Bush’s Generals: How they led America to war

These are some of the generals that the Pentagon and Bush administration deployed into our living rooms, courtesy of CNN, ABC, Fox News, NBC, CBS and the other usual suspects that make up our traditional media — yes, that unrepentant bastion of America-hating liberalism.

The New York Times reports on just how well the Pentagon and the Bush administration coordinated their efforts to manipulate the American Public as they duped us into the invasion of Iraq:

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.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror.

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Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

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In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

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The Pentagon paid a private contractor, Omnitec Solutions, hundreds of thousands of dollars to scour databases for any trace of the analysts, be it a segment on “The O’Reilly Factor” or an interview with The Daily Inter Lake in Montana, circulation 20,000.

Omnitec evaluated their appearances using the same tools as corporate branding experts. One report, assessing the impact of several trips to Iraq in 2005, offered example after example of analysts echoing Pentagon themes on all the networks.

Of course, as the New York Times goes on to point out, the manipulation of the American public by these very sources and tactics, continues:

Two weeks ago General Petraeus took time out from testifying before Congress about Iraq for a conference call with military analysts.

Mr. Garrett, the Fox analyst and Patton Boggs lobbyist, said he told General Petraeus during the call to “keep up the great work.”

“Hey,” Mr. Garrett said in an interview, “anything we can do to help.”

Guess which of the candidates has failed the commander in chief test?

Jon Soltz, co-founder of VoteVets.org and a veteran himself of the Iraq war, points out that the candidate touting his military record this presidential season has, in fact, incorrectly answered two basic questions. The first was, when McCain confused the Sunni and Shia populations or Iraq. And, now, the second question, “[W]ho commands what in our military?”

Mr. Soltz points out:

Just yesterday, John McCain seemed to say that General Petraeus is the top military commander of our Armed Forces, telling the Associated Press that he wouldn’t shift the focus of the military from Iraq to Afghanistan “unless Gen. [David] Petraeus said that he felt that the situation called for that.”

Petraeus, of course, is our commander of forces in Iraq. That’s it. He’s not responsible for Afghanistan, or our regional commitment, or our global commitments. As a Commander in Chief, McCain should know that there are people much more qualified to speak to our global strategy than Petraeus — including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of Defense, and the CENTCOM commander.

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It sounds to me like Senator McCain has become confused because of the White House strategy. The White House, of course, has sent General Petraeus to Capitol Hill a number of times, and tried to paint it as an overall assessment of the global war on terror. If they were serious, they’d would have long ago sent the CENTCOM commander up for days upon days of hearings, followed by General McNeill, who could talk about the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, followed by General Petraeus.

The head of Petraeus

Great take on this photo of Gen. Petraeus, before the House Armed Services Committee, via BagNewsNotes.com:

[T]he General [represents] the serpentine head of of a military institution which has been cut off but for the one spokesman, who is marginalized and dislocated. Checking out the hands under the table, the school boy quiescence demonstrates that assessment has been silenced. Also noted was the fact that Petraeus’s mug is actually blocking a symbol of one of the service branches on the wall — more evidence that Petraeus has become a branch unto himself.