(Military Times) Op-Ed: Ministry of Truth and Peace

Ministry of Truth and Peace
Jeff Huber | January 27, 2009

It's fitting that as young Mr. Bush exited the world stage, the military pardoned itself for lying about his woebegone wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. A report released on January 16 by the Pentagon's inspector general stated, "we found the evidence insufficient to conclude that RMA (retired military analysts) outreach activities were improper," and that further investigation into the matter "was not warranted."

The RMA program flew under the radar until an April 2008 New York Times article revealed that the Pentagon had recruited media military analysts for a "campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance." The article discomfited the Pentagon I.G. office into launching an investigation of RMA, six years into the program's existence. The I.G. report, posted on the Pentagon's web site the Friday before the inauguration so everyone would be sure to notice it, explained, "the evidence in this case was insufficient to conclude" that RMA activities "violated statutory prohibitions on publicity or propaganda," but conceded that the judgment had been difficult to arrive at because "the definition of propaganda in this context remains unclear."

So it all depends what your definition of "propaganda" is. I feel the I.G.'s pain, don't you?

I first started hearing the expression "we're losing the public affairs war" about the time of Desert Storm, when the Air Force was grabbing all the headlines for winning the air battle and Navy carrier participation got piddled into the footnotes.

Time passed. During the 1999 Kosovo War, my ship, the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, entertained more members of the foreign press than the number of combat sorties she launched. As a wartime operations officer of a U.S. Navy flagship, my number one concern was to make sure those reporters got on and off the ship safely.


Rest of article at: http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,183763,00.html?wh=news