Washington, D.C. (Rightcommentary.com): A story has been slowly bubbling, mostly of interest to those of us within the Beltway, regarding the access that the Pentagon provided former military members and other influential individuals - collectively referred to as “military analysts.” The allegation of the Pentagon’s critics is that the Administration was engaged in propaganda. My understanding is that the issue has become a bit heated between the Pentagon and Congress, to the point that some that I know are saying there may be hearings about the issue.

The Pentagon announced last Friday that it was suspending its briefings for retired military officers who often appear as military analysts on television and radio programs.

A spokesman for the Pentagon said the briefings and all other interactions with the military analysts had been suspended indefinitely pending an internal review.

Last Sunday, The New York Times reported that since 2002 the Pentagon has cultivated several dozen military analysts in a campaign to generate favorable coverage of the administration’s wartime performance. The retired officers have made tens of thousands of appearances for television and radio networks, holding forth on Iraq, Afghanistan, detainee issues and terrorism in general.

The Times story alleged that, records and interviews show that the Bush administration worked to transform the analysts into an instrument intended to shape coverage from inside the major networks.

As the Time story reported, the analysts were given hundreds of private briefings with senior government officials, given access to classified information and taken on Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq and Guantánamo Bay in Cuba.

I have some first hand knowledge about these activities, as my position within the Pentagon in Detainee Affairs, required me to brief some of the analysts as well as accompany them to Guantanamo to visit US detention facilities located there.

Let me begin by saying that I never participated in any military analyst “junkets” where the analysts were not allowed to see, hear, ask, say, or write, whatever they wanted or felt. I never observed any behavior that was coercive or otherwise imposing the “Pentagon” on those correspondents. We never asked them to do anything beyond write what they saw, felt, and thought, about the issue. Moreover, I am not aware of any analysts who were denied access to our group because of prior stories they had written, or statements made, about US detention policies. I do know that there were some analysts and reporters we didn’t particularly care for - largely because of sensationalist and sloppy reporting - but we even met with most of them as well.

Howard Kurtz, interviewed a former military analyst and Pentagon Officials about the “scandal”:

US law is very clear about engaging in propaganda: 5 U.S.C. 3107 prohibits the use of appropriated funds to hire publicity experts. Further, Annual appropriations laws, such as the 2004 omnibus statute, usually provide a standard prohibition that funds may not be used “for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofor authorized by Congress.” These restrictions have appeared in appropriations laws for over a half-century, and are little commented on by Congress.

There is a fine line between “outreach” and “propaganda” - and perhaps it is time that both the Executive Branch and Congress agree about which is what. There have been a number of controversies surrounding the use of Federal money to publicize activities of the federal government. These controversies have unfolded in both Democrat and Republican administrations because the legal prohibitions are rather narrow - but the intent that the law was designed to obtain, to not allow the government to sway public opinion through taxpayer funds, is rather broad. Where the line between providing transparency of government, informing people about government activities, on the one hand, and propagandizing on the other, is difficult to legislate.

Without question, some elements of government “outreach” border on propaganda. The desired result from propaganda is a change of the cognitive narrative of the subject in the target audience to further a political agenda. In the case of the detainee issue, it was our hope that through providing access to Guantanamo, reporters would change how they reported the issue - instead of repeating myths and in many cases, out and out lies by al Qaida or sympathizers. Was this propaganda? I don’t think so - and if it was - it was wholly ineffective, so one would have to question the value of it as a propagandist tool.

In an age of 24 hour news, blogs, news journals, radio, TV, etc. - it’s absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to control a story completely. However, the Government is at a considerable disadvantage in combating propaganda of others - and you have what I call the “Who Shot Liberty Valance” problem - once a lie takes hold nothing can be done to displace it.

