APPEASEMENT' ATTACK ON OBAMA BY BUSH IN ISRAEL STIRS WIDESPREAD OUTRAGE

5-16-08

Coming on the day the *New York Times* published as its lead story
a piece about the "waves of apprehension" that are sweeping Republican Party
circles in the aftermath of a striking defeat in a Mississippi by-election on
Tuesday suggesting that Barack Obama's coattails may be long and wide,
President George W.Bush's decision to inject a veiled attack on Sen. Barack Obama in a formal speech to the Israeli Knesset given on the occasion of that nation's 60th anniversary celebrations has "created a political firestorm in
Washington," the *Times* reported Thursday.[1] -- In remarks broadcast on
CNN (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKyN9QooHRE) and posted on YouTube, Sen. Joe Biden, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, noted that Robert Gates and Condoleezza Rice are also proposing dealing with Iran, and said of Bush's remark: "This is bullshit. This is malarkey. This is outrageous -- outrageous, for the president to go to a foreign country, sit in the Knesset . . . and make this kind of ridiculous
statement. He's the guy that's weakened us, he's the guy who's increased the number of terrorists in the world." -- As for dealing with Hitler, what commentators should be pointing out is that the president's
grandfather, Prescott Bush, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prescott_Bush) was part of a financial élite that worked to facilitate Adolf Hitler's rise: "By the late 1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Brothers_Harriman) [a Wall Street firm
of which Prescott Bush was a managing partner] and Dillon Read were two
notable active investors in a Germany rapidly rearming under Adolf Hitler.
It is an irony, but not a coincidence, that by 1943, many of their
best-known partners and executives -- from Averill Harriman and James
Forrestal to Robert Lovett, Douglas Dillon, William Draper, and David K.E.
Bruce -- were major figures in the Washington war effort or the Office of
Strategic Services, as were the two Wall Street lawyers with the largest
German practices -- the two Dulleses. John Foster Dulles, as a board
member of International Nickel, actually had helped work out that firm's
prewar cartel agreement with I.G. Farben to provide Germany with a steady
supply of nickel for armor plating. When Wall Street firms and major
multinational corporations like General Motors, ITT, and Ford needed to
rearrange German holdings, it was to these two that they turned. Prescott
Bush, who handled much of the German work at Brown Brothers Harriman, used
their services. . . . In 1938, the firm had been collaterally involved in
a German transaction -- shipping tetraethyl lead needed by the Luftwaffe
-- by the Ethyl Corporation . . . In 1941, the *New York Herald Tribune*
had featured a front-page story headlined 'Hitler's Angel Has $3 Million
in U.S. Bank'" (Kevin Phillips, *American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune,
and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush* [Viking, 2004], pp.
38-39). -- George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a director
of that bank (the Union Banking Corporation
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Banking_Corporation]). -- In a
review of this sorry history, the London *Guardian* summed it up this way:
"[F]iles in the U.S. National Archives [confirm that] a firm of which
Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of
Nazism."[2] -- "[N]ew documents, many of which were only declassified
last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there
was already significant information about the Nazis' plans and policies,
he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very
German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power." -- "UBC [with
Prescott Bush as a director] was caught red-handed operating a American
shell company for the Thyssen family [August Thyssen was a crucial
financial backer for the Nazi Party] eight months after America had
entered the war and . . . this was the bank that had partly financed
Hitler's rise to power." -- That George W. Bush should propose to give
lessons to Barack Obama about dealing with fascists is testimony to the
utter cynicism of the forty-third president.

Possibilities for a Nuclear-Free World

Introduction

In the following opinion piece, which appeared in the March 20, 2008 issue of the Asahi Shimbun, Jayantha Dhanapala—the distinguished former Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs at the United Nations—not only makes the case for a nuclear-free world, but argues that it is a viable possibility.

In Dhanapala's view, the campaign to abolish nuclear weapons has acquired significant momentum thanks to the initiative of four former senior U.S. government officials: George Shultz (Ronald Reagan's secretary of state), Henry Kissinger (Richard Nixon's secretary of state), William Perry (Bill Clinton's secretary of defense), and Sam Nunn (former chair of the senate armed services committee). In January 2007 and, again, in January 2008, they published powerful opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal that outlined the need for a nuclear-free world, as well as steps in that direction. Since that time, Dhanapala notes, there has been important follow-up to this initiative by other former national security officials and nuclear experts.

As none of these former U.S. government officials showed much interest in the idea of abolishing nuclear weapons in the past, how should we account for their newfound zeal? Part of the answer seems to lie in their fear that terrorists will acquire and use nuclear weapons. As they stated in the first paragraph of their 2008 article: "We face a very real possibility that the deadliest weapons ever invented could fall into dangerous hands." Of course, many people believe (and have believed for decades) that nuclear weapons are already in "dangerous hands." Nevertheless, it is hard not to agree that adding terrorist bands—or additional nations--to the list of the nuclear-armed will raise the level of nuclear danger.

A second factor that might explain why portions of the U.S. national security elite are keener on nuclear abolition than in the past is that U.S. conventional military power is far superior to that of any other nation. In reality, as U.S. scientists began warning in 1945, U.S. national security can be maintained better in a non-nuclear world than in a world bristling with nuclear weapons. Even so, people of good will might still welcome the Shultz-Kissinger-Perry-Nunn initiative for, although it appears to contain an element of self-interest and to return us to the pre-nuclear era debate over the broader issue of using military force to maintain national security, it does enhance the prospects for human survival.

A more telling objection to this focus on a group of former national security managers is that they might not be sufficient for the task at hand. For one thing, there are plenty of national security officials who are not at all interested in nuclear abolition—or at least nuclear abolition for their country! And these people are in power. As Dhanapala observes, at present "there are no ongoing negotiations for nuclear weapons reductions."

Conversely, there is plenty of pro-nuclear activity by government officials. Although the Bush administration has focused on nuclear projects in Iran and North Korea, it has consistently supported the building of new nuclear weapons by the United States. Moreover, it has winked at the development of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan. Indeed, it recently pushed through Congress a nuclear technology sharing agreement with the Indian government that will upgrade the ability of that government to churn out nuclear weapons.

The leaders of many non-nuclear nations, of course, are less enthusiastic about the ongoing nuclear arms race. Even so, there has been an erosion of their willingness to challenge the policies of nuclear-armed nations. The emergence of the nonaligned movement during the 1950s provided powerful international pressure upon the great powers for an end to the testing, development, and deployment of nuclear weapons. For decades, Third World nations played a key role in the nonaligned movement, and were particularly sharp in their condemnation of the Soviet-American nuclear confrontation. Today, however, relatively little antinuclear rhetoric seems to emanate from these nations.

Furthermore, although there was substantial nuclear disarmament in the past, that progress toward a nuclear-free world was based heavily on massive popular pressure from peace and disarmament organizations. In the United States, groups like the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), Women Strike for Peace, the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, and Physicians for Social Responsibility helped create a national uproar over the nuclear arms race. They were joined in their protest ventures by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Britain, the Congress Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs (Gensuikin) and the Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs (Gensuikyo) in Japan, Project Ploughshares in Canada, the Trust Groups in the Soviet Union, and hundreds of similar organizations around the world. This activist pressure, plus the antinuclear sentiments of the general public, led politicians in numerous nations to abandon many of their nuclear ambitions. But, although polls show that popular sentiment remains antinuclear, that previous massive campaign against nuclear weapons is largely absent today.

Thus, ironically, when portions of the national security elite have finally come around to championing a nuclear-free world, much of the popular antinuclear movement is dormant.

Can it be revived? Perhaps so. Groups like Peace Action (the successor to SANE and the Freeze), Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and Faithful Security are among those striving to spark a resurrection of the nuclear disarmament campaign in the United States. And others are at work abroad. But popular protest against nuclear weapons remains far from its peak in the mid-1980s.

At present, then, Dhanapala—and all other people committed to human survival—should certainly welcome the recent antinuclear activities of a portion of the national security elite. But, as he implies, substantial progress toward a nuclear-free world remains dependent on a revival of pressure from non-nuclear nations and from the public. Lawrence S. Wittner



From pie in the sky toward a nuke-free world

Jayantha Dhanapala


The vision of a nuclear weapon-free world was most famously dismissed by the former Prime Minister of Britain, Margaret Thatcher, as a "pie in the sky." Such was the derision which greeted the disarmament scenario championed by governments, especially from the Non-aligned Movement, as well as nongovernmental organizations such as Pugwash.

It is therefore a revolutionary change to see senior officials in former U.S. Administrations combine to write--not one but two--pieces in the conservative Wall Street Journal, calling for such pie in the sky.

In the past, other senior members of U.S. Administrations, like Robert McNamara, and retired military top brass, like Gen. Lee Butler, have also experienced epiphanies and recanted their views on nuclear weapons.

What distinguishes this year-long initiative by George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn and William Perry is the fact that they have been able to gather a number of distinguished U.S. individuals like Madeleine Albright, James Baker III, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Warren Christopher and Colin Powell behind them with a group of scholars in Stanford University's Hoover Institution providing the scientific expertise.

