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Ersatz Experts
By Serge Truffaut
Le Devoir
Tuesday 22 April 2008
The Pentagon has stuck to the adage that "the first victim of war is the truth" with incredible resolve, force, and tenacity. Thanks to the extraordinarily detailed and thorough work of a New York Times journalist, we know today that the Executive branch applied itself to the erection of a propaganda machine so powerful that it highlights the contempt Bush and Company harbor for democracy.
Well before the drama of September 11, the then-public relations boss at the Pentagon, Torie Clarke, had decided to create a group of retired military officers suitable to appropriately fulfill the role of television analysts. Obviously, she took particular care to make sure these gentlemen shared the administration's neo-conservative views.
Quite simply, her objective was to subvert the work of traditional journalism by occupying media space through the intermediary of experts in the pay of the Pentagon. The operation succeeded beyond any of Ms. Clarke's, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's or Vice President Dick Cheney's hopes. For the 80 generals and colonels who regularly paraded across the television screens proved, in fact, to be the veritable chroniclers of the Iraq war. And that from the moment the White House decided to overthrow Saddam Hussein. In other words, this raft of brass relayed and reported the administration's message, including the lies about weapons of mass destruction.
The worst is that the big networks, from CBS to CNN, including Fox, NBC and ABC, resorted to these military spokesmen without having verified whether they had any conflicts of interests - as they do verify for journalists. According to The New York Times, these military retirees were and remain vice presidents, consultants, or lobbyists for a combined total of 150 companies that supply the Pentagon with weapons and various goods and services. The more they hammered out the messages Rumsfeld and his inner circle conceived, the more the military budget increased and the more their companies pocketed.
Quite naturally, this conflict of interest had the perverse effect of making these so-called experts erase certain aspects of the Iraq conflict. As one of them confided, when they knew that the Rumsfeld and General Staff's strategy experienced failures, they refrained from mentioning them for fear of immediately losing this or that contract.
All of this story's aspects, elements and factors allow us to insist on one of them ... the state of mind that characterized Rumsfeld and Cheney! We will never repeat enough that these veterans of the Nixon and Ford administrations never digested the obligation they were under while Ford was in the White House to manage the reduction of powers resulting from Watergate and the Vietnam War. When they returned to power, their inclination for an imperial America combined with delight in revenge and the reappropriation of powers lost during the 1970s. With the resulting damage that we now realize.
Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.
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