A while back I noted that the Administration had spent $1.6 billion on PR alone and said, more or less, WTF? The three fake journalists (Armstrong WIlliams, Maggie Gallagher and Michael McManus) barely added up to $2 million all together. Either some columnist out there got one hell of a sweetheart deal from the government or there is something really weird going on. One clue came when a commenter pointed out that the cash mostly went to the DoD.
Now we know one reason why – almost every “military analyst” on rotation through the major networks has substantial connections with the Pentagon, links which are almost never disclosed to viewers. In some cases the links are financial and obvious, such as when the “analyst” is a lobbyist or a consultant hoping for another $10 million contract. In other cases the connection takes the form of posh junkets and privileged access to Pentagon insiders. The case of retired Col. John Garrett illustrates the point nicely.
John C. Garrett is a retired Army colonel and unpaid analyst for Fox News TV and radio. He is also a lobbyist at Patton Boggs who helps firms win Pentagon contracts, including in Iraq. In promotional materials, he states that as a military analyst he “is privy to weekly access and briefings with the secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high level policy makers in the administration.” One client told investors that Mr. Garrett’s special access and decades of experience helped him “to know in advance — and in detail — how best to meet the needs” of the Defense Department and other agencies.
In interviews Mr. Garrett said there was an inevitable overlap between his dual roles. He said he had gotten “information you just otherwise would not get,” from the briefings and three Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq. He also acknowledged using this access and information to identify opportunities for clients. “You can’t help but look for that,” he said, adding, “If you know a capability that would fill a niche or need, you try to fill it. “That’s good for everybody.”
At the same time, in e-mail messages to the Pentagon, Mr. Garrett displayed an eagerness to be supportive with his television and radio commentary. “Please let me know if you have any specific points you want covered or that you would prefer to downplay,” he wrote in January 2007, before President Bush went on TV to describe the surge strategy in Iraq.
Conversely, the administration has demonstrated that there is a price for sustained criticism, many analysts said. “You’ll lose all access,” Dr. McCausland said.
Some of the sources eventually realized the yawning gulf between the “inside information” that they were being fed at private audiences and the evidence from their own eyes, and a small few acknowledged it publicly. Out of either political loyalty, loyalty to cash or sheer obliviousness the rest went right on spinning. It’s a sad denouement for a bunch of guys who at one time served the country with pride and honor.
gypsy howell
If this country had any sense at all, we would just shut down the entire fucking military – the Pentagon and Dept of Defense, oh, and you can throw in the CIA too. These bloated, festering maggots have done nothing but spread death and misery around the world for the last 6 decades, robbing the taxpayers of their dollars so a handful of people can get rich, while selling us all on the lie that they’re “protecting our freedoms.”
At least real maggots serve a useful purpose in our ecosystem- more than I can say about the whole defense complex.
Dennis - SGMM
Dug Jay
Gypsey Howell, another deranged lunatic heard from:
Just a typical sort of comment one can find almost hourly on the blog that has rapidly become known as home to the Beavis and Buttheads of the Left.
Andy K
In light of this latest news- and this 3 week old article– it’s again time to question the case against Scott Beauchamp, and to ask whether the outrage from the right wing of the blog-o-sphere, as well as the investigation into Beauchamp’s claims, were orchestrated by the Pentagon.
Andy K
Riiiight…Because every back-and-forth featuring Dug Jay rises to the level of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
jrg
White House chief of staff Andrew Card during the run-up to the Iraq War:
Bush on why retired people don’t need to worry about anything:
This kind of reckless, partisan, and dictatorial behavior is exactly what the Bush presidency is known for. There is nothing these people won’t do: torture, ignore international law, start wars pre-emptively over false intelligence, out CIA operatives for political retribution, manipulate terror warnings as a political distraction, label political opponents as treasonous, politicize prosecutor’s offices, overturn elections, subsidize industry cohorts with taxpayer dollars… The list goes on for miles.
Of course they’ve got to “market” this crap, it’s not going to sell itself.
It’s a product of the “White Collar” mindset that says that “Business is War”. When you’re dumb enough to believe that, and you’ve been doing “Business” for 20+ years, sending someone to war is no different than selling a tube of toothpaste. Losing $200K on a option play is just like getting your leg blown off by an IED. A widget is a fucking widget.
