Endless Shameless

Charles Kaiser, "Above the Fold: Complex Analysis"

Is there any limit to the shamelessness of NBC News?

That is one of several questions sparked by David Barstow's 5,000-word assault against the military-industrial complex in general and "One Man's Military-Industrial-Media Complex" in particular—the one owned and operated by retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey.

Barstow's piece, on the front page of yesterday's New York Times, appeared exactly six months after the same reporter's previous spectacular effort on this subject, five and a half years after The Nation's Daniel Benaim, Priyanka Motaparthy, & Vishesh Kumar first disclosed McCaffrey's very extensive ties to military contractors—and thirty-seven years after CBS News first identified military manipulation of the media in a documentary called The Selling of the Pentagon.

Barstow's earlier story revealed that the Pentagon had recruited an army of seventy-five retired military officer talking heads to appear as objective experts on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC—men who actually work with "more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants." The companies are "all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration's war on terror."

The networks reacted to that Times story with a stunning wall of silence. Neither CBS nor NBC nor ABC has ever mentioned it on any of their evening news broadcasts. (Glenn Greenwald noted yesterday that clocks had been created "to count the number of days the networks blackballed Barstow's story"; they now stand at "223 days, and counting.")

Selling the Drama

David Barstow, "One Man's Military-Industrial-Media Complex"

General McCaffrey did not mention his new contract with Defense Solutions in his letter to General Petraeus. Nor did he disclose it when he went on CNBC that same week and praised the commander Defense Solutions was now counting on for help — "He's got the heart of a lion" — or when he told Congress the next month that it should immediately supply Iraq with large numbers of armored vehicles and other equipment.

He had made similar arguments before he was hired by Defense Solutions, but this time he went further. In his testimony to Congress, General McCaffrey criticized a Pentagon plan to supply Iraq with several hundred armored vehicles made in the United States by a competitor of Defense Solutions. He called the plan "not in the right ballpark" and urged Congress to instead equip Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles.

"We've got Iraqi army battalions driving around in Toyota trucks," he said, echoing an argument made to General Petraeus in the Defense Solutions briefing packet.

Through seven years of war an exclusive club has quietly flourished at the intersection of network news and wartime commerce. Its members, mostly retired generals, have had a foot in both camps as influential network military analysts and defense industry rainmakers. It is a deeply opaque world, a place of privileged access to senior government officials, where war commentary can fit hand in glove with undisclosed commercial interests and network executives are sometimes oblivious to possible conflicts of interest.

Few illustrate the submerged complexities of this world better than Barry McCaffrey.

About the Least Surprising Thing You Could Tell Me

David Barstow, "Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand"

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.

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 ....

..... A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”