True to the Flag

True to the Flag

by Hubert Wetzel

Many US television networks hired ex-military officers as experts on the Iraq war. Now it turns out the Pentagon was controlling many of them.

They popped up on TV screens after September 11th 2001: the “Military Analysts.” America was at war and every TV network hired one or two, some as many as a half dozen military commentators. Their mission: to explain what was happening on the battlefield to the viewers. As a rule, they were mostly retired generals or colonels who could comment in complete sentences while avoiding the usual clichés and who wore well tailored suits.

However, the independence of these experts became secondary when it was realized that a lot more profit could be gotten out of them. The New York Times evaluated 8,000 pages of documents and concluded that the Defense Department had systematically tried to influence the military analysts. With a well-aimed campaign, the Pentagon tried to convert the analysts into mouthpieces for the administration line. That idea came from Torie Clarke, the notorious first spokesperson for then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The Pentagon rapidly identified the lever that could be applied to the experts in order to make them more pliable. They became a brigade of commentators, most of who had never been harsh critics of the military in the first place, and they were given exclusive access to information in the form of conversations with Rumsfeld or Vice-President Dick Cheney. Whoever opposed the official government line openly or who criticized the situation in Iraq disappeared from the list of favored experts in short order. In addition, the experts also had an economic motive to avoid stepping on Pentagon toes: it’s business as usual in Washington for retired officers to work as lobbyists for the defense industry. That was the case for many of the commentators. By virtue of their media positions, they had easy access to high-level Pentagon officials who had money to spread around.

The documents analyzed by the New York Times prove that the Pentagon systematically took care of the network military experts. Notes from the Department of Defense routinely refer to them as “our analysts” with the advantage, naturally, that they were being paid by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN or Fox. In addition, the newspaper can also prove that at least some of the military experts willingly allowed themselves to be used as Pentagon tools, whether by dint of reporting supposed successes in Iraq when they knew better, or by praising the prison camp in Guantanamo. The discoveries are embarrassing for the Pentagon and the television broadcasters alike. Above all, they confirm the ancient suspicion that truth is the first victim of war.