The never-ending scandals of Bushco - where does it all end?  Time for someone to ask McCain what he thinks of this particular mess - Holy Joe might have to "personally check his bearings" again after he answers that one!

Bush let the cat out of the bag quite a while ago on this, and it's taken quite a while now for it to begin to be talked about.  We're really screwed when the "free press" are among the co-conspirators and propagandists.  

This is not what the Framers had in mind.

With you citing Greenwald citing others it gets confusing.  Thanks.  Keep up the important work.

media is because Media itself was involved in this scheme.  They knew (of course) that generals with so much knowledge had to be plants by the Pentagon...but they didn't care.  They just wanted their 'situation rooms' and 'command centers' to be as convincingly official as CentCom looked (no, not the multi-million dollar staged one we built in Bahrain or some such place for the Iraq war) when pressers were given there.

Hey, if they could embed reporters with the military, why couldn't the military embed operatives within the media?  

And now they're embarrassed as the pentagon is that this information has surfaced...so they ignore it.

Look out Bush!  Look out Pentagon!  Look out Lapdog Media!

The Sternly Worded Letters are gonna steamroll you into submission!!!  You're sooo gonna wish you were never born!  Our Democratic leaders in Congress are ALL over this, and they are gonna scare you like you've never been scared in your life with probably not just one, but even TWO SWLs!

Woe to you who shall receive thy dreaded SWLs.

I posted the following message last night in Meteor Blades' diary about this story, and sent a similar note to John Kerry last week.

What I'm wondering is whether a meaningful portion of the $300 million DoD foreign propaganda program has found its way into domestic message production, with the generals being a part of that paid effort...

******

The preponderance of silence from all major corporate media quarters save TimesCo may be circumstantial evidence of their conspiracy and legal jeopardy.

I would conject the following possibility -- the Department of Defense contracted out $300 million worth of so-called foreign propaganda in June 2005.  Matt Kelley of USA Today wrote back-to-back articles on these contracts six months later, on December 13 and December 14, 2005.  The first article was titled "3 groups have contracts for pro-U.S. propaganda", and the second was titled "Pentagon rolls out stealth PR".

Kelley gets to the nub of the media owners' legal jeopardy in para. 11 of the second article.

It's legal for the government to plant propaganda in other countries but not in the USA. The White House referred requests for comment about the contracts to the Pentagon, where officials did not respond.

There are shared personalities and timelines between Kelley's propaganda stories and the New York Times' revelations of two weeks ago.  The late Gen. Wayne Dowling, for example, was intimately tied with SAIC, one of the three contracted out by DoD for the propaganda program.

Lincoln, which Maryland records show was created in January 2004 as Iraqex, had no experience in public relations, advertising or other media work. Adler says the firm went to Iraq to work with Iraqi businesses and did its first "strategic communications" work at the request of U.S. commanders.

One of Lincoln Group's founders, a native Briton named Christian Bailey, had been a co-chairman of a political group aligned with the Republican Party called Lead 21. Adler says Bailey did not use his political ties to get government contracts.

SAIC is one of the nation's larger defense contractors. It had more than $7 billion in revenue last year.

Until July, one of its directors was retired Army general Wayne Downing, a former head of Special Operations Command. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has asked Downing to assess Special Operations Command and suggest possible improvements.

Now, needless to say, $300 million is one helluva lot of money to be sloshing around in the pockets of three defense contractors with demonstrable ties to the Bush political shop who were at best subject to Vegas-style oversight.  Pamphlet drops in Warziristan don't cost $300 million.  You need to pay this kind of dough to institutions that demand this kind of dough.  You know, media companies, like, say, General Electric, NewsCorp, CBSCorp, Disney, and Time/Warner.

If any of this $300 million found its way into US or foreign accounts controlled by these five multinationals for purposes of disseminating propaganda directly to US communication channels, I think that's illegal.  And IANAL, but if these companies knew of the arrangement (or as in the case of the telcos, were explicitly asked to violate the law for national security reasons like sustaining public favor for flagging war effort), they would be in legal jeopardy.

I want to put this out to the community, since this kind of research has "hive" written all over it -- read Matt Kelley's two articles linked above, and collate names, dates and conicidences with the New York Times piece.  It may be a first step toward demonstrating a broad pattern of law-breaking.

[As a sidebar, I would just point out that James Risen published his story just a week after Kelley about the telecom side of the US information industry violating the law by "snaring US calls".  This, we should remember, was after Keller and Sulzberger sat on it for a year, forcing Risen to publish "State of War".  New kind of war, indeed.]