approaches Hunter Thompson levels:

"Those visits to the Pentagon are almost as depressing as the V.A. blogging-rap group I attend. Inside the Pentagon the War-Porn DVD rental shop is always packed with brass-officers that are dressed in yellow galoshes, three piece sear-sucker orange bib-overalls, and the conventional pink bow ties. The DOD embezzlers are overdosed on aspirin, and zombie-thorazine. They shuffle along... and keep making irritating dry-heaving upchuck sound in the hallways. The dry tongue is hung out. They military hacks pant in blood lust.... The kill-club is gag-elite. They buy Wimpy hamburgers snacks there, and bet on greyhound dog races with 'our' taxes. The Brass Band plays "Amazing Grace" the Americans are so happy. Wretches!"

Imagination and art are sometimes more exact than logic.

I think it's also important to keep in mind that this story is just one manifestation (among many) of the larger sickness of militarism that continues to grip our media and political establishment.

We cannot separate the psychology motivating these media outlets to showcase propaganda "force multipliers" from the overall psychology that got us into the Iraq War and its attendant abuses in the first place.

-- DCLaw1

Yes.

The country has militarized police, churches, clubs, citizens, news outlets, car bumper stickers, and many more. Maintaining an empire will do that to a society. It makes the propaganda job all that much easier if the rube, ah, citizen is already half-way to believing that others should be killed.

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.

I don’t agree that history’s lessons have never been learned or heeded. I agree it has been far too infrequent. It is books and the arts that teach these lessons for future generations. Now we have something far more accessible for everyone, the Internet. We are just beginning to learn the power of instant information and history. We are also viewing the valuable creation of an alternate to the gross filtering by the M$M. And finally, if the world doesn’t realize the value of banding together to prevent human banishment from history in 200 years due to global warming, what history teaches won’t matter. If we do learn to do that, we may enter into a real age of enlightenment.

You're adding your assumption there, Pedinska- that the military tendency to view the press as I described- "disloyal, indiscreet, and incompetent"- is solely due to their own discomfiture over having "the truth" of their actions exposed by journalists.

I was not making an assumption. I was addressing your statement that "the army carries a chip on its shoulder" about the media because of their "feelings" that "the journalists ... were mostly made up of people with hostile biases."

I have little doubt that there were 'biased' journalists, but I do wonder what would cause a journalist to be labelled as such and, from what I've seen of the embedding program in the Iraq war, and the propaganda objectives (clearly laid out by Glenn in this piece), the takeaway seems to be that 'biased' means journalists who are not onboard with the Pentagon objectives.

As for your statement that

the truth is ugly (as it always is in war)

that would read to many experienced observers as an overgeneralization-

I should have left out the parenthetical sentence. Having made that concession though, I would really like to hear the positives that you think justify the death, destruction and dislocation we have wrought in Iraq. There would be no need for redemption if a debt had not been incurred in the first place, no?

Characterizing soldiers as a class simply as bloodthirsty premeditated murderers is unfair.

I have never, nor will ever, make this characterization. If you are going to address your posts to me, then please address my points and not those of others here who are more single-minded than I.

Remember what underpins the touchiness of many soldiers on questions of military morality, even moreso when hurled as accusations by uninvolved civilians: they've put more on the line than you ever have.

I am not "hurling accusations" and I am certainly not "uninvolved". I have friends and family members who are at stake here, so your assumptions about me need to be reconsidered. I am saying, as Glenn has, that ex-members of the military, officers who should know better because they were well-educated as to their duties and responsibilities by the military, have assisted the Pentagon in its disregard for laws regarding the spreading of domestic propaganda.

Let's ask some of our other soldiers here, RMP or quickstrategy, if I am making them "touchy".

BTW, I appreciate your engagement with me but I may be spotty at responding for the rest of the weekend as I have plans which will take me away from my computer. Just didn't want you to think that I'd abandoned a good discussion.