WORLD ARCHIVES

Now, a lengthy New York Times investigation, published on Sunday, revealed the Pentagon targeted many of these analysts as part of an information apparatus to generate favorable news coverage of the administration's wartime performance.

Pentagon officials organized hundreds of private meetings with senior military leaders and the military analysts. They included talks with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

According to the Times, analysts were also taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated.

It was also disclosed that most of the analysts have ties to military contractors [corporate military money ties].
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JOHN STAUBER, Center for Media and Democracy [and author of the book, "Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq."]: Well, Judy, first of all, congratulations to the NewsHour for doing this report. And it's a shame on the networks who were duped this way that they didn't show up to defend or explain their actions.

What happened here was a psy-ops campaign [a psychological operations campaign], an incredible government propaganda campaign whereby Donald Rumsfeld and Torie Clark, the head of public relations for the Pentagon, designed a program to recruit 75, at least 75 former military officers, as your report said, most of them now lobbyists or consultants to military contractors, and insert them, beginning in 2002, before the attack on Iraq was even launched, into the major networks to manage the messages, to be surrogates.

And that's the words that are actually used, "message multipliers" for the secretary of defense and for the Pentagon. This program continues right up to now.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And is the essence of this that what they did was -- what the Pentagon did was illegal?

JOHN STAUBER: Yes, what they did was illegal. Now, the Pentagon might contest that, but we've had various laws on the books in our country going back to the 1920s. It is illegal for the U.S. government to propagandize citizens in this way.

In my opinion, this war could have never been sold if it were not for this sophisticated propaganda campaign. And what we need is congressional investigation of not just this Pentagon military analyst program, but all the rest of the deception and propaganda that came out of the Bush administration and out of the Pentagon that allowed them to sell and manage this war.