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• Saturday, May 10, 2008 11:24 AM

  Mr. Di Rita

  To sharpen a point. Captain Merritt's memo to Di Rita (among others) states:

  By providing them with key and valuable information, they become the key go to guys for the networks and it begins to weed out the less reliably friendly analysts by the networks themselves . . . . .

  To which Di Rita replies:

  I think it makes a lot of sense to do as you suggest...

  But in talking to the NYT, Di Rita denies this ever occured to him.

  Di Rita to Barstow (NYT)

  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.

  Di Rita is just flat lying on this. His office (the Secretary's) was clearly and explicitly trying to impact which analysts were "in favor" and which were "weeded out". He not only saw the memo, he approved of it and said "make it so".

  If I were Senator Durbin (or any other house or senate Dem--but Durbin was specifically mentioned elsewhere), I'd be hot to yank Di Rita in and get him under oath about this specific issue.

  In re-reading Barstow's NYT piece, I see where he refers to Merritt's memo (without attribution), but it doesn't come through as clearly as it does here in GG's piece.

  —casual_observer Read casual_observer's other letters
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