Propaganda in the USA

Glenn Greenwald is fast becoming my new fave news analyst. His exhaustive piece today, entitled "CNN, the Pentagon's 'military analyst program' and Gitmo" details how the Pentagon enrolled retired military officials, who were working as "independent analysts" for the major television and cable news networks, into a systematic propaganda campaign aimed at refuting damning reports from Amnesty International's 2005 report on the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

The piece singles out CNN's analyst, retired General Don Shepperd, as indicative of how blatant this campaign was to hide the truth from the American public. Key quote:

Shepperd managed to reach all of these findings [about Gitmo] -- and to label Amnesty's findings "totally false" -- by virtue of a single, three-hour guided tour. Shepperd is the President of The Shepperd Group, which "provides expert guidance and consulting services to defense contractors." CNN's viewers were never told about that. (emphasis Greenwald's)

The Pentagon was forced to release nearly 8,000 pages of documents related to this program to the NY Times and has posted them on its website.

The networks have been completely silent about it. What a sickening realization: that our media may have been knowingly complicit in deceiving the public about what the military was really doing down in Gitmo. It isn't as though many suspected real torture was going on at Gitmo. It's that now proof is all but assured. These papers prove that steps were taken to confuse the public and discredit Amnesty International.

We may as well start calling the mainstream media Pravda. Next step: state-run media.