Shoveling Pentagon shit. Here's a nice division of labor: the Washington Post breaks news, and the Times dutifully comes along a day later on the administration's behalf to try to police the resulting mess.

On Sunday, Barton Gellman reported the existence of a clandestine initiative within the Defense Department, based on perverse reinterpretation of existing law and funded with secretly diverted appropriations, that gives Donald Rumsfeld unprecedented authority to direct aggressive, covert operations, aka "black reconnaissance":

The Pentagon, expanding into the CIA's historic bailiwick, has created a new espionage arm and is reinterpreting U.S. law to give Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld broad authority over clandestine operations abroad, according to interviews with participants and documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The previously undisclosed organization, called the Strategic Support Branch, arose from Rumsfeld's written order to end his "near total dependence on CIA" for what is known as human intelligence. Designed to operate without detection and under the defense secretary's direct control, the Strategic Support Branch deploys small teams of case officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists alongside newly empowered special operations forces.

"Secret Unit Expands Rumsfeld's Domain"

[Unnoticed in blog commentary on this has been the degree to which Gellman's story provides substantial grounding for one of the key assertions in Seymour Hersh's recent New Yorker article, that Rumsfeld is seeking expanded authority "to run operations off the books—free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A." as part of a second-term agenda to widen the TerrorWar.]

Following up on A1 today, Eric Schmitt produces an extended exercise in missing the fucking point ("Pentagon Sends Its Spies to Join Fight on Terror", a gung-ho headline if ever there was one). [Read Corrente's Lambert on this topic, by the way, if you want to contrast Schmitt with someone actually getting the point.] It's almost impressive, the careful way Schmitt entirely denudes the story of its significance: nothing about (potentially) illegally diverted funds, nothing about the Pentagon arrogating to itself the judiciary's right to interpret the law, nothing about the history of Rumsfeld's "brain trust" in this matter, the loathsome Stephen Cambone and Gen. William "Crusader" Boykin—nothing about what amounts to Rumsfeld's elaboration of something that begins to look like a personal dictatorship within the American military establishment. The Times piece reads essentially as an extended gloss on Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita's statement dismissing the WaPo article, a statement quoted extensively throughout the piece in such a way as to suggest that it represents the appropriate (practically the sole) context for understanding the story. Di Rita's statement in fact provides the article its central "nothing-to-see-here" dynamic—this isn't really anything knew, and besides, didn't you guys want us to beef up human intelligence, 9/11 9/11 9/11?

"It is accurate and should not be surprising that the Department of Defense is attempting to improve its longstanding human intelligence capability," the Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said in a statement on Sunday. "A principal conclusion of the 9/11 commission report is that the U.S. human intelligence capability must be improved across the board."

Some intelligence experts said the creation of the units was the latest chapter in a long-running battle for intelligence dominance between Mr. Rumsfeld's Defense Department and the C.I.A. ... Among the C.I.A.'s concerns, former intelligence officials have said, are that an expanded Pentagon role in intelligence-gathering could, by design or effect, escape the strict Congressional oversight imposed by law on such operations when they are carried out by intelligence agencies. ...

But other analysts said the teams were merely the latest incarnation of intelligence units that the Army, Navy and Air Force operated throughout the cold war to recruit spies, debrief defectors and gather information about foreign weapons systems in countries like China and the Soviet Union. "D.O.D. is not looking to go develop strategic intelligence," said one senior adviser to Mr. Rumsfeld who has an intelligence background.

Even the institutional implications, glanced at in the above excerpt, are allowed to be dismissed by a Defense Intelligence Agency official—named, no less, hence clearly offering an approved opinion—calling that whole aspect of the thing just "really a giant turf battle."

Only at the end of the article, in a vestigial set of paragraphs, do we get a suggestion that there's been something less than entirely forthright and above-board about this whole deal:

A former senior intelligence official who left his post last year said he had known that the Defense Department was seeking a greater role in human intelligence. But he said he had not known that the Defense Department had begun any such effort, and said he did not believe that the Central Intelligence Agency had been notified. "I was astounded, and it's the sort of thing I should have known about, given the perch I had," he said of the details reported by The Post.

Given that Douglas Jehl is credited with additional reporting for the article, I'm guessing this emanates from him, and that Schmitt dangles it from the end of the piece to cordon it off as much as possible from his otherwise clean parroting of the official storyline. Wouldn't do to get Larry Di Rita mad, now, would it, Eric? Keep shoveling!

posted by michael  5:58:48 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

For some unknown reason, I'm unable to leave a comment on my own freakin' blog today: so I'll do it here.

A little while ago, a post on Alicublog that made reference to a series of Lexus-under-the-Christmas tree commercials led me to think a bit about the aspirational qualities of luxury brands, and about consumerist envy as a property of brand equity. Roy Edroso stopped by to add a comment, to wit:

You're right about the aspirational angle (I worked on Mad Ave awhile too) -- you also explain it better than most.

I would only rejoin that, while you can see that process at work in more typical luxury ads (thanks to deBeers advertising, everyone can relate to the magic a gift of diamonds can grant, and that goes especially for those of us who cannot afford to give them), Lexus-for-Christmas does not seem engineered to inspire envy so much as to inspire actual holiday sales.

I take this from the way the ads mutated over two seasons. The first wave of the ads were all magic and wonder -- how splendid to give a car for Xmas! This year we saw more self-deprecating comedy ("How did you get a bow that big?"). I think this is not so much a refreshment as a normalization of the theme: we aren't gonna blow smoke up your ass about how wonderful this is, we're just reminding you to buy it. Which you were gonna do anyway, right?

I think the Jaguar campaign is more middle-class aspirational. Those folks are so close to normal that you have to think, "How the fuck can they buy a Jag and I can't?"

To which the Salon comment system won't let me reply:

Roy, I like your distinction between "refreshment" and "normalization" of the Lexus-for-Christmas theme—and I'd say that normalization does double duty, both in the immediate term to move sales, and over the longer term to establish the Lexus brand in the consumerist pantheon as a standard of the unattainably desirable (or the desirably unattainable).

There are aspirational products I can imagine buying, or imagine somebody much like me (who'd made better life choices) buying; but I think the category of stuff-I-know-I'll-never-get-close-to is aspirational in its own way—if only by defining the limit at which aspiration fails. And prophetic, I'm afraid, of the utter Texas-Republicanization of American culture (one of your ongoing themes on Alicublog): all that Dallas trash rising to walk again. Which was basically farce the first time around—so what does it become on the flip?

Marx would have called a psychology of class resentment that systematically repressed or perverted revolutionary desire, petit-bourgeois: but I don't know that he ever really elaborated that psychology, much less imagined it as the dominant mode of feeling throughout the entire spectrum of non-owner classes. That psychology seems to be the crucial production of our advertising-industrial complex, and the chief service that the corporate masters pay for, whether they know it or not. It strikes me as a nice irony that my training in Marxist cultural theory gave me a leg up on the B-school types in being able to shill brands: and thank God for downsizing, which happened to me before I had to choose whether or not to really blacken my soul with that kind of work.

posted by michael  2:38:05 PM  
tell me about it []