The influence of this extraordinary initiative is beginning to percolate in the campaigns for the U.S. presidential elections and the policies of other countries like Britain. At the end of February, the Norwegian government hosted a meeting of global experts in Oslo to carry the initiative further.

A major aim of the initiative is to make the goal of a nuclear weapons-free world into "a joint enterprise."

The need for broader support is obvious. Not only do many of the nuclear weapon states (NWS) and NATO retain policies for the first use of nuclear weapons, but some also have plans for preemptive strikes and the building of new weapons with the specific intent of violating the taboo that has existed since the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that has long stood against proliferation and represented a hope for nuclear disarmament is now in grave jeopardy.

There are no ongoing negotiations for nuclear weapons reductions; negotiations about the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran are still inconclusive, and there is growing evidence of terrorist groups seeking access to nuclear weapons technology and materials.

Faced with this seemingly entrenched attitude in favor of nuclear weapons and their use, broader support for an initiative that will eventually lead to the elimination of the world's 26,000 nuclear weapons must come primarily from the governments and peoples of the NWS, two of which, the United States and Russia--who own 95 percent of the weapons--will soon have new presidents.

At the same time the non-nuclear weapon states (NNWS) and their citizens also have a right, and indeed an obligation, to take steps that will help usher in a nuclear weapons-free world.

The NNWS do not, however, form a monolithic group. There are the NNWS who are allied to NWS and who, like Japan, enjoy the benefits of a security umbrella by belonging to a security pact or, like Canada, to a security alliance (NATO) with "nuclear sharing" arrangements.

The NATO summits in April 2008 and again on the 60th anniversary of the alliance in 2009 will enable a review of the 1999 Strategic Concept.

The involvement of some NNWS in ballistic missile defense plans clearly linked to nuclear weapons strategy is another factor compromising these NNWS.

But we do have a unique opportunity where the fulfillment of the reciprocal, albeit asymmetrical, obligations of the nuclear "haves" and "have-nots" can together help to usher in a nuclear weapons-free world. This is the "partnership" the Wall Street Journal articles call for.

A new U.S. president can take the lead. But for this United States leadership to be effective, the support for the Shultz/Kissinger/Nunn/Perry initiative must also come from other NWS and the NNWS.

Sweden sponsored the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (WMDC), chaired by the respected Hans Blix, which proposed a world summit on disarmament, nonproliferation and terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction.

The time is right to prepare for this summit in 2009. The alternative is too awful to contemplate.

As the Blix Report noted, "So long as any state has such weapons--especially nuclear weapons--others will want them.

So long as any such weapons remain in any state's arsenal, there is a high risk they will one day be used, by design or accident. Any such use would be catastrophic."

Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany and the author of The Struggle Against the Bomb (Stanford University Press). Jayantha Dhanapala is a former ambassador of Sri Lanka to the United States and a former U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs. He is currently chair of the U.N. University Council, president of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs and Simons Visiting Professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Sitting This One Out

(A year old but timely and to the point. Jerry Lotierzo)

By Adolph L. Reed Jr.
November 2007 Issue
OK, HERE WE ARE AGAIN, a year out from a Presidential election, and we’re all supposed to be figuring out which of the Democrats has the best chance to win—determined mainly by the standard of raising the most money—and subordinating all our substantive political concerns to the objective of getting him or her elected. This time, I’m not going to acquiesce in the fiction that the Presidential charade has any credibility whatsoever. I’m not paying any attention to the horse race coverage—that mass-mediated positioning in the battle for superficial product differentiation.

The Democratic candidates who are anointed “serious” are like a car with a faulty front-end alignment: Their default setting pulls to the right. They are unshakably locked into a strategy that impels them to give priority to placating those who aren’t inclined to vote for them and then palliate those who are with bromides and doublespeak. When we complain, they smugly say, “Well, you have no choice but to vote for me because the other guy’s worse.” The party has essentially been nominating the same ticket with the same approach since Dukakis.

The last straw for me was the spectacle of all the “serious candidates” falling over one another to link Castro and Chávez with Ahmadinejad, bin Laden, and Kim, thus endorsing the Bush Administration’s view that any government that does anything that ours doesn’t like—including giving its own people’s needs higher priority than those of our corporations—qualifies it as a supporter of terrorism, a rogue state, part of the Axis of Evil, or whatever comic book slogan is operative this week. Then came the supposedly anti-war Obama buttressing his commitment to increase overall American troop strength with a pledge to invade Pakistan. Then came his and HRC’s tiff over the etiquette of publicly declaring a willingness to use nuclear weapons on a case-by-case basis, with both parties treating the issue as purely a matter of foreign policy gamesmanship. And this was during Hiroshima and Nagasaki week, no less!
Each serious candidate has boosters who will tell us that we should be more sophisticated than to take what their candidates say at face value, that their empty, inadequate, or objectionable proposals are the best, most realistic versions of whatever we think we want—from ending the war, to universal national health care and access to quality education, to public investment in rebuilding the Gulf Coast and the rest of the country’s physical and social infrastructure, to worker protection and fighting environmental degradation.

A friend of mine characterizes this as the “we’ll come back for you” politics, the claim that they can’t champion anything you want because they have to conciliate your enemies right now to get elected, but that, once they win, they’ll be able to attend to the progressive agenda they have to reject now in order to win. This worked out so well with the Clinton Presidency, didn’t it? Remember his argument that he had to sign the hideous 1996 welfare reform bill to be able to come back and “fix” it later? Or NAFTA? Or two repressive and racist crime bills that flooded the prisons? Or the privatizing of Sallie Mae, which set the stage for the student debt crisis? Or ending the federal government’s commitment to direct provision of housing for the poor?

This time, the nominal frontrunners have Rube Goldberg health care proposals that protect the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, the chief sources of the health care crisis. They discuss the murderous adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan mainly in bloodless, managerial terms—as a “broken policy” or some other such technician’s euphemism. Not only do their references to the tragic loss of American lives seem pro forma and constructed by focus-group engineers; they also reinscribe the presumption that only American lives count. This is part of what undergirds the broader framework of a foreign policy hinged on cavalier use of military assault and invasion in the first place—what used to be clearly recognized as imperialism. Edwards, who seems somewhat better than the others on Iraq, apparently needs to make up for it—lest what seem like expressions of decency be grounds for accusations of weakness—by being even more bellicose than they regarding Iran. However, all of them have indicated a lusty willingness to attack Iran, Syria, or any other country that can be demonized either for not dancing to our government’s tune or even just because it’s convenient to do so as a prop for some other purpose.

At the end of the primary campaign, one of the “serious candidates” is going to get the nomination and form a ticket with another version of his or her triangulating self. (I still wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be Clinton-Obama, in an all-Oprah ticket, an exercise in massive short-term self-delusion and empty identity politics that will guarantee the White House to whichever combo the GOP puts up.) Maybe by Election Day I’ll be moved or guilted or frightened into voting for that ticket, whatever it is. But I’m just as likely to sit this one out.

And I’m prepared to blow off every liberal who starts whining and hectoring, in that self-important and breathless way they do, about our obligation to protect “choice” or to make sure we can get another Stephen Breyer or Sandra Day O’Connor onto the Supreme Court.

I know that some outraged readers are going to write in, fulminating about how nihilistically ultraleftist I am to criticize the Democrats in this way and how irresponsible The Progressive is to publish the criticism—especially now, when the stakes are so great and it’s so crucially important for the future of the country, the world, the galaxy, the cosmos, that some Democrat—anyone, no matter how worthless—wins the Presidency. (That they make the same cataclysmic claim about every election never seems to dull their self-righteous fervor.) They’ll explain that we have to understand that we can’t get everything we want all at once, that the Democrats can’t go any further than they go, and that a half-hearted promise of part of a stale loaf of bread in some unspecified future is better than no bread at all—especially for those who don’t really need the bread at the moment.

Well, in part, they’re right. The Democrats are what they are. We should all know that by now, after two decades of their failing to stand up to the rightwing juggernaut, of presenting themselves as more responsible and steady managers of the country’s slide to the right. By the time the national elections come around, there really are no options other than to vote for their predictably worthless nominee, make an existential statement (or engage in wish-fulfillment, if you think it’s more than that) by voting for a third party candidate, or just not bother. This bleak reality reflects the left’s failure to build any durable extra-electoral force between elections that can bring pressure to bear on the Democratic contenders and debate.

Elected officials are only as good or as bad as the forces they feel they must respond to. It’s a mistake to expect any more of them than to be vectors of the political pressures they feel working on them. This is a lesson that progressives have forgotten or failed to learn.

