NYT : Message Machine: Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

Message Machine: Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

By DAVID BARSTOW | April 20, 2008

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”

The Pentagon defended its relationship with military analysts, saying they had been given only factual information about the war. “The intent and purpose of this is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people,” Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said.

It was, Mr. Whitman added, “a bit incredible” to think retired military officers could be “wound up” and turned into “puppets of the Defense Department.”

Many analysts strongly denied that they had either been co-opted or had allowed outside business interests to affect their on-air comments, and some have used their platforms to criticize the conduct of the war. Several, like Jeffrey D. McCausland, a CBS military analyst and defense industry lobbyist, said they kept their networks informed of their outside work and recused themselves from coverage that touched on business interests.

“I’m not here representing the administration,” Dr. McCausland said.

Some network officials, meanwhile, acknowledged only a limited understanding of their analysts’ interactions with the administration. They said that while they were sensitive to potential conflicts of interest, they did not hold their analysts to the same ethical standards as their news employees regarding outside financial interests. The onus is on their analysts to disclose conflicts, they said. And whatever the contributions of military analysts, they also noted the many network journalists who have covered the war for years in all its complexity.

Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But 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.”

The documents released by the Pentagon do not show any quid pro quo between commentary and contracts. But some analysts said they had used the special access as a marketing and networking opportunity or as a window into future business possibilities.

John C. Garrett is a retired Army colonel and unpaid analyst for Fox News TV and radio. He is also a lobbyist at Patton Boggs who helps firms win Pentagon contracts, including in Iraq. In promotional materials, he states that as a military analyst he “is privy to weekly access and briefings with the secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high level policy makers in the administration.” One client told investors that Mr. Garrett’s special access and decades of experience helped him “to know in advance — and in detail — how best to meet the needs” of the Defense Department and other agencies.

In interviews Mr. Garrett said there was an inevitable overlap between his dual roles. He said he had gotten “information you just otherwise would not get,” from the briefings and three Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq. He also acknowledged using this access and information to identify opportunities for clients. “You can’t help but look for that,” he said, adding, “If you know a capability that would fill a niche or need, you try to fill it. “That’s good for everybody.”

At the same time, in e-mail messages to the Pentagon, Mr. Garrett displayed an eagerness to be supportive with his television and radio commentary. “Please let me know if you have any specific points you want covered or that you would prefer to downplay,” he wrote in January 2007, before President Bush went on TV to describe the surge strategy in Iraq.

Conversely, the administration has demonstrated that there is a price for sustained criticism, many analysts said. “You’ll lose all access,” Dr. McCausland said.

With a majority of Americans calling the war a mistake despite all administration attempts to sway public opinion, the Pentagon has focused in the last couple of years on cultivating in particular military analysts frequently seen and heard in conservative news outlets, records and interviews show.

Some of these analysts were on the mission to Cuba on June 24, 2005 — the first of six such Guantánamo trips — which was designed to mobilize analysts against the growing perception of Guantánamo as an international symbol of inhumane treatment. On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo and on the flight home that night, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so analysts on their key messages — how much had been spent improving the facility, the abuse endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded detainees.

The results came quickly. The analysts went on TV and radio, decrying Amnesty International, criticizing calls to close the facility and asserting that all detainees were treated humanely.

“The impressions that you’re getting from the media and from the various pronouncements being made by people who have not been here in my opinion are totally false,” Donald W. Shepperd, a retired Air Force general, reported live on CNN by phone from Guantánamo that same afternoon.

The next morning, Montgomery Meigs, a retired Army general and NBC analyst, appeared on “Today.” “There’s been over $100 million of new construction,” he reported. “The place is very professionally run.”

Within days, transcripts of the analysts’ appearances were circulated to senior White House and Pentagon officials, cited as evidence of progress in the battle for hearts and minds at home.

Charting the Campaign

By early 2002, detailed planning for a possible Iraq invasion was under way, yet an obstacle loomed. Many Americans, polls showed, were uneasy about invading a country with no clear connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. Pentagon and White House officials believed the military analysts could play a crucial role in helping overcome this resistance.

Torie Clarke, the former public relations executive who oversaw the Pentagon’s dealings with the analysts as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, had come to her job with distinct ideas about achieving what she called “information dominance.” In a spin-saturated news culture, she argued, opinion is swayed most by voices perceived as authoritative and utterly independent.

And so even before Sept. 11, she built a system within the Pentagon to recruit “key influentials” — movers and shakers from all walks who with the proper ministrations might be counted on to generate support for Mr. Rumsfeld’s priorities.

In the months after Sept. 11, as every network rushed to retain its own all-star squad of retired military officers, Ms. Clarke and her staff sensed a new opportunity. To Ms. Clarke’s team, the military analysts were the ultimate “key influential” — authoritative, most of them decorated war heroes, all reaching mass audiences.

The analysts, they noticed, often got more airtime than network reporters, and they were not merely explaining the capabilities of Apache helicopters. They were framing how viewers ought to interpret events. What is more, while the analysts were in the news media, they were not of the news media. They were military men, many of them ideologically in sync with the administration’s neoconservative brain trust, many of them important players in a military industry anticipating large budget increases to pay for an Iraq war.

Even analysts with no defense industry ties, and no fondness for the administration, were reluctant to be critical of military leaders, many of whom were friends. “It is very hard for me to criticize the United States Army,” said William L. Nash, a retired Army general and ABC analyst. “It is my life.”

Other administrations had made sporadic, small-scale attempts to build relationships with the occasional military analyst. But these were trifling compared with what Ms. Clarke’s team had in mind. Don Meyer, an aide to Ms. Clarke, said a strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war. Journalists were secondary. “We didn’t want to rely on them to be our primary vehicle to get information out,” Mr. Meyer said.

The Pentagon’s regular press office would be kept separate from the military analysts. The analysts would instead be catered to by a small group of political appointees, with the point person being Brent T. Krueger, another senior aide to Ms. Clarke. The decision recalled other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism. Federal agencies, for example, have paid columnists to write favorably about the administration. They have distributed to local TV stations hundreds of fake news segments with fawning accounts of administration accomplishments. The Pentagon itself has made covert payments to Iraqi newspapers to publish coalition propaganda.

Rather than complain about the “media filter,” each of these techniques simply converted the filter into an amplifier. This time, Mr. Krueger said, the military analysts would in effect be “writing the op-ed” for the war.

Assembling the Team

From the start, interviews show, the White House took a keen interest in which analysts had been identified by the Pentagon, requesting lists of potential recruits, and suggesting names. Ms. Clarke’s team wrote summaries describing their backgrounds, business affiliations and where they stood on the war.

“Rumsfeld ultimately cleared off on all invitees,” said Mr. Krueger, who left the Pentagon in 2004. (Through a spokesman, Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment for this article.)

Over time, the Pentagon recruited more than 75 retired officers, although some participated only briefly or sporadically. The largest contingent was affiliated with Fox News, followed by NBC and CNN, the other networks with 24-hour cable outlets. But analysts from CBS and ABC were included, too. Some recruits, though not on any network payroll, were influential in other ways — either because they were sought out by radio hosts, or because they often published op-ed articles or were quoted in magazines, Web sites and newspapers. At least nine of them have written op-ed articles for The Times.

The group was heavily represented by men involved in the business of helping companies win military contracts. Several held senior positions with contractors that gave them direct responsibility for winning new Pentagon business. James Marks, a retired Army general and analyst for CNN from 2004 to 2007, pursued military and intelligence contracts as a senior executive with McNeil Technologies. Still others held board positions with military firms that gave them responsibility for government business. General McInerney, the Fox analyst, for example, sits on the boards of several military contractors, including Nortel Government Solutions, a supplier of communication networks.

Several were defense industry lobbyists, such as Dr. McCausland, who works at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, a major lobbying firm where he is director of a national security team that represents several military contractors. “We offer clients access to key decision makers,” Dr. McCausland’s team promised on the firm’s Web site.

Dr. McCausland was not the only analyst making this pledge. Another was Joseph W. Ralston, a retired Air Force general. Soon after signing on with CBS, General Ralston was named vice chairman of the Cohen Group, a consulting firm headed by a former defense secretary, William Cohen, himself now a “world affairs” analyst for CNN. “The Cohen Group knows that getting to ‘yes’ in the aerospace and defense market — whether in the United States or abroad — requires that companies have a thorough, up-to-date understanding of the thinking of government decision makers,” the company tells prospective clients on its Web site.

There were also ideological ties.

Two of NBC’s most prominent analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey and the late Wayne A. Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein. Both men also had their own consulting firms and sat on the boards of major military contractors.

Many also shared with Mr. Bush’s national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation’s will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.

This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from “enemy” propaganda during Vietnam.

