From The Guardian UK
By Robert Fox

The news that the Pentagon ran a systematic information campaign to get favourable analysis on Iraq from military officers should hardly be news to many people. The New York Times has used the Freedom of Information Act in America to get some 8,000 pages of transcripts of emails and other communications in the Pentagon to reveal how Donald Rumsfeld waged the war of spin over Iraq, and lost it.

The high point came in 2005, when it was clear that things were really falling apart in Iraq. Chosen analysts, former generals and colonels to the fore, were given privileged access to information, which they then spun on through the media. Some were hired talking heads for mainstream channels like CNN and Fox News. In all, says the New York Times, some 75 officers were hired by Rumsfeld to do the job.

The most striking thing about this story about a story – and full marks to the NYT for uncovering it at last – is how badly the whole thing was done. It has not helped the administration’s credibility over Iraq, nor America’s standing in the world. As a campaign it has been less than victorious.

When former army general Montgomery Meigs claimed to NBC, that there “had been over $100 million of construction” at Guantánamo, he, and more to the point his editors, must have known that the increasing band of sceptics in the audience were unlikely to be persuaded. The general had been a part of carefully selected group of “analysts” allowed by the Pentagon into the Guantánamo complex.

Keith Allard, a former consultant to NBC and an instructor in information warfare at the National Defence University said that what the analysts were given in their “private” briefings bore little relation to the facts later uncovered by inquiries and reporters’ books.

“Night and day,” Allard told the New York Times, “I felt we’d been hosed.”

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