"Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand "

So I don’t know how many people have seen this, or how many will have time to read all 11 pages (for the online version at least), but if you haven’t you definitely should, it can be found here

It turns out that starting even before the war in Iraq the Pentagon was employing a strategy of “psyops” against…… us. For those who haven’t read the New York Times article here’s a basic summary:

The Pentagon has basically recruited former military generals to act as Pentagon spokesmen in the media (all those “military experts” networks have been using for the last 5 years or so). The way it works is that they give these “experts” briefing sessions in which paint an incredibly bright and happy picture of how things are going in Iraq, and then have them report that information to the public using their status as “experts” in the media. Of course all of these analysts know that the information they’ve being fed is incredibly optimistic but they still do it anyway. The reason that they do this is that many of these retired military personnel turned “experts” happen to own/have a large stake in companies that do contract work with the Pentagon (the good old military-industrial complex), and it turns out that in all of these fun informational meetings these retired generals and such have incredible access to the top brass in the Pentagon, which coincidently happens to be great for their business ventures.

So in sum, a very large portion of the military analysts used in the media are literally being fed bullet-points by the Pentagon, and then regurgitating those bullet-points (I believe it said in some cases word for word) to the general public, and most of them are doing it so that the companies which they have a large stake are able to get good contracts in Iraq from the Pentagon.

I don’t know about anyone else, but this is pretty disgusting to me. The fact that the military is willing to trade military contracts to generals so that they repeat Pentagon bullet points in the media just seems low, although I suppose coming from this administration I shouldn’t be surprised. However for me for the rest of the time Bush is in office (at least) I’m not going to be able to take any military “experts” seriously because I’ll be wondering 1) if they even have a real idea of what’s going on in Iraq and 2) how many government contracts their companies will get for their testimony.

One final note the article had, which I think sums up Iraq perfectly is this:

An analyst said at another point: “This is a wider war. And whether we have democracy in Iraq or not, it doesn’t mean a tinker’s damn if we end up with the result we want, which is a regime over there that’s not a threat to us.”

“Yeah,” Mr. Rumsfeld said, taking notes.