Brig. Gen. David L. Grange doesn't wear a star on his shoulder much since his retirement in 1999. But he's on the list of retired officers the Pentagon has cultivated in an effort to influence domestic news coverage of military matters.

In fact, Grange, a CNN analyst, was tagged as the most visible shill for the Pentagon since 2002.

The Pentagon suspended the analysts' program and its weekly briefings shortly after the Times published its story in April revealing the extent of the Pentagon's message massaging.

When Grange appeared again on CNN late last week, host Lou Dobbs made no mention of Grange's previous participation in the Pentagon program. But he did ask him about Iran:

[Special Thanks to TPM Reader LB for the tip.]

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Yesterday, CREW and VoteVets.org released an email from a FOIA request that showed an employee in the Veterans Administration "suggesting" that staff ought to "refrain from giving a diagnosis of [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder] straight out" to "compensation seeking veterans" and that VA staff members "really don't . . . have time to do the extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD."

The Washington Post identified the official in a story this morning as Norma Perez, a psychologist who helps lead the PTSD program at the Department of Veterans Affairs' Olin E. Teague Veterans' Center in Temple, Texas. The VA responded that it was simple Perez's bad idea:

Veterans Affairs Secretary James B. Peake said in a statement that Perez's e-mail was "inappropriate" and does not reflect VA policy. It has been "repudiated at the highest level of our health care organization," he said.

"VA's leadership will strongly remind all medical staff that trust, accuracy and transparency is paramount to maintaining our relationships with our veteran patients," Peake said.

Peake said Perez has been "counseled" and is "extremely apologetic." Aikele said Perez remains in her job.

But Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) picking up the torch, is not reassured. And in a letter to Peake today, he calls for an investigation of the email, whether Perez's suggestion was followed, and a look at the numbers of PTSD diagnoses to see whether it really was so isolated of an occurrence. The letter is below.

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Yesterday, NBC reported that the U.S. had finally cut off ties to Ahmed Chalabi because of "unauthorized" contacts with Iranian officials. Newsweek reported the same today, but said that Nouri al-Maliki's government had acted first. McClatchy's take is even clearer:

A State Department official said that this time the U.S. cut off Chalabi, who was appointed in September to head Maliki's Services Committee, which is meant to help usher services into communities after they're secured by U.S. and Iraqi troops, in deference to Maliki.

"Maliki has effectively de-horsed him and asked us to maintain a similar position," said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive interchanges with the Iraqi government. "My sense is that Maliki wants to marginalize and diminish Chalabi because he sees him as a pretender to the throne."

OK, that's it! Let no one say that the administration has not handled the situation with its typical forbearance and caution. Other, rasher leaders would have shunned Ahmad Chalabi after it became apparent that his network of informants were liars and that he could not be trusted. But the U.S. has not been overly swift to act. Sure, there were suspicions that he had passed classified information to Iran, but this is not a group that rushes to judgment.

Now, however, the straw has finally broken the camel's back:

Sources in Baghdad tell NBC News that as of this week American military and civilian officials have cut off all contact with controversial Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi, the former favorite of Washington's once powerful neoconservatives.

The reason, the sources say, is "unauthorized" contacts with Iran's government, an allegation Chalabi denies. Iran has been accused of arming and training rebel Shiite forces in Iraq....

Since September 2007... American military officials and civilian officials working out of the U.S. Embassy had contacts with Chalabi. At that time he was installed as the head of a "services" committee for Baghdad that was to coordinate the restoration of services to the city's residents.

Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the Multi-National Forces-Iraq, even escorted Chalabi on a trip, on U.S. helicopters, to address reconstruction issues. And American officials attended meetings with him and supported his efforts.

Call it tough love.

Note: By the Charlie Black code of lobbying, it is now not OK to lobby for Ahmed Chalabi.

You'd think that an Iraqi anti-corruption crusader who testified before Congress about his travails would find no great difficulty in obtaining asylum in the United States. You'd think the U.S. would be grateful for the news that $18 billion worth of corruption had virtually "stopped" reconstruction in Iraq. But not so much.

Former State Department officials told Congress earlier this week that, though Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, the former head of the Iraqi Commission on Public Integrity, was able to get access into the U.S., he is not allowed to work and is living hand to mouth. Why has he fallen through the cracks?

It's always a toss-up between negligence/incompetence and malfeasance with this administration. On the negligence side of things, you have the disastrously impenetrable immigration system, which has allowed so few Iraqis to come to the U.S. As The New York Times reports today, U.S. soldiers have actually set up organizations to help their interpreters gain asylum, since the Iraqis, even though they face certain threat of death for collaborating with American forces, cannot navigate the system on their own. As one Army captain tells it, interpreters are required to produce a letter from a general, which he said was "like a junior associate at a Fortune 500 company asking the chief executive for a letter of recommendation."

