(Military Times) Op-Ed: Ministry of Truth and Peace (Part II)

[unhappycamper]

Ministry of Truth and Peace (Part II)
Jeff Huber | February 03, 2009

On January 16, the Friday before Barack Obama's inauguration, the Defense Department inspector general released the report of an investigation of the Pentagon's Retired Military Analyst program. The report stated that, "the evidence in this case was insufficient to conclude" that the program had "violated statutory prohibitions on publicity or propaganda," because "the definition of propaganda in this context remains unclear."

In April 2008, an in-depth investigation by the New York Times revealed that the RMA program had employed retired military officers in a "campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance."

So all that really remains unclear in this context is why the I.G. didn't look up the definition of "propaganda." Maybe that was outside the scope of his investigation.

"Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand," by David Barstow was a watershed story for the New York Times, the paper that, more than any other mainstream media outlet, had allowed the Bush administration to use it as a conduit for the false propaganda that convinced the country of the need to invade Iraq. Where Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller cited unnamed "officials" nearly 30 times in their September 2002 article that fraudulently asserted Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear weapons technology, Barstow's investigative report was an exemplar of cold fact and attributed testimony.

Retired Army colonel Ken Allard, an NBC analyst, called the RMA program a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he told Barstow.


Rest of article at: http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,184231,00.html