“We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped,” he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach “MindWar” — using network TV and radio to “strengthen our national will to victory.”

The Selling of the War

From their earliest sessions with the military analysts, Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides spoke as if they were all part of the same team.

In interviews, participants described a powerfully seductive environment — the uniformed escorts to Mr. Rumsfeld’s private conference room, the best government china laid out, the embossed name cards, the blizzard of PowerPoints, the solicitations of advice and counsel, the appeals to duty and country, the warm thank you notes from the secretary himself.

“Oh, you have no idea,” Mr. Allard said, describing the effect. “You’re back. They listen to you. They listen to what you say on TV.” It was, he said, “psyops on steroids” — a nuanced exercise in influence through flattery and proximity. “It’s not like it’s, ‘We’ll pay you $500 to get our story out,’ ” he said. “It’s more subtle.”

The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.

In the fall and winter leading up to the invasion, the Pentagon armed its analysts with talking points portraying Iraq as an urgent threat. The basic case became a familiar mantra: Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, was developing nuclear weapons, and might one day slip some to Al Qaeda; an invasion would be a relatively quick and inexpensive “war of liberation.”

At the Pentagon, members of Ms. Clarke’s staff marveled at the way the analysts seamlessly incorporated material from talking points and briefings as if it was their own.

“You could see that they were messaging,” Mr. Krueger said. “You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over.” Some days, he added, “We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks were up there delivering our message. You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.’ ”

On April 12, 2003, with major combat almost over, Mr. Rumsfeld drafted a memorandum to Ms. Clarke. “Let’s think about having some of the folks who did such a good job as talking heads in after this thing is over,” he wrote.

By summer, though, the first signs of the insurgency had emerged. Reports from journalists based in Baghdad were increasingly suffused with the imagery of mayhem.

The Pentagon did not have to search far for a counterweight.

It was time, an internal Pentagon strategy memorandum urged, to “re-energize surrogates and message-force multipliers,” starting with the military analysts.

The memorandum led to a proposal to take analysts on a tour of Iraq in September 2003, timed to help overcome the sticker shock from Mr. Bush’s request for $87 billion in emergency war financing.

The group included four analysts from Fox News, one each from CNN and ABC, and several research-group luminaries whose opinion articles appear regularly in the nation’s op-ed pages.

The trip invitation promised a look at “the real situation on the ground in Iraq.”

The situation, as described in scores of books, was deteriorating. L. Paul Bremer III, then the American viceroy in Iraq, wrote in his memoir, “My Year in Iraq,” that he had privately warned the White House that the United States had “about half the number of soldiers we needed here.”

“We’re up against a growing and sophisticated threat,” Mr. Bremer recalled telling the president during a private White House dinner.

That dinner took place on Sept. 24, while the analysts were touring Iraq.

Yet these harsh realities were elided, or flatly contradicted, during the official presentations for the analysts, records show. The itinerary, scripted to the minute, featured brief visits to a model school, a few refurbished government buildings, a center for women’s rights, a mass grave and even the gardens of Babylon.

Mostly the analysts attended briefings. These sessions, records show, spooled out an alternative narrative, depicting an Iraq bursting with political and economic energy, its security forces blossoming. On the crucial question of troop levels, the briefings echoed the White House line: No reinforcements were needed. The “growing and sophisticated threat” described by Mr. Bremer was instead depicted as degraded, isolated and on the run.

“We’re winning,” a briefing document proclaimed.

One trip participant, General Nash of ABC, said some briefings were so clearly “artificial” that he joked to another group member that they were on “the George Romney memorial trip to Iraq,” a reference to Mr. Romney’s infamous claim that American officials had “brainwashed” him into supporting the Vietnam War during a tour there in 1965, while he was governor of Michigan.

But if the trip pounded the message of progress, it also represented a business opportunity: direct access to the most senior civilian and military leaders in Iraq and Kuwait, including many with a say in how the president’s $87 billion would be spent. It also was a chance to gather inside information about the most pressing needs confronting the American mission: the acute shortages of “up-armored” Humvees; the billions to be spent building military bases; the urgent need for interpreters; and the ambitious plans to train Iraq’s security forces.

Information and access of this nature had undeniable value for trip participants like William V. Cowan and Carlton A. Sherwood.

Mr. Cowan, a Fox analyst and retired Marine colonel, was the chief executive of a new military firm, the wvc3 Group. Mr. Sherwood was its executive vice president. At the time, the company was seeking contracts worth tens of millions to supply body armor and counterintelligence services in Iraq. In addition, wvc3 Group had a written agreement to use its influence and connections to help tribal leaders in Al Anbar Province win reconstruction contracts from the coalition.

“Those sheiks wanted access to the C.P.A.,” Mr. Cowan recalled in an interview, referring to the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Mr. Cowan said he pleaded their cause during the trip. “I tried to push hard with some of Bremer’s people to engage these people of Al Anbar,” he said.

Back in Washington, Pentagon officials kept a nervous eye on how the trip translated on the airwaves. Uncomfortable facts had bubbled up during the trip. One briefer, for example, mentioned that the Army was resorting to packing inadequately armored Humvees with sandbags and Kevlar blankets. Descriptions of the Iraqi security forces were withering. “They can’t shoot, but then again, they don’t,” one officer told them, according to one participant’s notes.

“I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south,” General Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times.

The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.

“You can’t believe the progress,” General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be “down to a few numbers” within months.

“We could not be more excited, more pleased,” Mr. Cowan told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. There was barely a word about armor shortages or corrupt Iraqi security forces. And on the key strategic question of the moment — whether to send more troops — the analysts were unanimous.

“I am so much against adding more troops,” General Shepperd said on CNN.

Access and Influence

Inside the Pentagon and at the White House, the trip was viewed as a masterpiece in the management of perceptions, not least because it gave fuel to complaints that “mainstream” journalists were ignoring the good news in Iraq.

“We’re hitting a home run on this trip,” a senior Pentagon official wrote in an e-mail message to Richard B. Myers and Peter Pace, then chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Its success only intensified the Pentagon’s campaign. The pace of briefings accelerated. More trips were organized. Eventually the effort involved officials from Washington to Baghdad to Kabul to Guantánamo and back to Tampa, Fla., the headquarters of United States Central Command.

The scale reflected strong support from the top. When officials in Iraq were slow to organize another trip for analysts, a Pentagon official fired off an e-mail message warning that the trips “have the highest levels of visibility” at the White House and urging them to get moving before Lawrence Di Rita, one of Mr. Rumsfeld’s closest aides, “picks up the phone and starts calling the 4-stars.”

Mr. Di Rita, no longer at the Defense Department, said in an interview that a “conscious decision” was made to rely on the military analysts to counteract “the increasingly negative view of the war” coming from journalists in Iraq. The analysts, he said, generally had “a more supportive view” of the administration and the war, and the combination of their TV platforms and military cachet made them ideal for rebutting critical coverage of issues like troop morale, treatment of detainees, inadequate equipment or poorly trained Iraqi security forces. “On those issues, they were more likely to be seen as credible spokesmen,” he said.

For analysts with military industry ties, the attention brought access to a widening circle of influential officials beyond the contacts they had accumulated over the course of their careers.

Charles T. Nash, a Fox military analyst and retired Navy captain, is a consultant who helps small companies break into the military market. Suddenly, he had entree to a host of senior military leaders, many of whom he had never met. It was, he said, like being embedded with the Pentagon leadership. “You start to recognize what’s most important to them,” he said, adding, “There’s nothing like seeing stuff firsthand.”

Some Pentagon officials said they were well aware that some analysts viewed their special access as a business advantage. “Of course we realized that,” Mr. Krueger said. “We weren’t naïve about that.”

They also understood the financial relationship between the networks and their analysts. Many analysts were being paid by the “hit,” the number of times they appeared on TV. The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon “sources,” the more hits he could expect. The more hits, the greater his potential influence in the military marketplace, where several analysts prominently advertised their network roles.

“They have taken lobbying and the search for contracts to a far higher level,” Mr. Krueger said. “This has been highly honed.”

Mr. Di Rita, though, said it never occurred to him that analysts might use their access to curry favor. Nor, he said, did the Pentagon try to exploit this dynamic. “That’s not something that ever crossed my mind,” he said. In any event, he argued, the analysts and the networks were the ones responsible for any ethical complications. “We assume they know where the lines are,” he said.

The analysts met personally with Mr. Rumsfeld at least 18 times, records show, but that was just the beginning. They had dozens more sessions with the most senior members of his brain trust and access to officials responsible for managing the billions being spent in Iraq. Other groups of “key influentials” had meetings, but not nearly as often as the analysts.

