Door Joseph L. Galloway | Eens, geloofde men wijd dat één van de grootste zonden de V.S. de overheid of zijn tijdelijke politieke meesters konden begaan waren een propagandamachine op de Amerikaanse mensen los te draaien.

Het congres bekeek zo ernstig dit dat elke kredietenrekening sinds 1951 heeft bevat taal overging die zegt geen openbaar geld „voor publiciteit of propagandadoeleinden binnen de Verenigde Staten“ zonder de wetgevers' voorafgaande goedkeuring zal worden gebruikt.

Het beleid van Bush is gevangen overtredend het propagandaverbod voordien, in het bijzonder in 2005 in het geval van radiogastheer Armstrong Williams, die werd betaald om Geen Kind te onderschrijven van President Bush's Verlaten achter wet.

Bijzonder weerzinwekkend aan de V.S. Het Bureau van de Verantwoordingsplicht van de overheid (GAO), dat op naleving van het verbod toezicht houdt, is het gebruik van een agentschap van „heimelijke propaganda“ of „heimelijke pogingen om advies door het niet bekendgemaakte gebruik van derden te vormen.“

Vandaar dat zouden de alarmklokken helemaal over Washington de onthulling over van de New York Times' moeten bellen die toen-secretaresse van Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld moedigde een geheim programma van het Pentagoon om te geven voor en lepel-voer aan meer dan 50 teruggetrokken hogere militaire ambtenaren die het beleid betrouwbare vrienden achtte die zouden kunnen worden geteld op „om ons water“ op de televisie en kabelnetwerken te dragen.

Voedend de militaire analisten „zeer belangrijke en waardevolle informatie“ in geheime briefings door de ambtenaren van het Pentagoon en van het Witte Huis, ging het idee, zou hen gaan-aan kerels voor de netwerken maken en zou de netwerken aanmoedigen „de vriendschappelijke analisten minder betrouwbaar verwijderen. . . .”

Deze mededeling van 2005, die aan toen HulpSecretaresse van Defensie voor Openbare Zaken Larry DiRita wordt gericht, voegde toe: „Deze vertrouwde op kerngroep zal meer dan bereid zijn om nauw met ons samen te werken omdat wij hun brood en boter.“ zijn

Gevraagd over het geval van Col. Bill Cowan, die zegt werd hij in brand gestoken als militaire analist voor het Nieuws van de Vos en werd afgesneden van de briefings voor het kritiseren van de oorlogsinspanning, vertelde DiRita Glenn Greenwald van Salon.com: “I don’t know anything. I saw that in the story. I’ve heard other assertions to that effect. It was certainly not the intent.”

In a follow-up e-mail exchange between DiRita and Greenwald, Rumsfeld’s former mouthpiece — now Bank of America’s chief spokesman — elaborated on what he said he didn’t remember: “I simply don’t have any recollection of trying to restrict him (Cowan) or others from exposure to what was going on.”

DiRita added: “There are plenty of examples to the contrary — reaching out to people who specifically disagreed with us. One example I recall is Joe Galloway — a persistent critic and apparently popular with military readers. He came in and met Secretary Rumsfeld and we had other interactions.”

Now that’s a real knee-slapper: Me as a poster boy for how Rumsfeld and DiRita “reached out” to their harshest critics even as they stroked and promoted and schemed to embed the old reliables to wax enthusiastic about a war that was going from bad to worse.

Let the record show that Rumsfelds’ folks reached out to me on these few occasions:

• In early summer of 2003, half a dozen of us were invited to an off-the-record lunch with Rumsfeld in the Pentagon. The defense secretary seemed to have a poor grasp of the reality on the ground in Iraq and was still declaring that we’d do no nation-building there. He saw no insurgency, only a handful of “dead-enders”.
• In October 2005, DiRita called to invite me to travel with Rumsfeld to the Middle East and Australia. I declined because it conflicted with a long-booked graduation speech I was to give at Luke Air Force Base, Ariz. to a class of new Air Force F-16 fighter pilots that included my nephew. DiRita was stunned that I wouldn’t drop a bunch of fighter pilots to be schmoozed by his boss.
• In November 2005, DiRita invited me to a “one-on-one” lunch with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. This one I accepted. I arrived to find across the table Rumsfeld, the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace; Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Dick Cody; Joint Staff Director Lt. Gen. Walter Sharp and DiRita. We went at it hammer and tongs for an hour and a half over their conduct of the war and the errors that were costing the lives of American soldiers. As I left, I told Rumsfeld that I’d continue to point out those mistakes every week in my column.
• In April 2006, DiRita sent me an e-mail telling me that my most recent column was “silly”. That column had discussed an expensive war game the Pentagon conducted about a U.S. attack on a thinly disguised country that obviously was Iran.

A retired Marine general, Paul Van Riper, had been the commander of the “enemy” forces, and he used unconventional tactics to destroy the U.S. Navy flotilla in the Persian Gulf, leaving thousands of sailors and Marines dead. At that point, the commanders stopped the war game, reset everything and imposed new rules forbidding Van Riper from employing those tactics.Van Riper walked out, furious, and requested an investigation. DiRita complained in his e-mail that I was silly to blame Rumsfeld for this and for covering up the investigators’ report. After all, he wrote, Rumsfeld couldn’t be expected to know retired generals several levels below him or to bear responsibility for such matters. His complaint sparked an escalating e-mail war that most reckon DiRita lost. The entire exchange was posted on the Internet and can still be found there.

So much for the Rumsfeld/DiRita outreach to their critics. They were much too busy hand-feeding horse manure to their TV generals, who in turn were feeding the same product to the American public by the cubic yard.

There’s little doubt that this program violated the laws against covert propaganda operations mounted against the American public by their own government. But in this administration, there’s no one left to enforce that law or any of the other laws the Bush operatives have been busy violating.

The real crime is that the scheme worked. The television network bosses swallowed the bait, the hook, the line and the sinker, and they have yet to answer for it.

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