I told you I'd get back to this...

This post is going to be something of a continuation of this post on the NY Times article detailing ties between military analysts and the Pentagon. I still say it doesn't look good, but I also find it interesting that I'm not even seeing much on this on the more left-leaning sites that would ordinarily jump on a story like this. That's not to say nobody's jumping on this - Glenn Greenwald jumped into this with both feet:

Identically, in April, 2003, a couple of weeks after the invasion of Iraq, Democracy Now interviewed then-CNN anchor Aaron Brown about CNN's reliance on retired Generals as military analysts, the virtually complete exclusion of anti-war voices from its coverage, and the various problems which such behavior engenders. Senso and Brown were equally dismissive of these concerns, contending that the "retired Generals" were merely speaking about apolitical tactical questions rather than engaging in political advocacy about U.S. policy. Both were also completely dismissive of the more general concerns that were raised -- in 2003, Brown said: "I think the generals question, respectfully, is a colossal red herring" and said that, once a war began, there was no reason to hear from anti-war advocates...

Now, as some of you are aware, I work in IT for a living. Let's pretend for a second that I was actually working at a news agency and there's a big breakthrough in computer technology that's about to hit (say, a new version of Microsoft Windows). I have the number of a former Microsoft employee, the number of an Amish guy that believes computers are tools of the devil, and the number of Richard Stallman. Who am I going to call? The guy who used to work at Microsoft and might have some insight about the product? The Amish guy that is wondering why we're talking about computers when we should be raising barns? Or the weird hippie who believes that all proprietary software is evil?

Right. Me too.

Well, back to story here, I'm running a news agency and a war is coming on. Who am I going to talk to? A former military man or an anti-war advocate? One of these people is going to have a clue about what's going on there, while the other is going to proselytize about how we shouldn't be there in the first place. One might be insightful. The other is definitely going to push an agenda.

Yeah, I'm going to roll the dice, too... and if it means I might actually end up with a Pentagon stooge, well, it beats the odds of definitely ending up with an anti-war stooge.