As an illustration, consider the recent contretemps between John Conyers and the pro-impeachment, anti-war activists who attacked him as a sellout for failing to push impeachment over Nancy Pelosi’s and the House Democratic leadership’s opposition. His critics accused him of betraying the spirit of Martin Luther King. But that charge only exposes their unrealistic expectations. Conyers isn’t a movement leader. He’s a Democratic official who wants to get reelected. He’s enmeshed in the same web of personal ties, partisan loyalties and obligations, and diverse interest-group commitments as other pols. It was the impeachment activists’ naive error, and I suspect one resting on a partly racial, wrongheaded shorthand, to have expected him to lead an insurgency. If the pro-impeachment forces had been able to organize a popular movement with militant local to national expressions on a wide scale, Conyers would have had the leverage necessary to press the movement’s case to Pelosi and Democratic leadership, or at least he and the others would have felt real pressure to act more boldly on this issue. Instead, an understandable sense of urgency led them to take a politically self-indulgent, doomed shortcut. The result is much wasted effort, unnecessary enmity, and another demoralizing defeat.

Unfortunately, like the Democrats, our side fails to learn from experience. Despite a mountain range of evidence to the contrary, we—the labor, anti-war, women’s, environmental, and racial justice movements—all continue to craft political strategy based on the assumption that the problem is that the Democrats simply don’t understand what we want and how important those things are to us. They know; they just have different priorities.

That’s why the endless cycle of unofficial hearings and tribunals and rallies and demonstrations and Internet petitions never has any effect on anything. They’re all directed to bearing witness before an officialdom that doesn’t care and feels no compulsion to take our demands into account. To that extent, this form of activism has become little more than a combination of theater—a pageantry of protest—and therapy for the activists.

Then at the apex of every election cycle, after having marched around in the same pointless circle, chanting the same slogans in the interim, we look feverishly to one of the Democrats or some Quixote to do our organizing work for us, magically, all at once.

We need to think about politics in a different way, one that doesn’t assume that the task is to lobby the Democrats or give them good ideas, and correct their misconceptions.

It’s a mistake to focus so much on the election cycle; we didn’t vote ourselves into this mess, and we’re not going to vote ourselves out of it. Electoral politics is an arena for consolidating majorities that have been created on the plane of social movement organizing. It’s not an alternative or a shortcut to building those movements, and building them takes time and concerted effort. Not only can that process not be compressed to fit the election cycle; it also doesn’t happen through mass actions. It happens through cultivating one-on-one relationships with people who have standing and influence in their neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, families, and organizations. It happens through struggling with people over time for things they’re concerned about and linking those concerns to a broader political vision and program. This is how the populist movement grew in the late nineteenth century, the CIO in the 1930s and 1940s, and the civil rights movement after World War II. It is how we’ve won all our victories. And it is also how the right came to power.

The anti-war movement isn’t coherent or popularly grounded enough to exert the pressure necessary to improve the electoral options; only the labor movement has the capacity to do so, but it doesn’t have the will. None of the other progressive tendencies has the capacity to do anything more than lobby or exhort. Effective lobbying requires being able to deliver or withhold crucial resources, and none but labor has that capacity. Exhortation works only with people who share your larger goals and objectives; other than that it’s useless except as catharsis.

We also need to think more carefully about what our demonstrations and protest marches can and can’t do. Here we could take a lesson from Martin Luther King. His 1962 Albany, Georgia, campaign failed because the local authorities figured out that the success of King’s mass marches depended on meeting brutal resistance from local officials. When they didn’t forcibly stop the marches, the movement fizzled.

Our approach to mass mobilization is like the Albany campaign. Our actions don’t raise public consciousness because they’re treated dismissively, if at all, in the mainstream media. They don’t even connect with the residents of the cities where we hold them because we agree to strict march routes and rally sites that make certain we don’t engage with anyone other than ourselves. And we agree not to disrupt routine daily life more than a homecoming parade would in exchange for having a designated place to gather and talk to ourselves. Even the civil disobedience is carefully choreographed and designed to be minimally disruptive.

Whether or not we admit it, these are features of a politics that is focused mainly inward, on shoring up the spirits of the participants in the actions themselves. They don’t send a message that those in power can’t simply ignore, and they don’t inform, excite, or win over anyone who’s not already on board with the movement’s agenda. It’s telling in this sense that our movement culture has evolved elaborately clever techniques for keeping participants entertained through the stale, all-too-predictable cavalcade of speeches and chants and puppets on stilts.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that people don’t need to engage in rallies and protests. It is self-defeating, however, to collapse the difference between the activities that make us feel good and the work that is necessary to build the movement. There are no shortcuts or magic bullets. And, if we don’t confront that fact and act accordingly, we’ll be back in this same position, but most likely with options a little worse than these, in 2012, and again and again.

Adolph L. Reed Jr. is professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

April 20, 2008
MESSAGE MACHINE


By DAVID BARSTOW
In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

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.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”

The Pentagon defended its relationship with military analysts, saying they had been given only factual information about the war. “The intent and purpose of this is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people,” Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said.

It was, Mr. Whitman added, “a bit incredible” to think retired military officers could be “wound up” and turned into “puppets of the Defense Department.”

Many analysts strongly denied that they had either been co-opted or had allowed outside business interests to affect their on-air comments, and some have used their platforms to criticize the conduct of the war. Several, like Jeffrey D. McCausland, a CBS military analyst and defense industry lobbyist, said they kept their networks informed of their outside work and recused themselves from coverage that touched on business interests.

“I’m not here representing the administration,” Dr. McCausland said.

Some network officials, meanwhile, acknowledged only a limited understanding of their analysts’ interactions with the administration. They said that while they were sensitive to potential conflicts of interest, they did not hold their analysts to the same ethical standards as their news employees regarding outside financial interests. The onus is on their analysts to disclose conflicts, they said. And whatever the contributions of military analysts, they also noted the many network journalists who have covered the war for years in all its complexity.

Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.

Internal Pentagon documents 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.”

Though many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per appearance, in Pentagon meetings they sometimes spoke as if they were operating behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, “the Chris Matthewses and the Wolf Blitzers of the world.” Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon copies of their correspondence with network news executives. Many — although certainly not all — faithfully echoed talking points intended to counter critics.

“Good work,” Thomas G. McInerney, a retired Air Force general, consultant and Fox News analyst, wrote to the Pentagon after receiving fresh talking points in late 2006. “We will use it.”

Again and again, records show, the administration has enlisted analysts as a rapid reaction force to rebut what it viewed as critical news coverage, some of it by the networks’ own Pentagon correspondents. For example, when news articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: “I think our analysts — properly armed — can push back in that arena.”

The documents released by the Pentagon do not show any quid pro quo between commentary and contracts. But some analysts said they had used the special access as a marketing and networking opportunity or as a window into future business possibilities.

John C. Garrett is a retired Army colonel and unpaid analyst for Fox News TV and radio. He is also a lobbyist at Patton Boggs who helps firms win Pentagon contracts, including in Iraq. In promotional materials, he states that as a military analyst he “is privy to weekly access and briefings with the secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high level policy makers in the administration.” One client told investors that Mr. Garrett’s special access and decades of experience helped him “to know in advance — and in detail — how best to meet the needs” of the Defense Department and other agencies.

In interviews Mr. Garrett said there was an inevitable overlap between his dual roles. He said he had gotten “information you just otherwise would not get,” from the briefings and three Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq. He also acknowledged using this access and information to identify opportunities for clients. “You can’t help but look for that,” he said, adding, “If you know a capability that would fill a niche or need, you try to fill it. “That’s good for everybody.”

At the same time, in e-mail messages to the Pentagon, Mr. Garrett displayed an eagerness to be supportive with his television and radio commentary. “Please let me know if you have any specific points you want covered or that you would prefer to downplay,” he wrote in January 2007, before President Bush went on TV to describe the surge strategy in Iraq.

Conversely, the administration has demonstrated that there is a price for sustained criticism, many analysts said. “You’ll lose all access,” Dr. McCausland said.

With a majority of Americans calling the war a mistake despite all administration attempts to sway public opinion, the Pentagon has focused in the last couple of years on cultivating in particular military analysts frequently seen and heard in conservative news outlets, records and interviews show.

Some of these analysts were on the mission to Cuba on June 24, 2005 — the first of six such Guantánamo trips — which was designed to mobilize analysts against the growing perception of Guantánamo as an international symbol of inhumane treatment. On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo and on the flight home that night, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so analysts on their key messages — how much had been spent improving the facility, the abuse endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded detainees.

The results came quickly. The analysts went on TV and radio, decrying Amnesty International, criticizing calls to close the facility and asserting that all detainees were treated humanely.

“The impressions that you’re getting from the media and from the various pronouncements being made by people who have not been here in my opinion are totally false,” Donald W. Shepperd, a retired Air Force general, reported live on CNN by phone from Guantánamo that same afternoon.

The next morning, Montgomery Meigs, a retired Army general and NBC analyst, appeared on “Today.” “There’s been over $100 million of new construction,” he reported. “The place is very professionally run.”

Within days, transcripts of the analysts’ appearances were circulated to senior White House and Pentagon officials, cited as evidence of progress in the battle for hearts and minds at home.

Charting the Campaign

By early 2002, detailed planning for a possible Iraq invasion was under way, yet an obstacle loomed. Many Americans, polls showed, were uneasy about invading a country with no clear connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. Pentagon and White House officials believed the military analysts could play a crucial role in helping overcome this resistance.