Business is War, and War is just like Football.
scarshapedstar
Why do you hate our veterans?
/smarmy wingnut prick
Incertus
My favorite part was this section from Larry Di Rita:
A Bush administration official never had an ethical conflict cross his mind? Color me amazed.
EZSmirkzz
It isn’t just a matter of insider information in my mind, but one of conducting an Information Operation, milspeak for propaganda, within the United States. This sort of thing used to piss Americans off, to the extent that it was made illegal.
Now it is a bigger crime to have known Bill Ayers than it is to have emulated Joseph Goebbels.
Martin
9/11 changed everything.
Look at how Obama is being attacked through his church, his flag pin, and his associations and it’s dead on for what the House Unamericans Activity Committee was doing.
dj spellchecka
i doubt this will surprise anyone, but the media outlet that made the most use of these “consultants?” fox news.
chopper
step 1: spoof a comment saying something stupid
step 2: as someone else, point out that it’s representative of the whole place
something about profiting, but this is a blog afterall.
w vincentz
If the NY Times article is accurate, well, I can only say that I’m devastated.
All the while, I was lead to believe that we were sacrificing both American lives and Iraqi lives for freedom, democracy, and the creation of a model for the rest of the Middle East to emulate. We couldn’t cause all of the death and destruction for corporate profits, would we? Would the Pentagon use military leaders to mislead the American populace?
After hearing this, I don’t think I’ll be wearing my flag lapel pin for a while.
Pb
Golly gosh, why would the Pentagon ever feed propaganda to Americans, let alone patriotic ex-military who show up all the time on American television? Gee willickers.
slippy hussein toad
Of course, first you fail to quote what the bloated festering maggots have done over the last six decades. You also fail to have any kind of coherent defense for it. Post WWII, the defense industry seems to have exclusively concentrated on seeking out hopped-up “threats” from overseas to waste our blood and treasure on. Is this something you feel was worth our national effort? If so, elaborate. If not, shut the fuck up.
Secondly, you apparently aren’t very hep to what Beavis & Butthead were. Of course, since all you probably know of them is third-hand you’d have left out the sniggering pyromania and nose-picking, farting idiocy, plus the overwhelming interest in setting fire to or causing explosions on everything. B&B would find war, death, and social chaos caused by military adventurism cool. And being a pair of little giggling sociopathic 15-year-olds, they would have had very little concern for the social destruction visited by the MICC (Military Industrial Concressional Complex).
So that’s both indefensible and ignorant.
For my part, I think the CIA should be shut down and all current employees barred from public service for all time. I am very uncomfortable with what they’ve been doing in this country for a very long time. The MICC should probably be shut down permanently and replaced with a completely different command structure starting from the ground up. We can keep the equipment but we need to internalize the development of our military hardware and remove the entire ridiculous contractor scheme from our construction and supply chain and just let the government handle it. It’s painfully obvious that private industry not only cannot do a better job of protecting our nation than our government, but that they instead turn into arms dealers and destructive opportunists when put in a position where it profits them for us to be involved in a war.
Finally, a law needs to be made that any industry which sells to any governmental agency during wartime must do so at cost, and that any profit such an industry makes is immediately forfeit, and that businesses engaging in such profiteering can be taken over, and closed down by the federal government, and investors in such a business can be stripped of their investment, and that officers of such a company can and will be jailed for profiteering on war. There has been such a large amount of unnecessary war and destruction created by those with little interest other than making money from horrendous chaos and suffering. I would like to see such individuals strung up by their thumbs in public squares across the nation, but seeing the investors in, for example, Halliburton have their entire stake stripped from them would suit me just fine. It would serve the purpose and make the point. Our society no longer has time for these shitheads. We’ve got better things to do with our money and our time.
TenguPhule
It takes a lot of bribes to get torture and treason by Republicans buried into pretty little phrases that put 1984 to shame.
gypsy howell
slippy – I’m copying that and saving it.
b-psycho
There was actually an episode of the show where, after seeing a recruiting commercial, they tried to join the army. Wrote on the sign-up sheet their names were “Major Woody” and “Private Parts”, and nearly destroyed the recruiting office juggling a live hand grenade.
/MTV Dork-out