Retired Officers, Still Doing The Pentagon's Work on TV?

Retired Gen. McCaffrey was among the TV analysts whose ties to contractors and closeness with the Pentagon were examined by the New York Times. (Nbc News Photo)

The article, by David Barstow, was based on 8,000 pages of internal Pentagon documents obtained in a lawsuit by the newspaper.

Garrett, an unpaid Fox analyst, told the Times there was an unavoidable overlap between his roles as commentator, retired officer and Patton Boggs lobbyist who seeks to help clients win defense contracts.

James "Spider" Marks, a retired general who served as a CNN analyst from 2004 to 2007, also pursued military contracts as an executive with McNeil Technologies. He told the Times he reported that income to CNN, which acknowledged being slow in asking follow-up questions.

"When we learned the extent of Spider Marks's dealings -- in a review of his financial disclosure form in July 2007 -- we immediately ended our relationship with him," a CNN spokeswoman said in a statement yesterday.

Marks was not alone. Retired Gen. Thomas McInerney, a Fox analyst, sits on the boards of such military contractors as Nortel Government Solutions. William Cohen, the former defense secretary and now a CNN analyst, heads the Cohen Group, which says it "provides global business consulting services and advice on tactical and strategic opportunities in virtually every market." Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, an NBC analyst, runs BR McCaffrey Associates, which "provides strategic, analytic, and advocacy consulting services to businesses, non-profits, governments, and international organizations."

The Pentagon arranged several trips for the analysts to the widely criticized military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. After a 2005 visit, retired Gen. Don Shepperd, a CNN consultant, said the media's portrayal of the prison had been "totally false." Retired Gen. Montgomery Meigs, an NBC analyst, said on "Today" that "there's been over $100 million in new construction."

NBC said in a statement that the network has "clear policies in place" to ensure that its analysts "have been appropriately vetted and that nothing in their profile would lead to even a perception of a conflict of interest."

The advocacy of these retired military men extended to print; at least nine wrote op-ed pieces for the Times. Vallely wrote the Pentagon in 2006, after several former generals (none of them TV commentators) turned on Rumsfeld, asking for "any input for the article" that he, McInerney and two other former officers were writing for the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. Rumsfeld's office provided statistics, and a Pentagon official wrote his colleagues that "Vallely is going to use the numbers."

The Journal piece was headlined "In Defense of Donald Rumsfeld."

Were these military men subject to intimidation? Fox News analyst Bill Cowan, a retired colonel who runs a small military consulting firm, said on "The O'Reilly Factor" in August 2005 that it had been "a bad week" in Iraq and that many military people he consulted were "expressing a lot of dismay and disappointment at the way things are going."

"Suddenly, boom, I never got another telephone call, I never got another e-mail from them," Cowan, who had been meeting regularly with Rumsfeld, recalled in an interview. "I was just booted off the group. I was fired." Whitman said he knew of no one who had been "dismissed, dropped, fired or disinvited" from the group.

Cowan, who took several Pentagon-orchestrated trips to Iraq, said the military gave him special access only "as long as they thought I was serving their purposes. . . . I drink nobody's Kool-Aid."