An internal memorandum in 2005 helped explain why. The memorandum, written by a Pentagon official who had accompanied analysts to Iraq, said that based on her observations during the trip, the analysts “are having a greater impact” on network coverage of the military. “They have now become the go-to guys not only on breaking stories, but they influence the views on issues,” she wrote.

Other branches of the administration also began to make use of the analysts. Mr. Gonzales, then the attorney general, met with them soon after news leaked that the government was wiretapping terrorism suspects in the United States without warrants, Pentagon records show. When David H. Petraeus was appointed the commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet with the analysts.

“We knew we had extraordinary access,” said Timur J. Eads, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and Fox analyst who is vice president of government relations for Blackbird Technologies, a fast-growing military contractor.

Like several other analysts, Mr. Eads said he had at times held his tongue on television for fear that “some four-star could call up and say, ‘Kill that contract.’ ” For example, he believed Pentagon officials misled the analysts about the progress of Iraq’s security forces. “I know a snow job when I see one,” he said. He did not share this on TV.

“Human nature,” he explained, though he noted other instances when he was critical.

Some analysts said that even before the war started, they privately had questions about the justification for the invasion, but were careful not to express them on air.

Mr. Bevelacqua, then a Fox analyst, was among those invited to a briefing in early 2003 about Iraq’s purported stockpiles of illicit weapons. He recalled asking the briefer whether the United States had “smoking gun” proof.

“ ‘We don’t have any hard evidence,’ ” Mr. Bevelacqua recalled the briefer replying. He said he and other analysts were alarmed by this concession. “We are looking at ourselves saying, ‘What are we doing?’ ”

Another analyst, Robert L. Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who works in the Pentagon for a military contractor, attended the same briefing and recalled feeling “very disappointed” after being shown satellite photographs purporting to show bunkers associated with a hidden weapons program. Mr. Maginnis said he concluded that the analysts were being “manipulated” to convey a false sense of certainty about the evidence of the weapons. Yet he and Mr. Bevelacqua and the other analysts who attended the briefing did not share any misgivings with the American public.

Mr. Bevelacqua and another Fox analyst, Mr. Cowan, had formed the wvc3 Group, and hoped to win military and national security contracts.

“There’s no way I was going to go down that road and get completely torn apart,” Mr. Bevelacqua said. “You’re talking about fighting a huge machine.”

Some e-mail messages between the Pentagon and the analysts reveal an implicit trade of privileged access for favorable coverage. Robert H. Scales Jr., a retired Army general and analyst for Fox News and National Public Radio whose consulting company advises several military firms on weapons and tactics used in Iraq, wanted the Pentagon to approve high-level briefings for him inside Iraq in 2006.

“Recall the stuff I did after my last visit,” he wrote. “I will do the same this time.”

Pentagon Keeps Tabs

As it happened, the analysts’ news media appearances were being closely monitored. The Pentagon paid a private contractor, Omnitec Solutions, hundreds of thousands of dollars to scour databases for any trace of the analysts, be it a segment on “The O’Reilly Factor” or an interview with The Daily Inter Lake in Montana, circulation 20,000.

Omnitec evaluated their appearances using the same tools as corporate branding experts. One report, assessing the impact of several trips to Iraq in 2005, offered example after example of analysts echoing Pentagon themes on all the networks.

“Commentary from all three Iraq trips was extremely positive over all,” the report concluded.

In interviews, several analysts reacted with dismay when told they were described as reliable “surrogates” in Pentagon documents. And some asserted that their Pentagon sessions were, as David L. Grange, a retired Army general and CNN analyst put it, “just upfront information,” while others pointed out, accurately, that they did not always agree with the administration or each other. “None of us drink the Kool-Aid,” General Scales said.

Likewise, several also denied using their special access for business gain. “Not related at all,” General Shepperd said, pointing out that many in the Pentagon held CNN “in the lowest esteem.”

Still, even the mildest of criticism could draw a challenge. Several analysts told of fielding telephone calls from displeased defense officials only minutes after being on the air.

On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, Mr. Cowan, who said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the “twisted version of reality” being pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give “a heads-up” that some of his comments on Fox “may not all be friendly,” Pentagon records show. Mr. Rumsfeld’s senior aides quickly arranged a private briefing for him, yet when he told Bill O’Reilly that the United States was “not on a good glide path right now” in Iraq, the repercussions were swift.

Mr. Cowan said he was “precipitously fired from the analysts group” for this appearance. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message, “simply didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t carrying their water.” The next day James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines’ deaths further erode support for the war.

“The strategic target remains our population,” General Conway said. “We can lose people day in and day out, but they’re never going to beat our military. What they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can help us not let that happen.”

“General, I just made that point on the air,” an analyst replied.

“Let’s work it together, guys,” General Conway urged.

The Generals’ Revolt

The full dimensions of this mutual embrace were perhaps never clearer than in April 2006, after several of Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals — none of them network military analysts — went public with devastating critiques of his wartime performance. Some called for his resignation.

On Friday, April 14, with what came to be called the “Generals’ Revolt” dominating headlines, Mr. Rumsfeld instructed aides to summon military analysts to a meeting with him early the next week, records show. When an aide urged a short delay to “give our big guys on the West Coast a little more time to buy a ticket and get here,” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office insisted that “the boss” wanted the meeting fast “for impact on the current story.”

That same day, Pentagon officials helped two Fox analysts, General McInerney and General Vallely, write an opinion article for The Wall Street Journal defending Mr. Rumsfeld.

“Starting to write it now,” General Vallely wrote to the Pentagon that afternoon. “Any input for the article,” he added a little later, “will be much appreciated.” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office quickly forwarded talking points and statistics to rebut the notion of a spreading revolt.

“Vallely is going to use the numbers,” a Pentagon official reported that afternoon.

The standard secrecy notwithstanding, plans for this session leaked, producing a front-page story in The Times that Sunday. In damage-control mode, Pentagon officials scrambled to present the meeting as routine and directed that communications with analysts be kept “very formal,” records show. “This is very, very sensitive now,” a Pentagon official warned subordinates.

On Tuesday, April 18, some 17 analysts assembled at the Pentagon with Mr. Rumsfeld and General Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

A transcript of that session, never before disclosed, shows a shared determination to marginalize war critics and revive public support for the war.

“I’m an old intel guy,” said one analyst. (The transcript omits speakers’ names.) “And I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. That is Psyops. Now most people may hear that and they think, ‘Oh my God, they’re trying to brainwash.’ ”

“What are you, some kind of a nut?” Mr. Rumsfeld cut in, drawing laughter. “You don’t believe in the Constitution?”

There was little discussion about the actual criticism pouring forth from Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals. Analysts argued that opposition to the war was rooted in perceptions fed by the news media, not reality. The administration’s overall war strategy, they counseled, was “brilliant” and “very successful.”

“Frankly,” one participant said, “from a military point of view, the penalty, 2,400 brave Americans whom we lost, 3,000 in an hour and 15 minutes, is relative.”

An analyst said at another point: “This is a wider war. And whether we have democracy in Iraq or not, it doesn’t mean a tinker’s damn if we end up with the result we want, which is a regime over there that’s not a threat to us.”

“Yeah,” Mr. Rumsfeld said, taking notes.

But winning or not, they bluntly warned, the administration was in grave political danger so long as most Americans viewed Iraq as a lost cause. “America hates a loser,” one analyst said.

Much of the session was devoted to ways that Mr. Rumsfeld could reverse the “political tide.” One analyst urged Mr. Rumsfeld to “just crush these people,” and assured him that “most of the gentlemen at the table” would enthusiastically support him if he did.

“You are the leader,” the analyst told Mr. Rumsfeld. “You are our guy.”

At another point, an analyst made a suggestion: “In one of your speeches you ought to say, ‘Everybody stop for a minute and imagine an Iraq ruled by Zarqawi.’ And then you just go down the list and say, ‘All right, we’ve got oil, money, sovereignty, access to the geographic center of gravity of the Middle East, blah, blah, blah.’ If you can just paint a mental picture for Joe America to say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t imagine a world like that.’ ”

Even as they assured Mr. Rumsfeld that they stood ready to help in this public relations offensive, the analysts sought guidance on what they should cite as the next “milestone” that would, as one analyst put it, “keep the American people focused on the idea that we’re moving forward to a positive end.” They placed particular emphasis on the growing confrontation with Iran.

“When you said ‘long war,’ you changed the psyche of the American people to expect this to be a generational event,” an analyst said. “And again, I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job...”

“Get in line,” Mr. Rumsfeld interjected.

The meeting ended and Mr. Rumsfeld, appearing pleased and relaxed, took the entire group into a small study and showed off treasured keepsakes from his life, several analysts recalled.

