News Flash: Sec Def Gates to suspend retired general officer's briefings

[bushmeister0]

CNN:

"The secretary of defense will no longer brief retired military officers-turned-network television analysts, the chief Pentagon spokesman said Friday. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Robert Hastings said he suspended the program this week amid media scrutiny of the practice . . . An article in the Sunday New York Times alleged that the analysts were used to push the Bush administration's messages topics including the war in Iraq and what was going on in the prison camps at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The report also claimed that some of the analysts were involved in business contracts with the Pentagon -- information the newspaper said was rarely or never disclosed, even to the networks. . . Hastings said he suspended the program indefinitely until a group independent of the Department of Defense public affairs office can perform a review.

He did not say how long the review would take."

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/04/25/pentagon.briefings/index.html

Wew, another problem solved!

Naturally, the actual outcome of the "investigation" will never be made public -- the media won;t follow up -- and then they'll just go back to business as usual.

As DUer bobthedrummer pointed out to me yesterday, the The Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) is still in business.

"OSI, headed by Air Force Brig. Gen. Simon P. Worden, began 'circulating classified proposals calling for aggressive campaigns that use not only the foreign media and the Internet, but also covert operations.' Worden envisioned 'a broad mission ranging from 'black' campaigns that use disinformation and other covert activities to 'white' public affairs that rely on truthful news releases,' according to Pentagon officials. 'It goes from the blackest of black programs to the whitest of white,' a senior Pentagon official said."

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Office_of_Strategic_Influence

As the James T. Conway, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs 2006, was quoted as saying in the NYT article:

"The strategic target remains our population."