The Most Disgraceful Episode in Media-Military Relations Since Vietnam {Commentary}

By Carl Levin in The Daily Caller

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Unless the bastards come after me again, this is my last column on a national disgrace.

So let me be absolutely clear about who the bastards are: The New York Times, Senator Carl Levin and their 40 Democratic allies in the House of Representatives. The disgrace in question: The Times’s April 2008 “exposé” alleging conflicts of interest and wrongdoing by the retired military analysts often featured on television newscasts before and during the Iraq War.

I was one of those analysts. In fact, I wrote a first-person history of the Pentagon briefing program in a 2006 book, Warheads. After the Times article was published, I repeatedly argued that the story was perversely unfair, misleading and badly slanted. Among other defects, it omitted the “small detail” that Warheads had even been published, immediately raising fundamental questions of inaccuracy, even plagiarism.

What was far worse: Solely on the basis of The Times’s article, Senator Levin and 40 House Democrats promptly demanded investigations: by the Pentagon inspector general, the Federal Communications Commission and the General Accounting Office. None found any of the wrongdoing alleged by The Times in the article for which it was subsequently awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

This ignominy finally came full circle last week in a Washington Times article by Rowan Scarborough, one of the only journalists courageous enough to follow this story through to its wildly improbable conclusion. Scarborough had watched in 2009 while Senator Levin leveraged his powerful position as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee to press the Pentagon IG for a re-investigation. Surely the IG must have overlooked wrongdoing by the previous administration, the chairman’s reasoning went, but with Barack Obama now in power, go back and look even harder!

Pentagon inspectors general follow orders but don’t compromise their integrity. In September 2011, Scarborough reported that, its two-year re-investigation complete, the DOD IG was about to report that Pentagon officials and retired military analysts had complied with all laws and regulations. Having provided lengthy sworn statements to each of those investigations, I kept asking DOD IG public affairs officers when the final report would be released, receiving increasingly evasive replies.

Scarborough eventually uncovered and reported the shocking truth: Senator Levin directly intervened in the investigation in order to influence the wording of the final IG report. This was the political equivalent of jury-tampering but, for a while, it seemed like Senator Levin’s misconduct would go un-noticed. But then, Congressman Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, announced his intention to examine Senator Levin’s meddling. The DOD IG’s final report was issued last week, reported appropriately enough by Rowan Scarborough.

Read more: http://trade.cc/ost

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