The Herald Sun, Steve Lewis, 30/4/2008

KEVIN Rudd's election commitment to squeaky clean government is under challenge, amid high-level calls to broaden a scheme regulating lobbyists.

Leading lobbying firms, representing businesses worth billions of dollars, have called on the Government to include accounting and legal firms in the new scheme.

One lobbyist has even labelled the scheme "undemocratic'', amid concerns political fixers will be able to roam the corridors of Parliament without scrutiny.

Industry leaders, including Gavin Anderson, Government Relations Australia and Labor's preferred lobbyist Hawker Britton, have called for legal firms, such as Freehills, and accountants, such as Pricewaterhouse Coopers, to be locked into the scheme.

But John Howard's former chief of staff, Grahame Morris, a senior adviser to PWC, warned the scheme would become "meaningless'' if the Government buckles.

The draft scheme was released for comment earlier this month. It was designed to prevent rogue lobbyists, such as disgraced former WA Premier Brian Burke, from plying their trade in Canberra.

It also gives Cabinet Secretary John Faulkner new powers to deregister lobbyists, effectively removing their right to work in Canberra's competitive environment.

Bruce Hawker, managing director of Hawker Britton, said a flaw in the scheme is that legal and accounting firms will be able to "escape the provisions of the register and the spirit of the new arrangements''.

"If they are lobbying the Government on behalf of a third party, they should be under the same strictures as any professional lobbying firm,'' Mr Hawker said.

Long-time lobbyist Colin Parks, from Gavin Anderson, said it was well known that accounting and legal firms lobbied on behalf of their clients.

"We regularly run into representatives of legal and accounting firms in Parliament House,'' Mr Parks said.

"Lawyers and accountants should be registered as lobbyists.''

Another lobbyist, former Howard Government adviser Ian Hanke, has written to every minister, slamming the draft scheme as "flawed, contradictory and undemocratic''.

Mr Hanke argues it will create "two classes of lobbyists''.

"Denying access to Ministers at a whim, while according it to others, is a travesty of democratic principles,'' Mr Hanke said.

But Mr Morris, head of PWC's federal government services group, cautioned against broadening the scheme.

"If they are going to include people like accountants and lawyers, then they would have to include anyone who deals with government at any stage,'' he said.

The Herald, Robbie Dinwoodie, 30/4/2008

The companies behind a controversial Lanarkshire hospital development stand to gain £145m for an £8.4m initial investment, according to research by a team of leading economists into the huge profits made by firms behind PFI deals.

Jim and Margaret Cuthbert analysed details released through Freedom of Information requests into projects such as the development of Hairmyres Hospital in East Kilbride.

They claim sometimes more than double the capital could have been raised through conventional public means via the National Loan Fund, for the same costs levied by the PFI operators.

Their financial analysis has nothing to do with the other way PFI firms make their money, which is through management and service charges for building, operating and maintaining hospitals, schools or colleges.

The Cuthberts have focused purely on the financing of the deals.

Their presentation to members of Holyrood's Finance Committee today looks in detail at Hairmyres Hospital, claiming documents show that the consortium comprising construction firm Keir and financiers Innisfree put in just £100 in equity to the project initially.

They then put in £8.4m in so-called "subordinate debt", charged at a rate of return estimated at 18.8% annually. Another £65m was raised in outside cash, known as "senior debt" at the much lower rate of around 7.2%.

The contract then provided for the senior debt to be paid off more quickly, while the subordinate debt sat accumulating more interest. The result was that the outlay of £8.4m plus £100 equity will recoup £145.2m - almost as much as the £147.1m repaid to the senior debt which had been initially eight times as much.

The economists claim that under this financial mechanism, the cost of financing Hairmyres was just under double (a ratio of 1.97) what conventional public financing would have cost.

For the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh this ratio was 2.04; for James Watt College in Greenock it was 1.97; for Perth and Kinross Council office buildings 1.82; for Hereford Hospital in England 1.68; and for a tranche of schools in the Highlands it was 1.49.

There is also concern over the way the original consortium members for such projects can cash in early. At Hairmyres, five years into the project the two original partners sold on part of their share and recouped £8.1m each, almost double what they had originally invested, while three years later the construction firm Keir sold out its remaining stake to Innisfree for £13.8m.

SNP MSP Alex Neil had been in the forefront of demanding the information on the Hairmyres project.

He said last night: "What this shows is that you could have got two and a half hospitals for the price of one using conventional finance. Hairmyres has been a complete rip-off for the taxpayer and shows that PFI is the most expensive way of financing public facilities.

"This has been a licence to print money on the public purse.

"This shows beyond any reasonable doubt that PFI is far too expensive and only exists to allow these companies to line their pockets at taxpayers' expense."

The Guardian, Andrew Sparrow, 30/4/2008

Ian Hargreaves, a former editor of the Independent and the New Statesman, is to take charge of communications at the Foreign Office, it was announced today.

He will join the department as strategic communications director on secondment from Ofcom, where he is a senior partner and board member responsible for the communications watchdog's international activities.

The Foreign Office said he was "one of the UK's leading professional communicators" and he would be "helping the FCO to develop its global campaigning skills and to broaden the debate on foreign policy to a wider public in the UK and abroad".

As well as editing the Independent and the New Statesman, Hargreaves has been deputy editor of the Financial Times and director of news and current affairs at the BBC.

Hargreaves will replace Lucian Hudson, the current director of communications at the Foreign Office, who is moving to another post in the department.

EuropeanVoice.com, Jim Brunsden, 30/4/2008

Commission defends access-to-documents proposals against criticisms.

The European Commission is insisting that its proposed reform of the rules on access to EU documents will increase transparency, on 30 April, despite criticisms that they could reduce rather than improve document access.

The civil liberties NGO Statewatch has claimed that two of the Commission's proposed changes will be “highly retrogressive”. It claims that the proposals would narrow the scope of what is officially considered to be a document. It also claims that, under the new rules, the right of the public to have access to the full-text of documents would be limited to documents associated with legislative acts and “non-legislative acts of general application” – potentially only a small number of the total number of documents produced. The European Citizen's Action Service (ECAS) also says that “a distinction between legislation and non-legislative documents could create ‘grey zones' for hiding information”.

According to a Commission spokesperson, however, “the aim of the changes is essentially to increase transparency, improve the efficiency of the system in operation and also clarify certain of the articles”.

“The objective is to make the process more proactive in terms of documents within the legislative process, to make those public, unless of course they fall within the existing exceptions.”