But then there's the malfeasance side of things. One of the former officials testified that "a senior State Department official had ordered agency employees not to give al Radhi references or contact him" for help with his asylum.

That might have a lot to do with the trouble that Radhi gave Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the administration. Like pointing out that corruption ran rampant under Maliki and that he'd jiggered the system so that corruption judges could not bring charges against any of his senior officials without his approval -- that was a decree on which Secretary of State Rice refused to pass judgment when she testified late last year. Rice also refused to comment on Radhi's many accusations.

Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) declared at the hearing early this week that he is "going to ask the State Department what in the hell are they thinking." Somehow I don't think Rice will be any more forthcoming this time around.

In our Pentagon military analyst doc dump thread, Kevin H comes up with a beauty. You can see it here.

In the exchange, someone (the name is redacted) emails public relations officials in the Pentagon with news that Jed Babbin, who was deputy undersecretary of defense in President George H.W. Bush's administration and a participant in the analyst program ("one of our military analysts," the emailer calls him), would be guest hosting the Michael Medved radio show. And Babbin wanted to interview Gen. George Casey, then the commanding officer in Iraq. Babbin is the editor of Human Events.

But just in case Pentagon officials were worried that the interview might not be worth doing, the emailer made the case: "this would be a softball interview and the show is 8th or 9th in the nation."

Allison Barber, a Public Affairs official at the Pentagon, responded quickly:

Thanks for sending this.

Just fyi, probably wouldn't put "softball" interview in writing. If that got out it would compromise jed and general casey.

The emailer, somewhat chastened, replied "check, check." Not bad advice at all.

Note: As for who this emailer is, it's unclear. The Pentagon redacted email addresses in the release, so it could very well be an official in the public affairs office emailing from a private address. The use of the phrase "our military analysts" certainly suggests that.

From the AP:

Arthur Brennan, who briefly served in Baghdad as head of the department's Office of Accountability and Transparency last year, and James Mattil, who worked as the chief of staff, told Senate Democrats on Monday that their office was understaffed and its warnings and recommendations ignored.

Brennan also alleges that the State Department prevented a congressional staffer visiting Baghdad from talking with staffers by insisting they were too busy. In reality, Brennan said, the staffers were watching movies at the embassy and on their computers. The staffers' workload had been cut dramatically because of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's "evisceration" of Iraq's top anti-corruption office, he said.

The State Department's policies "not only contradicted the anti-corruption mission but indirectly contributed to and has allowed corruption to fester at the highest levels of the Iraqi government," Brennan told the Senate Democratic Policy Committee.

As Josh says, we'd like any help we can get finding the revealing tidbits from the Pentagon's military analyst documents. The documents are here. Please provide a link to the pdf you are referring to, as well as the page number when you comment below.

And for those of you who haven't heard the audio of the analyst briefing on April 18, 2006, don't miss it.

Last month, The New York Times published its front-page exposé of the Pentagon's strategy of using military analysts. The retired officers who frequently appeared on TV were the ideal vehicle to broadcast the administration's message on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Message force multipliers," Pentagon officials called them.

Well, earlier this week, the Pentagon released all of the documents that had been turned over to the Times. It is a staggering load. But most immediately intriguing is audio of some of the briefings at the Pentagon, including two featuring Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The audio we've excerpted here comes from a meeting on April 18, 2006. It was an emergency meeting called because earlier in the month, several retired generals had hit the airwaves demanding that Rumsfeld resign. 17 analysts attended the briefing, which featured Rumsfeld and then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Peter Pace. It was a remarkable display of servility, with one analyst at one point proclaiming that Rumsfeld need to get out there on the "offense," because "we'd love to be following our leader, as indeed you are. You are the leader. You are our guy." Here's the audio:

Another analyst chimed in to the effect that, though PsyOps or "brainwashing" are dirty words, it was necessary to get out there on offense. "You know what they call PsyOps today, they call those public relations firms," another said approvingly. Finally, Rumsfeld had to throw up his hands: "You people should be taking notes. I'm taking all the notes!" It sure was an eager group.

A transcript is available here (pdf) for those who want to follow along at home. The excerpt above begins at the bottom of page 18. It cuts at one point to the top of page 20. The full audio of the briefing is here (wav).

