The site's been around since October 1994, according to its "About" page, so "About five years too late" would go back to 1999. Who are you criticizing with that one?

I understand your enthusiasm for hearing the propaganda you want to hear, but if you step back for a minute, is there anything at all proper about the Pentagon jumping into politics with both feet and turning its formidable propaganda and disinformation machine on the American people? It sounds disturbingly as though they've bought into the Far Right's paranoid assertion that "if you're not with us, you're agin' us", and that they now consider about 2/3 of the American people to be the enemy too. That's just not right.

And even though it's spun the way you want to hear it, it is politics, no less so just because it's the Pentagon. I browsed a few of their interventions in public debate, and they conform right down the line to the party line handed down by the RNC. For example, in its argument with the Washington Post, the Pentagon's position cravenly takes the tack of scapegoating the generals, repeating the line that if only the generals were to ask, sure, they'd send over a few more divisions. That fluffy and vague assertion has been thoroughly and exhaustively debunked based on testimony from the war planners interviewed immediately after they left the service. We all know it by heart by now: The experts said 400-600,000 troops, Rummy demanded less than 100,000, and over the course of a year of bombardment with Rumsfield's "snowflake" memos, he pretty much won his war of attrition against the military experts.

I get a strong sense that this Web site serves the civilian political faction inside the Pentagon, at the expense of the uniformed professionals. It stinks to high heaven, Tom, and you really ought to take a step back from partisanship to think twice about letting the Pentagon off the leash to intervene in American politics.