Barstow writes:

Through seven years of war an exclusive club has quietly flourished at the intersection of network news and wartime commerce. Its members, mostly retired generals, have had a foot in both camps as influential network military analysts and defense industry rainmakers. It is a deeply opaque world, a place of privileged access to senior government officials, where war commentary can fit hand in glove with undisclosed commercial interests and network executives are sometimes oblivious to possible conflicts of interest.

Read the whole thing–it’s an exemplary piece of journalism, sort of like reading an episode of The Wire focused on the Pentagon system. And while you’re at it, you should also read Barstow’s equally important April article on the Pentagon’s cultivation of “message force multipliers” in the run-up the Iraq war: another case of supposedly “disinterested” experts appearing on air, their extensive ties to the Pentagon’s public relations arm often unmentioned.

Most astonishing: the revelation that many of these Pentagon-groomed pundits were also simultaneously working for private companies as consultants. And that, at least in the case of General Barry McCaffrey, a retired four star general who is the primary subject of the more recent article, these two roles came into conflict, with interesting results.

For example:

Only when the invasion met unexpected resistance did General McCaffrey give a glimpse of his misgivings. “We’ve placed ourselves in a risky proposition, 400 miles into Iraq with no flank or rear area security,” he told Katie Couric on “Today.”

Mr. Rumsfeld struck back. He abruptly cut off General McCaffrey’s access to the Pentagon’s special briefings and conference calls.

General McCaffrey was stunned. “I’ve never heard his voice like that,” recalled one close associate who asked not to be identified. Headded, “They showed him what life was like on the outside.”

Robert Weiner, a longtime publicist for General McCaffrey, said the general came to see that if he continued his criticism, he risked being shut out not only by Mr. Rumsfeld but also by his network of friends and contacts among the uniformed leadership.

Update:

Glenn Greenwald mentions that McCaffrey’s corporate connections were already well-documented by The Nation in 2003 and notes, I think correctly, that the greatest culpability in this situation lies with the television networks, not the Pentagon or the analysts themselves:

Last April, in the wake of Barstow’s front-page story, I documented at length numerous other facts featured in today’s Barstow article — including the countless times McCaffrey went on NBC News shows to advocate war policies that directly benefited his undisclosed business interests, as well as the completely deceitful way NBC presented McCaffrey as an independent and objective analyst without ever mentioning any of his multiple activities that clearly called into question his objectivity as an “analyst.”

….

In response, Williams finally addressed Barstow’s story on his blog (but not on his network news broadcast), yet did so only by ignoring all of the specific, substantive issues that were raised, instead offering a patronizing little lecture about how Williams himself had developed what he called “a close friendship” with both McCaffrey and Downing, and could therefore assure us that “these men are passionate patriots” who would never offer anything but the most honest and forthright assessments. That was the full extent of NBC and Williams’ response to this story.

Not only has NBC and Williams suppressed this story, but — more amazingly still — they continue to feature McCaffrey as an “analyst” on American war policies still without disclosing or even alluding to his participation in the Pentagon program and/or his still-extant business stakes in the policies he’s being asked to assess. Just this past Thursday night — 3 days ago — Williams featured McCaffrey on his NBC Nightly News program to opine about American policy in Afghanistan, and McCaffrey was identified only as a Retired General and NBC Military Analyst.

For me, the issue is disclosure. If as a viewer I know where McCaffrey’s coming from I can make my own decision about the credibility of his exclusive-access allegedly expert analysis.

Lo and behold, his prediction bore out:

So we’re not talking about theory anymore – we’re talking about empirical fact. The media has exponentially increased the amount of times it claims that this country is a “center-right nation” – at the very same time public opinion data shows the country is a decidedly center-left nation. In short, we have the two hard data points proving that as the country has become more progressive and validated its progressivism on election day, the media has increased its claims that the nation is conservative.

Sirota is basically correct in his assessment, in my view, though he doesn’t go into detail about why it might be that everyone in the press seems to want to pretend that this country is basically “conservative.” Part of the answer is undoubtedly that many Americans self-identify as conservatives while actually supporting what the press would call “liberal” positions. The demonization of liberals has been systematic and ongoing for decades.

But it is worth pointing out that this demonization is present with most intensity and viciousness not among some fringe groups — as Sirota claims — but in the heart of the respectable mainstream. Witness the case of The New Republic’s James Kirchick, writing in the NY Daily News:

Barack Obama isn’t even President yet, and he’s already angering some of his most devoted followers on the party’s left wing. This is the mark of what could be a very successful presidency.