Unfortunately, the transcript does not name the analysts when they speak (it just says "Question"), meaning that it is not easily possible to figure out which of them said what. A list of the participants, however, is here.

The Times reported that the meeting was a rousing success for the Pentagon:

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Earlier this week, I noted an excerpt from the new book by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, where he told how Donald Rumsfeld had ordered a report by the Joint Warfighting Center of the bungled occupation of Iraq, but when Rumsfeld got the results, he'd ordered it squelched.

Sanchez writes that he was told by one of the people who'd done the study that when they'd presented their findings to Rumsfeld, he'd "just shut us down" and said "This is not going anywhere." According to Sanchez, the report validated his account that the entire Pentagon leadership knew that he'd had inadequate support when he'd been in command of the U.S. forces in Iraq after the fall of Hussein. It also showed that Gen. Tommy Franks had discarded the original plan, which called for a twelve-to-eighteen-month occupation deployment.

Sanchez added: "From that, my belief was that Rumsfeld's intent appeared to be to minimize and control further exposure within the Pentagon and to specifically keep this information from the American public."

Susanne Moore, media operations chief at the Joint Forces Command, told me today that the report actually had been finished and published in late 2006 -- but that it "was and remains classified."

So why is a historical report classified? "It has all the earmarks of an abusive classification," Steve Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy Project, told me. "The report has been publicly characterized as an embarrassing document, and an allegation has been made by an informed source that the motive for withholding was to avoid embarrassment and disgrace, which of course is not a legitimate use of the classification system. So it demands further investigation by Congress to get to the bottom of it."

Five years after the invasion of Iraq, there seems to have been a rash of accounting lately.

Consider: in March, the Joint Forces Command released (after a pathetic attempt at squelching it) a report definitively proving that there were no operational links between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda. That same month, The New York Times provided a detailed account of Paul Bremer's infamous decision to disband the Iraqi Army. And then of course there's Doug Feith's book, which purports to show how things would have gone so much better if everyone had just listened to Doug Feith -- a thesis that's necessarily met incredulity in a number of brutal interviews.

Some of this is just because enough time has passed that the players feel safe giving interviews. But then there's also the case of suppressed information that's finally seeing the light of day. In February, for example, the Times revealed that a 2005 report by the publicly-funded RAND Corporation had been buried because its conclusions were inconvenient. The report faulted just about everyone in the administration for not adequately preparing for securing postwar Iraq.

And here's what appears to be another example of a buried report. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. Forces in Iraq from the beginning of the occupation until 2004, has written a memoir. And he has a couple scores to settle. One, to be sure, is that he thinks he was scapegoated for the abuses at Abu Ghraib. The other has to do with how he was left in command of Iraq with far too few troops.

In an excerpt from the book published in Time, Sanchez tells how Rumsfeld, two years after that disastrous year in Iraq, called Sanchez into his office to try to diffuse blame. Rumsfeld hadn't known that Sanchez, commander of the Army's V Corps, was left in charge while CENTCOM and CFLCC [coalition land forces] staffs had pulled out, he said, and he'd written a memo of that official version to prove it.

But Sanchez wasn't buying it, he writes, and told Rumsfeld, "I just can't believe you didn't know." Rumsfeld flipped out. The meeting ended, Sanchez writes, with Rumsfeld saying that he was going to order a report to find out what happened. But that didn't go so well:

[Adm. Ed Giambastiani, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs] assigned the task to the Joint Warfighting Center and gave them a pretty tight timeline. So it wasn't long before I was giving the investigative team a complete rundown of everything that had happened in Iraq between May and June 2003. I later learned that Gen. Tommy Franks, however, had refused to speak with them.

A few months later, I was making a presentation at the Joint Warfighting Center and ran across several of the people involved with the study. "Say, did you guys ever complete that investigation?" I asked.

"Oh, yes sir. We sure did," came the reply. "And let me tell you, it was ugly."

"Ugly?" I asked.

"Yes, sir. Our report validated everything you told us -- that Franks issued the orders to discard the original twelve-to-eighteen-month occupation deployment, that the forces were drawing down, that we were walking away from the mission, and that everybody knew about it. And let me tell you, the Secretary did not like that one bit. After we went in to brief him, he just shut us down. 'This is not going anywhere,' he said. 'Oh, and by the way, leave all the copies right here and don't talk to anybody about it.'"

"You mean he embargoed all the copies of the report?" I asked.

"Yes, sir, he did."

From that, my belief was that Rumsfeld's intent appeared to be to minimize and control further exposure within the Pentagon and to specifically keep this information from the American public.

Update: Here's William Arkin's take on Sanchez.