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Military Analysts Trained By Government, Report Says
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Published: April 20, 2008
In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantanamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded "the gulag of our times" by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from U.N. human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.
The administration's communications experts responded swiftly. They put a group of retired military officers on a jet normally used by Vice President Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantanamo.
To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented on television and radio as "military analysts" whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration's wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.
The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war, reaches to the U.S. Central Command in Tampa and continues to this day. It has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.
Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. Collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration's war on terrorism.
Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its influence in an effort to transform the analysts into an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.
"It was them saying, 'We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,'" said Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst.
A Sophisticated Operation
Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation.
As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Allard recalled, he saw a gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books revealed.
The Pentagon defended its relationship with military analysts, saying they had been given only factual information about the war. "The intent and purpose of this is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people," Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said.
Some network officials acknowledged only a limited understanding of their analysts' interactions with the administration. They said that while they were sensitive to potential conflicts of interest, they did not hold their analysts to the same ethical standards as their news employees regarding outside financial interests.
Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon's campaign have never been disclosed. The New York Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantanamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.
Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer 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."
Drumming Up Support
By early 2002, detailed planning for a possible Iraq invasion was under way, yet an obstacle loomed. Many Americans, polls showed, were uneasy about invading a country with no clear connection to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Torie Clarke, the former public relations executive who as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs oversaw the Pentagon's dealings with the analysts, built a system to recruit movers and shakers who, with the proper ministrations, might be counted on to generate support for then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's priorities.
The Pentagon recruited more than 75 retired officers. The largest contingent was affiliated with Fox News, followed by NBC and CNN. Analysts from CBS and ABC also were included.
From their earliest sessions with the analysts, Rumsfeld and his aides spoke as if they were all part of the same team.
By the summer of 2003, the first signs of the insurgency had emerged. Reports from journalists based in Baghdad were increasingly suffused with the imagery of mayhem.
It was time, an internal Pentagon strategy memorandum urged, to "re-energize surrogates and message-force multipliers," starting with the military analysts.
The success of a September 2003 tour of Iraq for the analysts only intensified the Pentagon's campaign. The pace of briefings accelerated. More trips were organized. Eventually the effort involved officials from Washington to Baghdad to Kabul to Guantanamo and back to Tampa, the headquarters of U.S. Central Command.
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