Perino punts on Pentagon Pundit propaganda

It’s been nearly two weeks since the New York Times first reported on a Pentagon program in which retired military officers, who’ve since become lobbyists or consultants for military contractors, were recruited to become propaganda agents of the Bush administration. Throughout the war in Iraq, these retired officers — or “message multipliers,” as they were described by internal Defense Department documents — took on roles as military analysts for all of the major news networks, without noting their puppet-like relationships with the Pentagon.

Given their complicity in the scandal, most of the major news networks have been reluctant to even mention the story to the public. The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, to his enormous credit, said the media’s “coverage of this important issue has been pathetic.” He added, “The story makes the networks look bad, and their response, by and large, has been to ignore it.”

But a few brave souls are doing their level best to keep the story alive. At yesterday’s White House press briefing, Raw Story reporter Eric Brewer had raised his hand to ask a question for quite a while. Dana Perino ignored him until others intervened, urging Perino to call on him.

Brewer, after noting that the retired officers’ access was cut off if they departed from the Pentagon’s talking points, asked, “[D]id the White House know about and approve of this operation?” Perino responded:

“Look, I didn’t know — look, I think that you guys should take a step back and look at this — look, DOD has made a decision, they’ve decided to stop this program. But I would say that one of the things that we try to do in the administration is get information out to a variety of people so that everybody else can call them and ask their opinion about something. “And I don’t think that that should be against the law. And I think that it’s absolutely appropriate to provide information to people who are seeking it and are going to be providing their opinions on it. It doesn’t necessarily mean that all of those military analysts ever agreed with the administration. I think you can go back and look and think that a lot of their analysis was pretty tough on the administration. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t talk to people.”

And with that, she abruptly ended the press briefing.

Not surprisingly, there are a few problems with that response — starting with the fact that Perino doesn’t seem to know what the program was all about.



The press secretary’s spin makes it sound quite innocuous. The Defense Department, the White House story goes, was simply “proving information to people who are seeking it.” In turn, those people “provided their opinions on it.” What could possibly be controversial about that?

In reality, however, this was as sophisticated a media-manipulation scheme as anything the Bush gang has hatched to date. A small group of Pentagon political appointees would “cater to” more than 75 retired officers, giving them the message that needed to be multiplied. As one Pentagon official marveled, “You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over. We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks were up there delivering our message. You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.'”

The Pentagon kept this program secret, and wouldn’t acknowledge its existence until it was forced to as a result of a lawsuit. If this was simply “proving information to people who are seeking it,” why, do you suppose, the Bush administration went to such lengths to keep it hidden from public view? If it was ethical and appropriate, why the need for secrecy?

What’s more, some of these retired officers were pressured to say things they knew to be false, but were driven by a financial incentive: they work for military contractors who couldn’t risk upsetting the Pentagon. So, the officers were given talking points, they repeated them on the air, and their employers continued to win lucrative contracts.

The goal was 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.” And, it worked, with these respected retired officers going on national television, without disclosing their role in the propaganda program, and insisting that Bush administration’s policies were working, even when they were failing.

The dishonesty of the program is rivaled only by the dishonesty of the White House’s response yesterday.

As for why it took a writer from Raw Story to press the White House press secretary on this, nearly two weeks after the revelations came to public light, that’s a question for ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox News to consider.