Reed Irvine - Editor
The dramatic U.S.-led victory in the Persian Gulf War demonstrated convincingly the media's shallowness and inaccuracies in reporting the defense build-up under President Ronald Reagan. Seldom has our press been so consistently wrong on an important public issue. An "Iron Triangle" of leftists, "whistle blowers" and their patsies in the media did their best to convince us that the weapons systems being developed by the Pentagon over the past decade were largely worthless junk.
The naysayers' moans continued to the brink of war. On September 5 Scott Pulley of the "CBS Evening News" denounced the Apache assault helicopter as so complex, and prone to breakdowns, that it would be useless in war. David Shribman of The Wall Street Journal wrote on January 17, "In this war, American illusions [sic] about high technology could be among the victims." Charles Lane wrote in Newsweek on January 21 that pilots feared the "fast-flying F-15E and the army's gadget-laden Apache helicopter will be of little use against Iraqi tank columns." There was much more in this vein.
So what happened when our hardware was put to the test of war? The U.S. obliterated or scared off one of the world's largest military machines. The Iraqi arsenal included a one million-man army, fighter jets, bombers, thousands of tanks, high-tech weaponry and chemical and biological weapons potential. The Soviets had provided Saddam Hussein with some of their best weapons. But the war ended in only 43 days, with the ground campaign lasting a scant 100 hours. On the U.S. side, only 122 persons were killed in action, with 21 missing in action. General H. Norman Schwarzkopf called the light casualties miraculous. President Bush referred to our soldiers as "first-class talent." They deserved -- and got -- first-class weapons.
Many Americans were surprised at these successes because we have been saddled with a media that does second-class work when reporting defense issues. If policy makers had heeded news organizations and anti-defense activists, some of our best weapons would not have been deployed. These include the surface-to-air Patriot missile, the M-1 Abrams tank, cruise missiles, the F-15 Eagle fighter, the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS), the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and the Apache helicopter.
The early days of the air war, Americans rejoiced at film footage of Patriot missiles knocking Iraqi Scud missiles out of the sky. Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney commented, "A decade of gloom-and-gloom reporting made a lot of people forget that we do, in fact, lead the world in advanced technology." The Patriots, made by Raytheon, hit 45 of the 47 Scuds launched by Iraq. It is a complex weapon utilizing sophisticated radar and electronics and requiring quick thinking by soldiers who operate it.
While our media couldn't ignore the Patriot's success, the Gannett news service was one of the few news organizations to detail how Vice President Dan Quayle, as Senator from Indiana, "deserves a lot of the credit for the improved version" of the weapon that worked so well in the Gulf. Gannett wrote that Quayle and aides "spent years fighting an obscure battle to fund what is known as ATBM -- anti-tactical ballistic missile defense. In short, that means building weapons to knock down the short-range missiles in the arsenals of the Third World armies."
A Heritage Foundation report ignored by the major media cited the "strong opposition" in the 1980s to Quayle's drive, with the support of the Reagan Administration, to transform the Patriot into a weapon capable of destroying ballistic missiles in flight. (The Patriot was originally designed to shoot down warplanes.) The House Armed Services Committee voted against the modification in 1984. But the Senate approved funding for the program. Without the Patriot, Israel would surely have entered the war, breaking up the anti-Iraqi coalition and making Gun. Schwarzkopf's task more difficult.
Second-guessing has become popular since the war ended. It is legitimate to give credit, as in the case of Quayle and the Patriot upgrade, and also to fix blame. The Washington Times ran a biting series inducting individuals and groups into a "Desert Hall of Shame" because of their wrong predictions about the war. The Washington Post published its own "correction" of the record on February 28, detailing how "experts" misjudged the cost and conduct of the war. Buried deep inside the article was a telling criticism attributed to an anonymous Pentagon official: "If you have been reading press accounts of the American military for the past 10 years you would come away with the impression that we're the gang that couldn't shoot straight with weapons that don't work."
