Once upon a time, it was widely believed that one of the greatest sins the U.S. government or its temporary political masters could commit was to turn a propaganda machine loose on the American people.
Congress viewed this so seriously that every appropriations bill passed since 1951 has contained language that says no public money “shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States” without the lawmakers’ prior approval.
The Bush administration has been caught violating the propaganda ban before, notably in 2005 in the case of radio host Armstrong Williams, who was paid to endorse President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law.
Particularly abhorrent to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which oversees compliance with the ban, is an agency’s use of “covert propaganda” or “covert attempts to mold opinion through the undisclosed use of third parties.”
This is why alarm bells should be ringing all over Washington about The New York Times’ disclosure that then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld encouraged a secret Pentagon program to care for and spoon-feed more than 50 retired senior military officers whom the administration deemed reliable friends who could
be counted on “to carry our water” on the television and cable networks.
Feeding the military analysts “key and valuable information” in secret briefings by Pentagon and White House officials, the idea went, would make them the go-to guys for the networks and encourage the networks to “weed out the less reliably friendly analysts. ...”
This 2005 memorandum, addressed to then Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Larry DiRita, added: “This trusted core group will be more than willing to work closely with us because we are their bread and butter.”
Asked about the case of Col. Bill Cowan, who says he was fired as a military analyst for Fox News and cut off from the briefings for criticizing the war effort, DiRita told Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com: “I don’t know anything. I saw that in the story. I’ve heard other assertions to that effect. It was certainly not the intent.”
In a follow-up e-mail exchange between DiRita and Greenwald, Rumsfeld’s former mouthpiece — now Bank of America’s chief spokesman — elaborated on what he said he didn’t remember: “I simply don’t have any recollection of trying to restrict him (Cowan) or others from exposure to what was going on.”
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