The Pentagons Vindication
December 28 | Posted by mrossol | American Thought, Military, The Left“Ops, I was wrong… ” Senator … (don’t hold your breath)
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U.S. forces left Iraq this month, but at least one Iraq war tradition has continued: Years after politicians and pundits manufactured a headline-grabbing controversy to tar the Bush-era Pentagon, investigators have found no wrongdoing.
That’s the conclusion of the Defense Department’s Inspector General after a two-year probe of the Pentagon’s program for briefing retired military officers who sometimes appeared on television and in some cases had ties to defense contractors.
The IG found the program was “in compliance with policy and regulation” and was akin to any government agency’s regular outreach to media, religious groups, business leaders, or civilian policy experts. In short, it’s not unlike President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which is full of CEOs with government contracts who comment on policy questions.
Readers may recall the hullabaloo surrounding all of this in 2008 when the New York Times spun the Pentagon program on page one as a dishonest propaganda exercise: “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand.” Democrats picked up the line that the Pentagon was more or less bribing former military officers to lie about the war.
This all fit tidily into the narrative that the war was a conspiracy run by a Dick Cheney-Don Rumsfeld shadow government. Michigan Senator Carl Levin and then-Presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton called for federal investigations.
Well, those investigations have now shown that the liars weren’t at the Pentagon. According to the IG probers, the Pentagon “did not provide access for [retired military analysts] to travel, classified information, and senior officials that was special or different relative to other outreach groups or mainstream media.” Nor did Pentagon officials exclude military analysts who criticized the war, with a single exception among the 74 analysts in the program.
As for the retired officers’ business ties, “Neither statute nor policy prohibited the [analysts] from being affiliated with a defense contractor and participating in [analyst] outreach activities,” and investigators “did not identify that the [analyst] outreach activities provided a financial benefit to those [analysts] affiliated with a defense contractor.”
Then there’s the fact that the Pentagon’s “hidden” program was publicly known. This was clear at the time—one participant, retired Colonel Kenneth Allard, had written a book about it in 2006—but that didn’t stop the myth-makers.
Perhaps the IG report won’t either, but for the record it “found nothing contradicting” a previous finding (by the Government Accountability Office) of “no evidence that DOD concealed from the public its outreach to [retired military officers] or its role in providing them with information and materials. Indeed, it appears that the public was aware of the program.” Inspectors general aren’t always right, but the credibility of this report is enhanced because it runs the risks of infuriating Mr. Levin, who often punishes those who disagree with him.
So the Pentagon wasn’t running a secret propaganda shop, and scores of decorated military officers weren’t rapacious pawns. Don’t look for this vindication to appear on page one, however. It would embarrass too many people.
Review & Outlook: The Pentagons Vindication – WSJ.com.
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