Torie Clarke, the former public relations executive who oversaw the Pentagon’s dealings with the analysts as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, had come to her job with distinct ideas about achieving what she called “information dominance.” In a spin-saturated news culture, she argued, opinion is swayed most by voices perceived as authoritative and utterly independent.

And so even before Sept. 11, she built a system within the Pentagon to recruit “key influentials” — movers and shakers from all walks who with the proper ministrations might be counted on to generate support for Mr. Rumsfeld’s priorities.

In the months after Sept. 11, as every network rushed to retain its own all-star squad of retired military officers, Ms. Clarke and her staff sensed a new opportunity. To Ms. Clarke’s team, the military analysts were the ultimate “key influential” — authoritative, most of them decorated war heroes, all reaching mass audiences.

The analysts, they noticed, often got more airtime than network reporters, and they were not merely explaining the capabilities of Apache helicopters. They were framing how viewers ought to interpret events. What is more, while the analysts were in the news media, they were not of the news media. They were military men, many of them ideologically in sync with the administration’s neoconservative brain trust, many of them important players in a military industry anticipating large budget increases to pay for an Iraq war.

Even analysts with no defense industry ties, and no fondness for the administration, were reluctant to be critical of military leaders, many of whom were friends. “It is very hard for me to criticize the United States Army,” said William L. Nash, a retired Army general and ABC analyst. “It is my life.”

Other administrations had made sporadic, small-scale attempts to build relationships with the occasional military analyst. But these were trifling compared with what Ms. Clarke’s team had in mind. Don Meyer, an aide to Ms. Clarke, said a strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war. Journalists were secondary. “We didn’t want to rely on them to be our primary vehicle to get information out,” Mr. Meyer said.

The Pentagon’s regular press office would be kept separate from the military analysts. The analysts would instead be catered to by a small group of political appointees, with the point person being Brent T. Krueger, another senior aide to Ms. Clarke. The decision recalled other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism. Federal agencies, for example, have paid columnists to write favorably about the administration. They have distributed to local TV stations hundreds of fake news segments with fawning accounts of administration accomplishments. The Pentagon itself has made covert payments to Iraqi newspapers to publish coalition propaganda.

Rather than complain about the “media filter,” each of these techniques simply converted the filter into an amplifier. This time, Mr. Krueger said, the military analysts would in effect be “writing the op-ed” for the war.

Assembling the Team

From the start, interviews show, the White House took a keen interest in which analysts had been identified by the Pentagon, requesting lists of potential recruits, and suggesting names. Ms. Clarke’s team wrote summaries describing their backgrounds, business affiliations and where they stood on the war.

“Rumsfeld ultimately cleared off on all invitees,” said Mr. Krueger, who left the Pentagon in 2004. (Through a spokesman, Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment for this article.)

Over time, the Pentagon recruited more than 75 retired officers, although some participated only briefly or sporadically. The largest contingent was affiliated with Fox News, followed by NBC and CNN, the other networks with 24-hour cable outlets. But analysts from CBS and ABC were included, too. Some recruits, though not on any network payroll, were influential in other ways — either because they were sought out by radio hosts, or because they often published op-ed articles or were quoted in magazines, Web sites and newspapers. At least nine of them have written op-ed articles for The Times.

The group was heavily represented by men involved in the business of helping companies win military contracts. Several held senior positions with contractors that gave them direct responsibility for winning new Pentagon business. James Marks, a retired Army general and analyst for CNN from 2004 to 2007, pursued military and intelligence contracts as a senior executive with McNeil Technologies. Still others held board positions with military firms that gave them responsibility for government business. General McInerney, the Fox analyst, for example, sits on the boards of several military contractors, including Nortel Government Solutions, a supplier of communication networks.

Several were defense industry lobbyists, such as Dr. McCausland, who works at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, a major lobbying firm where he is director of a national security team that represents several military contractors. “We offer clients access to key decision makers,” Dr. McCausland’s team promised on the firm’s Web site.

Dr. McCausland was not the only analyst making this pledge. Another was Joseph W. Ralston, a retired Air Force general. Soon after signing on with CBS, General Ralston was named vice chairman of the Cohen Group, a consulting firm headed by a former defense secretary, William Cohen, himself now a “world affairs” analyst for CNN. “The Cohen Group knows that getting to ‘yes’ in the aerospace and defense market — whether in the United States or abroad — requires that companies have a thorough, up-to-date understanding of the thinking of government decision makers,” the company tells prospective clients on its Web site.

There were also ideological ties.

Two of NBC’s most prominent analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey and the late Wayne A. Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein. Both men also had their own consulting firms and sat on the boards of major military contractors.

Many also shared with Mr. Bush’s national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation’s will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.

This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from “enemy” propaganda during Vietnam.

“We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped,” he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach “MindWar” — using network TV and radio to “strengthen our national will to victory.”

The Selling of the War

From their earliest sessions with the military analysts, Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides spoke as if they were all part of the same team.

In interviews, participants described a powerfully seductive environment — the uniformed escorts to Mr. Rumsfeld’s private conference room, the best government china laid out, the embossed name cards, the blizzard of PowerPoints, the solicitations of advice and counsel, the appeals to duty and country, the warm thank you notes from the secretary himself.

“Oh, you have no idea,” Mr. Allard said, describing the effect. “You’re back. They listen to you. They listen to what you say on TV.” It was, he said, “psyops on steroids” — a nuanced exercise in influence through flattery and proximity. “It’s not like it’s, ‘We’ll pay you $500 to get our story out,’ ” he said. “It’s more subtle.”

The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.

In the fall and winter leading up to the invasion, the Pentagon armed its analysts with talking points portraying Iraq as an urgent threat. The basic case became a familiar mantra: Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, was developing nuclear weapons, and might one day slip some to Al Qaeda; an invasion would be a relatively quick and inexpensive “war of liberation.”

At the Pentagon, members of Ms. Clarke’s staff marveled at the way the analysts seamlessly incorporated material from talking points and briefings as if it was their own.

“You could see that they were messaging,” Mr. Krueger said. “You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over.” Some days, he added, “We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks were up there delivering our message. You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.’ ”

On April 12, 2003, with major combat almost over, Mr. Rumsfeld drafted a memorandum to Ms. Clarke. “Let’s think about having some of the folks who did such a good job as talking heads in after this thing is over,” he wrote.

By summer, though, the first signs of the insurgency had emerged. Reports from journalists based in Baghdad were increasingly suffused with the imagery of mayhem.

The Pentagon did not have to search far for a counterweight.

It was time, an internal Pentagon strategy memorandum urged, to “re-energize surrogates and message-force multipliers,” starting with the military analysts.

The memorandum led to a proposal to take analysts on a tour of Iraq in September 2003, timed to help overcome the sticker shock from Mr. Bush’s request for $87 billion in emergency war financing.

The group included four analysts from Fox News, one each from CNN and ABC, and several research-group luminaries whose opinion articles appear regularly in the nation’s op-ed pages.

The trip invitation promised a look at “the real situation on the ground in Iraq.”

The situation, as described in scores of books, was deteriorating. L. Paul Bremer III, then the American viceroy in Iraq, wrote in his memoir, “My Year in Iraq,” that he had privately warned the White House that the United States had “about half the number of soldiers we needed here.”

“We’re up against a growing and sophisticated threat,” Mr. Bremer recalled telling the president during a private White House dinner.

That dinner took place on Sept. 24, while the analysts were touring Iraq.

Yet these harsh realities were elided, or flatly contradicted, during the official presentations for the analysts, records show. The itinerary, scripted to the minute, featured brief visits to a model school, a few refurbished government buildings, a center for women’s rights, a mass grave and even the gardens of Babylon.

Mostly the analysts attended briefings. These sessions, records show, spooled out an alternative narrative, depicting an Iraq bursting with political and economic energy, its security forces blossoming. On the crucial question of troop levels, the briefings echoed the White House line: No reinforcements were needed. The “growing and sophisticated threat” described by Mr. Bremer was instead depicted as degraded, isolated and on the run.

“We’re winning,” a briefing document proclaimed.

One trip participant, General Nash of ABC, said some briefings were so clearly “artificial” that he joked to another group member that they were on “the George Romney memorial trip to Iraq,” a reference to Mr. Romney’s infamous claim that American officials had “brainwashed” him into supporting the Vietnam War during a tour there in 1965, while he was governor of Michigan.

But if the trip pounded the message of progress, it also represented a business opportunity: direct access to the most senior civilian and military leaders in Iraq and Kuwait, including many with a say in how the president’s $87 billion would be spent. It also was a chance to gather inside information about the most pressing needs confronting the American mission: the acute shortages of “up-armored” Humvees; the billions to be spent building military bases; the urgent need for interpreters; and the ambitious plans to train Iraq’s security forces.

Information and access of this nature had undeniable value for trip participants like William V. Cowan and Carlton A. Sherwood.

