October 16, 2005
It Would Be Irresponsible Not To
Reading over the coverage of Judith Miller's recent testimony in the Valerie Plame investigations, I'm starting to work on a theory. It's still very rough and tenuous, but here are the basic components I'm working with:
- "The Government Accountability Office has concluded that the Education Department engaged in illegal "covert propaganda" by hiring Williams to promote the No Child Left Behind Act without requiring him to disclose that he was being paid." (SFGate.com)
- "The OSI, under Feith's purview, was created last November to aid U.S. efforts to influence countries overseas to help or at least support the war against global terrorism. The office has been under criticism since a New York Times report that the office would plant false press releases in foreign media outlets to manipulate public opinion.
The media have asserted that such false stories -- or disinformation -- could eventually find their way into American news reports. Such a scenario, Rumsfeld has said in recent days, would be entirely contrary to DoD's policy on the dissemination of information to the public." (DefenseLink.mil) - "Rumsfeld: I was -- I met with Undersecretary Doug Feith this morning, and he indicated to me that he has decided to close down the Office of Strategic Influence." (FAS.org)
- "Nearly three years ago, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, under intense criticism, closed the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence, a short-lived operation to provide news items, possibly including false ones, to foreign journalists in an effort to influence overseas opinion.
Now, critics say, some of the proposals of that discredited office are quietly being resurrected elsewhere in the military and in the Pentagon.
[...]
Within the Pentagon, some of the military's most powerful figures have expressed concerns at some of the steps taken that risk blurring the traditional lines between public affairs and the world of combat information operations.
These tensions were cast into stark relief this summer in Iraq when Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top commander in Iraq, approved the combining of the command's day-to-day public affairs operations with combat psychological and information operations into a single "strategic communications office."" (NY Times, 12/13/2004) - "And did that reporter, believing in the same foreign policy agenda, use her stories to make more credible to the public the claims pertaining to the WMD threat, in cahoots with some Pentagon sources? This question has to be asked, given the long run in the Times' news pages of Miller's hyped accounts. She was not a passive recipient of leaks." (William Jackson, Common Dreams
- "Miller, by her own admission, was cleared to see secret information as part of her assignment as an "embedded" reporter in Iraq.
I had no idea journalists could receive security clearances -- and I had no idea that the mainstream media would allow their reporters to have such clearances." (Ivo Daalder on TPMCafe) - "The problem I had with her was that whenever other members of the press showed up, which they did as embeds from other units or as unilaterals, she would insist that I get rid of them and that the 75th's story was her story, exclusively. She didn't seem to have any idea that the Army needed as much coverage of the 75th's mission as possible and that excluding everyone else was detrimental to the credibility of what the 75th was trying to accomplish. Never mind that we didn't find a damn thing ... She could not understand why Michael Gordon, covering the war at ground force headquarters, could have his stuff read and cleared at any time of the day or night while she had to wait. She would talk about the 'news cycle' and how important it was, and threaten me or my boss with the wrath of the NYT or her buddies up at DoD."" (William Jackon, Common Dreams)
But I draw no conclusions.
Posted by ben at October 16, 2005 02:54 PM