On Friday May 8, Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! conducted the first national broadcast interview with New York Times reporter David Barstow about his 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning expose of the Pentagon propaganda campaign to recruit more than seventy-five retired military officers to appear on TV outlets as military analysts ahead of and during the Iraq war. This week, the Pentagon inspector general’s office admitted its exoneration of the program was flawed and withdrew it.
According to Goodman, Barstow uncovered Pentagon documents referring to the military analysts as "message force multipliers" or "surrogates" who could be counted on to deliver administration themes and messages to millions of Americans in the form of their own opinions.
The 'analysts' were given hundreds of classified Pentagon briefings, provided with Pentagon-approved talking points and given free trips to Iraq and other sites paid for by the Pentagon. According to Barstow "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." The officials appeared on all the main cable news channels—Fox News, CNN and MSNBC—as well as the three nightly network news broadcasts.
AMY GOODMAN:
As the media watch group Media Matters has pointed out, MSNBC continues to interview General Barry McCaffrey without disclosing his ties to military contractors. In this interview from February, McCaffrey advocates for building up the Afghan security force, but it’s not disclose that McCaffrey is a member of the board of directors of DynCorp International, a company under contract to train part of the Afghan national security force.
NORAH O’DONNELL:
And a big headline: the President is expected to announce a major drawdown in the number of US troops in Iraq. NBC News has learned that more than half of the American troops there will be pulled out within nineteen months, leaving perhaps around 50,000 still in the war zone. MSNBC analyst and retired US Army General Barry McCaffrey is here.
GEN. BARRY McCAFFREY:
By the way, another question to be decided is, what are we doing in Afghanistan? Are we there to build an Afghan security force with our NATO allies and then withdraw? Or are we there to fight a counterinsurgency battle in this gigantic country?
She then ran other examples of the propaganda:
BILL O’REILLY: You met with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.
MAJ. GEN. PAUL VALLELY: Special briefing on Thursday. Very interesting. A lot of good information, especially about post-Saddam, post-regime time, what are we going to do then? And it’s a very well laid-out plan.
WOLF BLITZER: This is just coming into CNN right now. The Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has just wrapped up his meeting with retired US generals. Our own military analyst, retired US Air Force Major General Don Shepperd, is fresh of that meeting. He’s joining us now live from the Pentagon.
MAJ. GEN. DONALD SHEPPERD: The message needs to be, imagine an Iraq—imagine Iraq under the control of Zarqawi with another conveyor belt for tourists, combined with oil and water and land and resources. Imagine the effect of that. That’s the message that has to get out to the American people.
Barstow went on to talk about the inspector general report that came out on January 14th concerning whether or not the program violated longstanding laws that forbid 1) the Pentagon from targeting the American public with propaganda, and 2) whether or not the special access that was granted to the military analysts who participated in this program was used to help them in the competition for contracts related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Barstow:
So the report comes out in January, and it effectively exonerated the program. ... It really is very rare for the inspector general of the Defense Department to rescind and repudiate and, in fact, even withdraw the report from its own website.
...it became pretty clear that there were significant problems with it, factual problems...it listed one particular general who I had written an awful lot about, General Barry McCaffrey, who’s probably the preeminent military analyst for NBC and MSNBC. They listed him as having absolutely no ties to any defense contractors. I had written 5,000 words that detailed tie after tie after tie he had to defense contractors, either as someone who sat on the boards of publicly traded companies, as a consultant to many defense contractors, and as an advisor to a private equity firm in New York that invests heavily in the biggest defense contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so, it became pretty clear that there was something wrong with this report.
Goodman brought up General Marks who, after becoming a CNN military analyst after his retirement in 2004, was named the president of the DynCorp subsidiary, Global Linguist Solutions where General McCaffrey was chair. Barstow explained that Global Linguist was a company set up specifically to go after one of the biggest defense contracts of the Iraq war to supply thousands of translators to the American military.
Barstow: General McCaffrey became aware that American generals in Iraq were not pleased with the performance of the company that held the contract and that they were thinking about rebidding. He recruited General Marks to come in to be the president of this new subsidiary for DynCorp. And that company then spent months fighting to win this contract that was worth over $4 billion. It was a contract that would have, when it was announced send DynCorp’s stock up 15 percent in one day. And so, the two of them together were involved in this effort to win this contract.
In the latter part of 2006...after the midterm elections, there was a moment of internal national soul-searching... Should we get in or get out of Iraq? Jim Baker and his commission were weighing ideas about whether we should exit Iraq by March of 2008 or not. And at that same time, General McCaffrey and General Marks and this company, Global Linguist, were locked in this battle for this $4 billion-plus contract to supply the translators in Iraq. They were going on television... Both took the position that we needed to stay in Iraq and see it through. General McCaffrey was hugely critical of the Baker-Hamilton recommendation to pull out most of our combat troops by March of 2008. There was this sort of confluence at that time of their business interests and what they were saying on air.
Not only were these relationships not disclosed to the viewers of either CNN or NBC, but CNN at least claimed that they weren’t even aware that General Marks, their main military analyst, had this role with this company, was deeply involved in fighting for this contract. When they found out in mid-2007 that he did play this role with this company, CNN pretty quickly severed its ties with General Marks, and he no longer appears on air as a military analyst for them. NBC, that’s not the case.
AMY GOODMAN: December 18, 2006, Pentagon stuns Wall Street by awarding the translation contract to Global Linguist. DynCorp stock jumps 15 percent. And as you point out, according to a 2007 corporate filing, General McCaffrey was promised $10,000 a month, plus expenses. Once Global Linguist secured the contract, he would also be eligible to share in profits which could potentially be significant. The contract was worth $4.6 billion over five years, but only if the United States did not pull out of Iraq first.