Mr. Cowan, a Fox analyst and retired Marine colonel, was the chief executive of a new military firm, the wvc3 Group. Mr. Sherwood was its executive vice president. At the time, the company was seeking contracts worth tens of millions to supply body armor and counterintelligence services in Iraq. In addition, wvc3 Group had a written agreement to use its influence and connections to help tribal leaders in Al Anbar Province win reconstruction contracts from the coalition.

“Those sheiks wanted access to the C.P.A.,” Mr. Cowan recalled in an interview, referring to the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Mr. Cowan said he pleaded their cause during the trip. “I tried to push hard with some of Bremer’s people to engage these people of Al Anbar,” he said.

Back in Washington, Pentagon officials kept a nervous eye on how the trip translated on the airwaves. Uncomfortable facts had bubbled up during the trip. One briefer, for example, mentioned that the Army was resorting to packing inadequately armored Humvees with sandbags and Kevlar blankets. Descriptions of the Iraqi security forces were withering. “They can’t shoot, but then again, they don’t,” one officer told them, according to one participant’s notes.

“I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south,” General Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times.

The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.

“You can’t believe the progress,” General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be “down to a few numbers” within months.

“We could not be more excited, more pleased,” Mr. Cowan told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. There was barely a word about armor shortages or corrupt Iraqi security forces. And on the key strategic question of the moment — whether to send more troops — the analysts were unanimous.

“I am so much against adding more troops,” General Shepperd said on CNN.

Access and Influence

Inside the Pentagon and at the White House, the trip was viewed as a masterpiece in the management of perceptions, not least because it gave fuel to complaints that “mainstream” journalists were ignoring the good news in Iraq.

“We’re hitting a home run on this trip,” a senior Pentagon official wrote in an e-mail message to Richard B. Myers and Peter Pace, then chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Its success only intensified the Pentagon’s campaign. The pace of briefings accelerated. More trips were organized. Eventually the effort involved officials from Washington to Baghdad to Kabul to Guantánamo and back to Tampa, Fla., the headquarters of United States Central Command.

The scale reflected strong support from the top. When officials in Iraq were slow to organize another trip for analysts, a Pentagon official fired off an e-mail message warning that the trips “have the highest levels of visibility” at the White House and urging them to get moving before Lawrence Di Rita, one of Mr. Rumsfeld’s closest aides, “picks up the phone and starts calling the 4-stars.”

Mr. Di Rita, no longer at the Defense Department, said in an interview that a “conscious decision” was made to rely on the military analysts to counteract “the increasingly negative view of the war” coming from journalists in Iraq. The analysts, he said, generally had “a more supportive view” of the administration and the war, and the combination of their TV platforms and military cachet made them ideal for rebutting critical coverage of issues like troop morale, treatment of detainees, inadequate equipment or poorly trained Iraqi security forces. “On those issues, they were more likely to be seen as credible spokesmen,” he said.

For analysts with military industry ties, the attention brought access to a widening circle of influential officials beyond the contacts they had accumulated over the course of their careers.

Charles T. Nash, a Fox military analyst and retired Navy captain, is a consultant who helps small companies break into the military market. Suddenly, he had entree to a host of senior military leaders, many of whom he had never met. It was, he said, like being embedded with the Pentagon leadership. “You start to recognize what’s most important to them,” he said, adding, “There’s nothing like seeing stuff firsthand.”

Some Pentagon officials said they were well aware that some analysts viewed their special access as a business advantage. “Of course we realized that,” Mr. Krueger said. “We weren’t naïve about that.”

They also understood the financial relationship between the networks and their analysts. Many analysts were being paid by the “hit,” the number of times they appeared on TV. The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon “sources,” the more hits he could expect. The more hits, the greater his potential influence in the military marketplace, where several analysts prominently advertised their network roles.

“They have taken lobbying and the search for contracts to a far higher level,” Mr. Krueger said. “This has been highly honed.”

Mr. Di Rita, though, said it never occurred to him that analysts might use their access to curry favor. Nor, he said, did the Pentagon try to exploit this dynamic. “That’s not something that ever crossed my mind,” he said. In any event, he argued, the analysts and the networks were the ones responsible for any ethical complications. “We assume they know where the lines are,” he said.

The analysts met personally with Mr. Rumsfeld at least 18 times, records show, but that was just the beginning. They had dozens more sessions with the most senior members of his brain trust and access to officials responsible for managing the billions being spent in Iraq. Other groups of “key influentials” had meetings, but not nearly as often as the analysts.

An internal memorandum in 2005 helped explain why. The memorandum, written by a Pentagon official who had accompanied analysts to Iraq, said that based on her observations during the trip, the analysts “are having a greater impact” on network coverage of the military. “They have now become the go-to guys not only on breaking stories, but they influence the views on issues,” she wrote.

Other branches of the administration also began to make use of the analysts. Mr. Gonzales, then the attorney general, met with them soon after news leaked that the government was wiretapping terrorism suspects in the United States without warrants, Pentagon records show. When David H. Petraeus was appointed the commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet with the analysts.

“We knew we had extraordinary access,” said Timur J. Eads, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and Fox analyst who is vice president of government relations for Blackbird Technologies, a fast-growing military contractor.

Like several other analysts, Mr. Eads said he had at times held his tongue on television for fear that “some four-star could call up and say, ‘Kill that contract.’ ” For example, he believed Pentagon officials misled the analysts about the progress of Iraq’s security forces. “I know a snow job when I see one,” he said. He did not share this on TV.

“Human nature,” he explained, though he noted other instances when he was critical.

Some analysts said that even before the war started, they privately had questions about the justification for the invasion, but were careful not to express them on air.

Mr. Bevelacqua, then a Fox analyst, was among those invited to a briefing in early 2003 about Iraq’s purported stockpiles of illicit weapons. He recalled asking the briefer whether the United States had “smoking gun” proof.

“ ‘We don’t have any hard evidence,’ ” Mr. Bevelacqua recalled the briefer replying. He said he and other analysts were alarmed by this concession. “We are looking at ourselves saying, ‘What are we doing?’ ”

Another analyst, Robert L. Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who works in the Pentagon for a military contractor, attended the same briefing and recalled feeling “very disappointed” after being shown satellite photographs purporting to show bunkers associated with a hidden weapons program. Mr. Maginnis said he concluded that the analysts were being “manipulated” to convey a false sense of certainty about the evidence of the weapons. Yet he and Mr. Bevelacqua and the other analysts who attended the briefing did not share any misgivings with the American public.

Mr. Bevelacqua and another Fox analyst, Mr. Cowan, had formed the wvc3 Group, and hoped to win military and national security contracts.

“There’s no way I was going to go down that road and get completely torn apart,” Mr. Bevelacqua said. “You’re talking about fighting a huge machine.”

Some e-mail messages between the Pentagon and the analysts reveal an implicit trade of privileged access for favorable coverage. Robert H. Scales Jr., a retired Army general and analyst for Fox News and National Public Radio whose consulting company advises several military firms on weapons and tactics used in Iraq, wanted the Pentagon to approve high-level briefings for him inside Iraq in 2006.

“Recall the stuff I did after my last visit,” he wrote. “I will do the same this time.”

Pentagon Keeps Tabs

As it happened, the analysts’ news media appearances were being closely monitored. The Pentagon paid a private contractor, Omnitec Solutions, hundreds of thousands of dollars to scour databases for any trace of the analysts, be it a segment on “The O’Reilly Factor” or an interview with The Daily Inter Lake in Montana, circulation 20,000.

Omnitec evaluated their appearances using the same tools as corporate branding experts. One report, assessing the impact of several trips to Iraq in 2005, offered example after example of analysts echoing Pentagon themes on all the networks.

“Commentary from all three Iraq trips was extremely positive over all,” the report concluded.

In interviews, several analysts reacted with dismay when told they were described as reliable “surrogates” in Pentagon documents. And some asserted that their Pentagon sessions were, as David L. Grange, a retired Army general and CNN analyst put it, “just upfront information,” while others pointed out, accurately, that they did not always agree with the administration or each other. “None of us drink the Kool-Aid,” General Scales said.

Likewise, several also denied using their special access for business gain. “Not related at all,” General Shepperd said, pointing out that many in the Pentagon held CNN “in the lowest esteem.”

Still, even the mildest of criticism could draw a challenge. Several analysts told of fielding telephone calls from displeased defense officials only minutes after being on the air.

On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, Mr. Cowan, who said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the “twisted version of reality” being pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give “a heads-up” that some of his comments on Fox “may not all be friendly,” Pentagon records show. Mr. Rumsfeld’s senior aides quickly arranged a private briefing for him, yet when he told Bill O’Reilly that the United States was “not on a good glide path right now” in Iraq, the repercussions were swift.

Mr. Cowan said he was “precipitously fired from the analysts group” for this appearance. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message, “simply didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t carrying their water.” The next day James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines’ deaths further erode support for the war.

“The strategic target remains our population,” General Conway said. “We can lose people day in and day out, but they’re never going to beat our military. What they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can help us not let that happen.”

