Inspector General Sees No Misdeeds in Pentagon's Effort to Make Use of TV Analysts

The office of the Defense Department's inspector general said in a report Friday that it had found no wrongdoing in a Pentagon public relations program that made use of retired officers who worked as military analysts for television and radio networks. inspector general's office, noting the absence of a clear legal definition of propaganda, said there was an "insufficient basis" to conclude that the program had violated laws prohibiting the government's domestic use of it. It also said investigators had been unable to document any instance where military analysts had used their special access — scores of meetings with senior officials, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, hundreds of pages of briefing materials — "to achieve a competitive advantage for their company." Moreover, while the report said two senior Pentagon officials had complained in sworn testimony that the outreach to military analysts had become "politicized," and while it documented one instance in which an analyst had lost access because of critical war commentary, it also found there was not enough evidence to conclude that the Pentagon "undertook a disciplined effort" to assemble a contingent of influential analysts "who could be depended on to comment favorably on DoD programs." The report dismissed as merely a "personal view" one e-mail message, written by a senior public affairs official at the Pentagon, that urged her superiors to cultivate a core group of military analysts "that we can count on to carry our water." It also discounted repeated references in Pentagon documents that described military analysts as administration "surrogates." These references, the report said, simply reflected the fact that several of the officials who catered to the analysts had previously worked in political campaigns.