Trump’s latest order stifling pentagon reporters may be the most aggressive of it’s kind, but the American empire has a long history of lying about it’s foreign policy.
Last week, it was reported that President Donald Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth had effectively issued an expansion of restrictions to reporter access at the Pentagon, stating that reporters will be forced to pledge to not gather or use any information that had not been formally authorized for release with failure to do so resulting in a loss of credentials to cover the military.
Understandably, the move has drawn criticism and alarm from both journalists and press freedom advocates, who warned that restricting the flow of information and further closing the door on transparency presents a grave risk to American citizens’ right to know how the Department of War is utilizing their tax dollars.
Mike Balsamo, president of the National Press Club stated in part:
“This is a direct assault on independent journalism at the very place where independent scrutiny matters most: the U.S. military.” … “If the news about our military must first be approved by the government, then the public is no longer getting independent reporting. It is getting only what officials want them to see. That should alarm every American. Independent reporting on the military is essential to democracy. It is what allows citizens to hold leaders accountable and ensures that decisions of war and peace are made in the light of day.”
While heightened scrutiny like this is certainly justified, what is typically left out of the conversation is just how opaque the Department of War—and, by extension, the National Security Military-Industrial complex—has always been. While on the surface reporters seemingly do their utmost to provide raw, unfiltered coverage of Pentagon news, the reality is, and has always been, that journalists of the corporate media, for the most part, have acted as stenographers to promote the official narrative of the imperialist status quo.
As far back as one can remember, the federal government has always taken steps to obstruct the reporting of dissenting voices and inconvenient stories that challenge the government’s official narrative—such as when, in 1862 and subsequent years, the Lincoln administration showed blatant contempt for First Amendment protections of press freedom during the war between the states, arresting and imprisoning journalists and shutting down newspapers in the process.
Those with an astute memory may recall that this isn’t the first time the Trump administration has openly flouted military transparency to fit its agenda. As The Free Thought Project reported in 2020, during his first presidency, Donald Trump surpassed his predecessor, Barack Obama, in the number of drone strikes carried out—many of which inflicted numerous civilian casualties—and also instituted policy reforms that restricted transparency and hampered accountability regarding such casualties.
Lies and disinformation have always served as the lubricant to keep the American war machine running. Perhaps nowhere is this malignant manipulation more apparent than in the second Iraq War. From lies about weapons of mass destruction to allegations of Iraq’s involvement in the September 11th false flag attack, a steady stream of falsehoods was used to facilitate the conflict—along with all of its wanton death and destruction—and to keep the blood money flowing.
When dissenting journalists did publish bits of truth about the war, such as when WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder video along with the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, it was not the perpetrators of these atrocities who were held accountable, but the journalists who were targeted and prosecuted for telling the truth.
At the same time as Iraq, the Afghanistan War was likewise propped up by nothing but propaganda and fictitious fabrications. Using the manufactured boogeyman of al-Qaeda—a boogeyman that was, all along, a creation and asset of U.S. intelligence agencies—the U.S. government knowingly spent two decades blatantly lying to Americans not only about the reasons for the war, but also about the progress being made. In 2019, a trove of documents known as The Afghanistan Papers was released. These documents laid bare the 20 years of lies sold to the American public by Pentagon officials and three separate administrations to continue the quagmire.
The picture the documents paint is one of veritable confusion and disorder regarding what American troops were doing there, a total lack of strategy, and open admissions from top military officials that they knew the war was unwinnable—but kept it going anyway.
A new documentary titled Bodyguard Of Lies, presented by Oscar nominated director Dan Krauss, premiered on September 23rd on Paramount+ that further exposes the two decades of deceit, money laundering, and war crimes that came to define America’s longest conflict.
Whether it be the 20-year-long War on Terror—accompanied by its numerous occupations and destabilizations—or more recent conflicts such as the expansionist proxy war in Ukraine, with decades of American-backed neo-Nazi regime change; a U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza, accompanied by decades of falsehoods to justify Israeli apartheid; or any of the countless other wars of aggression the United States of America has created or otherwise exacerbated in its quest for geopolitical dominance, lies, propaganda, and cover-ups have been the mainstay of Pentagon ‘reporting’.
So while Trump’s recent attacks on transparency and accountability at the War Department may stand out, they are certainly nothing new. And Americans would do well to keep in mind that, ultimately, it is they who must stand up to demand truth and justice from those who hold power—because putting your faith in professional propagandists will only take you so far.
“Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war” — Martin Luther King Jr