The Commission has made its proposals following adverse judgements at the European Court of Justice, and a request for changes from the European Parliament. A public consultation was carried out during 2007.

One of the changes would clarify the rules on blacking out of names in documents. The Commission's widespread use of this practice, which is has claimed is necessary on privacy grounds, was criticized by the ECJ in a judgement on 8 November 2007. The case concerned a request from the Bavarian Lager Company to see the full minutes of a meeting held between the Commission and the UK Department of Trade and Industry, including names of participants.

The proposals to revise the legislation, which were put forward by the Commission on 30 April, would make it clear that: “Disclosure of names, titles and functions of public office holders, civil servants and interest representatives in relation will their professional activities is deemed to be lawful under the data protection legislation unless, given the particular circumstances, disclosure would adversely affect the persons concerned.”

The Commission is also seeking to clarify member states' ability to block public access to documents which they have sent to the EU institutions. The new draft rules say that the Commission will deny access to documents at member states' request – but only if the member state can justify it under either the special exceptions allowed in the EU access to documents regulation (eg, that disclosure would undermine relations with a foreign power), or under rules contained in their national law. That follows an ECJ ruling that criticised a Commission decision not to disclose documents from the German government, in which Germany argued that a factory enlargement and airport extension should be allowed on an area protected under the EU's habitats directive.

Other proposed changes to the legislation include that the EU institutions should have more time to respond to appeals from people who have been initially refused access to a document. The current deadline for the institutions to respond is 15 days, but the Commission notes that it has proved in practice very difficult to respond during this period, and is proposing to extend the limit to 30 days.

Global Research, John Pilger, 24/4/2008

John Pilger argues that an unreported war is being waged by the US to restore power to the privileged classes at the expense of the poor

Beyond the sound and fury of its conquest of Iraq and campaign against Iran, the world's dominant power is waging a largely unreported war on another continent - Latin America. Using proxies, Washington aims to restore and reinforce the political control of a privileged group calling itself middle-class, to shift the responsibility for massacres and drug trafficking away from the psychotic regime in Colombia and its mafiosi, and to extinguish hopes raised among Latin America's impoverished majority by the reform governments of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia.

In Colombia, the main battleground, the class nature of the war is distorted by the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the Farc, whose own resort to kidnapping and the drugs trade has provided an instrument with which to smear those who have distinguished Latin America's epic history of rebellion by opposing the proto-fascism of George W Bush's regime. "You don't fight terror with terror," said President Hugo Chávez as US warplanes bombed to death thousands of civilians in Afghanistan following the 11 September 2001 attacks. Thereafter, he was a marked man. Yet, as every poll has shown, he spoke for the great majority of human beings who have grasped that the "war on terror" is a crusade of domination. Almost alone among national leaders standing up to Bush, Chávez was declared an enemy and his plans for a functioning social democracy independent of the United States a threat to Washington's grip on Latin America. "Even worse," wrote the Latin America specialist James Petras, "Chávez's nationalist policies represented an alternative in Latin America at a time (2000-2003) when mass insurrections, popular uprisings and the collapse of pro-US client rulers (Argentina, Ecuador and Bolivia) were constant front-page news."

It is impossible to underestimate the threat of this alternative as perceived by the "middle classes" in countries which have an abundance of privilege and poverty. In Venezuela, their "grotesque fantasies of being ruled by a 'brutal communist dictator'", to quote Petras, are reminiscent of the paranoia of the white population that backed South Africa's apartheid regime. Like in South Africa, racism in Venezuela is rampant, with the poor ignored, despised or patronised, and a Caracas shock jock allowed casually to dismiss Chávez, who is of mixed race, as a "monkey". This fatuous venom has come not only from the super-rich behind their walls in suburbs called Country Club, but from the pretenders to their ranks in middle-level management, journalism, public relations, the arts, education and the other professions, who identify vicariously with all things American. Journalists in broadcasting and the press have played a crucial role - acknowledged by one of the generals and bankers who tried unsuccessfully to overthrow Chávez in 2002. "We couldn't have done it without them," he said. "The media were our secret weapon."

Many of these people regard themselves as liberals, and have the ear of foreign journalists who like to describe themselves as being "on the left". This is not surprising. When Chávez was first elected in 1998, Venezuela was not an archetypical Latin American tyranny, but a liberal democracy with certain freedoms, run by and for its elite, which had plundered the oil revenue and let crumbs fall to the invisible millions in the barrios. A pact between the two main parties, known as puntofijismo, resembled the convergence of new Labour and the Tories in Britain and Republicans and Democrats in the US. For them, the idea of popular sovereignty was anathema, and still is.

Take higher education. At the taxpayer-funded elite "public" Venezuelan Central University, more than 90 per cent of the students come from the upper and "middle" classes. These and other elite students have been infiltrated by CIA-linked groups and, in defending their privilege, have been lauded by foreign liberals.

With Colombia as its front line, the war on democracy in Latin America has Chávez as its main target. It is not difficult to understand why. One of Chávez's first acts was to revitalise the oil producers' organisation Opec and force the oil price to record levels. At the same time he reduced the price of oil for the poorest countries in the Caribbean region and central America, and used Venezuela's new wealth to pay off debt, notably Argentina's, and, in effect, expelled the International Monetary Fund from a continent over which it once ruled. He has cut poverty by half - while GDP has risen dramatically. Above all, he gave poor people the confidence to believe that their lives would improve.

The irony is that, unlike Fidel Castro in Cuba, he presented no real threat to the well-off, who have grown richer under his presidency. What he has demonstrated is that a social democracy can prosper and reach out to its poor with genuine welfare, and without the extremes of "neo liberalism" - a decidedly unradical notion once embraced by the British Labour Party. Those ordinary Vene zuelans who abstained during last year's constitutional referendum were protesting that a "moderate" social democracy was not enough while the bureaucrats remained corrupt and the sewers overflowed.

Across the border in Colombia, the US has made Venezuela's neighbour the Israel of Latin America. Under "Plan Colombia", more than $6bn in arms, planes, special forces, mercenaries and logistics have been showered on some of the most murderous people on earth: the inheritors of Pinochet's Chile and the other juntas that terrorised Latin America for a generation, their various gestapos trained at the School of the Americas in Georgia. "We not only taught them how to torture," a former American trainer told me, "we taught them how to kill, murder, eliminate." That remains true of Colombia, where government-inspired mass terror has been documented by Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and many others. In a study of 31,656 extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances between 1996 and 2006, the Colombian Commission of Jurists found that 46 per cent had been murdered by right-wing death squads and 14 per cent by Farc guerrillas. The para militaries were responsible for most of the three million victims of internal displacement. This misery is a product of Plan Colombia's pseudo "war on drugs", whose real purpose has been to eliminate the Farc. To that goal has now been added a war of attrition on the new popular democracies, especially Venezuela.