Soon after, analysts hit the airwaves. The Omnitec monitoring reports, circulated to more than 80 officials, confirmed that analysts repeated many of the Pentagon’s talking points: that Mr. Rumsfeld consulted “frequently and sufficiently” with his generals; that he was not “overly concerned” with the criticisms; that the meeting focused “on more important topics at hand,” including the next milestone in Iraq, the formation of a new government.

Days later, Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memorandum distilling their collective guidance into bullet points. Two were underlined:

“Focus on the Global War on Terror — not simply Iraq. The wider war — the long war.”

“Link Iraq to Iran. Iran is the concern. If we fail in Iraq or Afghanistan, it will help Iran.”

But if Mr. Rumsfeld found the session instructive, at least one participant, General Nash, the ABC analyst, was repulsed.

“I walked away from that session having total disrespect for my fellow commentators, with perhaps one or two exceptions,” he said.

View From the Networks

Two weeks ago General Petraeus took time out from testifying before Congress about Iraq for a conference call with military analysts.

Mr. Garrett, the Fox analyst and Patton Boggs lobbyist, said he told General Petraeus during the call to “keep up the great work.”

“Hey,” Mr. Garrett said in an interview, “anything we can do to help.”

For the moment, though, because of heavy election coverage and general war fatigue, military analysts are not getting nearly as much TV time, and the networks have trimmed their rosters of analysts. The conference call with General Petraeus, for example, produced little in the way of immediate coverage.

Still, almost weekly the Pentagon continues to conduct briefings with selected military analysts. Many analysts said network officials were only dimly aware of these interactions. The networks, they said, have little grasp of how often they meet with senior officials, or what is discussed.

“I don’t think NBC was even aware we were participating,” said Rick Francona, a longtime military analyst for the network.

Some networks publish biographies on their Web sites that describe their analysts’ military backgrounds and, in some cases, give at least limited information about their business ties. But many analysts also said the networks asked few questions about their outside business interests, the nature of their work or the potential for that work to create conflicts of interest. “None of that ever happened,” said Mr. Allard, an NBC analyst until 2006.

“The worst conflict of interest was no interest.”

Mr. Allard and other analysts said their network handlers also raised no objections when the Defense Department began paying their commercial airfare for Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq — a clear ethical violation for most news organizations.

CBS News declined to comment on what it knew about its military analysts’ business affiliations or what steps it took to guard against potential conflicts.

NBC News also declined to discuss its procedures for hiring and monitoring military analysts. The network issued a short statement: “We have clear policies in place to assure that the people who appear on our air have been appropriately vetted and that nothing in their profile would lead to even a perception of a conflict of interest.”

Jeffrey W. Schneider, a spokesman for ABC, said that while the network’s military consultants were not held to the same ethical rules as its full-time journalists, they were expected to keep the network informed about any outside business entanglements. “We make it clear to them we expect them to keep us closely apprised,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Fox News said executives “refused to participate” in this article.

CNN requires its military analysts to disclose in writing all outside sources of income. But like the other networks, it does not provide its military analysts with the kind of written, specific ethical guidelines it gives its full-time employees for avoiding real or apparent conflicts of interest.

Yet even where controls exist, they have sometimes proven porous.

CNN, for example, said it was unaware for nearly three years that one of its main military analysts, General Marks, was deeply involved in the business of seeking government contracts, including contracts related to Iraq.

General Marks was hired by CNN in 2004, about the time he took a management position at McNeil Technologies, where his job was to pursue military and intelligence contracts. As required, General Marks disclosed that he received income from McNeil Technologies. But the disclosure form did not require him to describe what his job entailed, and CNN acknowledges it failed to do additional vetting.

“We did not ask Mr. Marks the follow-up questions we should have,” CNN said in a written statement.

In an interview, General Marks said it was no secret at CNN that his job at McNeil Technologies was about winning contracts. “I mean, that’s what McNeil does,” he said.

CNN, however, said it did not know the nature of McNeil’s military business or what General Marks did for the company. If he was bidding on Pentagon contracts, CNN said, that should have disqualified him from being a military analyst for the network. But in the summer and fall of 2006, even as he was regularly asked to comment on conditions in Iraq, General Marks was working intensively on bidding for a $4.6 billion contract to provide thousands of translators to United States forces in Iraq. In fact, General Marks was made president of the McNeil spin-off that won the huge contract in December 2006.

General Marks said his work on the contract did not affect his commentary on CNN. “I’ve got zero challenge separating myself from a business interest,” he said.

But CNN said it had no idea about his role in the contract until July 2007, when it reviewed his most recent disclosure form, submitted months earlier, and finally made inquiries about his new job.

“We saw the extent of his dealings and determined at that time we should end our relationship with him,” CNN said.

Telegraph (UK) : Bankrupt relationship

Bankrupt relationship

November 9, 2007

Despite George W Bush's rhetoric about freedom, the struggle against terrorism is provoking a reaction familiar from the Cold War and nowhere is that clearer than over Pakistan.

In the old parlance, General Pervez Musharraf is "our sonofabitch". He has failed to stamp out extremist groups and close the madrassas that inspire them. He has allowed the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan to fall into the hands of assorted jihadis. And he has sacked independent-minded judges for fear that the Supreme Court declare illegal his re-election as president last month.

Yet, despite this combination of incompetence and brutality, America and Britain continue to back him as head of what has a strong claim to be the most dangerous country in the world.

In order to broaden the government's political base, their plan is for the general to doff his army uniform later this month and enter into a power-sharing arrangement with Benazir Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People's Party, after general elections in February.

If that ever comes to pass, it will bring together a soldier whose popularity has plummeted and a politician whose standing has been undermined by her willingness to cut a deal with him. And the prospects for its lasting are slim: Miss Bhutto and the military are like oil and water.

In short, the relationship between Gen Musharraf and the West is bankrupt. Valued as an ally after 9/11, he is now part of the problem. Under his dictatorship, Pakistan has become an increasingly ungovernable country in which moderate, secular forces have been sidelined to the advantage of the Islamists.

An alternative – an alliance between General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, the army chief designate, and Miss Bhutto's secular rival, Nawaz Sharif – seems neither imminent nor especially enticing. But that should not blind Britain and America to the fact that their "sonofabitch" in Pakistan is a spent force.

# Pakistan's High Commission sent the following response to this article:

"The language used for the President of Pakistan in your leading article ("Bankrupt relationship", November 9) is offensive and flouts the norms of decent journalism.

"For a newspaper of The Daily Telegraph's reputation to resort to such derogatory language is highly regrettable. This deserves an apology."

Imran Gardezi, Minister Press

LAT : Pakistan expels British journalists

Pakistan expels British journalists

The three are ordered out after their newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, describes Musharraf with an expletive in an editorial.

By Henry Chu, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer | November 11, 2007

LAHORE, Pakistan — Three British journalists have been ordered expelled from the country because their newspaper published an editorial that used a mild expletive in describing President Pervez Musharraf.

The Pakistani government gave the journalists 72 hours to leave the country, Pakistan's deputy information minister, Tariq Azim, said Saturday. Daily Telegraph reporters Isambard Wilkinson, Colin Freeman and Damien McElroy are the first journalists to be kicked out since Musharraf declared a state of emergency Nov. 3, putting Pakistan under de facto martial law.

The offending term appeared in an editorial in Friday's edition of the paper, one of Britain's major dailies. The editorial accused Musharraf of "incompetence and brutality," and took the United States and other Western countries to task for supporting him.

As is the case at most major Western newspapers, the Daily Telegraph's editorials are not written by its reporters. But Azim said the three journalists were being expelled as the paper's "representatives" in Pakistan.

"We have certain cultural sensitivities. And if people don't realize that, I think it's very unfortunate," Azim said, adding that his government has demanded an apology.

The newspaper had no immediate comment.

Under the state of emergency, news media are forbidden from airing or publishing any content thought to "ridicule" Musharraf or the government. Musharraf, a general who came to power in a 1999 coup, says that emergency rule is necessary for him to fight a growing Islamic insurgency.

Private Pakistani news channels and foreign channels such as CNN have been yanked off the air. Many journalists fear that they are the next targets of a crackdown that has already thrown thousands of lawyers, human-rights activists and opposition members into jail.

The decision to expel the three Daily Telegraph reporters was immediately lambasted by Human Rights Watch, which described it as the act of "an increasingly desperate government."

"Instead of seeking to muzzle and punish his critics, it is time for Musharraf to face up to the reality of his well-earned dismal domestic and international image," the organization said in a statement.

henry.chu@latimes.com

LAT : Pakistan's private TV channels struggle

Pakistan's private TV channels struggle

By Laura King, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer | November 8, 2007

ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN -- The newsroom of Geo television buzzed with activity. Intense young reporters hurried in and out, editors shouted to one another as they juggled BlackBerrys and cellphones, and big TV monitors showed the fruit of these frantic labors: another tumultuous day's news unfolding, live.

