Glenn Greenwald has put together a fairly comprehensive description of the DoD/military analyst scandal. <link>

I always wondered about these military analyst reports at the time, particularly those of Wayne Downing, now deceased, and Ken Allard.

Dowing was a Chalibi man so that tells volumes about his "impartiality". <link>

Allard had a different set of problems. He decried the ethics of NBC and what he thought was their left agenda and gave them an ultimatum; either Keith Olbermann goes or he goes while did not seeing his own ethical lapse with his sweetheart arrangement with the DoD. <link>

Allard really has egg on his face in the way he was used to go after Hans Blix. Later he began to see where his feeds from DoD were at odds with other analysis but he never blew the whistle on the sweetheart arrangement.

One of the tragedies of all of these scandals is how willing people were to participate in all of these schemes, never looking at the consequences nor the ethical lapses they were engaged in. So far they have pretty much escaped accountability for their actions as well and that is the other side of the coin in this whole mess. Corruption was on an unimaginable scale; actual crimes were committed yet nothing has come of much of this. The obvious remedy for this would be a crushing defeat for the Republicans as they largely empowered this corruption.

and very instep with military thinking. It is easy to imagine that the men who installed the program were confident they were serving the nation, not hurting it. In their eyes, the military does just that, so the more we justify the military, the better for our future. It is a trap of the devil that they were all too willing to step into; anything that ticks around their egos was bound to capture their ambition.

on TV news, except for News Hour which has covered it twice, I think.

I was glad to see Ralph Peters strike just the right tone of contempt on this one.

Haven't seen that since, gosh, when was it, . . . leadup to invasion? ('Course I guess since it's over Peters' byline it can't be taken as the "official" NYP editorial position.)

given consequences like, ya know for example, a million dead (give or take).

But hard to imagine a better illustration of the thorough corruption of the corporate "mainstream" media -- with the original corruption of uncritically using these Pentagon propagandists only the half of it.

The other half being compounding that original criminal corruption (yes, such government propaganda is actually a crime in this country, as Greenwald has repeatedly pointed out) with their ongoing coverup (via "news" blackout) -- the CURRENT news that should be a blockbuster scandal story, but ain't, except in the blogosphere.

Remember back when "free market" and "deregulation" ideologues tut-tutted concerns over parent corporation (e.g., Disney, GE, NewsCorp) interests creating conflicts (or "synergies" as they euphemize them) with objective news reporting? "Nah," they told us, "not to worry. We'll have impenetrable firewalls between news & commentary, and between them and all other corporate operations. No way we'd ever sit on a story critical of the parent company or a sister division. Couldn't happen! Never in a million years."

'Course that was never even theoretically possible, much less remotely credible that they'd actually accomplish it even if it were. Anybody falling for that at the time was either a gullible fool or a corporate toady (yes, I'm looking at you, Congress).

So, (to pick just one of dozens of potential examples), ya think rising media celebrity (and once-credible, mostly, actual WaPo reporter -- though that's increasingly ancient history) Dana Milbank doesn't have his highly remunerative talking-head MSNBC gigs in mind as he types up what have degenerated into political-insider gossip columns for WaPo? Or ya think WaPo's banishment of this scandal from it's news pages (relegating it to Dan Froomkin's online-only blog and Howie Kurtz's media-criticism column, also, I think, online-only -- where, credit-where-due-dept., he's actually credibly performing that function for a change in place of his more-typical calls for media "scrutiny" of Dem candidates' acquaintances, cleavage, haircuts, bowling prowess, and other such assorted trivia) might have anything, anything at all, to do with covering up for sister "news" division MSNBC's and parent GE's (major defense contractor) conflicts of interest?

Ya think?

(And while we're on claims that strain credulity <mischievous wink and grin>, ya think jo really "kn[e]w all of that already"?)

What's a few crooked ex generals when the entire thing is so crowded with conflicted interests, media whores, advertisers shills, partisan mouthpieces, and spooks that there is no room left for actual journalists.

Our system is completely fubar in the fullest sense of the term.

I have no idea how this will resolve, but it will resolve only through major crisis and abject rejection by the public. Could go any way, including some very ugly ones. Interesting times to come.