US special forces "advise" the Colombian military to cross the border into Venezuela and murder and kidnap its citizens and infiltrate paramilitaries, and so test the loyalty of the Venezuelan armed forces. The model is the CIA-run Contra campaign in Honduras in the 1980s that brought down the reformist government in Nicaragua. The defeat of the Farc is now seen as a prelude to an all-out attack on Venezuela if the Vene zuelan elite - reinvigorated by its narrow referendum victory last year - broadens its base in state and local government elections in November.

America's man and Colombia's Pinochet is President Álvaro Uribe. In 1991, a declassified report by the US Defence Intelligence Agency revealed the then Senator Uribe as having "worked for the Medellín Cartel" as a "close personal friend" of the cartel's drugs baron, Pablo Escobar. To date, 62 of his political allies have been investigated for close collaboration with paramilitaries. A feature of his rule has been the fate of journalists who have illuminated his shadows. Last year, four leading journalists received death threats after criticising Uribe. Since 2002, at least 31 journalists have been assassinated in Colombia. Uribe's other habit is smearing trade unions and human rights workers as "collaborators with the Farc". This marks them. Colombia's death squads, wrote Jenny Pearce, author of the acclaimed Under the Eagle: US Intervention in Central America and the Caribbean (1982), "are increasingly active, confident that the president has been so successful in rallying the country against the Farc that little attention will shift to their atrocities".

Uribe was personally championed by Tony Blair, reflecting Britain's long-standing, mostly secret role in Latin America. "Counter-insurgency assistance" to the Colombian military, up to its neck in death-squad alliances, includes training by the SAS of units such as the High Mountain Battalions, condemned repeatedly for atrocities. On 8 March, Colombian officers were invited by the Foreign Office to a "counter-insurgency seminar" at the Wilton Park conference centre in southern England. Rarely has the Foreign Office so brazenly paraded the killers it mentors.

The western media's role follows earlier models, such as the campaigns that cleared the way for the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the credibility given to lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The softening-up for an attack on Venezuela is well under way, with the repetition of similar lies and smears.

Cocaine trail

On 3 February, the Observer devoted two pages to claims that Chávez was colluding in the Colombian drugs trade. Similarly to the paper's notorious bogus scares linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda, the Observer's headline read, "Revealed: Chávez role in cocaine trail to Europe". Allegations were unsubstantiated; hearsay uncorroborated. No source was identified. Indeed, the reporter, clearly trying to cover himself, wrote: "No source I spoke to accused Chávez himself of having a direct role in Colombia's giant drug trafficking business."

In fact, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has reported that Venezuela is fully participating in international anti-drugs programmes and in 2005 seized the third-highest amount of cocaine in the world. Even the Foreign Office minister Kim Howells has referred to "Venezuela's tre mendous co-operation".

The drugs smear has recently been reinforced with reports that Chávez has an "increasingly public alliance [with] the Farc" (see "Dangerous liaisons", New Statesman, 14 April). Again, there is "no evidence", says the secretary general of the Organisation of American States. At Uribe's request, and backed by the French government, Chávez played a mediating role in seeking the release of hostages held by the Farc. On 1 March, the negotiations were betrayed by Uribe who, with US logistical assistance, fired missiles at a camp in Ecuador, killing Raú Reyes, the Farc's highest-level negotiator. An "email" recovered from Reyes's laptop is said by the Colombian military to show that the Farc has received $300m from Chávez. The allegation is fake. The actual document refers only to Chávez in relation to the hostage exchange. And on 14 April, Chávez angrily criticised the Farc. "If I were a guerrilla," he said, "I wouldn't have the need to hold a woman, a man who aren't soldiers. Free the civilians!"

However, these fantasies have lethal purpose. On 10 March, the Bush administration announced that it had begun the process of placing Venezuela's popular democracy on a list of "terrorist states", along with North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Sudan and Iran, the last of which is currently awaiting attack by the world's leading terrorist state.

The Telegraph, 29/4/2008

An employee of BAA is alleged to have tried to influence consultants advising the Competition Commission on a possible break-up of the airports operator.

The lobbying is believed to have occurred after the commission carried out a tender process for consultants to advise it on BAA's plans to build a new runway at Stansted airport in January.

BAA said it regretted the "unauthorised actions" of one of its employees and said it had co-operated with the commission on the issue.

"We have explained to the commission that the employee concerned has no involvement in BAA's response to the CC's market investigation."

The commission launched an investigation after it became concerned that there "may have been interference in the tendering and appointment process".

The regulator also initiated a second tender process.

In a statement, the regulator said it took "any suggestion of interference in the discharge of its functions very seriously".

Meanwhile The Sunday Telegraph has revealed that the Government has quashed attempts by BAA to hand a lucrative directorship to Sir David Rowlands, a former civil servant who played a key role in directing airport policy.

Sir David, who spent four years as the permanent secretary of the Department for Transport before retiring last May, is understood to have been offered a role as non-executive director.

Sources close to Downing Street said he had accepted the post in principle before the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments recommended against the move because of its political sensitivity.

EuropeanVoice.com, Jim Brunsden, 24/4/2008

The European Commission will next week present proposals  to give citizens greater access to documents held by  EU institutions.

The move to increase transparency, which will be published on 30 April, follows adverse judgements from the European Court of Justice (ECJ), which criticised the application of the existing rules on access to documents.

According to a draft version of the proposal, the Commission will seek to alter provisions on member states' right to veto the disclosure of documents. The new rules would require EU institutions to consult member states before granting access to documents provided by national governments, unless the document is already in the public domain. Member states will be able to request that a document is not made public, but only on the grounds that doing so would contravene either provisions contained in the EU regulation on access to documents or national law.

The Commission argues that the redrafting is needed following a ruling from the ECJ in December 2007, which found that the EU executive was at fault for not disclosing documents from the German government after a request from an environmental campaign group. The documents concerned a request from Germany that the enlargement of a factory and the extension of a runway should be allowed on an area covered by the EU's habitats directive. The ECJ ruled that, under current access-to-documents regulation, member states can block disclosure only if they make an objection based on the regulation's list of ‘exceptions to publication'.