During the Reagan defense build-up, several organizations and individuals used the media to agitate against the hardware that proved so successful in the Guff War. The record shows a strong interlock between these groups and individuals and the media. One of the media's most popular sources of military-bashing material was the Center for Defense Information (CDI) (cited in the Washington Post article as an "anti-war Pentagon watchdog group" that predicted that 10,000 Americans would be killed and 35,000 wounded in an overland drive to Baghdad).
CDI was founded in 1972 with money from General Motor's heir Stewart R. Mott, a longtime angel for leftist groups in Washington, and a big contributor to George McGovern's 1972 run for president. Gene R. La Rocque, a retired Navy admiral, heads CDI and its staff includes other former officers. This brass is protective coloration for a group whose record indicates hostility to virtually every new weapons system.
CDI aligned itself with a host of "military reformers" in Congress and elsewhere. Gary Hart, whose 1984 presidential campaign derailed after his womanizing became a public scandal, was a prominent leader of this pack. Hart wrote in his 1983 book, A New Democracy, "Not only are we buying equipment so expensive we can't afford enough, we are buying equipment so complex it doesn't work well on the battlefield. Our weapons must work in combat m in rain and mud, and fear, and confusion. Only simpler weapons are likely to do so. So we should concentrate on equipment that is affordable in large quantities and simpler to operate and maintain." Hart's thinking, accepted by many in the news media and in the Democratic Party, entailed opposition to the Patriot, the MX missile, the B-1 bomber, large aircraft carriers, and the F-18 and F-15 fighters.
Bob Andrews, a Vietnam veteran, former CIA officer and Senate staffer who now works for a major defense contractor, says the impression created by such "bedroom commandos" as Hart was that America's defense was in the hands of "fools and bunglers." But the Guff War, he says, demonstrated that the high technology worked. "Across the board," Andrews says, "the low tech arguments became irrelevant, like the flower children of the 1960s." During the build-up, he charges, the military reformers and anti-defense activists found allies in the media who served as "professional spitball artists" against practically every weapons system. "Most of these 1ow- tech weapons people were pushing for something that could not project American power overseas."
A good case can be made that if CBS ran our defense establishment, the U.S. would have lost the Gulf War. CBS's anti-defense bias began in earnest in 1971, when it aired "The Selling of the Pentagon." an anti-military program characterized by wild exaggerations and dishonest editing. Walter Cronkite, the anchor of the "CBS Evening News," explained the CBS policy to a Gannett reporter in 1974. He said, "There are always those in Washington who want to increase defense spending. We don't report that. The story is those who want to cut defense spending."
In 1981, CBS News aired a five-hour series on national defense slanted to undermine the consensus in favor of the military buildup that Reagan had made an issue in his campaign. The series included a segment, The War Machine, attacking the "U.S. military-industrial complex" and a supposed "Iron Triangle" of congressmen, Pentagon officials and defense contractors who allegedly promoted expensive unnecessary hardware. Correspondent Dan Rather asked, "Do we make ourselves stronger by unquestioning faith in new weapons technologies?"
Andrew Lack, the senior producer of the series, was the executive producer of a July 19, 1983, CBS Bill Moyers program, "Pentagon/Underground." It was largely based on material supplied by the Project on Military Procurement, a Pentagon-bashing group then led by a young woman named Dina Rasor, who was featured on the show. Moyers attacked the defense budget in general but purported to expose flaws in the M-1 battle tank and cruise missile technology. Rasor and an assistant, Paul Hoven, called the M-1 a failed system that often broke down, guzzled gas, and needed too many oil changes. She said the cruise missile "may be a rerun of old failures" and that, if sent on a mission, it may just "get lost." Paul Hoven said, "We couldn't be in any worse shape right now than if the KGB was running the Pentagon."