But few in Pakistan would see the coverage.

Broadcasts on Geo's Urdu-language news channel, like those of more than three dozen independent TV channels, have been blocked by the government since Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, declared a state of emergency Saturday.

"It was like watching the lights go out, one by one," said Kamran Rehmat, news editor at English-language Dawn TV, recalling the methodical shutdown of all but government-run Pakistan Television.

News-hungry viewers looking for the private channels, which normally attract a daily audience in the millions, get only a blue screen and a message: "No signal. Sorry for the inconvenience."

"It's so medieval," Rehmat said. "You think you live in the information age, in the information world, and you wonder, 'How could this be happening?' "

Criticism has poured in from around the world over the authoritarian measures. Here they are almost universally regarded as tantamount to martial law.

Foreign governments, human rights organizations and media advocates have condemned the crackdown on Pakistan's freewheeling independent broadcasters, which for months had provided a steady stream of news and commentary about the burgeoning political crisis.

Ironically, it was Musharraf who had allowed private channels to flourish over the last three years. But his self-described policy of "enlightened moderation" changed abruptly this year, when massive street demonstrations against him were broadcast on live TV, magnifying their impact.

Suddenly, people in far-flung towns and villages could see the groundswell of anti-government sentiment.

When Musharraf gave himself extraordinary powers to stifle dissent, private TV channels were among his first targets. He also blocked the reception by cable of international channels such as the BBC and CNN.

Tech-savvy Pakistanis are finding other ways to get the news and relay it. Traffic on Pakistan-themed blogs and in Internet chat rooms has exploded since the start of the emergency.

Geo is streaming news content on its website. On Tuesday, an incendiary address delivered via cellphone by fired Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry was swiftly disseminated.

Viewers with satellite dishes still can watch the private channels, but they represent only about 10% of viewership, and authorities are moving to restrict sales of new dishes. Even before the sale restrictions, prices had quadrupled to about $330, beyond the reach of all but the wealthy.

Private Pakistani TV channels also can be viewed outside the country, in large parts of the Middle East and South Asia. That nets a substantial audience of expatriate Pakistanis, who call, text-message and e-mail friends and relatives back home.

But reporters and editors say alternate technology and an audience among the Pakistani diaspora, while providing a lifeline in the crisis, are no substitutes for traditional broadcast channels, their most vital and immediate connection with the greatest number of viewers.

Being deprived of their regular audience hasn't stopped news channels from working flat-out to provide coverage. In TV newsrooms, bleary eyes and unshaven chins attest to long hours of nonstop news gathering from across the country.

"We have to go ahead with our work, no matter what," said Rehmat, Dawn's news director. "Even if no one at all were watching."

Geo's 24-hour news broadcasts feature a superimposed black digital clock counting off the hours, minutes and seconds since imposition of emergency rule. On Wednesday, with the clock just turning over to 92 hours, the channel covered an ugly confrontation between police and demonstrators in the eastern city of Lahore.

On camera, plainclothes policemen surrounded and pummeled a paunchy middle-aged man. When he fell, they moved in with well-aimed kicks as he rolled and writhed, trying to shield himself. Throughout the grim and gripping spectacle, the camera kept rolling.

Even if private channels are allowed to come back on the air, the government has said they will be subject to new restrictions that forbid, among other things, "ridicule" of the government or armed forces. Penalties include fines, seizure of equipment and loss of license.

Before the crackdown, satirical skit shows were enormous hits. One of them, "Hum Sab Umeed Se Hain," an Urdu-language play on the phrase for pregnancy, aired a prescient comedy sketch with a uniformed Musharraf character declaring: "Well, I still have my options."

As political tensions have grown in recent months, journalists have been beaten, harassed and intimidated by security forces and supporters of Musharraf. In September, dozens of Pakistani reporters, photographers and cameramen covering a demonstration outside the Election Commission were beaten by police, some severely.

Since the start of emergency rule, threats against the independent channels have sharply increased. Shakil Rahman, chief executive of the company that owns Geo, has received e-mails threatening his family.

Journalists fear the crackdown will spread to Pakistan's print media. Nationally circulated newspapers have provided hard-hitting coverage -- and scathing editorial commentary -- about the declaration, including the broadcasting curbs.

No one is certain why newspapers have been spared. Some journalists speculated that it was simply much more physically difficult to move against far-flung printing plants and news bureaus.

But in a move Monday that sent ripples of apprehension through Pakistan's print media community, police raided and briefly sealed a printing press belonging to Jang, the country's biggest media group and Geo's parent company.

"We are proceeding as normal in taking a very critical look at things," said Omar Quraishi, opinion page editor for the News, a nationally circulated paper. "But that can change -- the future looks very bleak."

The broadcast cutoff is putting financial pressure on the private channels, an effect broadcasters believe is deliberately punitive. Even Geo's sports, entertainment and music channels, all rich with advertising, have been knocked off the air.

"It's a huge setback for us as a nation, this denial of the right to information," said Wamiq Zuberi, director of Aaj TV. "We can only hope for a return to normal, though I wonder what that might be."

laura.king@latimes.com

WaPo : FEMA Meets the Press, Which Happens to Be . . . FEMA

FEMA Meets the Press, Which Happens to Be . . . FEMA

By Al Kamen | October 26, 2007

FEMA has truly learned the lessons of Katrina. Even its handling of the media has improved dramatically. For example, as the California wildfires raged Tuesday, Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson, the deputy administrator, had a 1 p.m. news briefing.

Reporters were given only 15 minutes' notice of the briefing, making it unlikely many could show up at FEMA's Southwest D.C. offices. They were given an 800 number to call in, though it was a "listen only" line, the notice said -- no questions. Parts of the briefing were carried live on Fox News, MSNBC and other outlets.

Johnson stood behind a lectern and began with an overview before saying he would take a few questions. The first questions were about the "commodities" being shipped to Southern California and how officials are dealing with people who refuse to evacuate. He responded eloquently.

He was apparently quite familiar with the reporters -- in one case, he appears to say "Mike" and points to a reporter -- and was asked an oddly in-house question about "what it means to have an emergency declaration as opposed to a major disaster declaration" signed by the president. He once again explained smoothly.

FEMA press secretary Aaron Walker interrupted at one point to caution he'd allow just "two more questions." Later, he called for a "last question."

"Are you happy with FEMA's response so far?" a reporter asked. Another asked about "lessons learned from Katrina."

"I'm very happy with FEMA's response so far," Johnson said, hailing "a very smoothly, very efficiently performing team."

"And so I think what you're really seeing here is the benefit of experience, the benefit of good leadership and the benefit of good partnership," Johnson said, "none of which were present in Katrina." (Wasn't Michael Chertoff DHS chief then?) Very smooth, very professional. But something didn't seem right. The reporters were lobbing too many softballs. No one asked about trailers with formaldehyde for those made homeless by the fires. And the media seemed to be giving Johnson all day to wax on and on about FEMA's greatness.

Of course, that could be because the questions were asked by FEMA staffers playing reporters. We're told the questions were asked by Cindy Taylor, FEMA's deputy director of external affairs, and by "Mike" Widomski, the deputy director of public affairs. Director of External Affairs John "Pat" Philbin asked a question, and another came, we understand, from someone who sounds like press aide Ali Kirin.

Asked about this, Widomski said: "We had been getting mobbed with phone calls from reporters, and this was thrown together at the last minute."

But the staff did not make up the questions, he said, and Johnson did not know what was going to be asked. "We pulled questions from those we had been getting from reporters earlier in the day." Despite the very short notice, "we were expecting the press to come," he said, but they didn't. So the staff played reporters for what on TV looked just like the real thing.

"If the worst thing that happens to me in this disaster is that we had staff in the chairs to ask questions that reporters had been asking all day, Widomski said, "trust me, I'll be happy."

Heck of a job, Harvey.
He's Leaving, Not Quitting

David Denehy, a.k.a. "The $75 Million Man," who headed a controversial program to dispense that amount to promote democracy in Iran, is leaving his job today at the State Department to go private-sector as head of a small company.

In a recent e-mail, Denehy said that "my decision to leave the administration is due, in part, to my belief that I am better able to serve the goals of the President's Freedom Agenda from outside the government. While there have been many challenges to the work we have done together, the rewards have been equally great."

More than two dozen Iranian American and human rights groups said the Iran program, which began last year, was "counter-productive" and led to wider repression of activists who were accused of being foreign agents or traitors. Four Iranian Americans were jailed for "crimes against national security," the groups said in appealing to Congress to eliminate the program, and continuation of the program would only further endanger democracy efforts by giving the Iranian government "a pretext to harass its own population."