“General, I just made that point on the air,” an analyst replied.

“Let’s work it together, guys,” General Conway urged.

The Generals’ Revolt

The full dimensions of this mutual embrace were perhaps never clearer than in April 2006, after several of Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals — none of them network military analysts — went public with devastating critiques of his wartime performance. Some called for his resignation.

On Friday, April 14, with what came to be called the “Generals’ Revolt” dominating headlines, Mr. Rumsfeld instructed aides to summon military analysts to a meeting with him early the next week, records show. When an aide urged a short delay to “give our big guys on the West Coast a little more time to buy a ticket and get here,” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office insisted that “the boss” wanted the meeting fast “for impact on the current story.”

That same day, Pentagon officials helped two Fox analysts, General McInerney and General Vallely, write an opinion article for The Wall Street Journal defending Mr. Rumsfeld.

“Starting to write it now,” General Vallely wrote to the Pentagon that afternoon. “Any input for the article,” he added a little later, “will be much appreciated.” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office quickly forwarded talking points and statistics to rebut the notion of a spreading revolt.

“Vallely is going to use the numbers,” a Pentagon official reported that afternoon.

The standard secrecy notwithstanding, plans for this session leaked, producing a front-page story in The Times that Sunday. In damage-control mode, Pentagon officials scrambled to present the meeting as routine and directed that communications with analysts be kept “very formal,” records show. “This is very, very sensitive now,” a Pentagon official warned subordinates.

On Tuesday, April 18, some 17 analysts assembled at the Pentagon with Mr. Rumsfeld and General Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

A transcript of that session, never before disclosed, shows a shared determination to marginalize war critics and revive public support for the war.

“I’m an old intel guy,” said one analyst. (The transcript omits speakers’ names.) “And I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. That is Psyops. Now most people may hear that and they think, ‘Oh my God, they’re trying to brainwash.’ ”

“What are you, some kind of a nut?” Mr. Rumsfeld cut in, drawing laughter. “You don’t believe in the Constitution?”

There was little discussion about the actual criticism pouring forth from Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals. Analysts argued that opposition to the war was rooted in perceptions fed by the news media, not reality. The administration’s overall war strategy, they counseled, was “brilliant” and “very successful.”

“Frankly,” one participant said, “from a military point of view, the penalty, 2,400 brave Americans whom we lost, 3,000 in an hour and 15 minutes, is relative.”

An analyst said at another point: “This is a wider war. And whether we have democracy in Iraq or not, it doesn’t mean a tinker’s damn if we end up with the result we want, which is a regime over there that’s not a threat to us.”

“Yeah,” Mr. Rumsfeld said, taking notes.

But winning or not, they bluntly warned, the administration was in grave political danger so long as most Americans viewed Iraq as a lost cause. “America hates a loser,” one analyst said.

Much of the session was devoted to ways that Mr. Rumsfeld could reverse the “political tide.” One analyst urged Mr. Rumsfeld to “just crush these people,” and assured him that “most of the gentlemen at the table” would enthusiastically support him if he did.

“You are the leader,” the analyst told Mr. Rumsfeld. “You are our guy.”

At another point, an analyst made a suggestion: “In one of your speeches you ought to say, ‘Everybody stop for a minute and imagine an Iraq ruled by Zarqawi.’ And then you just go down the list and say, ‘All right, we’ve got oil, money, sovereignty, access to the geographic center of gravity of the Middle East, blah, blah, blah.’ If you can just paint a mental picture for Joe America to say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t imagine a world like that.’ ”

Even as they assured Mr. Rumsfeld that they stood ready to help in this public relations offensive, the analysts sought guidance on what they should cite as the next “milestone” that would, as one analyst put it, “keep the American people focused on the idea that we’re moving forward to a positive end.” They placed particular emphasis on the growing confrontation with Iran.

“When you said ‘long war,’ you changed the psyche of the American people to expect this to be a generational event,” an analyst said. “And again, I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job...”

“Get in line,” Mr. Rumsfeld interjected.

The meeting ended and Mr. Rumsfeld, appearing pleased and relaxed, took the entire group into a small study and showed off treasured keepsakes from his life, several analysts recalled.

Soon after, analysts hit the airwaves. The Omnitec monitoring reports, circulated to more than 80 officials, confirmed that analysts repeated many of the Pentagon’s talking points: that Mr. Rumsfeld consulted “frequently and sufficiently” with his generals; that he was not “overly concerned” with the criticisms; that the meeting focused “on more important topics at hand,” including the next milestone in Iraq, the formation of a new government.

Days later, Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memorandum distilling their collective guidance into bullet points. Two were underlined:

“Focus on the Global War on Terror — not simply Iraq. The wider war — the long war.”

“Link Iraq to Iran. Iran is the concern. If we fail in Iraq or Afghanistan, it will help Iran.”

But if Mr. Rumsfeld found the session instructive, at least one participant, General Nash, the ABC analyst, was repulsed.

“I walked away from that session having total disrespect for my fellow commentators, with perhaps one or two exceptions,” he said.

View From the Networks

Two weeks ago General Petraeus took time out from testifying before Congress about Iraq for a conference call with military analysts.

Mr. Garrett, the Fox analyst and Patton Boggs lobbyist, said he told General Petraeus during the call to “keep up the great work.”

“Hey,” Mr. Garrett said in an interview, “anything we can do to help.”

For the moment, though, because of heavy election coverage and general war fatigue, military analysts are not getting nearly as much TV time, and the networks have trimmed their rosters of analysts. The conference call with General Petraeus, for example, produced little in the way of immediate coverage.

Still, almost weekly the Pentagon continues to conduct briefings with selected military analysts. Many analysts said network officials were only dimly aware of these interactions. The networks, they said, have little grasp of how often they meet with senior officials, or what is discussed.

“I don’t think NBC was even aware we were participating,” said Rick Francona, a longtime military analyst for the network.

Some networks publish biographies on their Web sites that describe their analysts’ military backgrounds and, in some cases, give at least limited information about their business ties. But many analysts also said the networks asked few questions about their outside business interests, the nature of their work or the potential for that work to create conflicts of interest. “None of that ever happened,” said Mr. Allard, an NBC analyst until 2006.

“The worst conflict of interest was no interest.”

Mr. Allard and other analysts said their network handlers also raised no objections when the Defense Department began paying their commercial airfare for Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq — a clear ethical violation for most news organizations.

CBS News declined to comment on what it knew about its military analysts’ business affiliations or what steps it took to guard against potential conflicts.

NBC News also declined to discuss its procedures for hiring and monitoring military analysts. The network issued a short statement: “We have clear policies in place to assure that the people who appear on our air have been appropriately vetted and that nothing in their profile would lead to even a perception of a conflict of interest.”

Jeffrey W. Schneider, a spokesman for ABC, said that while the network’s military consultants were not held to the same ethical rules as its full-time journalists, they were expected to keep the network informed about any outside business entanglements. “We make it clear to them we expect them to keep us closely apprised,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Fox News said executives “refused to participate” in this article.

CNN requires its military analysts to disclose in writing all outside sources of income. But like the other networks, it does not provide its military analysts with the kind of written, specific ethical guidelines it gives its full-time employees for avoiding real or apparent conflicts of interest.

Yet even where controls exist, they have sometimes proven porous.

CNN, for example, said it was unaware for nearly three years that one of its main military analysts, General Marks, was deeply involved in the business of seeking government contracts, including contracts related to Iraq.

General Marks was hired by CNN in 2004, about the time he took a management position at McNeil Technologies, where his job was to pursue military and intelligence contracts. As required, General Marks disclosed that he received income from McNeil Technologies. But the disclosure form did not require him to describe what his job entailed, and CNN acknowledges it failed to do additional vetting.

“We did not ask Mr. Marks the follow-up questions we should have,” CNN said in a written statement.

In an interview, General Marks said it was no secret at CNN that his job at McNeil Technologies was about winning contracts. “I mean, that’s what McNeil does,” he said.

CNN, however, said it did not know the nature of McNeil’s military business or what General Marks did for the company. If he was bidding on Pentagon contracts, CNN said, that should have disqualified him from being a military analyst for the network. But in the summer and fall of 2006, even as he was regularly asked to comment on conditions in Iraq, General Marks was working intensively on bidding for a $4.6 billion contract to provide thousands of translators to United States forces in Iraq. In fact, General Marks was made president of the McNeil spin-off that won the huge contract in December 2006.

General Marks said his work on the contract did not affect his commentary on CNN. “I’ve got zero challenge separating myself from a business interest,” he said.

But CNN said it had no idea about his role in the contract until July 2007, when it reviewed his most recent disclosure form, submitted months earlier, and finally made inquiries about his new job.

“We saw the extent of his dealings and determined at that time we should end our relationship with him,” CNN said.

Tough Guise by Glenn Greenwald

The following is adapted from Glenn Greenwald's new book, Great American Hypocrites, released this week.