Disclosure

The Commission is also proposing to limit the current practice of blacking out names and other personal data in disclosed documents. This follows a 8 November ruling from the ECJ that current practice is too restrictive. The redrafted legislation would state that the disclosure of names and titles of “public office holders, civil servants, and interest representatives” should be allowed, unless it would adversely affect them.

The European Parliament's civil liberties, justice and home affairs committee will hold a public hearing on the proposal on 2 June. One issue to be discussed will be whether the proposal should be redrafted to take into account new provisions on data protection contained in the Lisbon treaty. These include, notably, the opportunity to extend the scope of the regulation to cover other EU institutions, such as the European Central Bank, the European Investment Bank, and the European Court of Justice. The current regulation covers only the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament and the Commission.

The Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), a campaign group on the activities of lobbyists, has been highly critical of Commission decisions to black out names. Oliver Hodemann, an official for the CEO, said that blacking out lobbyists' identity was “stretching the interpretation of the regulation”. He said that the Commission had not performed well against the current targets for responding to access requests, noting that there had been a “very lax implementation of the deadlines to respond”.

International Herald Tribune, 25/4/2008

Senior lawmakers in the European Parliament have recommended that a business group be expelled from its office inside the legislature, saying it is seeking improper influence over legislation and other parliamentary business, officials said Friday.

The European Business and Parliament Scheme — an umbrella grouping of parliamentarians and 28 multinational companies that include Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica, software maker Microsoft and railway company Thalys — has been set up to give lawmakers firsthand business experience and industry an opportunity to get involved in shaping economic policies.

Lawmakers' concerns about a possible conflict of interest center on an arrangement under which the EU Parliament pays for some of the costs associated with the group's work, including phone bills and some travel and accommodation expenses. Saying the group is too intertwined with the assembly's affairs, they note that it even has a parliamentary e-mail account of the type reserved for lawmakers.

The concerns have emerged as the EU assembly seeks to clean up its image after a series of allegations of fraud by some of its members and a lack of transparency in tracking lawmakers' use of expense accounts.

The business grouping said its activities are transparent and that it has broken no rules. It said it had not yet been informed of the recommendation to expel it from the building and cut its financial support. Leaders of the EU assembly's political parties made the recommendation this week to the assembly's administration, which is expected to approve it.

The Guardian, Bill Blanko, 24/4/2008

Bill Blanko is unsettled as an alarming number of his Westminster colleagues 'cross the line' to work as lobbyists or 'PR consultants'

Suddenly, in the time it takes the prime minister to perform a humiliating tax U-turn, the lobby has been plunged into a series of U-turns too.

No sooner are we back clinging safely to the bosom of the press gallery after the Easter recess, than we're rocked by job moves, a lobby brain-drain and – worse – defections to PR or lobbying.

I'm talking career U-turns here. It's a disturbing trend, I can tell you. Even I have been tapped up!

There I was, crossing the central lobby earlier this week when I was assailed by a former lobby correspondent now employed (it would be a lie to say working) in the grubby trade of lobbying. (No doubt he was waiting to grease the sweaty palm of some backbench MP who had nothing better to do than go out to lunch with a lobbyist.)

"Bill," my former colleague greeted me, slapping his hand on my shoulder in that spivvy way PR people do. "You could treble your salary by becoming a public affairs consultant."

"A what?" I said. "All right, a lobbyist," he said sheepishly.

"No thank you," I said, horrified. "I'm very happy at Red Top Towers, thank you," I lied. (All those rows with the editor over missed stories, run-ins with the managing editor over my expenses and all those Sundays and bank holidays I have to work suddenly flashed through my head.) "But don't tell Mrs Blanko."

But an alarming number of our colleagues are "crossing the line", as I believe they call it in the PR trade. I've always thought "crossing the line" had something to do with joining the Masons. But perhaps they're one and the same thing.

This week James Hardy, the Harry Enfield lookalike political correspondent of the BBC, held a soiree in the Marquis of Granby as he said goodbye to two-ways on College Green and outside 10 Downing Street, having signed up as head of news for wee Dougie Alexander's Department for International Development.

Good boozer, the Marquis. Big glass-fronted fridges behind the bar, well stocked with champagne. And they put a slice of lime, not lemon, in the gin and tonic. (I've had many a G&T heart-starter in there on the way to work.) But it's a sad loss. James was one of us, a royal correspondent and political editor of the Press Association and the Daily Mirror before joining the Beeb.

And before James, Guto Hari, the boyo from the Welsh valleys with the Max Boyce baritone voice, quit the BBC's political team for the lobbyists Fleishman Hillard. How could he?

I did hear in the press gallery bar – like you do - that the firm is advising, among others, the MDC in Zimbabwe. I expect that because their leader is called Morgan, Guto thought he was Welsh.

And now Jenny Scott, Andrew Neil's co-presenter on the BBC's Daily Politics show, is off to become PR chief at the Bank of England. Mind you, my man operating the autocue tells me she was begged by the suits at the Beeb to apply for Evan "Tinsel Tits" Davis's old job, economics editor, and then was hugely hacked off when they gave it to the posh Sloane from Newsnight, Stephanie Flanders, instead.

However, before you fret that the BBC has no political staff left, consider this: colleagues who were patrolling the committee corridor during Monday evening's "I get it" plea to the PLP by the Big Clunking Fist tell me there were no fewer than eight BBC political journalists among the hacks. (Nick Robinson + producer, James Landale, Michael Crick, Carole Walker, John Pienaar + producer and Iain Watson, since you ask.)

Another former lobby correspondent, former Western Mail, Daily Telegraph and Scotsman political correspondent Jon Hibbs, held a soiree the same night as James Hardy. Well, we didn't come into the lobby to pay for our own drinks, did we?

He's leaving the Department of Health, where he was deputy director (news) for a secondment as communications director for the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse. Yes, you read that correctly: substance misuse. I'm sure we didn't come into the lobby to misuse substances, either, whatever it means.

Now civil servants know a good boozer too. Jon bought the drinks at the rather classy Walker's Wine and Ale Bar, up near Trafalgar Square, just off Whitehall. It's a favourite of the Ministry of Defence chaps in their blazers and chinos, I'm told, and they serve a ferociously chilled sancerre and a very decent rioja Faustino.

