January 14, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - Just like David Barstow’s explosive
investigative report on the Pentagon’s
“Message Force Multipliers” in April 2008, Lee
Fang at
The Intercept has done us a tremendous favor by
pointing out that many of the so-called military
experts who are making the rounds this week to talk
about the U.S.-Iran confrontation in Iraq are in
fact paid shills for the defense industry.
That’s
right: David Petraeus, Van Hipp, Jeh Johnson, John
Negroponte (and these are just the ones featured in
Fang’s piece)—all have ties to the Big 5 contracting
companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon (whose
stocks are soaring in response to recent events)
and/or work for venture capital firms that
invest in these companies. In fact, General
Jack Keane,
who is reportedly at the elbow of the president,
advising him directly, while alternately appearing
on FOX News to congratulate him after launching
kinetic attacks like killing Gen. Soleimani,
currently serves as a partner for such a firm (SCP
Partners) and has worked for General Dynamics
and Blackwater.
Read all of the greasy details
here, but key here, according to Fang is this:
Many of the pundits who appeared on national
television or were quoted in major publications
to praise the president’s actions have
undisclosed ties to the defense
industry — the only domestic industry that
stands to gain from increased violence.
(emphasis mine)
Whether they are not disclosing their ties to
producers or the hosts don’t bother to mention it on
air doesn’t matter. It’s called ethics and
journalistic integrity. Due diligence. Honesty. None
if it seems to be in evidence here.
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
|
“It is imperative that viewers are aware when
their news commentary is coming from someone with a
financial incentive tied to the topic they’re coming
on, especially when so many lives hang in the
balance,” Gin Armstrong, who’s with the Public
Accountability Initiative, told Fang.
Quite right. This seems so simple, yet this
practice of deception—and it is a deception—has been
going on for decades. But that doesn’t mean we have
to swallow it passively. Think of all the damage
that was done in the run-up to the Iraq War and
after the invasion,
when former military generals were cultivated by the
Pentagon and delivered to the networks and cable
shows as commentators for years, helping
to sell the war and pacify public opinion when
conditions on the ground went sour.
The
“Afghanistan Papers” revealed last month that
hundreds of government officials and military
officers knew for years that the war was lost and
that the American people were being sold a bill of
goods throughout the entire 18-year campaign. By
their silence and complicity they served as
enablers. How many of them have cycled through the
revolving door to the private sector and have served
as “experts” in any media capacity (authors,
speechmakers, pundits) to promote those lies back to
the American people? If they hadn’t, might there be
more public pressure to end the war in Afghanistan
and bring our troops home (14,000 still there)
today?
We are quick to dismiss social media as a medium
for political and corporatist propaganda,
engendering the divisions and divisiveness in a
society already riven by anger and tribalistic
behavior. Using this medium to expose these
conflicts and to pressure the hive to disclose their
guests’ conflicts of interest (if they in fact
insist on having these shills on air) would be in
the spirit of our best journalistic impulses:
informing the public, giving people all of the tools
available to form their own opinions—clear of smoke
and mirrors—about critical national security
policies made in their name.
This is where it starts:
Judd, who runs
Popular Information, and Jason Paladino, who
reports for the
Project on Government Oversight (aka POGO, which
has been tracking the revolving door for decades),
are on to something. Collectively we need to shame
the media when they do not disclose their guests’s
conflicts of interest, and thank them when they do.
Maybe at some juncture they will get the point and
realize that there are plenty of ex-military and
government officials out there who have thoughtful
things to say (like Doug MacGregor, Larry Wilkerson,
a ton of TAC writers, and even TAC critics too) but
are not compromised by their vested interest in
promoting an interventionist global posture and
American military primacy.
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, executive editor, has been
writing for TAC for the last decade, focusing on
national security, foreign policy, civil liberties
and domestic politics. She served for 15 years as a
Washington bureau reporter for FoxNews.com, and at
WTOP News in Washington from 2013-2017 as a writer,
digital editor and social media strategist. She has
also worked as a beat reporter at Bridge News
financial wire (now part of Reuters) and Homeland
Security Today, and as a regular contributor at
Antiwar.com. A native Nutmegger, she got her start
in Connecticut newspapers, but now resides with her
family in Arlington, Va.
This article was originally published by "The
American Conservative " -
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