Friendly Fire

By Cernig

A series of emails from the DoD's document dump on the media's stenography-driven easy access program for Pentagon military shills analysts caught my attention the other day. I wonder how veterans will react?

Beginning on page 17 of this document, there's a conversation about how to spin friendly fire incidents in the initial invasion phase of the Iraq war. Press officer LTC Kenneth McClellan notes:

"That's what I like about the American press. The dirt clods used to come before and during the fight - - as they would tend to do internationally. Now they seem to come principally afterwards."

The subject? How they're going to explain why, after 3 White Sands studies on friendly fire issues, they're still relying on "foil on plywood and glint tape on helmets" for air-to-ground IFF and why the three services purchased different IFF systems that didn't work together.

Friendly fire incidents, the talking points pack issued to the pet analysts notes, killed 35 and wounded 72 U.S. troops. [Let's not even talk about British losses to U.S. fire, OK?] That's an increase to 17% from WW2's 12-14% and Vietnam's 10-14%.

Callous bastard, this McClellan, eh? But he's sure they've got a tame press - and thus the public are subjected to another kind of friendly fire, pushing the administration's spin. The object of the game isn't to 'fess up and it isn't even to do something about the situation - it's to defuse prospective media criticism about the issue before it happens by feeding the Pentagon line right into the media via those in-house analysts.

That's just one example of the way the media were used and abused by this Pentagon psy-ops extravaganza. But the mainstream media still won't report on the matter and don't want to go on the record when someone else reports on it either.

In an April 24 PBS NewsHour report about a New York Times article that revealed "the role of military analysts on TV and in the Pentagon," Judy Woodruff stated:"[W]e invited Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and NBC to participate, but they declined our offer or did not respond." Further, according to a search of programs in Nexis, several of these outlets have yet to report on the revelations in the April 20 Times article.

The mainstream's silence is unsurprising given that every major media outlet was involved and doesn't want to report on its own shill status - "used like a ribbed trojan", as Matt Duss eloquently puts it* - but this is exactly the kind of story where blogs can force their hands. Just keep digging in the document dump for juicy tidbits the NYT story didn't mention - if there's news, then eventually they have to follow it up.

(* I owe Matt a tequila for stealing his line.)

Update Glenn Greenwald has an excellent post examining the tame media's response at the time to the military's junket to Gitmo for their tame analysts - and the utter lack of integrity those media outlets are now displaying by insisting that there's nothing to see here.