I'm told that James's crowd included a few of those politically correct BBC types, while a few of the lobby's old guard were at Jon's thrash, including the Guardian's very own John Carvel, latest in a lobby dynasty, and Nick Timmins, former Times political correspondent, now public policy guru on the FT and the man with the untidiest beard in the lobby.

Ah, nostalgia isn't what it used to be. When I was youngster in the lobby (yes, some time ago, I confess) John's father Bob was political editor of the Evening Standard and one of a trio of lobby legends – along with the great Alan Watkins (still a living legend) and the late, great and much lamented Vincent Hanna of Newsnight - who used to descend on a byelection and terrorise hapless candidates.

In the days when the candidates and their minders from Westminster used to hold morning press conferences at byelections every day, (madness, I know) I remember Bob confronting one terrified young candidate in a Scots accent that was as rich and peaty as a fine single malt.

"Laddie," roared Bob. "Aa've been coverrring byelections fer forrrty yearrrs…" Pause. Silence. "And yer the worrrst candidate aa've everrr seen." A lost deposit followed, I recall.

Besides the BBC exodus, the Times is losing Greg Hurst, the softly-spoken vicar's son from Maidenhead and author of Charles Kennedy: A Tragic Flaw, who's off to work on the news desk at Wapping. A tragic sort of existence, if you ask me. I don't know which is worse, lobbying, PR or the news desk.

Oh dear. This is all very unsettling. A large chardonnay in there, please, Clive. Now, where's the phone number of my mate who said I could treble my salary…?

AlterNet, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, 25/4/2008

The Bush Administration has spent millions on deceptive PR to sell the war, as recently documented in the New York Times. Where's the fallout?

David Barstow of the New York Times has written the first installment in what is already a stunning exposé of the Bush Administration's most powerful propaganda weapon used to sell and manage the war on Iraq: the embedding of military propagandists directly into the TV networks as on-air commentators. We and others have long criticized the widespread TV network practice of hiring former military officials to serve as analysts, but even in our most cynical moments we did not anticipate how bad it was. Barstow has painstakingly documented how these analysts, most of them military industry consultants and lobbyists, were directly chosen, managed, coordinated and given their talking points by the Pentagon's ministers of propaganda.

Thanks to the two-year investigation by the New York Times, we today know that Victoria Clarke, then the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, launched the Pentagon military analyst program in early 2002. These supposedly independent military analysts were in fact a coordinated team of pro-war propagandists, personally recruited by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and acting under Clarke's tutelage and development.

One former participant, NBC military analyst Kenneth Allard, has called the effort "psyops on steroids." As Barstow reports, "Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as 'message force multipliers' or 'surrogates' who could be counted on to deliver administration 'themes and messages' to millions of Americans 'in the form of their own opinions.' … Don Meyer, an aide to Ms. Clarke, said a strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war."

Clarke and her senior aide, Brent T. Krueger, eventually signed up more than 75 retired military officers who penned newspaper op/ed columns and appeared on television and radio news shows as military analysts. The Pentagon held weekly meetings with the military analysts, which continued as of April 20, 2008, when the New York Times ran Barstow's story. The program proved so successful that it was expanded to issues besides the Iraq War. "Other branches of the

administration also began to make use of the analysts. Mr. Gonzales, then the attorney general, met with them soon after news leaked that the government was wiretapping terrorism suspects in the United States without warrants, Pentagon records show. When David H. Petraeus was appointed the commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet with the analysts."

Barstow spent two years digging, using the Freedom of Information Act and attorneys to force the Bush Administration to release some 8,000 pages of documents now under lock and key at the New York Times. This treasure trove should result in additional stories, giving them a sort of "Pentagon Papers" of Iraq war propaganda.

In 1971, when the Times printed excerpts of the Pentagon Papers on its front page, it precipitated a constitutional showdown with the Nixon Administration over the deception and lies that sold the war in Vietnam. The Pentagon Papers issue dominated the news media back then. Today, however, Barstow's stunning report is being ignored by the most important news media in America -- TV news -- the source where most Americans, unfortunately, get most of their information.

Joseph Goebbels, eat your heart out. Goebbels is history's most notorious war propagandist, but even he could not have invented a smoother PR vehicle for selling and maintaining media and public support for a war: embed trusted "independent" military experts into the TV newsroom. As with most propaganda, the key to the success of this effort was the element of concealment, as these analysts and the Bush administration hid the fact that their talking points and marching orders were coming directly from the Pentagon.

The use of these analysts was a glaring violation of journalistic standards. As the code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists explains, journalists are supposed to:

* Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.

* Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.

* Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement,

public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.

* Disclose unavoidable conflicts.

* Be vigilant and courageous about holding those with power accountable.

* Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests and resist their pressure to influence news coverage.

* Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money.

The networks using these analysts as journalists shamelessly failed to vet their experts and ignored the obvious conflicts of hiring a person with financial relationships to companies profiting from war to be an on-air analyst of war. They acted as if war was a football game and their military commentators were former coaches and players familiar with the rules and strategies. The TV networks even paid these "analysts" for their propaganda, enabling them to present themselves as "third party experts" while parroting White House talking points to sell the war.

Now that Barstow has blown their cover, the TV networks have generally refused to comment about this matter. Further compounding their violations of the public trust, they are blacking out coverage of the New York Times exposé, no doubt on advice of their own PR and crisis management advisors.

Since the 1920s there have been laws passed to stop the government from doing what Barstow has exposed. It is actually illegal in the United States for the government to propagandize its own citizens. As Barstow's report demonstrates, these laws have been repeatedly violated, are not enforced and are clearly inadequate. The U.S. Congress therefore needs to investigate this and the rest of the Bush propaganda campaign that sold the war in Iraq.

The attack and occupation of Iraq continues, with no end in sight. Estimates of the number of Iraqi dead range from the hundreds of thousands to more than a million. The cost to American taxpayers will eventually be in the trillions of dollars. More than 4,000 US soldiers have lost their lives, and this is just a part of the horrific toll of mental and physical disability that the war is taking on hundreds of thousands of troops and their families.

This war would never have been possible had the mainstream news media done its job. Instead, it has repeated the Big Lies that sold the war. This war would never have been possible without the millions of dollars spent by the Bush Administration on sophisticated and deceptive public relations techniques such as the Pentagon military analyst program that David Barstow has exposed. It should come as no surprise to anyone that Victoria Clarke, who designed and oversaw this Pentagon propaganda machine, now works as a commentator for TV network news. She may have changed jobs and employers since leaving the Pentagon, but her work remains the same.

