| Molitary/Media Hegemony
From Democracy Now! with David Barstow, here's most of the intro before the interview proper begins:
AMY GOODMAN: We begin our show today with New York Times reporter David Barstow. He recently won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for exposing how dozens of retired generals working as radio and television analysts had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to military contractors that benefited from policies they defended.
Barstow uncovered Pentagon documents that repeatedly refer to the military analysts as "message force multipliers" or "surrogates" who could be counted on to deliver administration themes and messages to millions of Americans in the form of their own opinions.
The so-called analysts were given hundreds of classified Pentagon briefings, provided with Pentagon-approved talking points and given free trips to Iraq and other sites paid for by the Pentagon.
David Bartow wrote, quote, "Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse-an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks."
The officials appeared on all the main cable news channels-Fox News, CNN and MSNBC-as well as the three nightly network news broadcasts.
The Pentagon program started during the build-up to the Iraq war.
BILL O'REILLY: You met with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.
MAJ. GEN. PAUL VALLELY: Special briefing on Thursday. Very interesting. A lot of good information, especially about post-Saddam, post-regime time, what are we going to do then? And it's a very well laid-out plan.
AMY GOODMAN: The Pentagon continued to use retired generals to counter criticism on various issues, ranging from Guantanamo to the surge in Iraq. In some cases, analysts would appear on cable news programs live from the Pentagon just minutes after receiving a special briefing.
WOLF BLITZER: This is just coming into CNN right now. The Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has just wrapped up his meeting with retired US generals. Our own military analyst, retired US Air Force Major General Don Shepperd, is fresh of that meeting. He's joining us now live from the Pentagon.
MAJ. GEN. DONALD SHEPPERD: The message needs to be, imagine an Iraq-imagine Iraq under the control of Zarqawi with another conveyor belt for tourists, combined with oil and water and land and resources. Imagine the effect of that. That's the message that has to get out to the American people.
So, Major General Paul Vallely assures us, via Bill O'Reilly, that there's "a very well laid-out plan" for post-Saddam Iraq, and Major General Donald Shepperd assures us, via Wolf Blitzer, that Iraq is terrorist threat number one, with Zarqawi about to overthrow Saddam and blow us all to smithereens.
Good to know!
I quote that at length because it's such a clear and comprehensive demonstration of how seamlessly and integrably the use of retired military officers fit into the strategy of lying the US into an illegal war that not only had nothing to do with fighting terrorism, but that actually inflamed terrorist tendencies and empowered bin Laden by destroying his most prominent ideological rival.
Of course, any astute observer at the time just had to know that something fishy was going on. As "W" Blitzer himself told us:
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has just wrapped up his meeting with retired US generals.
What possible reason was there for Rumsfeld to hold such a meeting, except for feeding a propaganda operation? Especially when he goes right on to say:
Our own military analyst, retired US Air Force Major General Don Shepperd, is fresh of that meeting. He's joining us now live from the Pentagon.
In short, this was not a "hidden operation" in any meaningful sense of the words. It was blatantly right out there in the open for all to see. This is not to detract from Barstow's work. Being able to see the obvious right in front of you is one thing. Digging deep behind the scenes, and getting a wide-ranging detailed story about everything that's going into it, and how it fits together snugly with everything else--that's a whole different matter.
But the fact that even now the obvious surface of this story remains studious ignored--now that's the essence of hegemony in action. You want to know about war? Ask a retired general! It's just common sense! That's hegemony: ideology in drag as a common sense.
And here's a discussion of the Pentagon's whitewash report, denying any wrong-doing, and how they had to retract it:
AMY GOODMAN: Let's begin by talking about this report that has been retracted by the Pentagon. Explain exactly what it said and where it was and how it was retracted.
DAVID BARSTOW: Well, on January 14th of this year, as you pointed out, the inspector general came out with this long-awaited report that was-essentially, a group of members of Congress, after the stories ran, asked for the inspector general to take a look at this program that I wrote about and look at a couple of key questions. One was, did it violate longstanding laws that we have that forbid the Pentagon from targeting the American public with propaganda? And another was this question of whether or not the special access that was granted to the military analysts who participated in this program, whether that access was used to help them in the competition for contracts related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So the report comes out in January, and it effectively exonerated the program. Now, one thing your viewers should know is that as soon as the stories ran, the program itself was suspended by the Pentagon, pending the outcome of this investigation. But what happened earlier this week was really unusual. It really is very rare for the inspector general of the Defense Department to rescind and repudiate and, in fact, even withdraw the report from its own website.
And the reason why they did is because after the report was released, it became pretty clear that there were significant problems with it, significant factual problems with it. The one that jumped out to me immediately as I read through the report for the first time was that it listed one particular general who I had written an awful lot about, General Barry McCaffrey, who's probably the preeminent military analyst for NBC and MSNBC. They listed him as having absolutely no ties to any defense contractors. Well, I had written 5,000 words that detailed tie after tie after tie he had to defense contractors, either as someone who sat on the boards of publicly traded companies, as a consultant to many defense contractors, and as an advisor to a private equity firm in New York that invests heavily in the biggest defense contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so, it became pretty clear that there was something wrong with this report.