But Denehy, in an e-mail to us yesterday, said he's not leaving because of criticism of the effort. "I continue to enjoy the support of my leadership," he said, and "from Congress and more importantly from those within Iran who participate in our programs. . . . I don't back away from a fight."
All the Same?

April 8, 2004: Then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told the Sept. 11 commission that "terrorism is terrorism is terrorism -- in other words, you can't fight al-Qaeda and hug Hezbollah or hug Hamas."

"We don't make a distinction between different kinds of terrorism. And we're, therefore, united with the countries of the world to fight all kinds of terrorism. Terrorism is never an appropriate or justified response just because of political difficulty."

Wednesday: Army Maj. Gen. Richard Sherlock, a senior member of the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a news briefing: "There are over 45 different organizations on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations, and you can't look at all of them the same way.

"If you look at all of these as nails, then all of the solutions you have all of a sudden suddenly start to appear like a hammer, and a hammer's not always the right answer."

Hmmmm. . . .
Don't Forget Where You Came From

In June, Paul McNulty left the No. 2 job at the Justice Department -- and the hassle being called to Capitol Hill to answer questions about whether politics played a role in the firing of U.S. attorneys -- for a big-bucks partnership at Baker & McKenzie in Washington.

He told the audience at an American Bar Association conference in Washington yesterday that he's still getting the hang of his new job. Talking about criminal-fraud investigations of big companies, McNulty referred to himself as part of the government, then laughed and told the crowd: "I have to get the 'we' out of my vocabulary," our colleague Carrie Johnson reports.

Maybe he needs to remember who's signing his paycheck. At the conference, McNulty staunchly defended a DOJ policy that allows prosecutors to strong-arm companies to comply with the feds.
Resourcefulness at the FAA, Cont'd

The Federal Aviation Administration calls to say that the poker table and other furnishings bought for the Atlanta air traffic control center did not cost $3,500 by itself, as we had written Wednesday, but only $795. And it's a "de-briefing table for trainees," FAA spokeswoman Diane Spitaliere said, although you "could flip over the top for the checkerboard on the other side," which folks could use to relax during downtime.

Of course, they could play poker on it. And since the FAA can't get around to spending a few bucks to fix the chronically leaky roof at the center, the controllers could put their equipment under the table so it's not damaged when it rains. Beats using the umbrellas that they have to hold over the stuff now.

"It could be used for other purposes," Spitalieri conceded.

Research editor Alice Crites contributed to this column.

Reuters : Director De Palma disturbed over Iraq film edit

Director De Palma disturbed over Iraq film edit

By Christine Kearney | October 19, 2007

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Veteran Hollywood director Brian De Palma has lashed out at what he calls the censorship of his new film about Iraq and the chilling effect of corporate America on the war.

De Palma's film, "Redacted," is based on the true story of a group of U.S. soldiers who raped and killed a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and murdered members of her family. It has stunned audiences for its shocking images and rattled American conservative commentators before its U.S. opening next month.

But De Palma says he is upset that the documentary-style drama -- its name derived from his view that news coverage of the war has been incomplete -- has been censored.

The film's distributor, Magnolia Pictures, ordered the faces of dead Iraqis shown in a montage of photographs at the end of the film be blacked out.

"I find it remarkable. 'Redacted' got redacted. I mean, how ironic," De Palma, who made his name directing violent films like "Scarface" and "The Untouchables," said in an interview. "I fought every way I could in order to stop those photographs from being redacted and I still lost."

De Palma has loudly argued the issue in public, including sparring with Eamonn Bowles, the president of Magnolia, during a recent forum at the New York Film Festival. Bowles countered that possible future lawsuits by the families of the dead Iraqis meant the photos had to be edited.

Bowles said Magnolia had been put in "an untenable legal position," and that De Palma lost rights to the film's final cut in recent arbitration with the Directors Guild of America.

"We were always open about letting him make the sort of film he wanted to make," Bowles said in an interview, adding not many distribution companies would have supported the film at all.

CORPORATE POWER

De Palma, who has criticized Hollywood for not being willing to finance such independent films, said he was shocked at his own lack of editorial control.

"I can't even get the photographs out there, that was all surprising to me," he said. "What is going on here? These are war photographs. ... You see these and you go 'oh boy, this shouldn't be happening.'"

The 67-year-old director said he blames "the insurance companies" for exercising too much control over film distribution. Bowles admitted Magnolia could not insure the film if it ran the unedited photos, which were too graphic to run in mainstream newspapers or television reports.

De Palma said he expected the images in "Redacted" to stir U.S. public debate about the conduct of American soldiers. Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi was gang-raped, killed and burned by U.S. troops in Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, in March 2006. Her parents and another family member were also killed.

He said the film provided a realistic portrait of U.S. troops and how "the presentation of our troops has been whitewashed" by mainstream media.

De Palma, who looked at the atrocities of conflict in the 1989 film "Casualties of War," which also centers on the rape of a young girl by U.S. soldiers, believes news coverage of wars had changed since the Vietnam War.

"We saw fallen soldiers, we saw suffering Vietnamese. We don't see any of that now," he said. "We see bombs go off, but where do they come down? Who do they hit?"

The U.S. invasion of Iraq was "clearly a mistake," he said, that was perpetuated by "defense contractors, big corporations of America" profiting from the war.

"How many billions of dollars are those companies making? And who gets more famous than ever? The media. There is nothing like a war to fill the airwaves 24 hours a day," he said.

© Reuters 2007 All rights reserved

WaPo : As War Dragged On, Coverage Tone Weighed Heavily on Anchors

As War Dragged On, Coverage Tone Weighed Heavily on Anchors

By Howard Kurtz | Washington Post Staff Writer | October 8, 2007

Charlie Gibson is a product of the Vietnam War era. When he was a television reporter in Lynchburg, Va., he had driven to Washington on weekends to march in antiwar demonstrations. And he had lost friends in that jungle war.

Now Gibson had friends whose sons were dying in Iraq. His thoughts kept returning to one central question: When you commit kids to war, what are they fighting for? What was the mission in Iraq? How could a family say that the war was worth little Johnny's well-being?

The ABC anchor was obsessed with this point. If you were president, and you decided to go to war, was there a calculus in your mind, that the goal was worth so many American lives? After all, your generals would tell you that X number were likely to die. What was the acceptable trade-off? Gibson's threshold would be one: Was the war worth one life?

As the U.S. occupation of Iraq stretched into its fourth bloody year, the media coverage was turning increasingly negative, and the three evening news anchors constantly agonized over how to deal with the conflict.

Their newscasts had become a nightly tableau of death and destruction, and whether that was an accurate picture of Iraq had become a matter of fierce political debate. Certainly the constant plague of suicide bombs, explosive devices, sniper fire and, occasionally, the massacre of large numbers of civilians played into television's need for dramatic events and arresting visuals. Certainly, by 2006 it was easier for the anchors and correspondents to offer a skeptical vision of the war, now that a majority of the country disapproved of the conflict, than in the heady days after the toppling of Saddam Hussein seemed to strike a blow for democracy in the Middle East. By training their powerful spotlight on the chaos gripping Iraq, the anchors were arguably contributing to the political downfall of a president who had seemed to be riding high when he won his second term.

Through the routine decisions of daily journalism -- how prominently to play a story, what pictures to use, what voices to include -- the newscasts were sending an unmistakable message. And the message was that George W. Bush's war was a debacle. Administration officials regularly complained about the coverage as unduly negative, but to little avail. Other news organizations chronicled the deteriorating situation as well, but with a combined 25 million viewers, the evening newscasts had the biggest megaphone.

Painful Images

When Brian Williams thought about Iraq, he thought about his visits to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He was tortured by these trips to comfort the veterans being treated there. It was hard to look at their wounds. He remembered one soldier who had five titanium pins sticking out of his toes. His heart ached for these brave men and women who had been to Iraq, on orders from their commander in chief.

For Williams, it all went back to Sept. 11, 2001. As a citizen, he thought on that fateful day, thank God that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell were on the team. How together we all seemed. There was something about the murderous attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that, in the eyes of the White House press corps, gave Bush a stature that could not be violated. And that was no accident. The administration's deft use of 9/11 against its critics had created an impenetrable shield. It was political magic.

Some people, the NBC anchor knew, believed that the administration was jonesing for a fight, exploiting Sept. 11 as an opportunity to launch a war in Iraq. Whatever the truth, he had to admire, in a clinical sort of way, the political management of the press during what came to be known as the war on terror. It was truly remarkable.

Williams did not enjoy looking back on the run-up to war, knowing what he knew now about the media's flawed performance. He did not want to look back on this period with the same sense of regret. He recognized how deeply the war had divided the country.

