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Read other letters about this article
In earlier comments, I put up links to responses by retired Col. Ken Allard, one of the analysts named in the NYT Barstow feature, and Lt. Colonel Robert Bateman, writing at Small Wars Journal's blog.
In checking the currency of another link provided in response to a comment by Nequals1, for the Committee for Concerned Journalists, I discovered that LTC Bateman had also made a (more lengthy) comment there. A link to that article, a longer and more fully articulated version of the objections he made in Small Wars Journal, is at my sig.
I'm still mulling over all the problems with that article. Both acknowledge the conflict of interest problem, but both point the finger at the media for not checking this out. This is probably legitimate, at least in the way they argue it. Fine.
Beyond this, though, the thing I find most disturbing about both Allard's and Bateman's responses is the "So what?" argument. Both say, in essence, that the administration is only 'putting its side forward' and trying to minimize 'bad news'. Bateman admits the administration has spun the public "like a kitten in a Maytag washer", but both say, big deal, there's no news here. Allard says that he "broke" this story a couple years ago in the publication of his book, "WarHeads", which is a gentle and anecdotal prodding at the media who (as he accurately depicts), have no expertise in media affairs and so choose to 'outsource' their expertise from retired officers, which could eventually lead to problems (!).
Neither seems bothered, or even aware, that this was against the law. Bateman seems blissfully ignorant of the explicit details of what is in the FOIA docs (even what the NYT reported), and claims 'only the NYT knows' and hasn't made their story. In both cases, it's supposedly not news that the administration broke the law.
Bateman adds the non-criticism that the NYT piece employs 'ad homeneim reasoning', saying that they assume because the Pentagon provided the information to the MAs, it must therefore be wrong. The story, however, says that many analysts acknowledged that they were given information, encouraged to share it, and after they did they discovered it was false or presented an unrealistically rosy picture of what was going on in Iraq. In either case, Bateman's claim that the NYT was guilty of an 'ad homeneim' seems to be a non sequitur.
Bateman also argues against the validity of the piece through an appeal to the Pentagon's incompetence in spinning the message ... another non-sequitur. He cites opinion polls about the war, and says they obviously tried to spin the war and failed. By this logic, the Watergate break in must not have been a crime, either, or no greater than a simple B&E. Bateman also repeats the false 'fact' that 'most' of the analysts appeared on Fox, and since Fox is already largely a propoganda arm of the administration, anything that analysts did or said there, whether primed by the administration or not, is hardly news. I admit to being confused by this argument ... but note that what proportion of the analysts appeared where doesn't matter since they did also appear on CNN, NBC, MSNBC, etc.
The other response, that seems to me geared to sow doubt more than respond, is the claim that some of the analysts had in fact been critics of the conduct of the war for some time. This, too, is a non-sequitur. A general who screams loudly that not enough troops were deployed, or that the occupation has been too heavy-handed, etc. and then goes home to write an email to Larry Da Rita asking what else he can do to help, is still just as culpable as the NYT piece says he is. Sort of like Ken Pollack's claim to be a 'war critic', except that Pollack can actually claim that he raised objections beforehand about whether or not the admin should go to war in Iraq (as he did in 'Threatening Storm', despite arguing in the entirety of the book that such a war was essential), whereas the MAs who did criticize the conduct of the war only did so on tactical matters, after the fact.