The government has had a few forays into attempting to use the same tools as “madison avenue” to try and shape its message. Charlotte Beers, a former advertising executive who was once nicknamed “the most powerful woman in advertising,” served as U.S. Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and was the driving force behind the creation of the State Department’s Shared Values campaign, which attempts to counteract growing anti-American sentiment in Arab countries.

Public diplomacy is a term coined in the 1960s to describe aspects of international diplomacy other than the interactions between national governments. It has been closely associated with the United States Information Agency, which used the term to define its mission. It was originally a euphemism for purportedly “truthful propaganda”.

An advertising executive, Beers built her reputation in the private sector, marketing Uncle Ben’s rice before going to work for some of the world’s leading ad agencies including J. Walter Thompson, Tatham-Lair & Kudner and Ogilvy & Mather. She joined the State Department in October 2001, following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Under her supervision, the U.S. State Department produced videos, pamphlets, booklets and other materials, including an advertising campaign intended for broadcast in Muslim countries depicting religious tolerance and thriving Muslims in the United States. However, several Arab nations refused to run the TV ads, and they were discontinued after a focus group in Jordan said the ads left them cold.

She resigned - citing health reasons - but the general feeling was she was largely ineffective in her role at state and it was time to try again.

The reality is that in a society as free as ours, and given the speed at which information travels, and the relentlessly diffuse nature of information - propaganda is extremely difficult for the government to achieve. It does, however, seem easy for smaller groups to achieve - largely because of cults of personality and sympathy that can be generated by groups engaged in government resistance. This was a concern of Secretary Rumsfeld, who wrote:

The United States has also lost several tools that were central to winning the Cold War. Notably, U.S. institutions of public diplomacy and strategic communications — both critical to the current struggle of ideas against Islamic radicalism — no longer exist. Some believed that after the fall of the Soviet Union such mechanisms were no longer needed and could even threaten the free flow of information. But when the U.S. Information Agency became part of the State Department in 1999, the country lost what had been a valuable institution capable of communicating America’s message to international audiences powerfully and repeatedly.

Meanwhile, a new generation of foes has mastered the tools of the information age — chat rooms, blogs, cellphones, social-networking Web sites — and exploits them to spread propaganda, even while the U.S. government remains poorly organized and equipped to counter with the truth in a timely manner. The nation needs a 21st-century “U.S. Agency for Global Communications” to inform, to educate and to compete in the struggle of ideas — and to keep its enemies from capitalizing on the pervasive myths that stoke anti-Americanism.

Further, as Secretary Gates noted:

For example, public relations was invented in the United States, yet we are miserable at communicating to the rest of the world what we are about as a society and a culture, about freedom and democracy, about our policies and our goals. It is just plain embarrassing that al-Qaeda is better at communicating its message on the internet than America. As one foreign diplomat asked a couple of years ago, “How has one man in a cave managed to out-communicate the world’s greatest communication society?” Speed, agility, and cultural relevance are not terms that come readily to mind when discussing U.S. strategic communications.

There remain few tools for the United States to ‘get it’s message out’ on governmental operations. inviting people who can reach a large audience - opinion shapers - is a useful tactic to broadcast your message.

However, in the end - US policy, and not US “PR”, is the real issue here. US policies are dramatically unpopular. The President is dramatically unpopular. No amount of Madison Avenue can fix that. Guantanamo was a public relations problem because it was a POLICY problem. Troop levels in Iraq, and the consequences of those choices, caused real difficulties for foreign policy NOT public relations. US positions on international trade, military agreements, information sharing, and the dominance of US culture, cause problems in the world and in relations with other countries - not our Public Diplomacy (or the lack thereof).

International (and domestic) public reaction to policy must be considered and weighed as a variable in making policy choice. If there was one lesson to be learned from all of this - it would be (in my view) that one.

There is also an irony in all of this - if the Government denies reporters access on the basis of national security - they cry foul claiming the Public’s right to know (a specious argument in many cases). Should the Government OFFER to bring influential people to observe - it’s considered pandering, or worse, propaganda.