By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 21, 2008; 2:55 PM

Talk about marching orders.

John Garrett, a retired Army colonel and a Fox News military analyst, was in regular touch with the Pentagon as President Bush prepared to announce his Iraq troop surge last year.

"Please let me know if you have any specific points you want covered or that you would prefer to downplay," Garrett wrote. That note was one of numerous documents published yesterday in a lengthy New York Times investigation of the close ties between the parade of former officers who serve as television analysts, Defense Department officials who feed them information, and corporations who hire them to win federal contracts.

It's hardly shocking that career military men would largely reflect the Pentagon's point of view, just as Democratic and Republican "strategists" stay in touch with aides to the candidates they defend on the air. But the degree of behind-the-scenes manipulation--including regular briefings by then-Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other officials -- is striking, as is the lack of disclosure by the networks of some of these government and business connections.

With an aura of independence, many of the analysts used their megaphones, and the prestige of their rank, to help sell a war that was not going well. Not all marched in lock step, of course, and a half-dozen former generals broke with the Pentagon in 2006 to call for Rumsfeld's resignation. But the networks rarely if ever explored the outside roles of their military consultants.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said in an interview yesterday that the former officers are "highly educated, experienced in their field. To suggest they could be puppets of the Defense Department is a little insulting to all of them. . . . Not all of them are advocates for everything the department is doing." The department, he added, provides information not just to retired officers but to corporate, educational and religious leaders as well as journalists.

Marty Ryan, a Fox News executive producer, said yesterday that the analysts are hired not just for their expertise but also as people "who have access to and know what the thinking of the Pentagon is. That makes them valuable to us."

With so many military commentators retained in wartime, "it's a little unrealistic to think you're going to do a big background check on everybody," Ryan said. "Some of the business ties aren't necessarily relevant when you're asking them about a specific helicopter operation."

The credibility gap, to use an old Vietnam War phrase, was greatest when these retired officers offered upbeat assessments of the Iraq war even while privately expressing doubts.

Defense officials arranged for a number of the analysts to visit Iraq in September 2003, the Times reported. "You can't believe the progress," retired Gen. Paul Vallely, then a Fox analyst, told viewers, although he told the Times that he recognized at the time that "things were going south."

Ken Allard, a retired colonel and former NBC military analyst, told the Times there was a "night and day" difference between what Pentagon briefers told him and the deteriorating conditions in Iraq. "I felt we'd been hosed," Allard said.

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 assure 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."

But others may have sipped it. Military pundits obviously come at their subject with a viewpoint sympathetic to their longtime profession. What has been obscured is the extent to which many are still part of the military's web and entangled with companies trying to milk the Pentagon for profit.

Update: I reached John Garrett, the Fox analyst and retired Marine colonel, today, and he said he was simply trying to gather information from the Pentagon.

"You have to accept I'm a little bit biased. I've been in this business for 27 years," the Vietnam veteran said. "There's plenty of people out there to make a negative point. If there's anything that could explain or be constructive, it ought to be pointed out . . . Never once, in my recollection, did anyone in the Pentagon or DOD establishment tell me what to say."

In last week's Democratic debate, ABC News presented Nash McCabe as a typical voter with a particular concern. She asked Barack Obama on a video "if you believe in the American flag," and if so, why he doesn't wear a flag pin.

But the Latrobe, Pa., woman was hardly neutral. ABC found her because she had been cited in the New York Times two weeks ago as a Democrat who maintained she could not vote for the Illinois senator, saying: "How can I vote for a president who won't wear a flag pin?"

Viewers had no way of knowing that McCabe had indicated in advance that she could not back Obama against Hillary Clinton. Her question, expanded upon by moderator Charlie Gibson, forced Obama to defend his patriotism during a 40-minute sequence in which Gibson and George Stephanopoulos directed most of the tough questions to Obama.

Asked about the use of McCabe, first noted by McClatchy Newspapers, ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider says another questioner "made clear that Clinton had lost his vote over her explanation of her trip to Bosnia. . . . These questions were representative of what we heard again and again from voters regarding the importance of credibility and electability as central issues in this campaign."

There's still plenty of buzz about ABC's presidential debate. I've criticized the unbalanced nature of the first 40 minutes. But the way some critics are trashing Gibson and Stephanopoulos, you'd think they had cornered Obama in a dark alley while taking cellphone instructions from Hillary. Some media critics are all but asking the pope to excommunicate Charlie and George from the journalistic cathedral.

I don't think Obama should have been asked about flag pins either. But maybe, just maybe, the reaction has to do with the way the critics, ideological and otherwise, view Obama.

The Politico guys, John Harris and Jim VandeHei, see the reaction as proof positive of bias:

"Hillary Clinton and her aides have been complaining for months about imbalance in news coverage. For the most part, the reaction to her from the political-media commentariat has been: Stop whining. That's still a good response now that it is Obama partisans--some of whom are showing up in distressingly inappropriate places--who are doing the whining. The shower of indignation on Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos over the last few days is the clearest evidence yet that the Clintonites are fundamentally correct in their complaint that she has been flying throughout this campaign into a headwind of media favoritism for Obama . . .

