Who else can proclaim they have investigated themselves and found they did nothing wrong?
Remember when the US military was caught redhanded planting Pro-US propaganda in the Free Iraqi media?
An unclassified summary of results of the inspector general's probe, released on Thursday, said:
"We concluded that the Multi-National Force-Iraq and Multi-National Corps-Iraq complied with applicable laws and regulations in their use of a contractor to conduct Psychological Operations and their use of newspapers as a way to disseminate information."
Yes it's official. Our current military leaders are not only fucking idiots, but as thick in the slime of corruption as their political counterparts.
More on the flip side
Early this year, the Pentagon confirmed that troops in an "information operations" task force were writing articles with positive messages about the mission in Iraq that were translated into Arabic and given to Iraqi newspapers to print in return for money.
The stories were planted with the help of Washington-based Lincoln group.
The inspector general, the Pentagon's internal watchdog agency, reviewed three Lincoln Group contracts.
In one of those cases, it found that a military contracting office did not maintain enough documentation to verify expenditures under the program. Because of that, the inspector could not determine if the contract was awarded properly or if payments made were appropriate, the summary results stated.
Seriously, it just makes me sick to my stomach. American taxpayer money funding propaganda puff pieces planted by military war profiteers to promote a Republican agenda is deemed LEGAL after being investigated by the VERY SAME people who started the whole damn thing in the first place.
Never mind that the whole idea was so stupid that whoever suggested it should have been taken out and shot for polluting the gene pool. Never mind that once it was found out, the whole thing BACKFIRED against the US occupation and permanently poisoned any future 'good' news in Iraq with the suspicions that they were merely more planted stories. Never mind that it was clearly morally and legally wrong to subvert the 'free' press in Iraq (and by extension the US and International Media relying on Iraqi reports). Never mind that the situation in Iraq was already so bad that they had to PAY Iraqis to print happy news stories rather then the bloody truth.
Because the Pentagon's own investigation found nothing wrong with what they themselves were doing. And the military high command answers to nobody outside of themselves and the Republicans holding their leash. Congressional Oversight? Please, Rumsfield and his diddling Chiefs spit on 'requirements' and 'regulations'.
I wish I could say that it was just another straw of the corrosive influence of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield and the whole nest of cobras. But I fear the rot is becoming institutionalized, to the point that it may never be fully removed. Our military leadership has indeed returned to the days of Vietnam. The trust is gone.