Activism

Two years ago, public revulsion against the Bush Administration's unnecessary and disastrous attack and occupation of Iraq resulted in the Democratic Party taking control of the U.S. Congress. But Nancy Pelosi and the new political leadership backed down before President Bush and refused to withhold funding for the war, while rhetorically denouncing it and thus playing to anti-war voters. The liberal lobby group MoveOn spent tens of millions of dollars on anti-war advertisements and door-to-door canvassing events as part of its partisan campaign to blame the war on the Republicans, while letting Democrats off the hook for giving Bush all the money he wanted to continue the occupation into next year.

Today, as the 2008 election approaches, worry over Iraq has slipped down the public's list of concerns while more immediate economic issues and the spectacular collapse of the Wall Street investment banks take center stage. However, one anti-war organization has proven especially tenacious, independent and committed to immediately bringing home troops from Iraq and making good to the Iraqi people, while taking care of the soldiers who fought the war. That organization is the Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) composed of more than thirteen hundred soldiers who have recently served or are still serving in the U.S. military.

As reporters and researchers know all too well, releasing information isn't necessarily the same thing as releasing useful information.

Case in point: the Pentagon's military analyst program. In early 2002, the Defense Department began cultivating "key influentials" -- retired military officers who are frequent media commentators -- to help the Bush administration make the case for invading Iraq. The program expanded over the years, briefing more participants on a wider range of Bush administration talking points, occasionally taking them overseas on the government's dime.

In April 2006, the group was used to counter criticism of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The apparent coordination between the Pentagon and the pundits piqued the interest of New York Times reporters. Two years later -- after wresting some 8,000 pages of internal documents from the Defense Department -- the Times exposed the Pentagon's covert attempts to shape public opinion through its so-called "message force multipliers." A few weeks later, the Defense Department posted the same documents publicly.

It wasn't the high-octane data dump it first appeared to be. Sure, paging through the emails, slides and briefing papers is interesting, and occasionally you come across something noteworthy. But the documents are formatted in such a way that systematically exploring them via keyword searches is impossible. A cynic (or realist) might think the Pentagon was doing damage control by putting the documents out in the open, while making it near-impossible to find crucial needles in a very large, chaotically-compiled haystack.

Over the next week, campaigners from around the United Kingdom will converge on the site of a proposed expansion of the coal-fired Kingsnorth Power Station and participate in civil disobedience protests. The company behind the proposal, E.ON UK, a subsidiary of the German energy company E.ON, is so worried by the prospect of the planned civil disobedience campaign that it has hired the PR firm Edelman, to see if it can help ensure that the company's proposal retains government support.