Oh, well…it was just a great try at democracy, just the founding fathers’ attempt at implementing a couple thousand years of Western civilization, as distilled during the Enlightenment…

Thank you NYT for this excellent investigative piece.

“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.”

This very same sentence could be used to describe some of our journalists who are supposed to report on the Bush administration but instead run interference for them. How sickening to find that we have so many unethical people in positions of trust that are so willing to let themselves be used as tools for the propaganda of this administration. Their enormous greed and pitiful desire to cozy up to power is truly pathetic. In my book these poor excuses for human beings are nothing but traitors to our country and should be treated as the pariah’s that they’ve allowed themselves to become.
— pmorlan, Kentucky

BTW Wasn’t Vallely the General/Analyst that said that Ambassador Wilson told him that Valerie was a CIA agent?

Yes. To my knowledge, Vallely’s The Guy.

Also of interest: “Truth from These Podia” by Sam Gardiner (available at link). This is the legendary document copies of which Amb. Joseph Wilson used to distribute publically wherever he could, in the early days of the war.

By the way, is it still illegal for the US Government to distribute propaganda domestically?

I also was interested to see if he would be called during the Libby trial, but alas, it didn’t happen.

Heh.

BTW Wasn’t Vallely the General/Analyst that said that Ambassador Wilson told him that Valerie was a CIA agent? And here he is receiving word from the Pentagon on what to shill? And he knows there is a quid pro quo to his statements.

Hmm! Interesting that the Libby defense never brought Vallely forward in his trial…I bet that a certain prosecutor would have been all over the fact that Vallely was covertly on the Rumsfeld meal-ticket…and perhaps on Cheney’s.

Marcy, I read the complete NYT article on ‘Rent a General’ and wasn’t very surprised by what I read with the possible exception of the feigned surprise on some of their parts that they being manipulated by DoD. I have met and worked with hundreds of senior officers and DoD civilians and most of them are intelligent to know when they are being used. The morality of the individuals is another subject.

One thing that shocked even cynical me was the apparent loosening of the procurement laws and rules for retired people. When I retired I had a lawyer in the Pentagon that I had to run every potential job I was thinking about taking for conflict of interest. Some of the restrictions were for a year, some for three years, some longer and some were even lifetime restrictions if I had been the source selection authority for the contract.

It seems like some of the stuff I read sure looks suspicious based on the rules when I retired. I left in 1992. Does anyone know if the rules have been diluted that much?