The Independent, 26/4/2008

In the wake of the mysterious Israeli bombing raid on a Syrian facility last September, neither party wanted to talk about what had happened. But now the truth, or at least one interpretation of it, has come out on Washington's Capitol Hill.

American security officials this week presented members of Congress with evidence supposedly showing that Syria, with North Korean assistance, was building a nuclear reactor on the target site and that this facility was "not intended for peaceful activities". Pictures have been released allegedly taken inside the facility showing a reactor core being built as well as an image of North Koreans working there.

There is no independent way to verify any of this, especially since the installation has now been destroyed. We must rely on the integrity of the Israeli and US intelligence services. That is where we hit a problem. The former US Secretary of State Colin Powell presented similar evidence to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003 showing what we were told was strong evidence of Iraqi storage of weapons of mass destruction. As we all know, that intelligence turned out to be bogus.

This is not to say that the Syrian government and the North Korean government were not indeed setting up a covert nuclear plant and thus breaking international law. But it does emphasise that the US security services have a severe credibility problem.

There is another question raised by all this. If the US and Israel were so convinced of Syria's malign intentions, why the secrecy? The head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed El Baradei, has criticised the US for not passing on this information sooner. The IAEA also says Israel should have given its investigators a chance to investigate the purported reactor before they bombed it.

A further question is: why release this information now, having kept a lid on it for so long? One explanation is that it is part of an attempt to disrupt the present efforts to bring North Korea back into the international fold, a process some in the White House reportedly find difficult to stomach.

If so, this episode shows that elements in the US administration have learnt nothing from Iraq. They are still using intelligence for propaganda purposes. As for the Israeli bombing raid itself, apparently sanctioned by the US, it is hard to see in this anything other than a dangerous contempt for the autonomy of the IAEA and an enduring disregard for international law.

The New York Times, 24/4/2008

Resisting every inch of the way, the powerful National Association of Manufacturers has finally agreed to follow Congress’s new ethics law and disclose which of its members have been funding its lobbying operations on Capitol Hill.

Welcome to the sunshine club. Like other lobbying groups, the trade association must disclose to Congress and the taxpayers which of its 11,000 members have been essential to developing lobbying strategies or contributed payments of $5,000 or more each quarter to the effort. Until this week, N.A.M. has refused to do so, arguing that such disclosure somehow violates its privacy rights and its rights to free speech.

Tracking the quid pro quo money flow in Washington is an urgent priority and long overdue. Last year, Congress tightened disclosure requirements for lobbyists’ war chests — but only after a raft of scandals. It is encouraging that the courts have so far rejected N.A.M.’s arguments. The law was plainly written to smoke out stealth lobbying organizations, not to protect Washington insiders.

Unfortunately, sunshine remains only a sometimes thing in the capital. One of the biggest problems in the midst of this year’s billion-dollar campaign is the failure of the Federal Election Commission to write the rules for what was supposed to be another breakthrough reform: full disclosure of the multiple donations bundled by lobbyists to court candidates.

That has been stymied by the tooth-and-claw standoff in the Senate that has left the F.E.C. short four of its six members and without the quorum it needs to do its work. Senate Republicans demand that the F.E.C. vacancies be filled as a package, the better to protect a particularly unqualified party wheelhorse. That means there is no official referee for any of this year’s campaign mayhem. Let the voters beware.

The Guardian, Simon Tisdall, 28/4/2008

Here we go again: anonymous briefings, dubious dossiers and claims of secret weapons. Watch out, Iran

A shrill cacophony of Washington voices is once again attempting to ratchet up pressure on Iran over its "malign influence" in Iraq and its suspect nuclear activities. Although military options remain on hold, Bush administration officials have been briefing for the first time on possible targets inside the Islamic republic.

A dossier purporting to contain new evidence of Iranian assistance to Iraqi Shia militias opposed to the US presence is expected to be published in the coming days. The dossier, ordered by the US commander, General David Petraeus, will detail recently discovered caches of rockets, mortars, roadside bombs and armour-piercing explosives that the US says were supplied by Iran.

US officials claim increased rocket attacks on Baghdad's Green Zone, including one during last week's visit by the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, are a result of Iran's accelerated efforts.

The defence secretary, Robert Gates, protested angrily last week: "What Iranians are doing is killing American servicemen inside Iraq." He also said Iran "is hellbent on acquiring nuclear weapons".

Much of the new information was gathered during recent joint US and Iraqi army operations in Basra against Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army militia, which military officials said revealed the startling depth of Iran's influence there. Other evidence was reportedly obtained from alleged Iranian agents detained in Iraq.

In a series of briefings to American media, administration officials claimed Tehran had reneged on last year's agreement with Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to halt weapons supplies. Instead, they say, Iran has continued to train, equip and arm militiamen at camps inside Iran before sending them back across the border.

Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told a Pentagon press conference no military action was currently being contemplated. But he said Iran, which was showing no sign of backing off, should not underestimate the depth of Washington's concerns or its determination to resolve them.

A third Middle East conflict involving US forces, in addition to Iraq and Afghanistan, would be "extremely stressful", Mullen admitted. But in a clear indication of the form any future strikes might take, he went on: "I have reserve capability, particularly in our navy and our air force. So it would be a mistake to think we are out of combat capability."

In a show of possibly ill-advised complacency, Mohammad Ali Hosseini, Iran's foreign ministry spokesman, remained undeterred two days later. "We see it as unlikely that they [the US] plan to enter a new disaster which they themselves believe will have unpleasant consequences for the region and the world," he said.

Yet two unidentified senior administration officials told the New York Times last week that the feasibility of attacks, presumably launched by air from US bases and ships in the Gulf, had already been discussed. The targets were training camps, safe houses and weapons storehouses inside Iran, they said.

Even limited attacks of this nature could nevertheless provoke a fierce Iranian response. That in turn would inevitably lower the threshold for subsequent US action against Iranian nuclear facilities, a development hawks in Washington and Jerusalem would welcome.

With tensions apparently set to rise, the pattern of US behaviour begins to look familiar: more or less justified claims about terrorism, secret weapons and mass destruction programmes; debatable intelligence, anonymous briefing, threats of unilateral action and the bypassing of relevant institutions such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the UN security council.