“With its congressional majority, the Democratic Party has refused to seriously try to end the war, to stop the bailout and to stop the trampling of civil liberties, just to name a few off the top of my head,” wrote David Sirota on the popular liberal blog OpenLeft, decrying the serial betrayals of Obama and the congressional Democratic majority. The Democratic Party, he wrote, has “faced no real retribution” for its manifold heresies, something that Sirota believes he and his band of angry bloggers must change. “We better understand why this happened,” he fumed.

Allow me to provide an answer. You don’t matter.

…

Given the intensity of blogger rage over Lieberman, one can understand how their defeat at the ends of their own party would lend itself to hyperbole, but when did the “American people” appoint Markos Moulitsas their spokesman? And while there are many ways to interpret the outcome of this year’s presidential and congressional elections, that voters across the country wanted Joe Lieberman to be stripped of his committee chairmanship is not one of them.

Indeed, the only people who seemed to give a fig about Lieberman were the “Netroots.” Along with abandoning Iraq to Iran and Al Qaeda, punishing the “traitor” Joe Lieberman was their paramount concern (know that in the minds of Netroots, Lieberman hasn’t only committed treason against the Democratic Party; a quick perusal of the more popular liberal blogs will also find the words “Zionist” and “Likudnik” attached to his name). Most Americans probably recognize Lieberman as the guy who ran with Al Gore in 2000. But to the Netroots, Lieberman is an obsession, an individual who inspires mania. He is the worst thing possible: not only someone who disagrees with them about foreign policy, but a liberal who disagrees with them on foreign policy.

That’s right, you non-mattering demonic liberals you — i.e. arguably a supermajority of the U.S. population — by supporting the withdrawal of the military from Iraq you are in favor of “abandoning Iraq to Iran and Al Qaeda.” If you happen to think that Joe Lieberman should be published for deploying the vilest of attacks against Obama — who made a point of helping defend Lieberman against Ned Lamont and his netroot supporters — then you’re some kind of (implicitly anti-Semitic, or anti-Semitic by association) nut.

Personally, I don’t really care that Lieberman has been allowed to keep caucusing with the Democrats. There is something to be said for reconciling after a tough election with your opponents. What bothers me is that Obama’s cabinet is increasingly shaping up to be precisely the sort of center-right cabinet that commentators like Kirchick are ready to praise.

Shouldn’t an Obama cabinet include officials who are unapologetic liberals? That is, not a cabinet of only liberals, but a cabinet where the voices of what Kirchick would call the Democratic party’s “left wing” (the Kuciniches or even Edwardses of the party) are audible. The so-called left wing partly contributed to helping get Obama elected. Is it unfair to ask for a voice — not dominance, mind you, but just a voice — at the table? Is there some left voice in Obama’s cabinet I’ve missed? If the left doesn’t get a voice, how should it respond?

Update (11/23)

Glenn Greenwald addresses the question posed by my post and comes to a conclusion I largely agree with:

So many progressives were misled about what Obama is and what he believes. But it wasn’t Obama who misled them. It was their own desires, their eagerness to see what they wanted to see rather than what reality offered.

…

It goes without saying that there will be Obama policies, both in the foreign policy and domestic realms, that are vastly superior to what we’ve seen the last eight years and to what we would have seen had McCain/Palin won…

But Barack Obama is a centrist, establishment politician. That is what he has been since he’s been in the Senate, and more importantly, it’s what he made clear — both explicitly and through his actions — that he intended to be as President. Even in the primary, he paid no price whatsoever for that in terms of progressive support. As is true for the national Democratic Party generally, he has no good reason to believe he needs to accommodate liberal objections to what he is doing. The Joe Lieberman fiasco should have made that as conclusively clear as it gets.

The point isn’t that this reality should just be passively accepted and nothing done about it. The point is that for anything to be done about it, the reality needs to be accepted. The campaign we began earlier this year with Accountability Now and are now vigorously developing and pursuing — to devote all resources and energies to defeating incumbents in primary challenges — is grounded in the premise that one’s political beliefs and principles will be ignored until there is a price to pay for ignoring them. Democrats don’t perceive there is a price to pay for ignoring progressives, and so they do. That isn’t surprising. What would be surprising is if, under those circumstances, anything else happened.