Pentagon pursuing new investigation into Bush propaganda program

By Brad Jacobson
Thursday, November 5th, 2009 -- 8:40 am

[Read Part I, Part II and Part III of this series.]

The Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General is conducting a new investigation into a covert Bush administration Defense Department program that used retired military analysts to produce positive wartime news coverage.

Last May, the Inspector General’s office rescinded and repudiated a prior internal investigation’s report on the retired military analyst program, which had been issued by the Bush administration, because it “did not meet accepted quality standards for an Inspector General work product.” Yet in recent interviews with Raw Story, Pentagon officials who took part in the program were still defending it by referencing this invalidated report.

Gary Comerford, Inspector General spokesman for the Defense Department, told Raw Story last week that his office is conducting an investigation into the retired military analyst program and confirmed that the investigation began during the summer.

Asked when his office expects to conclude the investigation, Comerford said, “As a matter of policy we do not set deadlines since any number of variables or factors could result in a delay.”
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He did confirm that investigators in his office have read Raw Story’s recent articles on the topic.

Congressman John F. Tierney (D-MA), Chairman of the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, issued a press release (cache link) this past June, announcing that Pentagon Inspector General Gordon Heddell had begun the new investigation.

Yet Raw Story and Comerford could find no news outlet that has yet reported on the matter.

Rep. Tierney confirmed that Inspector General Heddell had reassured him that he was continuing to pursue a new investigation.

“I spoke with Gordon Heddell about his investigation of the DOD ‘Pentagon Pundits’ program yesterday, and he assured me that his office is making good progress on its investigation,” Tierney said in a recent statement to Raw Story. “I again expressed my expectation that his office pursue this investigation with all diligence and speed.”

“I look forward to receiving updates on his progress as well as his final report,” Tierney added. “I, along with my staff, will remain in close contact with the IG’s office as the investigation continues.”

Pentagon officials defend program by citing rescinded report

Former Pentagon public affairs chief Lawrence Di Rita and current deputy assistant secretary of defense for media operations Bryan Whitman continue to defend the retired military analyst program by referencing the discredited Pentagon Inspector General’s report released in the final days of the Bush administration.

In an interview with Raw Story, Di Rita, now a chief spokesperson for Bank of America, called the Pentagon propaganda project “an important program” and asserted that “there’s nothing related to it that’s worth talking about” because the “IG’s report debunked” and “utterly invalidated” the findings of David Barstow’s New York Times expose.

Di Rita then incorrectly suggested that this investigation and report had been conducted and released by the Obama administration.

In fact, the Inspector General’s report that Di Rita cited as evidence exonerating the program and discrediting Barstow’s reporting was not only later rescinded after an internal audit but also removed from the Defense Department’s website.

In a May 5, 2009 memorandum, Pentagon Inspector General deputy director Donald Horstman wrote, “The internal review concluded that the report did not meet accepted quality standards for an Inspector General work product.” It found inadequacies in “the methodology used to examine RMA [retired military analysts] relationships with Defense contractors” and “a body of testimonial evidence that was insufficient or inconclusive.”

“In particular,” Horstman added, “former senior DoD officials who devised and managed the outreach program refused our requests for an interview” and that only “7 out of 70” military analysts were interviewed during the investigation.

Investigators also failed to interview retired Army General and military analyst Barry McCaffrey, the conspicuous subject of David Barstow’s 5,000-plus-word follow-up Times expose on the military analyst program, whom Barstow proved “consistently advocated wartime policies and spending priorities that are in line with his corporate interests.”

In the internal audit’s conclusion, Horstman stated expressly, “We are notifying you of the withdrawal of this report so that you do not continue to rely on its conclusions. The report has been removed from our website.”

Nevertheless, Di Rita flatly denied these facts when Raw Story brought them to his attention.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman -- who Raw Story revealed was a senior official and active participant in the program – also attempted to downplay the Bush Pentagon’s report’s inaccuracies and omissions. He failed as well to acknowledge that the document has been invalidated.

Additionally, Whitman reaffirmed his assertion that the “intent and purpose of the [program] is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people.”

In defending the program, Whitman also cited the Government Accountability Office’s report, which was released last July.

The report acknowledged that “[c]learly, DOD attempted to favorably influence public opinion with respect to the Administration’s war policies in Iraq and Afghanistan through the RMOs [retired military officers],” but “did not violate the ban” against domestic propaganda.

A central supporting point for drawing that conclusion, however, was “[w]e found no evidence that DOD attempted to conceal from the public its outreach to RMOs or its role in providing RMOs with information, materials, access to department officials, travel, and luncheons.”

The key evidence cited to support this conclusion was an April 2006 New York Times article, “Pentagon Memo Aims to Counter Rumsfeld Critics,” which was based on a leak.

The article noted that the memorandum had been sent to “a group of former military commanders and civilian analysts,” offering “a direct challenge to the criticisms made by retired generals about Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.”

But much of the article’s focus was fixed on the political drama swirling around Rumsfeld’s fight to retain his job amid a growing firestorm of criticism.

In fact, Defense Department officials at the time, such as then-press secretary Eric Ruff, rushed to spike any notion that the Pentagon had fed military analysts talking points. The idea that there might be an elaborate, systematic Pentagon talking points operation involving the retired generals was never specifically raised in the article.

Ruff told the Times the memo was simply a “fact sheet” and that, as the Times paraphrased Ruff saying, “In no way was it meant to enlist retired officers to speak out on behalf of Rumsfeld.”