During the Gulf War, both systems performed flawlessly. The M-l, the world's premier battle tank helped lead the ground assault into Kuwait and Iraq. The Tomahawk cruise missile, manufactured by General Dynamics and McDonnell-Douglas, has a range of 1,500 miles and carries warheads within a few feet of their targets. According to Aviation Week and Space Technology, cruise missiles hit their targets more than 90% of the time, initially Iraqi air defense systems and command and control sites. It proved it could save lives by taking out targets that might pose especially high risks for our pilots.
CBS' popular "60 Minutes" program also specialized in ill-reported exposes of weapons systems. For example, on February 15, 1987, correspondent Harry Reasoner narrated a story about the FMC Corporation's Bradley Fighting Vehicle, a troop-transport and a scouting vehicle with a 25-mm gun and TOW anti-tank missiles. Reasoner began the story by appearing in front of a large picture of the Bradley, under the story tagline "$12 Billion of Your Money." The segment featured "whistle blowers" who questioned the Bradley's safety and reliability. Not surprisingly, the story was more flawed than the Bradley. The cost of the Bradley program was $10.5 billion, not $12 billion. "60 Minutes" misled viewers about one of the most thoroughly tested systems in our arsenal, one that met or exceeded the Army's standards and proved its value in the Gulf War.
Defenders of programs on Pentagon scandals claim their purpose was to highlight problems so that they could be solved. But the constant use of dishonest tactics by Moyers and others suggests the real reason was to smear the U.S. military and get weapons canceled, not fixed. The emphasis on test failures was also misleading. Weapons indeed fail many tests. "But that's why you test these things," Bob Andrews explained, "so you can find out where they fail and then you fix them."
In 1989, ABC refused to air "Early Warning," a documentary favorable to the military in which it had invested $1.5 million. Narrated by David Hartman, the former host of ABC's "Good Morning America," it was produced with Pentagon cooperation. It ended up on the Fox Network. An ABC spokesman said ABC wanted something: hat went in a "different direction." They preferred "The Business of Defense: Flaws in the Shield," which they aired December 1, 1988. Sensing what ABC was up to, the Pentagon withheld its cooperation, charging that ABC reporters, including moderator Tom Jarriel, "showed little or no interest in our repeated offers to 'tell the whole story' in a balanced way that would show ABC viewers the complete cycle of the procurement process."
By finding the occasional Pentagon miscue m such as the infamous $7,622 coffeepot -- Dina Rasor of the Project on Military Procurement built credibility when she worked to kill support for weapons systems. One of her chief targets on the Moyers show was the M-1 tank. She bragged that she had scored a "grand slam" when The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal ran stories on September 20, 1982, about a Pentagon memorandum revealing that the M-1 tank had failed a test. Other reporters picked Up the story and various papers wrote editorials condemning the Army's management of the tank. Another Rasor "high point" came when a New York Times editorial blasted the M-1 and called for a "simpler" and more "cost-effective weapon."
The AH-64 Apache attack helicopter was another weapon that Rasor's group said would not work. Her associate, Gregory Williams, said the helicopter, produced by McDonnell-Douglas, was too costly, too fragile and there was "doubt" as to whether its main weaponry, the Hellfire missile, would work. After the war ended, Pentagon officials told Aviation Week that the Apache had the highest operational readiness rate among U.S. Army rotorcraft in the Gulf War. They said that one Apache helicopter alone was credited with destroying eight Iraqi Soviet-made T-72 tanks.
Rasor's organization is now known as the Project on Government Procurement (PGP), and she works elsewhere. But the mission remains unchanged. PGP is sponsored by the Fund for Constitutional Government, whose president, Anne B. Zill, was formerly Washington representative for leftist philanthropist Mort. She is on the PGP board along with Christie Institute conspiracy theorist Daniel Shechun, whose RICO suit against General John K. Singlaub and 28 other defendants charging that they ran U.S. foreign policy was dismissed for lack of evidence. Bob Andrews remembers Rasor: "She was a woman who had no personal experience in the military. She was better with her mouth and a press release than she was with any analytical ability on military issues."
