Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Pavlov's Dogs of War Propaganda

Pavlov's Dogs of War Propaganda
Jeff Huber | April 29, 2008
It turns out that James “Spider” Marks, retired Army general and military
analyst, was peddling the Bush administration’s war propaganda on CNN
under the guise of objective journalism for fun and profit. 
Say it ain’t so, Spider. 
“Shoeless” Barry McCaffrey and “Clueless” Ken Allard were also among the
ranks of retired officers who cashed in on their military experience to
shill young Mr. Bush’s woebegone war on the major news networks, according
to a recent article in the New York Times by David Barstow. Many of the
analysts who spoke with Barstow were so contrite they sounded like they
were trying to put their hands on a Get Out of Hell Free card. Allard was
especially amusing, seeming to want us to think that it took him five
years or so to figure out that he was being duped by the Pentagon, but now
that he’s on to their little charade, boy he’s hoppin’ mad about it. 
It’s difficult to believe Allard could have been that dumb for that long,
but keep in mind that he’s a former intelligence officer, and that the
average intelligence officer is no more intelligent than the average
fighter pilot, so he might have been. 
A Few Bad Men
Allard, McCaffrey, Marks and many other network military analysts have
been part of an extensive Pentagon information campaign designed “to
generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime
performance,” according to Barstow. The effort “began with the buildup to
the Iraq war and continues to this day.” Not surprisingly, “Most of the
analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies
they are asked to assess on air.” 
Allard told Barstow the campaign amounted to a “sophisticated information
operation.” “This was a coherent, active policy,” Allard said. He would
know. If Irony were alive and with us, it would adore the fact that Allard
has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, yet now
wants to portray himself as a hapless victim of Pentagon spin merchants.
“Night and day,” Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.” 
Gee, Ken. Imagine how the rest of us feel. 
You Can’t Panhandle the Truth
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told Barstow it is “a bit incredible” to
think retired military officers could be “wound up” and turned into
“puppets of the Defense Department.” Yet what the retired officers have
done is no less unimaginable than the behavior of their still on active
duty counterparts. 
Air Force General Richard B. Myers was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff from 2001 to 2005, and one of the administration’s most avid and
visible echo chamberlains. It was during his tenure that a bitter debate
arose within the Department of Defense over the ethic and legal
implications of Donald Rumsfeld’s programs for planting disinformation in
the news media. In the summer of 2004, then U.S. commander in Iraq General
George Casey approved merging his public affairs and combat information
operations into a single “strategic communications office.”
Myers issued a memorandum that warned commanders like Casey about the
risks of merging public affairs with things like psychological operations
and operational deception, but that didn’t forbid them from doing so.
Casey and the other commanders promptly ignored the memo. Did Myers really
expect his generals to follow an order he didn’t actually give? Well, he
is a fighter pilot, after all, which, as we discussed earlier, makes him
as dumb as an intelligence officer. Our late friend Irony might wonder,
though, if Myers is so dumb, how did he manage to earn graduate degrees
and certificates from Auburn University, the Air Force Command and Staff
College, the Army War College and (ahem) Harvard? 
Now retired, Myers seems desperate to distance himself from another
disgrace of his tenure: torture. Myers has gone and gotten himself a
ten-dollar lawyer named Philippe Sands who’s apparently smarter than an
intelligence officer and a fighter pilot put together. Sands says Myers
was “hoodwinked” by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney into allowing
waterboarding and other torture techniques to be practiced at the
Guantanamo Bay detention center. While JCS chairman, Myers aggressively
defended the GITMO camp’s existence and the interrogation techniques
practiced there. Lawyer Sands says Harvard graduate Myers was “confused”
about the decisions that allowed torture to take place, and that he
thought the interrogation techniques Rumsfeld approved came from a U.S.
Army field manual. 
I’ll bet you cash money that a copy of that field manual was laying around
somewhere at the Pentagon back then, and that if Myers had really wanted
to know what it said about interrogation techniques, he would have had one
of his little helpers read it for him and tell him all about it. I think
Myers already had a pretty good idea what it said but he didn’t want to
know for sure, because then he would have had to stand up to Donald
Rumsfeld, and being an Air Force fighter pilot he didn’t have the body
parts it takes to do that. 
Irony would be delighted to hear that following his retirement, Myers was
named as the Colin Powell Chair of Character, Leadership and Ethics at
National Defense University, and it would tickle Irony pink that Myers now
serves on the boards of Northrup Grumman, one of America’s largest defense
contracting firms, and John Deere, which makes the kind of heavy
construction equipment that comes in so handy in countries that are trying
to rebuild themselves after being blown to smithereens by the United
States. 
Where Do We Find Such Men?
A good friend who taught at the scandal plagued U.S. Naval Academy once
told me that Annapolis is a place where plebe freshmen spend a summer
learning a million senseless rules and then spend the next four years
learning to break them without getting caught. That the Academy’s
curriculum includes an honor code and a required course on ethics would
satisfy Irony to no end. 
Given the moral incubation the Academy provides the naval forces’ officer
corps, it is little wonder that the semi-official motto of naval
aviation’s fighter community is “If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.”
Toward the end of my career, the Navy launched its “Moral Sailor” program,
the watchwords of which were, “Moral sailors do the right thing even when
nobody’s watching.” On the deck plates, this bromide swiftly morphed into
“Smart sailors only do the right thing when nobody’s watching because
that’s the only time they can get away with it.” 
The naval services hardly have a monopoly on moral hypocrisy. The Air
Force has produced its share of generals like Richard Myers. Irony would
likely say, though, that the Army broke the mold when it manufactured
General David H. Petraeus. 
The moment he took over as commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Petraeus
began living up to the assessment of his boss, Admiral William Fallon, who
reportedly called him "an a**-kissing little chickens***." One of
Petraeus’s first acts in his new billet was to meet with and
re-indoctrinate the news channel military analysts like Barry McCaffrey
and Spider Marks and Ken Allard. 
Petraeus is a master of ends-justify-means media manipulation when it
comes to promoting his mission, his agenda and himself. The most atrocious
example of his showboating was the Baghdad outdoor market shopping spree
he put on for pro-surge Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham in April
2007,... 
a propaganda event made possible by more than 100 U.S. troops who provided
security. 
The security detail wasn’t just the standard red rump window dressing you
deck out whenever VIPs show up. Real danger was involved. The Shorja
Market, where Lindsey Graham bought five carpets for a dollar each, had
been bombed at least six times since the summer prior to the McCain
retinue’s visit. 61 people were killed there the previous February. At
least 60 people, mostly women and children, died during a suicide bombing
in another Baghdad market the Thursday before McCain’s party arrived. The
day after McCain’s shopping excursion, 21 Shiites who worked at the Shorja
Market were ambushed, tied up and shot to death.
Any way you want to slice it, Petraeus put the lives of more than 100
soldiers under his command at risk in order to convince the American
public his surge was “working,” to promote John McCain’s presidential
candidacy, and to grease the rails for his own retirement career in
politics. 
Lovely guy, huh? 
Irony wouldn’t get its hopes up that America’s military can somehow
reverse its trend of rewarding self-promoting yes men with its top
leadership spots. The man the Army brought in from the field last November
to preside over its brigadier (one-star) general selection board was one
David H. Petraeus. 
This was the same David H. Petraeus, Irony would add, whom young Mr. Bush
just nominated to move up and take over Central Command
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