Red State Renegade

Military Experts on your favorite news station turn out to be Pentagon Hacks!

Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned against the influence of an ever more powerful military-industrial complex in 1961. Indeed, his vision of the merging of government, media, industry, and the military was ahead of it’s time. Yet no one could have predicted the acceleration of that trend in the last seven years.

Author Naomi Wolf (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism) has argued convincingly that the same steps which worked to subdue and numb the people of Germany, Czeckoslovakia, China, and Latin American dictatorships are being imposed upon the American people equally successfully:

“…beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable…that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.”

Among her “ten easy steps” to fascism in the U.S. (besides “Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy”) was “control the press.”

It was slightly unreal when, in 2004, the Guardian (UK) reported that “The US government admitted it paid actors to pose as journalists in video news releases sent to TV stations intending to convey support for new laws about health benefits,” including completely fake scenes of crowds giving George Bush a standing ovation as he signed health care legislation.

More disturbing still was the 2005 N.Y. Times disclosure that “A handful of columnists wrote in support of administration policies without disclosing they had accepted payments from the government,” and that:

“at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government’s role in their production.”

The most high profile case involved syndicated columnist and TV host Armstrong Williams, who, after being busted for accepting almost $1/4 million to promote Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” law, acknowledged that it was “bad judgement” on his part.

Care to imagine the ones that didn’t get caught?

Last year it was revealed that the White House had interfered in Global Warming reports from scientists, with the Christian Science Monitor reporting that “More than 120 scientists across seven federal agencies say they have been pressured to remove references to ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ from a range of documents, including press releases and communications with Congress.”

Today we learn that for years now, the administration has employed a handful of military retirees, to appear on network and cable news shows as ‘experts’ to help you and I understand everyday developments and decisions in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and our upcoming sequel, Iran). These hacks have been flown around in the plane normally used by Dick Cheney in a deliberate campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s military performance.

If your head isn’t spinning yet, the Times reports that the synergies of the relationships are not simply military or ideological, but financial as well:

“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. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants.”