"Those questions about Jeremiah Wright, about Obama's association with 1960s radical William Ayers, about apparent contradictions between his past and present views on proven wedge issues like gun control, were entirely in-bounds. If anything they were overdue for a front-runner and likely nominee."

And the best part? One author jabs the other:

"Harris only here: As one who has assigned journalists to cover Obama at both Politico and the Washington Post, I have witnessed the phenomenon several times. Some reporters come back and need to go through detox, to cure their swooning over Obama's political skill. Even VandeHei seemed to have been bitten by the bug after the Iowa caucus.

"VandeHei only here: There is no doubt reporters are smitten with Obama's speeches and promises to change politics. I find his speeches, when he's on, pretty electric myself. It certainly helps his cause that reporters also seem very tired of the Clintons and their paint-by-polls approach to governing."

Kurtz only here: Can we name some of the swooners? And is there a drug that works, like Obamethadone?

Chuck Todd and the gang at NBC's First Read make a similar point:

"Curious of what the bitterness and anger could look like if Obama is somehow denied the Democratic nomination? Check out the reaction from the ObamaNation over Wednesday's debate. To put it simply, ABC was under siege. This may only be a taste of how the ObamaNation would react to a Clinton nomination. If MoveOn is motivated to do a petition campaign against the media over a debate, imagine what Clinton delegates and undecided superdelegates would face this summer if there is doubt."

Will the Bill Ayers connection (all but ignored by the news media, other than Fox, until Stephanopoulos raised it) hurt Obama? National Review's Jim Geraghty puts it this way:

"Do you, personally, know anyone who has ever tried to blow up the Pentagon? Do you know of anyone who actually brags that they did, successfully, plant and detonate a bomb at the Pentagon?

"Do you, personally, know anyone has ever planned to blow up an officer's dance at a military base, say, Fort Dix?

"Do you, personally, know anyone who has gotten someone killed in an explosion because of their actions?

"Even if these bombings and attempted bombings occurred forty years ago, is that the sort of thing you could forgive, and/or dismiss? Do you believe that assembling a bomb, and intending to kill police, members of the military, and ordinary innocent civilians is the sort of thing that should be considered 'water under the bridge' once enough time has passed?

"Could you shake hands with this person? Go to a party at their house? Accept a donation from them? If you knew this about a person, could you look at them and forget that they gathered the explosives, assembled the wires and the parts, scoped out their target, planted it, and watched it detonate with excitement? Do you relate to having people like that in your social circle?

"No, I don't, either."

Geraghty may be a right-winger, but here's lefty commentator John Ridley who is also troubled:

"Jeremiah Wright nontroversy? Not a problem.

"Bitter clingy blue collar types, flag lapel pins? He can navigate those annoyances with ease.

"But come November the Bill Ayers issue rushing up in Barack Obama's rear view mirror could be a real political problem.

"A former member of the Weather Underground Organization -- a radical group responsible for a string of bombings in the early seventies - Ayers was a privileged kid turned domestic terrorist. Reformed and respectable Ayers is now an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, an informal advisor to Chicago's mayor and a past contributor to an Obama campaign . . .

"What someone did forty years ago -- within reason -- should not damn them forever. But that's assuming the offending individual pays their debt to society and repents. Ayers has done neither."

Portfolio's Matt Cooper chides Charlie for his math:

"If Americans needed more proof that the media elite are rich and out of touch, Gibson gave them more. In the St. Anselm's College debate in New Hampshire, Gibson asserted that average professors make $100,000. They don't. The median household income is around $46,000. For families it's closer to $68,000. In Philadelphia, he blithely repeated the canard that cutting capital gains taxes yields more revenue. The short answer is that sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. The rooster crows and the sun rises. Just because revenue has risen following some capital gains cuts doesn't mean it automatically yields a cut. Gibson stated it as fact.

"I thought Obama did better than most commentators did. He took a lot of crap and answered it pretty sensibly, saying that the issues were distractions."

Are we approaching a turning point? Joe Klein has "a gut feeling that the Philadelphia debate may have been the last straw for the Democratic Party, that the superdelegates are about to rush to Barack Obama in order to end this thing and liberate him to actually answer the Republican-style attacks that Hillary Clinton has been previewing . . .

"There is still the possibility that if Clinton really blows out Obama in Pennsylvania--a twenty point win, say--there will be some second thoughts. And this is not to say that Democrats are entirely thrilled with a candidate who has such obvious difficulties getting white middle class people to vote for him. But there is a growing sense that the bleeding needs to be staunched. If he's to be the nominee, Obama needs to start putting together his general election campaign now--and start responding to the character attacks in a way that won't be restrained by his desire not to offend fellow Democrats. My guess is that the superdelegate tidal wave is about to begin."

Could this be the first sign? A Newsweek poll gives Obama a 54-35 lead among registered Democrats and Dem leaners.

Or should I believe this Gallup tracking poll, which gives Obama a mere 47-45 advantage?

The Washington Post devotes enormous space to the question of John McCain's temper.

Finally, sex on the campaign trial: Who's hooking up with whom.

Howard Kurtz hosts CNN's weekly media program, "Reliable Sources.