The Men Who Stare At Old Goats

[Lucky]

Story coming out tonight about the military using psych ops to manipulate US Congressional delegations to approve greater military spending...surely this has to be a bad joke.

[Bob Kohm]

Someone with stars on his shoulders had better wind up spending the golden years of his life behind bars at Fort Leavenworth for this. If this story is true then this is one of the worst cases of breaching the civilian leadership of the military line that we've ever seen. This has to be come down on in a manner that made Abu Ghraib look like a weekend on KP.

[billbuckner]

link?

[Bob Kohm]

link?

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...0110223?page=1

It's a Mike Hastings piece, so it carries a lot of credibility. General Caldwell's head has to be on a pike.

[DMT]

Glenn Greenwald (who, along with Matt Taibbi, is perhaps the most astute reporter/author around, in my humble opinion) details the complicity of MSNBC, the NY Times, Washington Post, ABC, and the Wall Street Journal when it comes to shoddy journalism and the most ridiculous of attacks on Hastings ---- especially the notion that this kind of reporting "has impacted, and will impact so adversely, on what had been pretty good military/media relations" and accused Hastings of violating "a kind of trust" which war reporters "build up" with war Generals.

http://www.salon.com/news/media_crit...02/27/hastings

Greenwald and Taibbi are great.

[amcg]

This is dirty pool, if true. But in principle is there really that big of a difference between what is alleged to have occurred here and the Bush-era colour-coded "threat levels" which would mysteriously rise every so often? Both, IMO, crossed the line from "informing" to "influencing" (military/civilian divide notwithstanding). For "more funding" read "4 more years".