Every day, Williams asked the question: Did Baghdad correspondent Richard Engel have any news other than another 20 Iraqi civilians killed when an IED detonated, leaving the same smoking carcasses and pathetic scenes of loved ones crying? That, Williams felt, was the problem: The horrible had become utterly commonplace. To most Americans, he believed, the war could not be more ephemeral. It was half a world away, and it required no sacrifice by those who did not have a family member in the armed forces.

Williams had his own private intelligence channel on the war. He had an e-mail relationship with a number of military men -- some still in the war zone, some who had returned from the region -- and they were candid about the conflict in a way that top generals were not. These informants alerted him to a wide range of problems with IEDs, armor and morale. But they never spoke on the phone, which would be too dangerous, since they were barred from talking to journalists. Private e-mail was the only safe form of communication.

Under Pressure

Katie Couric had always felt uncomfortable with the war, and that sometimes showed in the way she framed the story. When Bush had been marshaling support for the invasion, she felt, the country seemed to be swept up in a patriotic furor and a palpable sense of fear. There was a rush to war, no question about it. The CBS anchor could never quite figure out how Iraq had become Public Enemy No. 1, how the United States had wound up making many of the same mistakes as in Vietnam. She was happy, like most people, when the war initially seemed to be going well. Nobody wanted to see all these young kids getting killed. But the frenzied march to war had been bolstered by a reluctance to question the administration after 9/11.

She had firsthand experience with what she considered the chilling effect on the media. Two months before the 2004 election, when she was still at NBC's "Today" show, Couric had asked Condoleezza Rice whether she agreed with Vice President Cheney's declaration that the country would be at greater risk for terrorist attacks if John Kerry won the White House. Rice sidestepped the question, saying that any president had to fight aggressively against terrorism.

Couric interrupted and asked the question again. Would a Kerry victory put America at greater risk? Rice ducked again, saying that the issue should not be personalized.

Soon afterward, Couric got an e-mail from Robert Wright, the NBC president. He was forwarding a note from an Atlanta woman who complained that Couric had been too confrontational with Rice.

What was the message here? Couric felt that Wright must be telling her to back off. She wrote him a note, saying that she tried to be persistent and elicit good answers in all her interviews, regardless of the political views of her guests. If Wright had a problem with that, she would like to discuss it with him personally. Wright wrote back that such protest letters usually came in batches, but that he had passed along this one because it seemed different.

Couric felt there was a subtle, insidious pressure to toe the party line, and you bucked that at your peril. She wanted to believe that her NBC colleagues were partners in the search for truth, and no longer felt that was the case. She knew that the corporate management viewed her as an out-and-out liberal. When she ran into Jack Welch, the General Electric chairman, he would sometimes say that they had never seen eye to eye politically. If you weren't rah rah rah for the Bush administration, and the war, you were considered unpatriotic, even treasonous.

Couric believed that many viewers were now suffering from Iraq fatigue. She tried not to lead with the conflict every night, unless there were significant developments. And when the day's Iraq events were too big to ignore, Couric made clear -- in starker terms than the other anchors -- her disgust with the whole enterprise. One night she led her CBS newscast, "With each death, with every passing day, so many of us ask, 'Is there any way out of this nightmare?' "

Getting Graphic

By the fall of 2006, an urgent tone began creeping into the anchors' coverage of Iraq. No longer were they describing the war as a difficult battle whose outcome was in doubt, or depicting the military struggle as part of a larger effort to rebuild the battered country. Now it was all about the violence, and they were framing the situation as an unmitigated mess. The anchors were giving real weight to what had once seemed unmentionable, the possibility that the United States might have to pull out.

They were, to be sure, reflecting the rapid erosion of support for the war, and a level of killing and chaos that seemed to grow worse by the day. But given their huge platform, they were also shaping public sentiment, reinforcing the notion that nearly four years after the invasion, the situation was all but lost.

"In plain English," Brian Williams said, "this has been a tough week to be hopeful about the prospects for victory in Iraq."

Charlie Gibson spoke of a "killing spree," a "horrific surge in religious violence, Iraqis killing Iraqis in unprecedented numbers." After correspondent Terry McCarthy reported that 50 to 60 bodies were turning up each day, Gibson could not remain silent. "Sobering to see people simply driving by a body in the streets," he said. "But such is life in Baghdad today."

Couric, in particular, appeared to openly yearn for a pullout. One night she spoke of "opposition to the war in Iraq growing and no end in sight." And at times she came close to describing the situation as hopeless: "The day everyone is hoping for, the day American forces can finally come home from Iraq, seems more and more elusive."

The anchors looked for ways to dramatize the grim statistics. Williams, noting "the bloodshed that has become an all-too-common fact of life there for so many people," highlighted a report on how Baghdad coffinmakers could not keep up with demand. Gibson, reporting a United Nations finding on Iraqi casualties in July and August, tried to bring the impact home: "And just to put the 6,600 Iraqi deaths over the past two months in perspective -- if the U.S. lost an equivalent percentage of its population, that would represent 75,000 American dead."

War Over Words

As the carnage in Iraq continued to mount, Brian Williams was more than ready to declare civil war.

For months, Williams and the reporters and analysts on "NBC Nightly News" had been talking about whether Iraq was sliding toward all-out ethnic violence. Robert Wright had become frustrated with all the on-air hedging. The network president decided to circulate an e-mail to the news division, asking whether the time had come to use the term that everyone had been dancing around.

For Steve Capus, the NBC News chief, the final straw came on Thanksgiving Day 2006, when more than 200 Shiites in the slums of Sadr City were killed in a coordinated wave of car bombings, missiles and mortar attacks. The phrase "sectarian violence" no longer seemed to capture the magnitude of the warfare. Capus asked that the question be put to a range of experts.

Jeff Zucker, who ran NBC's television operations, had been following the debate. He sent a note to Alex Wallace, Capus's deputy: Whatever happened to that discussion about civil war? Are you guys going to do it?

Williams agreed that the network had to decide whether it was time to drop the qualifiers. The day after Thanksgiving, he asked Wallace: "When will we call this thing what it is?"

Williams suggested a list of experts for their consultations: Barry McCaffrey, the retired general and NBC analyst, who was already using the terminology, and another retired general and NBC consultant, Wayne Downing. Historians Doris Kearns Goodwin, David McCullough, and Richard Norton Smith. Richard Engel, who argued that the Arab media had regarded the conflict as a civil war for some time. There were calls back and forth over the weekend.

On Sunday, Wallace sent Capus an e-mail outlining the consensus that they should change their on-air language. Capus cautioned that they had to explain their decision to the viewers. They did not have editor's notes, as newspapers did, and couldn't start using the term out of the blue. Under the plan, Matt Lauer would be the first to weigh in on "Today."

Dan Bartlett's BlackBerry began to ping on Sunday night with requests for comment from NBC. The White House counselor decided there was no percentage in picking a fight over terminology.

On Monday morning, Lauer made the announcement in rather portentous fashion. "For months now, the White House has rejected claims that the situation in Iraq has deteriorated into civil war," and NBC had "hesitated" to challenge that assertion. "But after careful consideration, NBC News has decided a change in terminology is warranted."

This stirred up quite a fuss -- among White House correspondents, on talk radio, on the blogs -- and MSNBC spent much of the day ginning up a debate over its use of the term.

It seemed a self-conscious attempt to replicate the moment in 1968 when Walter Cronkite returned from Vietnam and pronounced the war a stalemate. But that verdict from America's most trusted man, in an era when a television anchor could hold that designation, was based on firsthand reporting, while NBC's maneuver was simply a linguistic confirmation of what most Americans already believed to be the case.

Williams felt that the news division should not have treated it as a major policy pronouncement. They often made changes to the network stylebook -- and had long ago stopped using phrases like "homosexual lifestyle" and "pro-life" -- without any fanfare. By trumpeting the move, Williams believed, they had made themselves the center of attention and invited the criticism that followed.

Fateful Decision

Williams spent the next few months wrestling with a personal question: Should he return to Iraq for the first time since the invasion, when a sandstorm had grounded his helicopter for three days? He was acutely conscious of the risks involved, and yet felt guilty about staying away. Iraq was the story of our time, it led the newscast night after night, and Williams felt a responsibility to touch it and feel it and not just observe from a safe distance.

There had been long conversations with his wife, Jane, in the den of their Connecticut home. For one year after their friend Bob Woodruff, the ABC anchor, had been injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq, Jane Williams could not imagine her husband returning there. Yes, the story was crucial to the national dialogue, but was any job, any assignment worth the destruction of a human life?

Jane reacted, on one level, like the television producer she had once been. She could not live her life paralyzed by fear. "I think you need to go to Iraq sooner rather than later," she said. But Jane also leveled with her husband about her emotional reaction. This is insane, she said; look at what happened to Bob Woodruff.

