Pentagon has been manipulating military news analysts

[In-A-Gadda-Levitre]

The New York Times breaks an incredible story about supposedly unbiased military analysts that were coached by the Pentagon to support their strategies, while working for contractors that set up huge contract opportunities.

 

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.

[mead107]

Just another story .Who knows what is bull sh-- and what is not .

[Phil Indablanc]

The New York Times breaks an incredible story about supposedly unbiased military analysts that were coached by the Pentagon to support their strategies, while working for contractors that set up huge contract opportunities.

 

While I am not discounting the validity of the article I feel compelled to note that the Times has become unusually liberal (ala Rolling Stone Magazine) in recent times. If the article has merit then "the truth will out" but I tend to take news from the Times with a grain of salt.

[DC Tom]

The New York Times breaks an incredible story about supposedly unbiased military analysts that were coached by the Pentagon to support their strategies, while working for contractors that set up huge contract opportunities.

 

The sad thing is that passes as "news". It doesn't take a whole lot of insight to figure out that's how the system works. Hell, you only have to listen to about an hour's worth of "analysis" and look up the analysts' affiliations on the internet to figure out that there are no "independent" analysts. The NY Times does the exact same thing with their "analysts".

[In-A-Gadda-Levitre]

The sad thing is that passes as "news". It doesn't take a whole lot of insight to figure out that's how the system works. Hell, you only have to listen to about an hour's worth of "analysis" and look up the analysts' affiliations on the internet to figure out that there are no "independent" analysts. The NY Times does the exact same thing with their "analysts".

umm, it sounds a lil more serious than you making it out to be.

 

The Pentagon and White House wanted the public to only have a specific set of information that supported their strategy and that covered their failures This is a PsyOps! They manipulated and falsified the entire mainstream news media using these puppets to speak for them.

 

The conflict of interest just made it worse.

[Acantha]

umm, it sounds a lil more serious than you making it out to be.

 

The Pentagon and White House wanted the public to only have a specific set of information that supported their strategy and that covered their failures This is a PsyOps! They manipulated and falsified the entire mainstream news media using these puppets to speak for them.

 

The conflict of interest just made it worse.

I have the same reaction I had when everyone discovered we use torture:

 

Duh.

[John Adams]

The sad thing is that passes as "news". It doesn't take a whole lot of insight to figure out that's how the system works. Hell, you only have to listen to about an hour's worth of "analysis" and look up the analysts' affiliations on the internet to figure out that there are no "independent" analysts. The NY Times does the exact same thing with their "analysts".

 

Maybe, but I haven't seen all the details laid out in one place like this. What a great bit of journalism.

 

My concern is less that the Pentagon has its hands up the ass of former military, playing them as puppets, and more the ties those people have to military contracts. No doubt that I'm not surprised the Pentagon erewards military contracts to its lapdogs but the extent of the puppeteering and the contracts is nicely outlined here, and some people should and will get a beatdown over this. I also find it very disturbing that the AG met with this group of "analysts."

 

To those who flog the Times for being liberal, the piece is equally an attack on the networks for not vetting the Pentagon mouthpieces who were getting the gov't contracts as it is an attack on the administration.

 

The article is long but here are a few excerpts.

 

Another analyst, Robert L. Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who works in the Pentagon for a military contractor, attended the same briefing and recalled feeling “very disappointed” after being shown satellite photographs purporting to show bunkers associated with a hidden weapons program. Mr. Maginnis said he concluded that the analysts were being “manipulated” to convey a false sense of certainty about the evidence of the weapons. Yet he and Mr. Bevelacqua and the other analysts who attended the briefing did not share any misgivings with the American public.

 

Mr. Bevelacqua and another Fox analyst, Mr. Cowan, had formed the wvc3 Group, and hoped to win military and national security contracts.

 

“There’s no way I was going to go down that road and get completely torn apart,” Mr. Bevelacqua said. “You’re talking about fighting a huge machine.”

 

Some e-mail messages between the Pentagon and the analysts reveal an implicit trade of privileged access for favorable coverage. Robert H. Scales Jr., a retired Army general and analyst for Fox News and National Public Radio whose consulting company advises several military firms on weapons and tactics used in Iraq, wanted the Pentagon to approve high-level briefings for him inside Iraq in 2006.

 

“Recall the stuff I did after my last visit,” he wrote. “I will do the same this time.”

 

Back in Washington, Pentagon officials kept a nervous eye on how the trip translated on the airwaves. Uncomfortable facts had bubbled up during the trip. One briefer, for example, mentioned that the Army was resorting to packing inadequately armored Humvees with sandbags and Kevlar blankets. Descriptions of the Iraqi security forces were withering. “They can’t shoot, but then again, they don’t,” one officer told them, according to one participant’s notes.

 

“I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south,” General Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times.

 

The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.

 

“You can’t believe the progress,” General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be “down to a few numbers” within months.

 

“We could not be more excited, more pleased,” Mr. Cowan told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. There was barely a word about armor shortages or corrupt Iraqi security forces. And on the key strategic question of the moment — whether to send more troops — the analysts were unanimous.

