If we watch closely we'll see the exposing (and hopefully, unraveling) of the Pentagon propagandists [View all]

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from Michael Hastings at Buzzfeed: http://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/the-sins-of-general-david-petraeus


The Sins Of General David Petraeus
Petraeus seduced America. We should never have trusted him.

_____ Petraeus’ first biographer, former U.S. News and World Report reporter Linda Robinson, wrote a book about him, then went to CENTCOM to work for him. Yes — a so-called journalist published a book about him, then started getting a paycheck from him soon after. This went largely unremarked upon.

Another huge supporter was Tom Ricks, a former Washington Post journalist who found a second career as unofficial press agent for the general and his friends. Ricks is the ringleader of what I like to call “the media-military industrial complex,” setting the standard for its incestuous everyday corruption. He not only built Dave up, he facilitated the disastrous liaison between Broadwell and Petraeus. Ricks helped get Broadwell a literary agent, a six-figure book deal, and a publisher.

Ricks blurbed her in All In, and earlier had promoted her content on his blog — the oddly titled Travels With Paula, a headline he slapped to a story about the U.S. military’s total destruction of a small village in southern Afghanistan. Broadwell described the ultra-violent wipeout in favorable terms — and when she was confronted with an angry villager whose house had been destroyed, she wrote that the Afghan’s tears and anger were a “a fit of theatrics.”

This was the kind of bullshit Ricks and Broadwell had been pushing — and it not only wasn’t called bullshit, it was embraced as serious work. Ricks wasn’t the only offender, of course — Petraeus more or less had journalists from many major media outlets slurping from the Pentagon’s gravy train. The typical route was to have all the cash and favors funneled through a third party like the Center for a New American Security.

CNAS was a Petraeus-inspired operation from its inception in 2007, and it made its reputation promoting Petraeus’ counterinsurgency plans. No problem, right? Except that it put the journalists who were covering those same plans and policies on its payroll. For instance, New York Times Pentagon correspondent Thom Shanker took money and a position from CNAS and still covered the Pentagon; Robert Kaplan, David Cloud from the Los Angeles Times, and others produced a small library’s worth of hagiographies while sharing office space at CNAS with retired generals whom they’d regularly quote in their stories.


read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/the-sins-of-general-david-petraeus

article forwarded by a tweet from, Joel Whitney ?@joel_whitney
Here's Michael Hastings on how Broadwell was part of the military's ongoing payola for journalists. http://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/the-sins-of-general-david-petraeus?s=mobile …

Petraeus and Pentagon Propaganda

Pentagon weighing news and spin - The top general in Iraq seeks to pierce the wall between public affairs and efforts that attempt to sway foreign populations.
April 18, 2007|Julian E. Barnes | Times Staff Writer

A 2004 memo by Gen. Richard B. Myers, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, codified the separation between public affairs, which communicates with the press and public, and "information operations," which attempts to sway people in other countries.

But Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, has asked for changes that would allow the two branches to work more closely. His request has unleashed a debate inside the Pentagon between those who say the separation has made the Defense Department less agile and those who believe that restructuring the relationship would threaten to turn military spokesmen into propaganda tools.
http://articles.latimes.com/2007/apr/18/nation/na-pentagon18

Lincoln Group Propagandists Paid to Tell Afghans Their Bombs are Worse than Ours
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Lincoln-Group-Propagandist-by-Ron-Fullwood-080808-41.html

Iraq Propaganda Program . . .
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_ron_full_060322_iraq_propaganda_prog.htm

Inspector General Reports Pentagon Merged Their Propaganda With PR
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/11/AR2008121103319_pf.html