On The Reservation

by digby

I noticed yesterday that the “military analysts” employed by the networks were not only helping the administration spin on Rumsfeld, but actually admitted on the air that they were giving the pentagon advice on how to handle the problem.

This post at TPM by Larry Johnson fills in the details of an ongoing propaganda effort that must be well known among the networks. Johnson prints a letter from his friend Pat Lang, who had been part of the arrangement for a while:

Over several months (this was in ’04) I attended meetings in the Pentagon and participated in conference calls with very senior officials (both military and civilian). The Pentagon meetings were well attended by a variety of retired generals, colonels, Navy captains and a few retired NCOs, all of whom were familiar faces from TV news. Most of them were cable people, and there was a disproportionate representation from Fox News as well as people who were both TV commentators and think tankers, mostly from AEI and Heritage. There were several retired four star generals present whom I had never seen on the tube, but who may have been off camera consultants.

The Defense staff always made their case for the correctness of the policies followed by the administration and handed out “talking points” as suggestions. The retired officers listened politely with clear skepticism on the part of quite a few. There was always an opportunity for Q&A and a lot of the questions were both polite and very pointed. Some of the questions were not well answered. This was the period of the emerging Abu Ghraib mess, and many of the officers attending were bitter and unhappy over what had been happening in that matter.

[…]

My impression was that the media consultant officers at these events wanted and needed the access provided in order to be secure in their retirement employment. The media companies obviously valued that. After all, most of them are commercial enterprises and cannot afford to have their rival companies granted such access if they are not. This creates a certain pressure on the retired military people involved to stay “on the reservation.”

Lang concludes that on the whole these retired officers try to do the right thing. Perhaps. But after the performance of General Shepperd on CNN yesterday, I think it’s pretty clear that some of them, at least, believe they are full members of the administration’s tribe — and if they were critical it was because they were having a rough time making Rummy’s case for him.

It would be very helpful if the public knew about these special briefings and knew especially that the pentagon was sponsoring these military analysts’ “fact-finding” trips to Iraq. Why isn’t this disclosed?

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