Central to the right-wing mythmaking machine is the depiction of their male leaders as swaggering tough guys in the iconic mold of an American cowboy and brave, steadfast warrior. Above all else, Republican leaders are invariably held up as exuding the virtues of traditional American masculinity – courage, physical strength, "regular guy"ness, and most of all, a willingness and ability to stare down America's various and numerous enemies – in war, if necessary – and defeat them through superior strength.

The reality, in virtually every case, is the opposite. Those who end up as leaders of the right-wing movement in America have nothing in their lives to demonstrate any actual courage, physical strength, or any of the warrior virtues they desperately strive to exude. Their only "toughness" or masculine "tough guy" credentials are from cheerleading as they send others off to fight wars, never to fight in any themselves. Just like John Wayne, their masculine toughness comes from the costumes they wear, the scripts they read, the roles they play – never from the reality of their own lives.

While Republicans have ensured that virtually every asset of America bears the name of Ronald Reagan – including a glorious battleship, the USS Ronald Reagan – right-wing tough guys who never spent a day in the military protested and mocked endlessly when it was announced, in 2005, that a submarine would be named after Navy veteran Jimmy Carter. Carter is a graduate of the Naval Academy, having attended during World War II. In the Navy he became a submariner, serving in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets, and he rose to the rank of lieutenant. He was personally selected by Admiral Hyman Rickover, known as the "Father of the Nuclear Navy," for the top-secret nuclear submarine program, where Carter enrolled in graduate work in reactor technology and nuclear physics, and served as senior officer of the precommissioning crew of the Seawolf, America's second nuclear submarine.

Despite a history of military service that few right-wing warriors can come close to matching, conservatives heaped endless scorn and ridicule on the decision that a nuclear submarine would bear Carter's name. At National Review alone – filled to the rim with absurd, swaggering, pretend tough guys – Steve Hayward referred to the "oxymoronic Jimmy Carter attack submarine"; Jonah Goldberg published an e-mail spouting that "naming this boat for Carter resounds with irony" and another stating that "the USS Jimmy Carter will be *The Best* submarine in the Navy, precisely because of the jokes"; and Goldberg himself wrote:

"You do have to feel sorry for the crew of the USS Jimmy Carter. I'm sure they'll be very well qualified and all that. But as several readers have noted, they're just never going to hear the end of it."

Goldberg continued: "If a Russian sub attacks undefended ships, will the USS Jimmy Carter immediately boycott the U.S.-Russian softball game in Guam?" His colleague Kathryn Jean Lopez sneered: "I can't get over how ridiculous the sound of a Jimmy Carter attack sub is. The enemy trembles."

In the world of right-wing Republicans, actual bravery, courage, and military service are irrelevant. What matters is a willingness to strike the pose of a warrior.

Numerous commentators, such as former Nixon White House counsel John Dean and psychology professor Bob Altemeyer, have definitively and convincingly documented this dynamic. People who feel weak and vulnerable crave strong male leaders to protect them and to enable them to feel powerful. And those same people will throng to a political movement that gives them those sensations of power, strength, and triumph, and will devote absolute loyalty to any political leader who can provide them with that.

This is also the basic dynamic of garden-variety authoritarianism, and it is what the right-wing Republican Party has become at its core – far more than a set of political beliefs or geopolitical objectives or moral agendas. All of it – the obsessions with glorious "Victory" in an endless string of wars; vesting more and more power in an all-dominant centralized Leader; the forced submission of any country or leader who does not submit to the Leader's Will; the unquestioning Manichaean certainties; the endless stigmatization of the whole array of Enemies as decadent, depraved, and weak; and most of all, the canonization of their male Leaders as Strong, Powerful, Brave, and Über-Masculine – it's just base cultural tribalism geared toward making the followers feel powerful and falsely secure.

The Coulter/Hannity/Limbaugh-led right wing is basically the Abu Ghraib rituals finding full expression in an authoritarian political movement. There is a reason that individuals such as Rush Limbaugh were not bothered by that horror show, but actually took perverse delight in and were tickled by the sadism displayed there and other revelations of American torture, barbarism, and cruelty. It is because that is the full-blooded manifestation of the impulses underlying this movement – feelings of power and strength from the most depraved spectacles of force.

Limbaugh is a physically weak individual, wallowing in a life of depraved hedonism, who has never displayed a single act of physical courage. He avoided combat in Vietnam by claiming that an anal boil rendered him unfit for service (and, once he became famous as an über-warrior, said nothing when a Limbaugh biographer falsely claimed it was due to a football injury). Thus, he takes pleasure in observing acts of American cruelty and barbarism. He finds "levity" in it and cheers it on. It makes him feel powerful and strong, feelings he – understandably – is unable to obtain from his own life and actions.

While the civilized world has recoiled in horror at the excesses and war-hungriness of the United States over the last six years, the only real complaint from our right-wing war cheerleaders about the commander in chief is that he has not given them enough torture, secret prisons, wars of aggression, barbaric slaughter, and liberty infringement. Their hunger for those things is literally insatiable, because they need fresh pretexts for feeling strong. And nothing provides those feelings of strength better than revering a tough-guy male leader and mocking liberal males as weaklings and losers.

The term "chicken hawk" (in the context of war) is much used, debated, and discussed, but its true, most revealing meaning is rarely made explicit. Although there is no formal definition for it, the chicken-hawk criticism is not applicable to someone who merely (a) advocates a war and also (b) will not fight in that war and/or has never fought in any war. After all, the vast majority of Americans in both political parties meet that definition. The war in Afghanistan was supported by roughly 90 percent of Americans, as was the first Persian Gulf War, even though only a tiny fraction of war supporters actually fought in them.

Something more than mere support for a war without fighting in it is required to earn the chicken-hawk label. Chicken-hawkism is the belief that advocating a war from afar is a sign of personal courage and strength, and that opposing a war from afar is a sign of personal cowardice and weakness. A "chicken hawk" is someone who not only advocates a war but believes that that advocacy is proof of the same courage required of those who will actually engage in combat.

One of the nation's most consummate chicken hawks is, unsurprisingly, one of the loudest advocates of sending others off to fight in endless wars: Weekly Standard editor, Fox News contributor, and New York Times columnist Bill Kristol. Kristol's central political view is that those who advocate sending other Americans off to fight in more and more Middle Eastern wars are themselves strong, resolute, principled, and brave. But those who oppose sending others off to fight in those wars are weak, cowardly, spineless appeasers.

As but one example, Kristol, writing in the June 2006 Weekly Standard, urged U.S. intervention in the Israeli war against Hezbollah, claiming that those who wanted the United States to enter that war were "strong horses" and those who opposed it were "weak horses." Thus, said Kristol, individuals such as E. J. Dionne, Richard Cohen, and George Will were all "weak horses" because they wrote columns arguing against increased U.S. involvement in Middle Eastern wars. By contrast, Kristol was a "strong horse" because he wrote a magazine column advocating that war.

As is true of most right-wing war cheerleaders who dominate today's Republican Party, Kristol believes that his desire for other people to fight more wars in the Middle East makes him not only wise (which is arguable) but also strong and brave (which it inarguably does not). He assigns to himself the courage and strength of those who will actually fight in a war, simply because he sits in his office, protected and safe, and advocates for war.

Revealingly, among the country's most influential neoconservatives, beyond just the war-cheerleading Podhoretzes, one finds extremely pervasive nepotism. A conspicuously high percentage of war-loving tough guys have had their careers created, shaped, and fueled by their parents. They have been dependent on the accomplishments of their parents, especially their fathers, whose political views they regurgitate almost without deviation.

At the end of 2007, the New York Times announced that it had hired Bill Kristol as its new op-ed columnist. That announcement provoked widespread bewilderment, given Kristol's lengthy history of pronouncements that were as false as they were banal, as well as his previous vicious attacks on that newspaper. But the process by which Kristol secured his new position was no mystery. Bill's father, Irv, was an old friend of longtime Times editor Abe Rosenthal, whose son, Andy, has now succeeded him in that position. Abe was appointed to his position by then-publisher Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger, and Andy was appointed by Punch's son, current publisher "Pinch" Sulzberger. Bill, son of Irv, and Andy, son of Abe, became good friends, just like their dads, and it was Abe's son (Andy) along with Punch's son (Pinch) who together chose Irv's son (Bill) as the new Times columnist.

It's rather ironic (and almost certainly not coincidental) that these same neoconservatives strut around spewing tough-guy warrior rhetoric and sermonizing on the virtues of self-reliance even though they have chosen extremely coddled, privileged lives feeding off the accomplishments and directives of their mothers and fathers.

This generation's neoconservatives are protected, sheltered recipients of endless nepotistic, parental largesse who never tire of sermonizing to the world about the necessities of self-sufficiency and meritocracy. Further, they insist that their war advocacy demonstrates how resolute and willful they are – self-glorifying announcements they make from positions arranged for them by their mommies and daddies.

It is glaringly apparent that the twisted and bloodthirsty tenets of neoconservatism that are dominating our country – this insatiable craving for military domination that is as endless as it is pointless, along with the corresponding, equally insatiable desire to expand presidential power – are not rooted in some coherent geopolitical doctrine so much as they are rooted in rotted personality disorders. These neoconservative phenomena are more psychological than political.

