Vote And Keep Your Mouth Shut, Soldier!

This New York Times editorial tells us today that…

In a stroke of self-satire, Pentagon officials tried to block Stars and Stripes — the military’s respected independent newspaper — from covering the troops’ plain and honest reactions to the election night news about their new commander in chief. The Department of Defense once again made news by smothering news.

To find out more on this startling moment of stupidity, I came across the following column from Mother Jones online, which provides further detail…

As part of its election coverage, (Stars and Stripes) planned to dispatch reporters to the common areas of military bases in order to chronicle the scene as the returns rolled on. A Stripes editor, Tom Skeen, advised the Pentagon of the paper's plans beforehand as a matter of "courtesy," but was "flabbergasted" by the response he received from the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs: stand down. “As a matter of long standing policy, DoD personnel are to avoid engaging in activities that could associate the Department with any partisan election,” the paper was told.

…

Ultimately, Stripes' editorial director, Terry Leonard, decided to ignore the order, instructing the paper's reporters to carry on as planned unless they were told to stop, in which case they were to state their objections and leave without incident. And at bases in Japan and South Korea military public affairs officials did indeed intercede, preventing Stripes reporters from interviewing servicemembers. Explaining the unusual interference in the paper's operations, a Pentagon spokesman later said that nothing good could come from covering the military perspective on presidential politics: "It’s nothing but a gateway to trouble for us."

In the end, Stripes reporters were successful in gauging the ground-level reaction of grunts worldwide—and, at press time, the Pentagon had yet to be subsumed into the void of partisan politics.

This is particularly dumb because, as you can read here, the DoD had no issues at all with obtaining reactions from our men and women in uniform during the 2004 Bush/Kerry presidential election.

So what changed?

Well, the Mother Jones piece tells us that the decision to “stand down” came from the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, and the person holding that title is Dorrance J. Smith.

As this Source Watch bio tells us, Smith was the “former ABC News producer and the former media adviser to Coalition Provisional Authority Ambassador L. Paul Bremer…confirmed ‘months after’ President George W. Bush "bypassed the Senate to install him in the job after objections were raised about a column he wrote for the Wall Street Journal," Editor & Publisher reported (the article “blast(ed) all major US television networks and the government of Qatar for cooperating with Al-Jazeera in showing gruesome battlefield footage obtained by the Arab television channel in Iraq," Agence France Presse reported January 5, 2006).

Continuing…

"(Smith) decried what he called 'the ongoing relationship between terrorists, Al-Jazeera and the networks' and asked if the US government should maintain normal relations with Qatar as long as its government continued to subsidize Al-Jazeera.”

As a result of what Smith said, Carl Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee at the time (now chairman), put a “hold” on Smith’s nomination, leading to his recess appointment by Dubya (Source Watch also tells us that the post in which Smith serves had been unfilled for three years since Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clarke left the job in June 2003).

And Oliver Willis tells us here that…

Smith had been (the first) President Bush’s communications director, and his secretary in the White House had been Linda Tripp. “The Washington bureau was like an outpost of the American Spectator,” an ABC News correspondent told me. “Dorrance was in constant touch with Tripp. He was calling the shots. He kept opposing views off the air and put views supportive of (Clinton inquisitor Ken) Starr on the air.”

Leave to a loyal Bushie to deprive our men and women in the military of a freedom they should enjoy while they fight so that very freedom, among others, can be imparted to those benefitting from their sacrifice.