Pentagon Pundit Scandal Broke the Lawby Sheldon Rampton
The Pentagon military analyst program unveiled in last week’s exposé by David Barstow in the New York Times was not just unethical but illegal. It violates, for starters, specific restrictions that Congress has been placing in its annual appropriation bills every year since 1951. According to those restrictions, “No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress.”
As explained in a March 21, 2005 report by the Congressional Research Service, “publicity or propaganda” is defined by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to mean either (1) self-aggrandizement by public officials, (2) purely partisan activity, or (3) “covert propaganda.” By covert propaganda, GAO means information which originates from the government but is unattributed and made to appear as though it came from a third party.
These concerns about “covert propaganda” were also the basis for the GAO’s strong standard for determining when government-funded video news releases are illegal:
The failure of an agency to identify itself as the source of a prepackaged news story misleads the viewing public by encouraging the viewing audience to believe that the broadcasting news organization developed the information. The prepackaged news stories are purposefully designed to be indistinguishable from news segments broadcast to the public. When the television viewing public does not know that the stories they watched on television news programs about the government were in fact prepared by the government, the stories are, in this sense, no longer purely factual — the essential fact of attribution is missing.
In a related analysis, the GAO explained that “The publicity or propaganda restriction helps to mark the boundary between an agency making information available to the public and agencies creating news reports unbeknownst to the receiving audience.”
In case anyone disagrees with the GAO on this point, here’s what the White House’s own Office of Legal Council had to say, in a memorandum written in 2005 following the controversy over the Armstrong Williams scandal (when it was discovered that the Bush administration had actually paid him to publicly endorse its No Child Left Behind Law):
Over the years, GAO has interpreted “publicity or propaganda” restrictions to preclude use of appropriated funds for, among other things, so-called “covert propaganda.” … Consistent with that view, OLC determined in 1988 that a statutory prohibition on using appropriated funds for “publicity or propaganda” precluded undisclosed agency funding of advocacy by third-party groups. We stated that “covert attempts to mold opinion through the undisclosed use of third parties” would run afoul of restrictions on using appropriated funds for “propaganda.”
The key passage here is the phrase, “covert attempts to mold opinion through the undisclosed use of third parties.” As the Times report documented in detail, the Pentagon’s military analyst program did exactly that.
It was covert. As Barstow’s piece states, the 75 retired military officers who were recruited by Donald Rumsfeld and given talking points to deliver on Fox, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS and MSNBC were given extraordinary access to White House and Pentagon officials. However, “The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.”
It was an attempt to mold opinion. According to the Pentagon’s own internal documents (which can be downloaded and viewed from the New York Times website), the military analysts were considered “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who would deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.” According to one participating military analyst, it was “psyops on steroids.”
It was done “through the undisclosed use of third parties.” In their television appearances, the military analysts did not disclose their ties to the White House, let alone that they were its surrogates. The military analysts were used as puppets for the Pentagon. In the words of Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and for Fox News military analyst, “It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you...”
MORE AT:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/29/8598/
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