The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn’t Want You to Read | Michael Hastings | Rolling Stone
►http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/the-afghanistan-report-the-pentagon-doesnt-want-you-to-read-20120210
Earlier this week, the New York Times’ Scott Shane published a bombshell piece about Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis, a 17-year Army veteran recently returned from a second tour in Afghanistan. According to the Times, the 48-year-old Davis had written an 84-page unclassified report, as well as a classified report, offering his assessment of the decade-long war. That assessment is essentially that the war has been a disaster and the military’s top brass has not leveled with the American public about just how badly it’s been going. “How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?” Davis boldly asks in an article summarizing his views in The Armed Forces Journal.
Le rapport (unclassified) en question:
►http://www1.rollingstone.com/extras/RS_REPORT.pdf
Senior ranking US military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the US Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan. It has likely cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars Congress might not otherwise have appropriated had it known the truth, and our senior leaders’ behavior has almost certainly extended the duration of this war. The single greatest penalty our Nation has suffered, however, has been that we have lost the blood, limbs and lives of tens of thousands of American Service Members with little to no gain to our country as a consequence of this deception.
To sum the above: the Secretary of Defense gave “talking points” to former generals to use when they went on television news shows to sell Mr. Rumsfeld’s views; no documentation even existed – among 25,000 documents – to even confirm what the purpose of the Secretary’s program was; talking points had a political purpose; when even two well-known former generals – McCaffrey and Clark – didn’t move their mouth “like a sock puppet”, they were dropped from the program. CNN demonstrated its proclivity to only want spokesmen with current access when they allegedly tried to drop General Clark. Does anyone see a problem with this?
Thus, the American people can expect that in future situations where military expert opinion is desired by major news media outlets, the main group of spokesmen who the networks will hire are those with access to top defense officials – and the Pentagon is only going to give access to those willing to share as their “opinions” the bullet points given them by the Department of Defense.
So long as our country’s top TV and print media continue to avoid challenging power for fear of losing access, there is every reason to expect many senior Defense Department leaders will continue to play this game of denial of access in order to effect compliant reports. As I’ve shown throughout this report, there is ample open source information and reports all over the internet that would allow any individual – or reporter – to find the truth and report it. But heretofore few have.