Mazzetti and Rutenberg reported: “One retired general who regularly attends the Pentagon meetings said Saturday that he found it unusual for the Pentagon to send such a memorandum in the middle of a heated debate, because it was almost certain to appear politically motivated.”

This account also suggested to readers that supplying Pentagon-approved talking points for the retired generals to disseminate on the airwaves would have been out of the ordinary when, in fact, records would later show that’s exactly what was happening.

Records would also eventually reveal Pentagon officials working behind-the-scenes to stamp out this fire before it had time to spread and to ensure that it could be contained.

In an email (p. 117) the day after the Times article was published, Dallas Lawrence, then director of the community relations office, warned a colleague (whose name is redacted) that “this is very very sensitive now. I need you to be protected. This email directly contradicts something Larry [Di Rita] said to a reporter, you’d have no way of knowing that unless you checked with me.”

When the Defense Department’s Office of the Inspector General issued the May memorandum invalidating the Bush Pentagon’s investigation of the military analyst program, it also noted that no further probe would occur because the program “has been terminated and responsible senior officials are no longer employed by the Department.”

Yet Raw Story’s months-long investigation has revealed that some “responsible senior officials,” including Whitman, are still employed by the Defense Department and that the retired military analyst program may not have been terminated.

Brad Jacobson is a contributing investigative reporter for Raw Story. Additional research was provided by Ron Brynaert.

Justifying What You Know Can't Be True

By: Emily Badger Print

President Obama has had a hard time dislodging misperceptions about his health care proposal — those stubborn beliefs that there are death panels and free care for illegal aliens that don't actually exist in the legislation. Recent research about the way people defend their faith in false information, though, suggests calling out the inaccuracies may not be all that effective in converting the suspicious.

Sociologists at the University of North Carolina and Northwestern University examined an earlier case of deep commitment to the inaccurate: the belief, among many conservatives who voted for George W. Bush in 2004, that Saddam Hussein was at least partly responsible for the attacks on 9/11.

Of 49 people included in the study who believed in such a connection, only one shed the certainty when presented with prevailing evidence that it wasn't true.

The rest came up with an array of justifications for ignoring, discounting or simply disagreeing with contrary evidence — even when it came from President Bush himself.

"I was surprised at the diversity of it, what I kind of charitably call the creativity of it," said Steve Hoffman, one of the study's authors and now a visiting assistant professor at the State University of New York, Buffalo.

The voters weren't dupes of an elaborate misinformation campaign, the researchers concluded; rather, they were actively engaged in reasoning that the belief they already held was true.

This type of "motivated reasoning" — pursuing information that confirms what we already think and discarding the rest — helps explain why viewers gravitate toward partisan cable news and why we tend to see what we want in The Colbert Report. But when it comes to justifying demonstrably false beliefs, the logic stretches even thinner.

By the time the interviews were conducted, just before the 2004 election, the Bush Administration was no longer muddling a link between al-Qaeda and the Iraq war. The researchers chose the topic because, unlike other questions in politics, it had a correct answer.

Subjects were presented during one-on-one interviews with a newspaper clip of this Bush quote: "This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaeda."

The Sept. 11 Commission, too, found no such link, the subjects were told.

"Well, I bet they say that the commission didn't have any proof of it," one subject responded, "but I guess we still can have our opinions and feel that way even though they say that."

Reasoned another: "Saddam, I can't judge if he did what he's being accused of, but if Bush thinks he did it, then he did it."

Others declined to engage the information at all. Most curious to the researchers were the respondents who reasoned that Saddam must have been connected to Sept. 11, because why else would the Bush Administration have gone to war in Iraq?

The desire to believe this was more powerful, according to the researchers, than any active campaign to plant the idea.

Such a campaign did exist in the run-up to the war, just as it exists today in the health care debate.

"I do think there's something to be said about people like Sarah Palin, and even more so Chuck Grassley, supporting this idea of death panels in a national forum," Hoffman said.

He won't credit them alone for the phenomenon, though.

"That kind of puts the idea out there, but what people then do with the idea ... " he said. "Our argument is that people aren't just empty vessels. You don't just sort of open up their brains and dump false information in and they regurgitate it. They're actually active processing cognitive agents."

That view is more nuanced than the one held by many health care reform proponents — that citizens are only ill-informed because Rush Limbaugh makes them so. (For the record, the authors say justifying false beliefs extends equally to liberals, who they hypothesize would behave similarly given a different set of issues.)

The alternate explanation raises queasy questions for the rest of society.

"I think we'd all like to believe that when people come across disconfirming evidence, what they tend to do is to update their opinions," said Andrew Perrin, an associate professor at UNC and another author of the study.

That some people might not do that even in the face of accurate information, the authors suggest in their article, presents "a serious challenge to democratic theory and practice."

"The implications for how democracy works are quite profound, there's no question in my mind about that," Perrin said. "What it means is that we have to think about the emotional states in which citizens find themselves that then lead them to reason and deliberate in particular ways."

Evidence suggests people are more likely to pay attention to facts within certain emotional states and social situations. Some may never change their minds. For others, policy-makers could better identify those states, for example minimizing the fear that often clouds a person's ability to assess facts and that has characterized the current health care debate.

Hoffman's advice for crafting such an environment: "The congressional town hall meetings, that is a sort of test case in how not to do it."

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