What we've learned in the last few days is that a couple of different independent inquiries happened inside the inspector general's office in the wake of that report, in the wake of concerns that were being raised by members of Congress and others that there was something wrong with this report. And as they dug deeper and deeper and deeper into it, they just found more and more factual errors, flaws in methodology. We learned that the people who did the initial report didn't even bother, apparently, to read all of the emails that we had pried loose over the course of a two-year Freedom of Information Act battle with the Defense Department. So, ultimately, they came very reluctantly to the conclusion that the only thing that they could do was simply to rescind the entire report.
We'll see where it goes from here. There are some members of Congress who are saying, "We need to know more about why that inspector general's report went so far off the track."
If there really was any seriousness to turning over a new leaf now, in the aftermath of the GOP trifecta driving America into the ditch, then certainly part of what's required would be getting to the bottom of a whitewash like this and taking harsh corrective action to deter the possibility of it ever happening again. But, of course, if the original Pulitzer Prize-winning story about the program itself can't even break through in the corporate media, it's pretty damn obvious how dead set against change the establishment really is, no matter how badly the BushCo system has damaged America.
This is the sort of routine, all-pervasive business-as-usual, institutionalized attitude that typifies what's meant by hegemony, and that stands in rock solid opposition to even considering the sorts of sweeping changes that are necessary to get our military back into a properly functioning condition.
Forget real change not being on the table. It's not even on the shopping list. Heck, it's not even in stock at the grocery store.
Military/Theocracy Hegemony
Here's part of the introduction to the Democracy Now! segment on prostelization by and within the military:
AMY GOODMAN: The former prime minister of Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai, has called for an investigation into allegations that US soldiers are trying to convert Afghans to Christianity. He said, quote, "This is a complete deviation from what they are supposed to be doing."
His comments come after a report on Al Jazeera showed footage of soldiers at Bagram Air Base discussing how to distribute Bibles translated into Pashto and Dari. The US military is denying it allows its soldiers to proselytize to Afghans. The military claims the Bibles shown in the video had been confiscated and destroyed and were "never distributed." Admiral Mike Mullen told a Pentagon briefing Monday, quote, "It certainly is, from the United States military's perspective, not our position to ever push any specific kind of religion, period."
The Pentagon has also sharply criticized Al Jazeera for releasing the year-old footage, which was shot by filmmaker and former soldier Brian Hughes. Military spokesperson Colonel Greg Julian said, quote, "Most of this is taken out of context. This is irresponsible and inappropriate journalism. There is no effort to go out and proselytize to Afghans."
Well, on Tuesday, Al Jazeera released unedited footage of the US soldiers' Bible study in Bagram to counter the Pentagon's allegations. These excerpts from the unedited video show military chaplain, Captain Emmit Furner, leading the discussion on the definition of the US Central Command's General Order Number One that explicitly forbids active-duty troops from trying to convert people to any religion.
CAPTAIN EMMIT FURNER: By all means, do as scripture tells you to do and share the word, but be careful how you do it. Do it professionally; represent the Christian faith in a professional manner. Proselytizing is against the rules. That means going out and just actively seeking out somebody. I'm not going to say a lot about it. Just be careful. Remember to represent the Christian faith in a respectable, professional manner. And there are ways to win people to Christ that not overbearing or offensive to people. There are ways to do it.
Why do you think there's a general order against it, proselytizing? Do we know what it means in order to proselytize?
SOLDIER: You mean, Army [inaudible] a general order?
SOLDIER: It's General Order Number One.
CAPTAIN EMMIT FURNER: Number one, man.
SERGEANT JON WATT: You cannot proselytize, but you can give [inaudible].
CAPTAIN EMMIT FURNER: Alright, let's talk about it. What do you think? Our ability to interact with the culture here is important for our mission in this country, so we can eventually hand this thing back over them to let them do their own thing. The more that we win over the hearts and minds, the better we're going to be in accomplishing our mission to eradicate insurgents and Taliban and everybody else who's bad. We want more on our side, and we're not going to have more on our side if they see us as Bible-thumping, finger-pointing, critical people. I'm not saying you don't share the word. That's what you do as a Christian. But you share the word in a smart manner: love, respect, consideration for their culture and their religion. That's what a Christian does is appreciation for other human beings. But at the same time, I'm not telling you not to share the word of God. I'm telling you to share the word of God, but be smart about it, please....
AMY GOODMAN: The initial report aired by Al Jazeera included footage of Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, calling on soldiers to hunt people for Jesus.
LT. COL. GARY HENSLEY: The Special Forces guys, they hunt men, basically. We do the same things as Christians: we hunt people for Jesus. We do. We hunt them down, get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into kingdom. Right? That's what we do. That's our business.
