The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

Though many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per appearance, in Pentagon meetings they sometimes spoke as if they were operating behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, “the Chris Matthewses and the Wolf Blitzers of the world.” Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon copies of their correspondence with network news executives. Many — although certainly not all — faithfully echoed talking points intended to counter critics.

“Good work,” Thomas G. McInerney, a retired Air Force general, consultant and Fox News analyst, wrote to the Pentagon after receiving fresh talking points in late 2006. “We will use it.”

Again and again, records show, the administration has enlisted analysts as a rapid reaction force to rebut what it viewed as critical news coverage, some of it by the networks’ own Pentagon correspondents. For example, when news articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: “I think our analysts — properly armed — can push back in that arena.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/washington/20generals.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5124&en=016e2520ffb3ab0b&ex=1366344000&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink&adxnnlx=1208685693-JDoHpXLDtUzDmUgCVDELJw

The fundamental problems that this raises are enormous, but I want to pick up a different angle to the one most people will, which is that the Pentagon needs a free press to keep the politicians who control their mission in line. If the free press is subverted and the public are mislead about the real conditions of war, then how can can one expect the public to put proper pressure on politicians to not use the armed forces in dumb ways?

The price paid by the Pentagon is a rabidly out of touch section of the public that gives unconditional support to a dumb agenda. The real lesson of vietnam was not “control public opinion” but “don’t fight stupid wars”.