Shortly after he took office in 1989, the first President George Bush, plagued by whispers that he was a "wimp" despite his combat heroism during World War II, sent the U.S. military to invade Panama – a country that could not and did not remotely threaten America – and remove its president, Manuel Noriega. On the day of the invasion, writing on the front page of the New York Times, political reporter R. W. Apple illustrated how vital war is for an American political leader to prove his "courage" and "strength."

Here we find what have become the depressingly familiar constants in virtually every discussion of American war in our mainstream political discourse – the willingness, even eagerness, to wage war against countries that do not and cannot attack us; reflexive support for any war efforts from America's highly technocratic "foreign policy experts"; and the underlying belief that American invasions of other countries are always justifiable because as a country that is inherently good, our invasions and bombs are well-intentioned. Missing entirely from Apple's front-page article were any contrary views from war opponents, any argument that the United States has no right to invade other nations at will, remove their leaders, and then occupy their country.

But far more significant than all of these now-common elements in our discussions of war is the psychological and cultural premise, the way in which wars are equated with strength and toughness. By "cut[ting] off the head of that government" (as Colin Powell put it) and turning its president into a "hunted fugitive" (as James Baker put it), the United States could feel powerful and strong. We showed them – and the world – who was dominant.

As a result, George Bush 41 proved his manhood by invading Panama. Based on this one decision to go to war, the front page of the New York Times declared him "capable of bold action." He and his aides "show[ed] the world promptly that they carried big sticks." Bush fulfilled the "presidential initiation rite" by demonstrating his "willingness to shed blood." Thus, declared Apple, Bush had overcome the perceptions of "timidity" and invisibility by "showing his steel" – all by sitting in the White House and starting a war with a small and weak country.

But as incoherent as this premise is, it is plainly the overriding cultural theme of American politics – that "real men" are leaders who start and prosecute wars.

The preceding is adapted from Glenn Greenwald's new book, Great American Hypocrites, released this week. Reprinted with permission of Glenn Greenwald/Crown Publishers. All rights reserved.

The Crisis of American Finance (New Book)

By Kevin Phillips

"Bad Money" refers to (a) the shaky U.S. dollar, (b) the persuasion of Americans to use their homes as ATM machines; (c) the predatory and speculative U.S. financial sector; (d) the waves of bubble-making and liquidity pumped out by the Federal Reserve over the last quarter century; or (e) all of the above.

Answer: (e).

The book's overall thesis is that a dangerous set of U.S. predicaments - unprecedented U.S. levels of public and private debt, imploding home prices, the emergence of a swollen, hubris-ridden and speculative financial sector, ballooning commodity inflation, oil supply perils and a declining dollar - have started to converge in a way that jeopardizes U.S. global economic leadership. Some pundits and financiers are already worried about the greatest financial crisis since World War Two or the 1930s.

For this discussion, I would like to concentrate on a central part of my thesis: the argument that a fair part of the U.S. peril stems from the tandem evolution since the 1980s of 1) a massive growth in public and private debt from $10 trillion to nearly $50 trillion; 2) the replacement of manufacturing by finance (by 2003 some 20-21% of U.S. GDP) as the dominant sector of the U.S. economy; 3) the use of debt by the financial sector - private financial debt soared more than any other category - to massively leverage its economic emergence speculation and wealth; and 4) the underwriting of financial sector emergence by Washington through roughly a dozen bail-outs since the early 1980s and the waves of liquidity provided by Alan Greenspan and now Bernanke.

The principal citations to examine are these: Chart 1.1 (p. 7) showing the incredible debt build-up since the 1980s (worse than the 1920s-1930s pattern); chart 2.1 (p. 31) showing the displacement of manufacturing by a swollen financial sector; chart 2.4 (p 43) showing the incredible growth of ddebt outstanding by sector between 1974 and 2006; chart 2.5 (p. 45) showing the incredible mushrooming of (private) financial sector debt between 1979 and 2006; and chart 2.7 (p. 57) which lists the notable financial bail-outs over a quarter century. The latter is captioned "U.S. Financial Mercantilism: Bail-outs, Debt and the Socialization of Credit Risk, 1982-2007."

Obviously, there is no easy data that breaks out the nature of the last 4-6 percentage points of GDP added by the financial sector between the mid-1990s and the filmiest part of the real estate bubble a year or two ago. But I would venture to say that it combined debt-fed leverage used for speculation, the mushrooming volume and profits of securitization (MBSs, ABSs, CDOs and the like), the expansion of mortgage finance through exotic and subprime lending, and the burgeoning of the non-bank or "shadow system of finance - hedge funds, mortgage pools, off-books conduits (SIVs, etc.) and securitization-issuers. These, of course, are the particularly "innovative," speculative and unstable element that have caused so much trouble, and respecting which the failure of regulation has been tragic.

A Tale of Three Lawyers by Scott Horton

Matthew Diaz served his country as a staff judge advocate at Guantánamo. He watched a shameless assault on America’s Constitution and commitment to the rule of law carried out by the Bush Administration. He watched the introduction of a system of cruel torture and abuse. He watched the shaming of the nation’s uniformed services, with their proud traditions that formed the very basis of the standards of humanitarian law, now torn asunder through the lawless acts of the Executive. Matthew Diaz found himself in a precarious position—as a uniformed officer, he was bound to follow his command. As a licensed and qualified attorney, he was bound to uphold the law. And these things were indubitably at odds.

Diaz resolved to do something about it. He knew the Supreme Court twice ruled the Guantánamo regime, which he was under orders to uphold, was unlawful. In the Hamdan decision, the Court went a step further. In powerful and extraordinary words, Justice Kennedy reminded the Administration that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions was binding upon them, and that a violation could constitute a criminal act. One senior member of the Bush legal team, informed of the decision over lunch, was reported to have turned “white as a sheet” and to have immediately excused himself. For the following months, Bush Administration lawyers entered into a frenzied discussion of how to protect themselves from criminal prosecution.

One of the crimes the Administration committed was withholding from the Red Cross a list of the detainees at Guantánamo, effectively making them into secret detainees. Before the arrival of the Bush Administration, the United States had taken the axiomatic position that holding persons in secret detention for prolonged periods outside the rule of law (a practice known as “disappearing”) was not merely unlawful, but in fact a rarified “crime against humanity.” Now the United States was engaged in the active practice of this crime.

The decision to withhold the information had been taken, in defiance of law, by senior political figures in the Bush Administration. Diaz was aware of it, and he knew it was unlawful. He printed out a copy of the names and sent them to a civil rights lawyer who had requested them in federal court proceedings.

Diaz was aware when he did this that he was violating regulations and that he could and would, if caught, be subjected to severe sanction. What he did was a violation of law, even as it was an effort to cure a more severe act of lawlessness by the Government. Diaz violated the law in precisely the same sense as Martin Luther King reminds us, in the Letter from Birmingham Jail, that his arrest was based on a violation of law. That everything the Nazis did in Germany was lawful. And that every act of the Hungarian freedom fighters was a crime. In terms of the moral law, however, Diaz was on the side of right, and the Bush Administration and the Pentagon had, by engaging in the conduct that the Supreme Court condemned, placed themselves on the side of lawlessness, corruption and dishonor.

Diaz was charged, tried and convicted for disclosing “secrets.” For the Bush Administration, any information which would be politically embarrassing or harmful to it is routinely classified “secret.” In this fashion the Administration believes it can use criminal sanctions against those who disclose information it believes will be politically damaging. The list of detainees at Guantánamo, which by law was required to be disclosed, was classified as “secret.”

Diaz spent six months in prison and left it bankrupt and without a job. In addition to his sentence, the Pentagon is working aggressively to have Diaz stripped of his law license so he will not be able to practice his profession. The Bush Administration has sought to criminalize, humiliate and destroy Diaz. Its motivation could not be clearer: Diaz struck a blow for the rule of law. And nothing could be more threatening to the Bush Administration than this.

In the week in which Diaz received the Ridenhour Prize, another Pentagon “secret” was disclosed. This “secret” was a memorandum made to order for William J. Haynes II, Rumsfeld’s General Counsel, and the man at the apex of the Pentagon’s military justice system that tried, convicted and sentenced Diaz. The memo was authored by John Yoo. This memorandum was designed to authorize the introduction of torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading interrogation techniques to be used upon prisoners held at Guantánamo, and ultimately also used in Afghanistan and Iraq. The memorandum authorized waterboarding, long-time standing, hypothermia, the administration of psychotropic drugs and sleep deprivation in excess of two days in addition to a number of other techniques. Each of these techniques is long established as torture as a matter of American and international law. The application and implementation of these techniques was and is a crime.

The exact circumstances surrounding the dealings between Haynes and Yoo that led to the development of this memorandum are unclear. However, it is clear that Haynes had previously authorized the use of the torture techniques, and had secured an order from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld authorizing them.

Following the implementation of these techniques, more than 108 detainees di