Not coincidentally, perhaps, the US produced another dossier last week, accusing Syria of building a nuclear reactor with North Korean help. Its failure to share its evidence with the IAEA brought a sharp rebuke from the agency. Syria, Iran's closest Arab ally, has frequently been accused by Washington of aiding anti-coalition forces in Iraq, and by Israel of fuelling Palestinian militancy.

Although the bellicose drumbeat is worrying, some regional experts suggest Washington's primary aim is to force Iran and Syria to back off in Iraq (and Lebanon and Palestine) and effectively isolate them, rather than to find an excuse to attack them. Reducing Iranian influence is seen as crucial to winning broad Arab support for the Maliki government, something Rice worked on during a Gulf visit last week.

EUobserver, honor Mahony, 24/4/2008

The European Parliament is to take steps to sever the close links it has with a business scheme that operates from within the Brussels assembly to boost contacts between MEPs and companies.

The European Business and Parliament Scheme (EBPS), whose patron is parliament chief Hans-Gert Poettering, has an office in the parliament and its employees share the same email address as euro-deputies.

The set-up - after two initial refusals because of lack of space - was approved on 26 September 2007 by the quaestors of the parliament, MEPs who look after the administrative affairs of the Brussels house.

The scheme's 28 affiliated companies include major internationals such as software giant Microsoft, and the energy companies BP, RWE and Gaz de France.

It provides a range of programmes including "company attachments" in which MEPs or other senior officials of the parliament can spend a day or two with a company to provide "an insight" into how the business works.

The official website of the scheme states that "costs such as travel, accommodation and other programme-related expenses are covered from the European Parliament and the EBPS budgets."

A meeting of the parliament's political group leaders on Thursday (24 April) decided to discontinue the office and email arrangements after the matter was raised by Italian MEP Monica Frassoni, co-head of the Green group, who asked in a letter "whether [EBPS] was engaged in some kind of lobbying activity."

Speaking to EUobserver, Ms Frassoni noted that the website was "very open" and there is "nothing evil" about the scheme but that it was the "wrong decision" by the quaestors to grant this sort of access.

She said it was "totally inappropriate" that a scheme of co-operation between parliamentarians and big multinationals has an "office and mail with an europa.eu address and on its web is written that training and meetings will be paid by the European Parliament."

"The conference of presidents decided to delete this authorisation of opening an office and a mail."

A spokesperson for Hans-Gert Poettering explained the European Parliament president has "granted patronage to very many things" and that being the EPBS patron and the set-up "are two completely separate things."

Frederick Hyde-Chambers, secretary-general of the European Business and Parliament Scheme, pointed out that the European Parliament as such does not make any "direct contributions" to the scheme.

The reference to payments on the website referred to money from MEPs allowances. If this is not enough, funds are supplied by companies, who pay a membership fee, he told the EUobserver.

Mr Hyde-Chambers said such a scheme between business and national parliaments has been in place around the world for thirty years - the International Association of Business and Parliament - and said that there is "quite a sophisticated mechanism" to ensure that it is not just a pure lobbying set up.

Thursday's decision comes in the context of wider moves by the parliament to clean up the workings of the house.

It recently revamped its pay system for MEPs making the travel reimbursement system more transparent, and it has pledged to regularise the allowances for MEPs' assistants after a damaging internal audit exposed cases of fraud.

In addition, a report on lobbying voted on in committee last month called for a mandatory register of lobbyists working in the EU institutions - a parliament spokesperson said it would be "not quite logical" to adopt the report in plenary next month with this organisation within the parliament's walls.

The Los Angeles Times, Judy Pasternak, 24/4/2008

WASHINGTON -- More than half of the scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency who responded to a survey said they had experienced political interference in their work.

The survey results show "an agency under siege from political pressures," said the Union of Concerned Scientists report, which was released Wednesday and sent to EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson.

The online questionnaire was sent to 5,419 EPA scientists last summer; 1,586 replied, and of those, 889 reported that they had experienced at least one type of interference within the last five years.

Such allegations are not new: During much of the Bush administration, there have been reports of the White House watering down documents on climate change, industry language inserted into EPA power-plant regulations and scientific advisory panels' conclusions about toxic chemicals going unheeded.

But Francesca Grifo, director of the scientific integrity program for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington-based nonprofit group, said the survey documented the widespread nature of the problem at the EPA. "What we've been up against until now is anecdotal evidence," Grifo said.

She acknowledged that scientists who were frustrated or upset might have been more likely than those who were satisfied to respond to her organization's survey, but added: "Nearly 900 EPA scientists reported political interference in their scientific work. That's 900 too many."

EPA spokesman Jonathan Shradar noted that administrator Johnson had had a 27-year career as a scientist himself.

"We have the best and finest scientific community in the world at EPA," Shradar said. "All of the issues we deal with are issues that we all are very passionate about. It's important that we let the scientists do the science and allow policymakers to do the policy work."

The survey respondents were split over the impact of political interference on regulations. According to the report, 48% believed that the EPA's actions were "frequently or always" consistent with scientific findings, and 47% believed that agency policy "occasionally, seldom or never" made use of scientific judgments.

In optional essays, scientists repeatedly singled out the Office of Management and Budget at the White House, accusing officials there of inserting themselves into decision-making at early stages in a way that shaped the outcome of their inquiries. They also alleged that the OMB delayed rules not to its liking. EPA actions "are held hostage" until changes are made, a scientist from the EPA's Office of Air and Radiation wrote.

Some also accused members of Congress of inappropriate intervention.

All of the respondents remained anonymous.

J. William Hirzy, an EPA senior scientist and union official, said that politics trumped science at times during the Clinton administration as well but that "what we're seeing now is . . . the favoring of energy interests, coal-fired power plants. That's something different in this administration."

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) wrote to Johnson on Wednesday asking him to be prepared to respond to the findings at a hearing next month of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. 

The Guardian, Robert Fox, 22/4/2008

Revelations of US media manipulation highlight the major failings of intelligence in British and American operations in Iraq and Afghanistan

The news that the Pentagon ran a systematic information campaign to get favourable analysis on Iraq from military officers should hardly be news to many people. The New York Times has used the Freedom of Information Act in America to get some 8,000 pages of transcripts of emails and other communications in the Pentagon to reveal how Donald Rumsfeld waged the war of spin over Iraq, and lost it.

The high point came in 2005, when it was clear that things were really falling apart in Iraq. Chosen analysts, former generals and colonels to the fore, were given privileged access to information, which they then spun on through the media. Some were hired talking heads for mainstream channels like CNN and Fox News. In all, says the New York Times, some 75 officers were hired by Rumsfeld to do the job.