 

“I am so much against adding more troops,” General Shepperd said on CNN.

 

Other branches of the administration also began to make use of the analysts. Mr. Gonzales, then the attorney general, met with them soon after news leaked that the government was wiretapping terrorism suspects in the United States without warrants, Pentagon records show. When David H. Petraeus was appointed the commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet with the analysts.

 

“We knew we had extraordinary access,” said Timur J. Eads, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and Fox analyst who is vice president of government relations for Blackbird Technologies, a fast-growing military contractor.

 

Like several other analysts, Mr. Eads said he had at times held his tongue on television for fear that “some four-star could call up and say, ‘Kill that contract.’ ” For example, he believed Pentagon officials misled the analysts about the progress of Iraq’s security forces. “I know a snow job when I see one,” he said. He did not share this on TV.

 

“Human nature,” he explained, though he noted other instances when he was critical.

 

Still, even the mildest of criticism could draw a challenge. Several analysts told of fielding telephone calls from displeased defense officials only minutes after being on the air.

 

On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, Mr. Cowan, who said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the “twisted version of reality” being pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give “a heads-up” that some of his comments on Fox “may not all be friendly,” Pentagon records show. Mr. Rumsfeld’s senior aides quickly arranged a private briefing for him, yet when he told Bill O’Reilly that the United States was “not on a good glide path right now” in Iraq, the repercussions were swift.

 

Mr. Cowan said he was “precipitously fired from the analysts group” for this appearance. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message, “simply didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t carrying their water.” The next day James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines’ deaths further erode support for the war.

 

“The strategic target remains our population,” General Conway said. “We can lose people day in and day out, but they’re never going to beat our military. What they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can help us not let that happen.”

 

“General, I just made that point on the air,” an analyst replied.

 

“Let’s work it together, guys,” General Conway urged.

 

The meeting ended and Mr. Rumsfeld, appearing pleased and relaxed, took the entire group into a small study and showed off treasured keepsakes from his life, several analysts recalled.

 

Soon after, analysts hit the airwaves. The Omnitec monitoring reports, circulated to more than 80 officials, confirmed that analysts repeated many of the Pentagon’s talking points: that Mr. Rumsfeld consulted “frequently and sufficiently” with his generals; that he was not “overly concerned” with the criticisms; that the meeting focused “on more important topics at hand,” including the next milestone in Iraq, the formation of a new government.

 

Days later, Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memorandum distilling their collective guidance into bullet points. Two were underlined:

 

“Focus on the Global War on Terror — not simply Iraq. The wider war — the long war.”

 

“Link Iraq to Iran. Iran is the concern. If we fail in Iraq or Afghanistan, it will help Iran.”

 

But if Mr. Rumsfeld found the session instructive, at least one participant, General Nash, the ABC analyst, was repulsed.

 

“I walked away from that session having total disrespect for my fellow commentators, with perhaps one or two exceptions,” he said.

[DC Tom]

umm, it sounds a lil more serious than you making it out to be.

 

The Pentagon and White House wanted the public to only have a specific set of information that supported their strategy and that covered their failures This is a PsyOps! They manipulated and falsified the entire mainstream news media using these puppets to speak for them.

 

The conflict of interest just made it worse.

 

No, that's pretty much exactly what I'm talking about. Why would anyone expect anything different? That's also exactly what the networks do: convey to the public only a specific set of information that supports their strategy. It's a legacy of Vietnam that there are no independent media analyses - since everyone realized that the media can not only report but influence, the government specifically restricts and manipulates what they release to get the influence they want, and the media exercises its influence according to its editorial bent, be it positive or negative towards the government.

 

Again, not news. The Times plays the game as well as anyone. Probably better, considering they're "independently" breaking the very process they helped create.

[In-A-Gadda-Levitre]

No, that's pretty much exactly what I'm talking about. Why would anyone expect anything different? That's also exactly what the networks do: convey to the public only a specific set of information that supports their strategy. It's a legacy of Vietnam that there are no independent media analyses - since everyone realized that the media can not only report but influence, the government specifically restricts and manipulates what they release to get the influence they want, and the media exercises its influence according to its editorial bent, be it positive or negative towards the government.

 

Again, not news. The Times plays the game as well as anyone. Probably better, considering they're "independently" breaking the very process they helped create.

I would agree that Fox News has a specific agenda and strategy that they want to achieve, and ABC, NBC, etc. have theirs; that they manipulate the stories and analysts to deliver that agenda and influence the public to varying degrees of success.

 

This campaign transcends all of those networks, by planting false stories and coordinating them across multiple outlets, measuring how often and how effective they have manipulated the public as a whole.

 

I expect the Fox conservatism and manipulation thereof, and I expect the New York Times and their brand of propaganda. I don't expect a coordinated disinformation campaign by the Pentagon and the White House that transcends the entire mainstream media market, that promotes an already corrupt federal contracting practice with huge conflicts of interest.