In short, this is a candid look at how forces within the military are continuing to act as Crusaders, in direct contradiction of our claims that we are doing no such thing. This is, quite frankly, the most counter-productive thing we could possibly do. And yet, it goes on, and when it is exposed, rather than take any steps to try to put a stop to it, the military simply denies it. How has anything changed? How can anyone expect anything to change, when Obama has made it transparently clear that kissing up to the religious right is one of his highest priorities?
The discussion begins:
AMY GOODMAN: Jeff Sharlet, first you. Talk about your reaction to these videotapes and the response by the military that it's taken out of context.
JEFF SHARLET: I think that's anything but the truth. You know, what we see on that videotape is really just the tip of the iceberg. When Mikey Weinstein, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, came to me and said, "You know, you should be writing about this subject," I was a little skeptical that it could be as widespread as they said. But in more than a hundred interviews at every rank, I encountered that same kind of thinking. And the same kind of thing that you see there on display with Lieutenant-Colonel Hensley is replicated over and over and over, from private to general. But most frighteningly, it's concentrated in the Officer Corps.
AMY GOODMAN: You write extensively about Hensley. Tell us who he is and the significance of this videotape.
JEFF SHARLET: Well, Lieutenant-Colonel Hensley, that you see in that videotape, you know, talking about hunting people for Jesus, was at the time the top chaplain, top military chaplain in Afghanistan. And I don't know if you can quite make it out on that videotape, if you look closer at the T-shirt he's wearing, it shows his affiliation with a sort of fundamentalist group called Chapel NeXt. And you can see a sort of a Christian cross inscribed over a map of Afghanistan.
And if you follow that-I mean, the rest of that footage is just as equally disturbing. At one point, speaking of the sort of the apocalyptic times that he believes we're in, he says that, you know, the US soldiers there have a mission basically to, you know, carry out the work of God. And then he declares that we, meaning the US military, "We are the new Israel," and repeats this for emphasis, "We are the new Israel."
You know, I would have thought that was-this guy was just a kind of a rogue, a maverick, if I didn't speak to so many other officers with just the same attitude. In the story, I talk about Lieutenant-Colonel Bob Young, who is also in Afghanistan at Kandahar Air Base, and he was quite plain in boasting about a PowerPoint presentation he had given to Afghan warlords explaining that American government was based on Christianity, that our Christian god was what made it great, and Afghanistan had a choice if it wanted to achieve democracy. And of course that choice was going to be for Jesus.
These people don't even know that they're crossing the line between church and state.
The idea that a military infested with this sort of theocratic Crusader mentality can do anything effective to help stabilize Afghanistan over the long run would be laughable if it weren't so tragic. But we don't get within a Star Trek lightyear of a serious discussion of the problem with a President who's "so profoundly impressed and grateful" to the servicemembers he's met,
and goes on to praise them as "fiercely loyal to this country." Fiercely loyal theocrats? As Rachel Maddow would say, "Really?"
Finally, here's just a snipped of what Mikey Weinstein had to say:
AMY GOODMAN: Mikey Weinstein, Air Force veteran, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, talk about how common this is and this videotape, what is your understanding of it, and how you experienced this in the military, if you did.
MIKEY WEINSTEIN: Well, Amy, there's a couple things. The first is, is that everyone remembers Eisenhower's famous farewell speech, which was warning America of the dangers of a military-industrial complex. What we're really faced with here is a fundamentalist-Christian-para-church-military-corporate-proselytizing complex.
A few months ago, a four-star general, a commander in the US military-I won't give his exact name, but commands hundreds of thousands of troops-asked me, "How bad is it, Mikey?" And I'll tell your viewers today, and I'll show them, exactly what I did. I said, "General, hold your pen six-and-a-half inches above your desk. Now drop it," as I've just dropped that pen. I asked him why it dropped. And he said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Why did it drop?" He said, "Well, gravity." That is how bad this is. It is that ubiquitous. It is that-it is in the very particulate of the technologically most lethal organization ever created by humankind, which is our US military. It's everywhere. We're about two inches away, you know, from a fundamentalist Christian America through our US military.
You know, I've come from a conservative military Republican family with three generations of Military Academy graduates. Three of my kids have graduated from the Air Force Academy. The only journalist that has grasped this and moved it into the mainstream media has been Jeff Sharlet. And he was incredibly, you know, skeptical when we first started talking a couple of years ago.
And I beg everybody out there to at least just do two things. You know, read Jeff's book-you know, it's more than ten pages, so you actually have to read it-The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, or Empire, or whatever you want to say, and then the Harper's cover story by Jeff.
This is a deeply serious problem, the ongoing subversion of our military to a theocratic purpose that's expressly contrary to our secular Constitution, and once again, the corporate media totally ignores it.
This is hegemony folks, hegemony of the most dangerous sort. And there's barely a whisper of complaint from the Democratic Party establishment, much less a hint of strong corrective action.
It would be too "controversial." The conservatives would get angry at us. Very, very angry at us.
And it would all be our fault.
Don't believe me? Well, just ask David Petraeus, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich and John McCain! |
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