The most striking thing about this story about a story - and full marks to the NYT for uncovering it at last - is how badly the whole thing was done. It has not helped the administration's credibility over Iraq, nor America's standing in the world. As a campaign it has been less than victorious.

When former army general Montgomery Meigs claimed to NBC, that there "had been over $100 million of construction" at Guantánamo, he, and more to the point his editors, must have known that the increasing band of sceptics in the audience were unlikely to be persuaded. The general had been a part of carefully selected group of "analysts" allowed by the Pentagon into the Guantánamo complex.

Keith Allard, a former consultant to NBC and an instructor in information warfare at the National Defence University said that what the analysts were given in their "private" briefings bore little relation to the facts later uncovered by inquiries and reporters' books.

"Night and day," Allard told the New York Times, "I felt we'd been hosed."

The Pentagon spokesman who devised the whole programme of embedding journalists with forces in the Iraqi operations, Bryan Whitman, said "the intent and purpose of this is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people".

One of his colleagues at the Pentagon, Torie Clarke, a former public relations executive, started planning, well before September 11 2001, a scheme of "key influentials" to support the Rumsfeld plan and philosophy at the defence department. In similar vein, Scooter Libby in Dick Cheney's office took the same approach in feeding the NYT's Judith Miller about weapons of mass destruction.

And on these shores, village Westminster, with Alastair Campbell as town-cryer, has been no stranger to such methodology.

There is a much bigger issue behind this than the misspeaking or credibility of the retired brass hats talking on the American networks, the BBC, ITV and Sky. The issue is the much wider use of information operations in the American-British campaign in Iraq since 2003.

Much of the initial operation in Iraq was to be based on information, propaganda, and psychological persuasion. In total over a billion dollars must have been spent on the "information line of operations" as the military call it. Newspaper free-sheets and leaflets were distributed by the million. American aircraft and a British ship pumped out propaganda radio, and there were at least three television services beamed into Iraq.

The exiled leader of the Iraq National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi, said it would be easy to persuade most Iraqis to ditch up Saddam and link up with the Americans and British to build a better Iraq. Emails were sent, and text messages to the mobile phones of Iraqi officials and commanders. Chalabi had told MI6: "at least 40% of the Iraqi army would come over and be usable."

So why was this colossal piece of electronic persuasion, arm-twisting and spin, such an utter failure? Few Iraqi soldiers actually surrendered to the invading force - and many chose to go home with their weapons to fight another day. I have read no detailed analysis, either in the public domain or in unpublished form, of why the information operation was such a comprehensive dud.

The failure of the information operations complemented the mess in intelligence. Intelligence gave little hint of the Sunni nationalist insurgency, and the unrest stirred by the Shiite militias, which came within a weeks of Saddam being overthrown and the arrival of the British and the Americans. Once the violence came, there seemed little that the elaborate apparatus of information operations of the collation forces could do to mitigate it.

Recently the British government appears to have adopted the approach of the Bush administration towards information and media operations. Each of the services used to have a senior officer at brigadier level who would direct their public relations - they were known as "DPRs". In a fit of pique, Geoff Hoon abolished the post because he caught the army DPR having a convivial lunch in the RAC Club with John Kay, chief reporter of the Sun.

Now the MoD vets correspondents who wish to "embed" with British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have also taken to allowing access to authors to forces on operations, provided they submit their books for vetting, line by line, before publication. While precautions on issues of genuine operational security are understandable, the authors are now expected to be on message politically. Such a concept of literary manoeuvre is hardly likely to cover the full complexities of what is really going on among the Afghan communities, for example, now caught up in the ragged and asymmetric conflict of Helmand and Kandahar. Strategically, this approach to propaganda warfare could be self-defeating.

The Nation, Ari Melber, 21/4/2008

The Sunday Times' article detailing the massive, secret coordinated campaign by the Pentagon and all the leading television news channels to sell and defend the administration's Iraq policy is a critical piece of investigative journalism. David Barstow provided meticulous and aggressive reporting, even referencing how The Times'amplified Pentagon "surrogates" without sufficient disclosure for readers. The Times also deserves credit, both for running the lengthy piece and suing the government to obtain related documents. (Read the whole thing here, or try this YouTube excerpt.)

The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel is urging Congress to investigate the program exposed by the article:

In its rigorous documentation of the relationship between the government, the networks and retired military analysts, the lineaments of the corrosive structure and impact of a new military-media-industrial complex are exposed. This corrupt complex demands investigation by all relevant Congressional committees...

Glenn Greenwald, who has written extensively about the media's pro-war bias and undisclosed conflicts of interest, flags the galling (non)-response of several news organizations, near the end of the article:

The most incredible aspect of the NYT story is that most of the news organizations which deceived their readers and viewers by using these "objective" analysts -- CBS, NBC, Fox -- simply refused to comment on what they knew about any of this or what their procedures are for safeguarding against it. Just ponder what that says about these organizations -- there is a major expose in the NYT documenting that these news outlets misleadingly shoveled government propaganda down the throats of their viewers on matters of war and terrorism and they don't feel the least bit obliged to answer for what they did or knew about any of it.... The single most significant factor in American political culture is the incestuous, extensive overlap between our media institutions and government officials.

The article reports that most of the news organizations either didn't know or didn't care about their paid analysts taking direction from the administration while claiming to neutrally assess its policies; or taking expensive trips paid by the administration; or meeting secretly with senior administration officials and plotting military or political strategy; or competing for military contracts.

So what does it take to disqualify a former general from on-air analysis?

Criticizing President Bush.

While the article does not cover this incident, CBS did fire Maj. Gen. John Batiste (Ret.) for criticizing President Bush's Iraq policy in a television ad. As the former commander of the Army's First Infantry Division, which was deployed to Iraq in 2003, Batiste had unassailable credentials, but his views were too much for CBS. This larger context is key, because while the Times exposed a sophisticated, deceptive domestic propaganda campaign for the administration, the flip-side is harder to document. But antiwar perspectives are routinely marginalized or scrubbed from televised debate, even when offered by our nation's brave military leaders.

As ABC News was reminded last week, the public expects more integrity and substance from these news organizations. They are egregiously late in even commenting on these new reports, let alone reforming their policies, which demonstrates why Congress must investigate this propaganda program -- and the marginalization of experts who are critical of the war or the government.