Rasor also has strong ties to far-left journalists in a connection that did not deter CBS from putting her forth as an "authority" on defense. In her book, The Pentagon Underground, Rasor discloses that she was approached to do the 1983 Moyers/CBS show by Moyers producer Leslie Cockburn, the wife of Andrew Cockburn and sister-in-law of Alexander Cockburn, a radical columnist for The Nation magazine. The father of Andrew and Alex was the late Claud Cockburn, a prominent British communist. Leslie Cockburn shares the family ideology. She produced stories on the CBS program "West 57th" charging involvement by the ClA and Nicaraguan freedom fighters in drug smuggling and her book, Out of Control, regurgitated the wild charges the Christie Institute had advanced in its failed RICO suit.
All of the Cockburns have used influential media organs to agitate against a strong U.S. military. Andrew Cockburn, who served as a contributing editor for the trade publication Defense Week, once took the line that we didn't have to worry about the Soviet military because it had inferior equipment. But he also doubted the effective- ness of U.S. weapons. He complained in a July 22, 1986 New York Times article that the Stinger anti-aircraft missile was too "puny" to do much damage to its targets. He claimed a "humid climate" could "play merry hell with the Stinger's electronic innards." Perhaps Cockburn was concerned about where the Pentagon intended to send the Stingers. During this period Stingers proved deadly effective in shooting down Soviet helicopters and MIGs over Afghanistan and Angola when used by Afghan freedom fighters and Jonas Savimbi's anti-communist UNITA forces. The Stingers are widely credited with helping to force the Soviets out of Afghanistan.
Yet Andrew Cockburn also complained when our weapons worked. After President Reagan ordered air strikes against terrorist-related targets in Libya, he argued on ABC's "Good Morning America" that the raids were "callous" and "not the thing that a power like the United States should be engaged in."
Brother Alex has enjoyed U.S. hospitality for more than a decade, deriding America all the while. His main American outlet is The Nation, but until recently his column appeared regularly in The Wall Street Journal. It was in the Journal that he maintained that manufacturers colluding with the Defense Department in the padded invoice and the faked test were sending American troops into battle in the Gulf." He repeated this charge in a Nation column before the ground war began. "From information surviving censorship in Saudi Arabia a somber picture emerges of poor liaison, dubious equipment (and) badly prepared troops," he wrote. "...Kuwait will most likely be vigorously contested, house by house, and just as the battle there could bog down, so too could the U.S. rush toward the rivers northwest of Basra come to grief."
Cockburn's record is consistently spavined when he writes about defense. He charged in the September 24, 1981 Wall Street Journal that the AWACS "does not work" and is a "preeminent example of the Pentagon's disastrous high tech procurement policies over the past generation." So what happened when the weapon was tested in battle? Aviation Week & Space Technology said that the AWACS "played a pivotal role in crushing Iraq's air and ground- based military elements." AW&ST credited AWACs "with providing vital control and coordination services from the start of the air war January 17 to the attack and close air support missions conducted through February 28." Allied planes flew more than 110,000 sorties, and AWACS operators controlled the "great majority" of them.
Despite these successes, the Project on Government Procurement still claims that some weapons didn't work well enough, or haven't really been tested. Research associate Kevin Paige is nagging at the Patriot's success by claiming that it only operated under "favorable combat conditions" and only demonstrated "part of its required mission capabilities." On January 21, after a Patriot knocked the first Scud out of the sky, former Pentagon analyst Pierre Sprey, who worked with Rasor over the years, claimed to the Philadelphia Inquirer that the Patriot was still hugely expensive and prone to break down. An unnamed defense analyst told the Inquirer, "I didn't think it would work at all."
