Pentagon Pundit Scandal Broke the Law

[babylonsister]

Pentagon Pundit Scandal Broke the Law
by Sheldon Rampton


The Pentagon military analyst program unveiled in last week’s exposé by David Barstow in the New York Times was not just unethical but illegal. It violates, for starters, specific restrictions that Congress has been placing in its annual appropriation bills every year since 1951. According to those restrictions, “No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress.”

As explained in a March 21, 2005 report by the Congressional Research Service, “publicity or propaganda” is defined by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to mean either (1) self-aggrandizement by public officials, (2) purely partisan activity, or (3) “covert propaganda.” By covert propaganda, GAO means information which originates from the government but is unattributed and made to appear as though it came from a third party.

These concerns about “covert propaganda” were also the basis for the GAO’s strong standard for determining when government-funded video news releases are illegal:

The failure of an agency to identify itself as the source of a prepackaged news story misleads the viewing public by encouraging the viewing audience to believe that the broadcasting news organization developed the information. The prepackaged news stories are purposefully designed to be indistinguishable from news segments broadcast to the public. When the television viewing public does not know that the stories they watched on television news programs about the government were in fact prepared by the government, the stories are, in this sense, no longer purely factual — the essential fact of attribution is missing.

In a related analysis, the GAO explained that “The publicity or propaganda restriction helps to mark the boundary between an agency making information available to the public and agencies creating news reports unbeknownst to the receiving audience.”

more...

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/29/8598/

[Quantess]

1. What will Dick Cheney say about this?

So?

[spanone]

2. i don't imagine anyone and i repeat anyone will ask the dick about it.

[L. Coyote]

3. WHO specifically broke the law. This will never go very high up the command chain!

It is an atrocity we all knew about all along, but this will not
impact the top of the command structure meaningfully.

It is an incredible gift to the DEM campaign! It goes to LYING!!!
The IDIOTS are always breaking the law to promote their illegal war!

[babylonsister]

4. Seems like the Pentagon as a whole is being blamed. nt

[L. Coyote]

5. Rumsfeld? That's my guess. Notice how there are no people in government when

something goes wrong, just agencies that do things--without actors that can be identified!!