Last Sunday, David Barstow of the New York Times revealed [2] just how effectively the Pentagon orchestrated a propaganda campaign for "information dominance" when it came to the President's various wars (and prisons). Pentagon officials, from the Secretary of Defense on down, put together a "rapid reaction force" of retired generals and other retired military officers (aka "message force multipliers" or "surrogates"). With copious Pentagon help and perks, these "experts" became key go-to guys for the mainstream media when it came to the War on Terror and the war in Iraq. As the Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel put the matter [3], "This was an all out effort at the highest levels of the Bush administration, continuing to this day, to dupe, mislead and lie to the American people -- using propaganda dressed up and cherry-picked as independent military analysis. As one participant described it, 'It was psyops on steroids.'" The Pentagon's Brent T. Kreuger put it another way, speaking of the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq: "We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks [the retired military men] were up there delivering our message. You'd look at them and say, 'This is working.'"

But let's face it, as today's Tomdispatch post indicates, the Pentagon, however unseen, is increasingly everywhere in our world. That it's been in bed with cable news, the major TV and radio networks, and our leading newspapers via retired-generals-tied-to-military-contractors-turned-pundits, can't really shock anyone who's bothered to listen to anything this bevy of talking-heads has had to say these last years. The fact is the Pentagon is now the most incestuous organization in America. If it regularly embeds reporters in its ranks to ensure decent coverage of its operations (think of this as a military version of Stockholm Syndrome) and, as Jon Stewart recently pointed out, embeds its retired generals in the media, it's also regularly in bed with itself in a way that can only be called perverse.

Take a simple example [4] of such in-beddedness, a $50 million Air Force contract involving another of those retired generals. Given our near trillion dollar [5] defense budget, the sum itself is military chump change. As the Washington Post's Josh White described the process, a seven-person "selection team" charged with picking a contractor to "jazz up the Air Force's Thunderbirds air show with giant video boards," under pressure from a higher-ranking officer, gave the contract to Strategic Message Solutions, "a company that barely existed in an effort to reward a recently retired four-star general and a millionaire civilian pilot who had grown close to senior Air Force officials and the Thunderbirds."

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