A current target of the Pentagon-bashers is the B-1 bomber and the B-2 Stealth bomber, which strategists would like to have configured so that they could be used both for strategic nuclear and conventional missions. The Air Force wants the B-1 as a replacement for the aged B-52. Lt. Gen. Charles A. Horner, air commander in the Persian Gulf, said he could have put both planes to deadly use in the air war. But Congressional delays supported by President Carter have delayed their development.
Uninformed media reporting has particularly harmed the B-2 Stealth bomber. A new study, "The B-2 and Network News," by Stephen Aubin of Boston University's Center for Defense Journalism, published by the Aerospace Education Foundation, accuses the TV networks of distorting news about the aircraft and misleading the public about the stakes involved in the decision to fund it. Aubin documents the familiar pattern of emphasizing images of high cost, failed or delayed test flights, defective parts and corrupt or incompetent defense contractors. When the aircraft had a successful test on August 26, 1989, only the "CBS Evening News" covered it, and with a brief report. Aubin writes, "In the case of the B-2, any American who had the misfortune of getting all of his news from the networks would have no idea about how cost relates to its mission, the technological advances made, the links to arms control, or even some of the controversies surrounding its technical capabilities, like range and aero- dynamics."
Bob Andrews, who fought in the battles for high-tech weapons over the years, has said, "The people who write about weapons systems should be as accountable as the people who build and use them." On that basis, our troops, the Pentagon and the defense contractors who supplied them should be hailed with flying colors. But many reporters deserve a dishonorable discharge.
See Editor's Notes.
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AIM Report NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF
THE WAR IS STILL VERY MUCH ON OUR MINDS. CLIFF KINCAID HAS BEEN KEEPING an eye on misleading media reporting about our military for many years, and so I asked him to do this report on how the media had disparaged some of the weapons that contributed so much to our quick victory in the Gulf War. Cliff, who does AIM's radio program, Media Monitor, with me and is co-author of our book, Profiles of Deception, has been doing a bang-up job as a radio talk show host on WNTR in Washington. The station is one of three owned by Pat Robertson, the highly respected televangelist and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988. The talk shows originating with WNTR were being carried on an expanding network of stations throughout the country, but evidently for financial reasons Robertson has decided to cut back drastically, dropping four of the five WNTR talk show hosts, including Cliff.
RUSH LIMBAUGH, A CONSERVATIVE AND A GREAT SHOWMAN, HAS OVER 300 RADIO stations airing his syndicated talk show, proving that conservatives don't need to buy networks or even stations to get their views aired. All they have to do is offer attractive programming to stations owned by others. Robertson was doing that, but unlike Limbaugh he started by buying three stations, all money-losers. Why can't someone, perhaps Limbaugh, put together a package of other good talk show hosts such as Cliff and get them aired nationwide? It could be a winner.
THE MEDIA CAMPAIGN TO PORTRAY PETER ARNETT AS A HERO PROCEEDS APACE. Arnett has appeared on ABC's Prime Time Live in a taped interview with Sam Donaldson, on the Donahue show and at a National Press Club luncheon televised by C-SPAN. He had a long article in The Washington Post on March 17, and has been the subject of numerous news stories and columns. Both Prime Time Live and Donahue asked AIM for material on Arnett. Neither made use of what we gave them. Donaldson had defended Arnett on This Week With David Brinkley, and I wasn't surprised when he did little more than give him a chance to defend his reporting on the alleged baby milk plant and civilian bomb shelter and ridicule charges that his reporting was "treasonous." There were no arguments for the other side, nor was they're any mention of Arnett's main story--civilian casualties. Donahue was a little better. He pressed Arnett to explain why he would not appear with Sen. Simpson and why CNN would not show a tape Arnett claims exists of Simpson upbraiding American reporters in Jerusalem for being hard on Saddam Hussein. The answers were feeble. He said, "I have no desire to tangle with the Senator...I don't have any common ground with the Senator.... You would be better than I. You're welcome to represent me in a debate." Arnett is willing to face the Donaldsons and Donahues, but he won't face A1 Simpson. I am challenging him to a debate at our May conference or anywhere else. WHAT YOU CAN DO: Send the enclosed postcard to your local paper to expose Arnett's cowardice and his gentle treatment by his pals in the media.
