From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

The Pentagon has posted to its website the roughly 8,000 pages and audio tapes it was forced to provide to the New York Times regarding its “military analyst” program. Anyone who reads through them, as I’ve now done, can only be left with one conclusion (other than being extremely impressed with David Barstow’s work in putting together this story): if this wasn’t an example of an illegal, systematic “domestic propaganda campaign” by the Pentagon, then nothing is.

Despite this, the truly extraordinary blackout by the major television and cable news networks — which were complicit in this program — continues. Howard Kurtz of CNN and The Washington Post previously called this blackout “pathetic”, and yesterday, The Politico published a relatively impressive article further documenting the “deafening silence” from the networks at the center of this story. As the article noted:

While bloggers have kept the story simmering, Democratic congressional leaders also are speaking out, calling for investigations that could provoke the networks to finally cover the Times story — and, in effect, themselves.

Beyond the networks’ keeping this scandal completely concealed from their viewers, The Politico story noted that only two network executives — CNN’s President Jim Walton and ABC’s President David Westin (.pdf) — even bothered to respond to the letters sent by Rep. Rosa DeLauro to all networks demanding answers with regard to their complicity in this program. When responding, the two executives — exactly as Brian Williams was when he was finally forced by blog-inspired commenters to respond (on his blog, but not on NBC) — were casually dismissive of the entire matter, insisting that they had done nothing wrong (other than CNN’s acknowledgment that they failed to detect a conflict of interest with regard to a single military analyst they had used).

Read more Military Analysts