Allard, who is 65, shouldn’t hold his breath waiting for a similar concession.
By JONATHAN GURWITZ
New York Times News Service
In 2006, Col. Ken Allard went to press with “Warheads,” his book describing a cadre of officers who became military analysts for the television networks after 9/11. Their job was to make sense of the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq and the broader war on terror for an audience that largely lacked any connections to the military.
In the book, Allard talked about the peril for a nation that fights its wars with “other people’s kids,” the short attention span of the media and the public on military matters, and the inevitable disconnection between facts on the ground in war zones and the filtered news that emanates from American television screens.
Allard also discussed what it was like for him and fellow warheads to be wooed by the Defense Department. “Was it seductive to be escorted into the Pentagon’s inner sanctums?” Allard told me. “My book said that it was — but hardly different from what any White House correspondent experiences every day.”
Many of the warheads, including Allard, were critics of the wars, of the ways they were being fought, of the generals who were leading them and of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Were the warheads perfect? “No,” Allard acknowledges, “but we always did our best to tell the truth.”
In 2008, Allard received a phone call from New York Times reporter David Barstow. Barstow told him he had read his book. In the following weeks, by Allard’s account, Barstow spent five hours on the phone interviewing him for an investigative piece about the warheads.
When that piece appeared on the front page of the New York Times on Sunday, April 20, 2008, Allard said his reaction was, “Oh my God.”
“Behind Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand,” which ran to an astonishing 7,600 words, described a nefarious plot to gin up favorable news coverage of the wars, a plot in which the warheads were active conspirators in disseminating Bush administration propaganda because they stood to profit from their ties with military contractors.
Allard maintains that Barstow’s quotes of him were taken out of context. Worse, from his standpoint, Barstow never mentioned Allard’s authorship of a book on the subject.
Barstow’s story was a sensation, earning him a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. It also led congressional Democrats — including then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. — to demand a federal investigation.
There would in fact be four federal investigations: one by the Government Accountability Office, one by the Federal Communications Commission and two by the Defense Department Inspector General. The four inquiries — including the most recent IG report made public in November — found no hidden hand, no propaganda effort, no financial benefits, nothing amiss.
This was duly reported by Barstow and the Times more than a month after the fact, on Christmas Day, on page A18. Allard emailed the Times’ publisher and editors seeking an apology for the damage to his and his fellow warheads’ reputations. A reply, from public editor Art Brisbane, said the IG’s findings “rebut select elements but do not invalidate the broader scope of the article.”
In 1932, New York Times reporter Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of dispatches about life in the Soviet Union under Stalin. The articles consistently downplayed the dictator’s brutality and the disastrous effects of government-induced famines while repeating Soviet talking points.
The Times stood by those stories for seven decades before publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. finally acknowledged in 2003 that “Duranty’s slovenly work should have been recognized for what it was.”
Allard, who is 65, shouldn’t hold his breath waiting for a similar concession.