"I reserve the right to be sad that you're walking out the door," Jane said.

The anchor's toughest sales job was with his two teenagers. "I'm going to be heavily guarded, I'm not going to do anything stupid, and I will be back," he assured them.

When Williams was in Iraq, the picture he got was as muddled as ever. Williams told friends that if they wanted to find good news in Iraq, he could show them plenty of examples. And if they wanted proof that Iraq was a lost cause, he could provide considerable evidence of that as well. Still, when he looked at the big picture, he wondered how the war effort was ever going to succeed.

Katie Couric, too, came back with a mixed verdict. As the single mother of two daughters, she had thought long and hard about whether it was responsible for her to make the trip. She talked it over with her teenagers and with her parents, but decided that she felt comfortable with CBS's security arrangements. Couric saw many signs of the frustrating stalemate in a war in which she felt the administration had made so many mistakes, but also concluded that, in some areas of Iraq, the situation was improving.

Charlie Gibson had not been to Iraq in three years and felt that he should go back, to get a better feel for the situation. Some generals had invited him to make the trip and promised that the military would keep him safe. He brought it up at a lunch with ABC News President David Westin.

"Not on my life are you going," Westin said. "Not with my track record." After what happened to Woodruff, Westin felt that he couldn't take the risk of losing another anchor.

Gibson wished that he could just sneak off to Iraq on his own. The problem, even if Westin were to acquiesce, was that the press would make the mere fact of his trip a bigger story than any reporting he was able to carry out. And Gibson had no desire to go to Baghdad as a PR stunt, not to wander into a dangerous a war whose mission, at least to him, was still not clear.

This article is adapted from "Reality Show," which is based on two years of research that included extensive interviews with journalists and executives at all levels of ABC, NBC and CBS. The interviews were conducted on condition that they be used for the book.

Houston Chronicle : Name-calling war overshadowing debate on Iraq

Name-calling war overshadowing debate on Iraq

'General Betray Us' ad, Limbaugh's 'phony soldier' reflect tone of elections

By ROBIN ABCARIAN | Los Angeles Times | October 7, 2007

Brian McGough, a 31-year-old former Army staff sergeant who was wounded in a roadside attack in Iraq knew he wouldn't receive a warm response from talk show host Rush Limbaugh when he starred in an ad made by the anti-Iraq war veteran's group, VoteVets.org.

The ad, which featured a photograph of McGough's shaved head with jagged scars, was a response to Limbaugh's implication during his broadcast last week that anti-war vets are "phony soldiers," saying:

"Rush, the shrapnel I took to my head was real, my traumatic brain injury was real and my belief we are on the wrong course in Iraq is real," says McGough, looking straight into the camera. "Until you have the guts to call me a phony soldier to my face, stop telling lies about my service."

Limbaugh responded on air Tuesday, comparing McGough metaphorically to a suicide bomber. The ad, said Limbaugh, was "a blatant use of a valiant combat veteran, lying to him about what I said, then strapping those lies to his belt, sending him out via the media in a TV ad to walk into as many people as he can walk into."

Bickering on both sides

With the 2008 presidential primary season at a fevered pitch, both sides of the political noise machine are cranking up the volume, looking for opportunities to slam the other side for bad behavior, bad word choice or bad intentions. Schoolyard-style taunts flung by irrepressible partisans are blown up into national debates.

The Republican side amped up after the left-wing group, MoveOn.org, ran an ad in The New York Times characterizing Gen. David H. Petraeus as "General Betray Us" on the eve of his Congressional testimony about the status of the war in Iraq. Both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly to condemn the ad.

Then, it was the Democrats' turn to wage all-out noisefare after Limbaugh made his "phony soldiers" remark during an exchange with a caller Sept. 26.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., composed a letter to Limbaugh's boss, Clear Channel Communications' CEO Mark P. Mays, urging him to "publicly repudiate" Limbaugh's comments and to ask the popular talk show host to apologize. Though Reid said he was confident Republicans "would join us in overwhelming numbers" none signed the letter. Of 41 signatures, all were Democrats, including four presidential contenders — Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joseph Biden and Christopher Dodd.

In a written response to Reid, Mays said that he would not intercede since Limbaugh was exercising his right to express an opinion, adding that "if Mr. Limbaugh's intention was to classify any soldier opposed to the war in Iraq as a 'phony soldier,' which he denies, then I, along with most Americans, would be deeply offended by such a statement."

'Manufactured controversy'

Wednesday, House Republican leader John Boehner called the issue "a manufactured controversy." The brouhaha over Limbaugh's remarks, he added, was an attempt by MoveOn.org and others "to change the subject away from the slanderous advertisement ... about U.S. General David Petraeus."

Some observers simply shook their heads.

"This is why people hate politics in America and why they are so desperate for a change," said former Republican pollster Frank Luntz, now a consultant on the Fox News Network. "Everyone is looking for the political advantage. Everyone is looking for a story they can use to beat the other guy over the head."

Limbaugh maintains he was not referring to anti-war veterans. He was, he said, referring to anti-war activist Jesse MacBeth, a 23-year-old Tacoma, Wash ., man who was sentenced to five months in prison last month after his false claims about his military service were unmasked by conservative bloggers.

During his show Wednesday, Limbaugh, who did not respond to e-mails and a faxed request for an interview, expressed disappointment that more officials had not come to his defense, but said that Republican presidential hopeful Fred Thompson had defended him on his Web site.

Jon Soltz, the Iraq veteran who co-founded VoteVet.org., said Limbaugh's "phony soldier" remark was brought to his attention by the liberal media watchdog group, Media Matters, with whom he is friendly but not affiliated. "This man has insulted these troops, and there is accountability for this stuff," said Soltz, who was not pleased with the "General Betray Us" ad, either.

"What we need to do, as veterans of the Iraq war is to distance ourselves from personal attacks and focus on the policy issues," Soltz said.

Meanwhile, McGough, the wounded vet in the VoteVet ad, is coming up on the fourth anniversary of his catastrophic injury, which happened in Mosul on Oct. 17, 2003. He was upset, he said, but not surprised to be compared by Limbaugh to a suicide bomber, and has even received some supportive e-mail from Limbaugh fans.

As for Limbaugh, said McGough, "I knew he was going to deflect everyone off of him by calling me names. I just wanted to point out that I am not a phony soldier."

Daily Times : US media intently covers presidential election

US media intently covers presidential election

* Durrani says election process was transparent

APP | October 6, 2007

WASHINGTON: The US media closely followed Saturday’s presidential election in Pakistan and widely covered President Pervez Musharraf’s endorsement by lawmakers for another five years, while underlining the ties between the two countries.

Major Washington newspapers and news channels also noted that the ultimate outcome would be formally announced upon the conclusion of legal challenges pending before the Supreme Court, which is due to resume proceedings on October 17.

The Washington Post, in its Internet edition, ran a lead story by its correspondent headlined “Unofficial Election Results Show Victory for Musharraf”, while it also published an editorial in its Saturday edition on the issue.

Transparent election: “The election process was transparent. It was credible. It was democratic,” the main story quoted Information Minister Muhammad Ali Durrani as saying. “The opposition had their candidates. But they didn’t vote for their candidates,” he added.

Commenting on the proceedings in the capital, the report said that outside the parliament, “planned protests by the opposition parties failed to materialise, and Islamabad was generally calm”.

However, it noted that the scene in Peshawar was “considerably more contentious’ as “hundreds of lawyers protested outside the assembly, clashing with police who used baton charges and teargas to disperse the crowd. The lawyers set fire to a police vehicle, and several people were injured in the melee”.

In its lead editorial in the print edition, the Post was critical of the election by the current assemblies but appreciated that President Musharraf “has promised that if granted a new mandate as president, he will give up his military command”.

The editorial also noted developments with regard to political reconciliation under which past charges against former prime minister Benazir Bhutto would be dropped and she would be allowed to return to Pakistan and take part in the upcoming parliamentary elections.

The Los Angeles Times headlined its report “New term for Musharraf - almost”, as it wrote about various aspects of the political scene in the country. The report by an LA Times staff writer noted that “although the formal outcome is on hold, the balloting was seen as a watershed in Musharraf’s months-long struggle”.

More than 150 opposition lawmakers quit their seats in protest prior to the balloting, and Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Part abstained, “but that made little dent in Musharraf’s near-total support”, the report said, adding that in the national assemblies, he won all but five of the 257 votes cast.

“Also on the eve of the vote, Musharraf signed into law a measure granting an amnesty on corruption charges for Bhutto, the cornerstone of an emerging power-sharing accord between the two,” it observed, and mulling the political situation, stressed that the crux of the matter is whether Pakistan will emerge from months of turmoil with a civilian government.

The Cable News Network also carried a story on its website on Saturday’s vote.