White House Asked About Propaganda War

Well, finally.  During today's White House press briefing, Dana Perino was asked, for the first time since the New York Times broke the story more than a week ago, about the administration's propaganda program aimed at the American people for the past five years.  It should be noted that the question was asked only because Helen Thomas Len Kinsolving forced Perino's hand:

Q How about this gentleman's question, Dana? How about him? He's had his hand up all this time.

MS. PERINO: Yes, I'm well aware. I am sure it will be a great question. Go ahead.

Q The New York Times has reported that over the last --

MS. PERINO: Definitely going to be a good question. (Laughter.)

Q -- over the last six years the Pentagon conducted a secret operation designed to sell the war in Iraq and the war on terror to the American people. It recruited more than 75 ex-military officers, many with financial ties to the defense industry, provided them with talking points and an extraordinary degree of access not available to ordinary members of the press, including meetings with the Secretary of Defense, and it got them higher supposedly independent military analysts by every U.S. television network. One of its participants described it --

MS. PERINO: Do you have a question?

Q One of its participants described the program as "psyops on steroids" and others said that if they --

MS. PERINO: Is this your opinion?

Q I'm describing the program.

MS. PERINO: What's your question?

Q Others said that if they departed from the Pentagon's talking points, their access was cut off. And my question is, did the White House know about and approve of this operation?

MS. PERINO: Look, I didn't know -- look, I think that you guys should take a step back and look at this -- look, DOD has made a decision, they've decided to stop this program. But I would say that one of the things that we try to do in the administration is get information out to a variety of people so that everybody else can call them and ask their opinion about something.

And I don't think that that should be against the law. And I think that it's absolutely appropriate to provide information to people who are seeking it and are going to be providing their opinions on it. It doesn't necessarily mean that all of those military analysts ever agreed with the administration. I think you can go back and look and think that a lot of their analysis was pretty tough on the administration. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't talk to people.

Interesting answer, isn't it?  She didn't even bother with the non-denial, denial, regarding the White House's knowledge of the program.  After more than a week of the media silence, apparently she wasn't expecting anyone to rock the you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours boat that is the White House press corps.  And she doesn't think it should be against the law?  Huh?  Is she admitting that the program was illegal?  

If only there were people whose job it was to investigate government operations like this...we could call them journalists.

Update:  It wasn't Helen Thomas who prompted the question, it was Les Kinsolving of WND and the person asking the question was Eric Brewer of Raw Story.  Kudos to Eric.