THE WASHINGTON POST SAID ON MARCH 23 THAT DEMOCRATS FELT THAT BUSH'S "popularity would plummet once the country got its mind back on basic issues like economics, crime, education and health care." It quoted House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt as saying, "We've got the right ideas, we've got the right values," but it didn't discuss the consequences of a Democratic move in Congress that would raise milk prices by 25c to 45c per gallon, and knock an estimated 112,000 women and children off food subsidy rolls. On March 20, the Post reported that the Senate had voted 60 to 40 to pass an amendment by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., "that would boost export subsidies for wheat farmers and raise the minimum price milk processors must pay dairy farmers." The story said nothing about the effect this would have on consumers. Leahy argued that this was needed to help dairy farmers suffering from depressed prices. Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., protested the increased cost to consumers. "You cannot," he said, "raise the price of milk by 25 to 45 cents a gallon without somebody paying." Sen. Alfonso D'Amato, R-N.Y., put into the record a Congressional Research Service report about the impact Leahy's amendment would have on supplemental food programs for women, infants and children (WIC). It said the impact of the higher milk costs on the WIC budget would cut the number of people served by the program by over 112,500 in an average month. Yet the Democratic majority approved the amendment, picking up a few farm-state GOP votes.
SEVERAL REPUBLICAN SENATORS POINTED OUT THAT LEAHY'S MOVE VIOLATED PROCEDURAL rules. Any committee did not hear the amendment. As "authorizing" legislation Senate rules say it should not be grafted onto an appropriations bill. None of that mattered. Another part of Leahy's amendment called for adding dried milk to liquid milk, even skim milk, as a means of reducing government stocks of dried milk so they could purchase still more. Leahy said this would give milk a "richer, better taste, as well as.... a higher nutritional value." Perhaps Leahy doesn't realize that many of us drink skim milk to avoid that "richer, better taste" and the higher calories that come with it.
OUR LIBERAL MEDIA LOVE TO POSE AS THE PROTECTORS OF THE CONSUMERS AND especially needy women and children. If it had been the Republicans in the Senate who were pushing up the price of milk and reducing supplementary food for poor women and children, the liberal journalists would have had a field day. Increases in milk prices that hurt poor mothers and children should be no less newsworthy when it is the Democrats who cast the majority of the votes. But our liberal media, including not only The Washington Post but also The New York Times and the TV networks saw nothing newsworthy in the Democratic move to raise the price of milk. The New York Times and the networks didn't even mention the milk-price vote. The only discussion we saw of the effect of the Leahy amendment was in a column by James Bovard, author of The Farm Fiasco, in The Washington Times. Now the good news. A House-Senate conference committee eventually killed the Leahy amendment, but the liberal media can't claim any credit for that.
WAR AND THE MEDIA April 25-26, 1991 The Washington Court Hotel Washington, D.C
The battle over the military's handling of our media, the media coverage of the war and the propriety of American reporters being stationed in the enemy capital during the war has lasted far longer than the war itself. Its outcome will have an important bearing on the role our media will play in future wars. We think it is important to bring together experienced journalists and other experts who can discuss and debate these issues thoughtfully and with historical perspective. We will have discussants who can bring light as well as heat to the debate and whose contributions will be worthy of publication in a permanent record that will provide a useful reference for both the media and policy makers in the future.
The conference will begin on Thursday, April 25 at 1:00 p.m. and run through Friday, April 26. The cost of the conference will be $75 per person. The price includes 2 receptions, a luncheon, and a banquet on Thursday. There will be a $10 charge for late registration after April 15. Make your hotel reservations early. Call the Washington Court Hotel at 1-800- 321-3010 and request the conference rate.