Your word for today: Pentapawns

By Dan Hagen

Pentapawns: American television pundits alleged to be independent military experts by the cable news channels who are in fact extensively and financially tied to defense contractors and directed by the Pentagon to feed military-industrial complex propaganda directly to the American people. 
A typical example is NBC News military analyst and retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who sits on the board of directors of DynCorp International, a company with a lucrative government contract to train Afghan military forces, and who penned a report about Afghanistan that was commissioned and funded by the Pentagon. 
As part of a Pulitzer-Prize-winning series, New York Times writer David Barstow exposed McCaffrey for “consistently advocat[ing] wartime policies and spending priorities that are in line with his corporate interests.” 
Keep in mind that the obscenely huge U.S. military budget already accounts for 40 percent of the total military spending on the entire planet. That includes plenty of money for propaganda to insure that the Pentagon keeps bleeding taxpayers white, and for military force that can be turned against the very American citizens it is supposed to serve. 
The Pentapawns’ mission is not to inform, but to obfuscate and manipulate, and the cable channels refuse to even disclose their pundits’ status as paid propagandists.