

Night and day, I felt we’d been hosed.... This was a coherent, active policy.

Once more, a major theme of this blog is confirmed: That the Bushies do what the Watergate-era Nixon White House does, only learning from Nixon's mistakes, and taking advantage of the fact that it takes a whole lot longer for the press to call foul. If the Times story gets traction, expect some Nixonian pushback:
From NIXONLAND:

CBS earned a privileged place on the White House enemies list with a documentary, "The Selling of the Pentagon," which exposed a Pentagon "public affairs" budget that deployed generals for political sales jobs in plain violation of Army regulations, enlisting trusted anchors like Walter Cronkite as unwitting dupes. TV critic Jack Gould called it "a whale of a constructive blow for unfettered TV journalism free from Washington manipulation." President Ahab reacted predictably. Vice President Agnew called it "a subtle but vicious broadside against the nation's defense establishment," and accused its producers of ethical lapses in 1966 and 1968, one for a show that never aired, and one in a complaint the FCC dismissed. Then he charged the interviews had been edited out of order, one obtained for a separate program; "the matter of the network's own record in the field of documentary-making," he concluded, "can no longer be brushed under the rug of national media indifference."

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