 

Deliberately spreading false information and planting speakers across all of the networks and news outlets is simply not in the same galaxy as Fox spreading their conservative agenda to viewers of the Fox network, or the New York Times spewing its liberal agenda across its readership.

[John Adams]

I would agree that Fox News has a specific agenda and strategy that they want to achieve, and ABC, NBC, etc. have theirs; that they manipulate the stories and analysts to deliver that agenda and influence the public to varying degrees of success.

...

 

Deliberately spreading false information and planting speakers across all of the networks and news outlets is simply not in the same galaxy as Fox spreading their conservative agenda to viewers of the Fox network, or the New York Times spewing its liberal agenda across its readership.

 

That's not quite what was happening. It's a long story, but there were 2 implications. First, that by serving as lapdogs, the "experts" got favorable treatment in their government contracts. No doubt true, although I'm sure it was never an exact quid pro quo--the parties would be too smart for that. Second, that the experts were deliberately fed one side of the story, given talking points etc., and were expected to not present opposing POVs....and if they did, they would be cut off from their government access.

 

The third part of the story (the one Tom enjoys the most) is that the networks failed to vet any of these experts to find their business ties or that the admin was feeding them talking points.

[In-A-Gadda-Levitre]

Second, that the experts were deliberately fed one side of the story, given talking points etc., and were expected to not present opposing POVs....and if they did, they would be cut off from their government access.

I agree with your 1st and 3rd, but here's a couple quotes that demonstrate it was little more than talking points

 

“You could see that they were messaging,” Mr. Krueger said. “You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over.” Some days, he added, “We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks were up there delivering our message. You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.’ ”

 

Another analyst, Robert L. Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who works in the Pentagon for a military contractor, attended the same briefing and recalled feeling “very disappointed” after being shown satellite photographs purporting to show bunkers associated with a hidden weapons program. Mr. Maginnis said he concluded that the analysts were being “manipulated” to convey a false sense of certainty about the evidence of the weapons. Yet he and Mr. Bevelacqua and the other analysts who attended the briefing did not share any misgivings with the American public.

 

Yet these harsh realities were elided, or flatly contradicted, during the official presentations for the analysts, records show. The itinerary, scripted to the minute, featured brief visits to a model school, a few refurbished government buildings, a center for women’s rights, a mass grave and even the gardens of Babylon.

[RayFinkle]

While I am not discounting the validity of the article I feel compelled to note that the Times has become unusually liberal (ala Rolling Stone Magazine) in recent times. If the article has merit then "the truth will out" but I tend to take news from the Times with a grain of salt.

Sadly I find the times to be very moderate, middle of the road. The Republican party has just been highjacked and moved so far over to the right that everything looks liberal in comparison. It's a shame.

[In-A-Gadda-Levitre]

Pentagon suspends analyst briefings

 

Representative Ike Skelton, Democrat of Missouri and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a speech on Thursday that he and many other members of Congress were “very angry” about the issues raised by the article. “The story does not reflect well on the Pentagon, on the military analysts in question, or on the media organizations that employ them,” he said.

 

“There is nothing inherently wrong with providing information to the public and the press,” Mr. Skelton added. “But there is a problem if the Pentagon is providing special access to retired officers and then basically using them as pawns to spout the administration’s talking points of the day.”

[DC Tom]

“There is nothing inherently wrong with providing information to the public and the press,” Mr. Skelton added. “But there is a problem if the Pentagon is providing special access to retired officers and then basically using them as pawns to spout the administration’s talking points of the day.”

 

Yeah, that's the media's job!

[tennesseeboy]

The New York Times breaks an incredible story about supposedly unbiased military analysts that were coached by the Pentagon to support their strategies, while working for contractors that set up huge contract opportunities.

Like duh...whores are whores. These guys make their bucks from the military industrial complex. The press should know better than to trot these guys out for $500 a pop when they are making literally hundreds of thousands of dollars (in some cases millions) from their military industry corporate employers not for their brains but for their good relationship with the Pentagon. The news people certainly knew what was what when they gave them face time, or they are more stupid than anyone could imagine. This war has been sold and packaged to us from the get go...just another brick in the wall.

[Alaska Darin]

Like duh...whores are whores. These guys make their bucks from the military industrial complex. The press should know better than to trot these guys out for $500 a pop when they are making literally hundreds of thousands of dollars (in some cases millions) from their military industry corporate employers not for their brains but for their good relationship with the Pentagon. The news people certainly knew what was what when they gave them face time, or they are more stupid than anyone could imagine. This war has been sold and packaged to us from the get go...just another brick in the wall.

Just like every other program you liberals love...

[inkman]

They manipulated and falsified the entire mainstream news media using these puppets to speak for them.

I thought this was common knowledge already.

[molson_golden2002]

I thought this was common knowledge already.

A lot of people very much trust the military. They see a uniform and feel that an honorable person is trying to explain the truth to them.

[KRC]

I thought this was common knowledge already.

 

Look at the audience here.

[Alaska Darin]

A lot of people very much trust the military. They see a uniform and feel that an honorable person is trying to explain the truth to them.

Much the same way you lap up the choad of your liberal masters...