The Pentagon's Puppets

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The Bush administration has covertly tried to influence public opinion in its favor throughout the Iraq war, planting stories in Iraqi newspapers and disseminating misleading polls. Last week, The New York Times reported that the Pentagon has been using more than 75 "military analysts" as "puppets," revealing one of the most extensive attempts at domestic propaganda in this war. These retired military officials, many of whom have contracting business with the government, have pushed the Bush administration’s talking points but without revealing their contracts with the Pentagon. In a disturbing tit-for-tat, analysts admitted that they were reluctant to buck the Bush administration out of fear that they might lose access to future briefings and information. "Our military services have an important story to tell, and public affairs offices are critical to that task," said Rep. Ike Skelton (D-MO) on the House floor this pasts week. "But credibility is paramount. Once lost, it is difficult or impossible to regain."

PRIVILEGED ACCESS: Day after day, the American public has watched distinguished retired military officers go on television and assess progress in the Iraq war. Many of these analysts, however, were repeating talking points given to them during private briefings by the administration, using this special access "as a marketing and networking opportunity or as a window into future business possibilities." They were all instructed to not "quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon." "It was them saying, ’We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’" said Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst. Certainly not all retired military officials have parroted Pentagon talking points. Last year, for example, CBS asked Iraq veteran Gen. John Batiste to step down as a consultant because he appeared in a VoteVets ad criticizing the war. A CBS vice president justified the network’s decision by saying of Batiste, "By putting himself front and center in an anti-Bush ad, the viewer might have the feeling everything he says is anti-Bush." The largest contingent of "puppets" was affiliated with Fox News, followed by MSNBC and CNN, although analysts also appeared on CBS and ABC. At least nine of them wrote op-eds for The New York Times. After significant public outcry, the Pentagon announced last week that it would be temporarily suspending the program, pending a review of the situation.

MEDIA BLACKOUT: "[T]he degree of behind-the-scenes manipulation -- including regular briefings by then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other officials -- is striking, as is the lack of disclosure by the networks of some of these government and business connections," wrote Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz last week, who also addressed the controversy on CNN. On the whole, however, the media have been disappointingly silent on their role in the Pentagon’s scheme since the story broke last week. On Thursday, PBS’s News Hour did a lengthy segment on the scandal, but it could not convince the other networks to join in. "And for the record, we invited Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and NBC to participate," said senior correspondent Judy Woodruff, "but they declined our offer or did not respond." Since The New York Times report, Fox News has repeatedly used quotes from one of the military analysts named in the story, without mentioning his ties to the Pentagon. Several conservatives have also rushed to dismiss the expose. Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Max Boot said simply, "All this is part and parcel of the daily grind of Washington journalism." Neoconservative pundit John Podhoretz added that the revelations showed "nothing more than that the Pentagon treated former military personnel like VIPs."

PATTERN OF PROPAGANDA: While The New York Times’s revelation was galling, it was hardly the first instance of abuse of public information by the Bush administration. In 2005, the Los Angeles Times revealed that the U.S. military was "secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the US mission in Iraq." However, most of those stories were presented as "unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists." Officials said the stories were "basically factual" but would often "present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the US or Iraqi governments." Even at this time, conservatives were backing the Bush administration’s propaganda. The National Review’s Stephen Spruiell said, "We need more operations like this in Iraq, and more respect for their classified nature." Also in 2005, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers touted poll results of Iraqis that supposedly demonstrated the insurgency was losing political steam, without revealing that the poll surveyed only Iraqis who had actively worked against the insurgents. More recently, in October 2007, it was revealed that the U.S. military was attempting to use funds from the independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes to bolster a PR campaign, which some Pentagon officials described as "tax-payer-funded propaganda."